Bush - most hated US president - Page 4

Beatnik · 11-15-2007, 09:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CingularDuality

I have a serious question for you, though, and to keep things simple, I'd like you to answer it with just a yes or a no.

If you were the President, and you just captured somebody that you are 100% positive has information about a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists inside the United States that is being planted in a large city in the next 72 hours, and no other interrogation techniques have worked, would you torture him to stop the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?

No.

The only thing that I'll add is that a) Republicans need to stop watching '24', b) torture is notoriously unreliable in producing quality information. They'll tell you who killed Hoffa if you torture them enough. Not to mention the fact that engaging in torture (or whatever label the administration calls it) actually encourages our enemies to torture our POWs.

In the end, on top of being morally obscene, it produces information of questionable reliability (at best), removes any position of moral authority, and increases the potential for harm to our captured soldiers, meaning that it hurts us more than it helps us.

On the issue of torture, I'm inclined to side with John McCain, who knows way more about the issue than 99% of the rest of us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=racw6pp9JvE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwHd5tuneeM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKPdXEsfaCw

Beatnik · 11-15-2007, 09:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skylark

Warning: long reply to rants

Indeed, although my listing of reasons I disapprove of Bush (intended to clarify the word "hate" in the threat title) hardly qualifies as "rants".

So I'll retort by quoting what I already stated.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beatnik

I strongly disapprove of the fact that otherwise decent Americans defend the use of torture, the restriction of rights and liberties, and the extension of a doomed, expensive war.

That pretty much sums it up, dude. Once you said that Iraqis are responsible for 99% of Iraqi civilian deaths in Iraq, that was a reality-red-flag, indicating that you more likely than not drank too much Fox News brand Kool Aid, making a substansive debate on...well, reality, impossible. Sorry. In any event, I wasn't intending to debate each random thought on a point by point basis so much as give people like yourself a little insight into why people seem to "hate" our dear leader.

Also worth noting: because I strongly disapprove of the many, many ridiculous aspects of the current administration doesn't mean I identify myself as a Democrat. It is amusing that it's instantly assumed that because someone is extremely dissatisfied with Republicans, they must be a Democrat. Or that saying something silly like "The Democrats do it worse" or "Bill Clinton did it", intending to excuse some objectionable republican behavior. Although I admit that hearing republicans/conservatives invoke Bill Clinton as a defense for whatever inpropriety is entertaining.

I've said it before: The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.

Steeler · 11-15-2007, 10:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beatnik

No.

The only thing that I'll add is that a) Republicans need to stop watching '24', b) torture is notoriously unreliable in producing quality information. They'll tell you who killed Hoffa if you torture them enough. Not to mention the fact that engaging in torture (or whatever label the administration calls it) actually encourages our enemies to torture our POWs.

In the end, on top of being morally obscene, it produces information of questionable reliability (at best), removes any position of moral authority, and increases the potential for harm to our captured soldiers, meaning that it hurts us more than it helps us.

On the issue of torture, I'm inclined to side with John McCain, who knows way more about the issue than 99% of the rest of us.

It depresses me how often these points need to be re-iterated. We're currently conducting "enhanced interrogation techniques" that we at one time prosecuted the Japanese and Germans for doing in WWII. When you do those sorts of things, you're not doing it for a logical purpose, you're doing it to enact revenge.

xTYBALTx · 11-15-2007, 10:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by xanathemax

Please read a history book that wasn't written by a guy in a bunker surrounded by creamed corn. Regardless of political affiliation, there's near unanimous consensus that FDR was a good president. Just because you, someone born after the Great Depression/World War II with little understanding of what it takes to recover from such a crisis, don't like paying for school lunches doesn't mean FDR is one of the worst presidents ever.

So I take it, then, that you lived through the Great Depression? Since the previous poster clearly doesn't "understand" what it takes to recover from such a crisis, and neither do I - and presumably neither do you! - let us ask someone who not only lived through the Great Depression, but whom actually 'aided the recovery' while working in the Roosevelt Administration during the 1930s:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wiki On Milton Friedman

Foreshadowing his later ideas, he saw price controls as interfering with an essential signaling mechanism to help resources go where they are most valued. Indeed, Friedman later concluded that all government intervention associated with the New Deal was "the wrong cure for the wrong disease," arguing that the money supply should simply have been expanded, instead of contracted.[10] In Monetary History of the United States he argues that the Great Depression was caused by monetary contraction, which was the consequence of poor policy making and the continuous crises in the banking system.[11]

Still not even scratching near 'Worst President Ever' territory - FDR did after all stave off a potential domestic rebellion, foresaw conflict with and defeated the Japanese and Germans, and kept morale high. Pretty momentous stuff, all of it. He clearly had more influence than any other 20th century president - the Bretton Woods Conference alone was incredibly beneficial, paving the way for the world's massive post war expansion.

Kerostasis · 11-15-2007, 10:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beatnik

b) torture is notoriously unreliable in producing quality information. They'll tell you who killed Hoffa if you torture them enough.
...
Not to mention the fact that engaging in torture (or whatever label the administration calls it) actually encourages our enemies to torture our POWs.
...
it ...removes any position of moral authority

Point 1: Torture is only "notoriously unreliable" when you are asking for information the victim doesn't actually possess. Its also really bad for producing confessions, since if theres a particular phrase you want them to say (like "I did it"), they'll say it whether or not its actually true. But in other situations, a skilled interrogator actually can and does produce lots of quality information through "enhanced techniques". Documenting that is tricky since no one wants to disclose the actual methods used, but we absolutely have numerous results of good quality information being produced by interrogators recently.

Point 2: Since Al-Qaeda and associated groups were gleefully torturing our captives long before the very first news story came out accusing us of doing the same, I'm gonna call BS on this one. Its just flat out not true. (At least not with respect to terrorist organizations -- it might work when applied to soldiers working for other nations, but to the best of my knowledge we don't torture them anyway.)

Point 3: Thats the 2nd time in as many posts that you've attempted to morally equate us with Al-Qaeda on no other grounds than our interrogation techniques. Your accusation rings hollow -- we demonstrate our difference from them every single day as our soldiers risk their lives defending the Iraqi people, while Al-Qaeda is doing their best to blow them up. We do not engage in gratuitous infliction of pain for the sake of pain. We do not remove limbs, or heads. We do not summarily execute our prisoners. If you honestly believe we are no better than them, then you're missing the picture.

xTYBALTx · 11-15-2007, 11:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steeler

It depresses me how often these points need to be re-iterated. We're currently conducting "enhanced interrogation techniques" that we at one time prosecuted the Japanese and Germans for doing in WWII. When you do those sorts of things, you're not doing it for a logical purpose, you're doing it to enact revenge.

Ripper:
Mandrake, were you ever a prisoner of war?

Mandrake:
Well, Jack, the time's running...very... huh?

Ripper:
Were you ever a prisoner of war?

Mandrake:
Ah yes I was. Matter of fact, Jack, I was.

Ripper:
Did they torture you?

Mandrake:
Ah... yes, they did. I was tortured by the Japanese, Jack, if you must know. Not a pretty story.

Ripper:
Well what happened?

Mandrake:
Oh... well... I don't know, Jack. Difficult to think of under these conditions. But, well, what happened was they got me on the old Rangoon HNRR railway. I was laying train mines for the bloody Japanese puff puffs.

Ripper:
No, I mean when they tortured you, did you talk?

Mandrake:
Ah, oh no, I ah... I don't think they wanted me to talk, really. I don't think they wanted me to say anything. It was just their way of having... a bit of fun, the swines. Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras.

Beatnik · 11-15-2007, 11:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kerostasis

Point 1: Torture is only "notoriously unreliable" when you are asking for information the victim doesn't actually possess. Its also really bad for producing confessions, since if theres a particular phrase you want them to say (like "I did it"), they'll say it whether or not its actually true. But in other situations, a skilled interrogator actually can and does produce lots of quality information through "enhanced techniques". Documenting that is tricky since no one wants to disclose the actual methods used, but we absolutely have numerous results of good quality information being produced by interrogators recently.

Point 2: Since Al-Qaeda and associated groups were gleefully torturing our captives long before the very first news story came out accusing us of doing the same, I'm gonna call BS on this one. Its just flat out not true. (At least not with respect to terrorist organizations -- it might work when applied to soldiers working for other nations, but to the best of my knowledge we don't torture them anyway.)

Point 3: Thats the 2nd time in as many posts that you've attempted to morally equate us with Al-Qaeda on no other grounds than our interrogation techniques. Your accusation rings hollow -- we demonstrate our difference from them every single day as our soldiers risk their lives defending the Iraqi people, while Al-Qaeda is doing their best to blow them up. We do not engage in gratuitous infliction of pain for the sake of pain. We do not remove limbs, or heads. We do not summarily execute our prisoners. If you honestly believe we are no better than them, then you're missing the picture.

As usual, your posts have tons o' rhetoric with no linkage. I've stopped assuming them to be true or supported by, you know, actual facts, a long time ago. Like your assurance that we "absolutely have numerous results of good quality information through 'enhanced techniques' (read: torture)", or your assurance that "we do not engage in gratuitous infliction of pain for the sake of pain". I know it feels like the truth (it certainly feels truthy), but yeah. We're actively debating whether waterboarding, a classic technique used in the Spanish Inquisition, constitutes torture in the Bushies' new definition of it. You might trust that that's the worst thing going on in these enhanced interrogations, but All Signs Point To No with regard to that. That's simply the worst technique we know of, and given the deliberately vague setup of institutional rules used to inspire creativity in MPs at Abu Ghraib (which were exported from Gitmo), the administration's lost the benefit of the doubt with regard to the torture question.

Also, saying that the practice of torture is morally obscene is not the same thing as me "trying to morally equate us with Al-Qaeda". Sorry, sport. Them's your words, not mine. They can both be abhorant, but not equal.

Seeing Americans step up in active defense of torture emboldens the enemy. For reals, y'alls.

xTYBALTx · 11-15-2007, 11:35 AM

Great. So now you're saying that the US is the same as the Spanish Inquisition!

Gosh!

Beatnik · 11-15-2007, 11:47 AM

Hahaha Yes and no. We absolutely use the same "interrogation" technique as the infamous Torquemada. Does that make us the "same as the Spanish Inquisition"? You decide.

But what exactly do you think "the water cure" or "water torture" in the spanish inquisition was? Tortura de agua - aka "enhanced interrogation" Waterboarding. The point of that comment wasn't to say that we're the "same as the Spanish Inquisition", rather than illustrate how we're "debating" whether this classic technique actually is torture in Bush's America. Pretty absurd, if you ask me.

Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, huh?

xTYBALTx · 11-15-2007, 11:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beatnik

America = the Spanish Inquisition - which no one expects!

^ The evidence!

Beatnik · 11-15-2007, 12:13 PM

Touche, Tybalt. You win this round.

**Gillespie** · 11-15-2007, 12:22 PM

If I take a knife and and begin peeling back your skin, are you going to tell me what I want to know? Probably. The unreliability of torture is that the results produced are not inherently useful. Is the prisoner being tortured even the right guy to be talking to? Ignore all the moral standing stuff; physical torture is stupid and needless.

You can extract the same information from a prisoner through non-invasive measures. Once a prisoner's been broken, the information flows freely. Something as simple as sensory deprivation can break a person's mental capabilities down.

A tactic utilized by the KGB was the very simple process of disrupting the body's biological clock; take a windowless cell and turn the lights on and off at random times for random durations.

**TheSkudDestroyer** · 11-15-2007, 01:52 PM

That would be considered "Torture" by many standards.

do I consider if torture? Kinda, but thats a stretch. But if you get yourself into a situation where you're being put in that windowless cell...

Think of it like portal: That damn cake. Did we ever get the cake? Were we physically abused? Yes.

**Skylark** · 11-15-2007, 02:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beatnik

That pretty much sums it up, dude. Once you said that Iraqis are responsible for 99% of Iraqi civilian deaths in Iraq, that was a reality-red-flag, indicating that you more likely than not drank too much Fox News brand Kool Aid, making a substansive debate on...well, reality, impossible.

SInce I don't have cable or satelite TV, that would be difficult.

Yes, I know you may not be a democrat. But much of what you say is ALSO generic statements by the democrats. Again, I agree with much of what you said, but my statement stands on how the bush hating is clouding all ability to actually do anything constructive. Because then the repubs will go 100% in defense, also stopping any progress.

I agree that we can't compare bush and clinton, but if you try to talk about how clinton was a great president, I'll be laughing pretty hard. But SIMILARLY, the whole issue of Clinton having sex, lying, etc.. was such an issue that many important issues were ignored or lost in the extreme desire to punish him.

Part of the problem is also that so much hate on so many topics makes it impossible to discuss one. Round and round everyone goes, refusing to finish even one topic without yanking in others. (This is true of both sides.)

Kerostasis · 11-15-2007, 04:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beatnik

As usual, your posts have tons o' rhetoric with no linkage. I've stopped assuming them to be true or supported by, you know, actual facts, a long time ago. Like your assurance that we "absolutely have numerous results of good quality information through 'enhanced techniques' (read: torture)", or your assurance that "we do not engage in gratuitous infliction of pain for the sake of pain". I know it feels like the truth (it certainly feels truthy), but yeah. We're actively debating whether waterboarding, a classic technique used in the Spanish Inquisition, constitutes torture in the Bushies' new definition of it. You might trust that that's the worst thing going on in these enhanced interrogations, but All Signs Point To No with regard to that. That's simply the worst technique we know of, and given the deliberately vague setup of institutional rules used to inspire creativity in MPs at Abu Ghraib (which were exported from Gitmo), the administration's lost the benefit of the doubt with regard to the torture question.

Also, saying that the practice of torture is morally obscene is not the same thing as me "trying to morally equate us with Al-Qaeda". Sorry, sport. Them's your words, not mine. They can both be abhorant, but not equal.

Seeing Americans step up in active defense of torture emboldens the enemy. For reals, y'alls.

Well, its good to know you've moved on from assuming everything I say comes from Fox News to assuming I've just made it up, since both are about equally true. Unfortunately, I can't quite match your level of "linking to random news stories that kinda sorta support your point if you squint the right way", so I suppose that makes all my logic inherently useless. I suppose you also believe that Bush and the CIA operated Gitmo for years and years without obtaining a single piece of useful information, and stubbornly believed that if they just kept it up for a few more months, someone would finally crack?

But while you probably did call torture "morally obscene", that wasn't actually what I was referring to. I referred to the twice-in-two-posts declaration that the US had "lost all moral highground" against the terrorists who are actively trying to kill our civilians. If thats not "trying to morally equate us with Al-Qaeda", then I'd love to hear your description of what it is.

11-15-2007, 11:35 AM	#53 (permalink)
xTYBALTx Join Date: Aug 2005 Posts: 3,851	Re: Bush - most hated US president Great. So now you're saying that the US is the same as the Spanish Inquisition! Gosh! __________________ Current good song: Justice - Stress "$250,000 a year won't get me to Central Park West."

11-15-2007, 11:47 AM	#54 (permalink)
Beatnik Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Austin, TX Age: 33 Posts: 4,322	Re: Bush - most hated US president Hahaha Yes and no. We absolutely use the same "interrogation" technique as the infamous Torquemada. Does that make us the "same as the Spanish Inquisition"? You decide. But what exactly do you think "the water cure" or "water torture" in the spanish inquisition was? Tortura de agua - aka "enhanced interrogation" Waterboarding. The point of that comment wasn't to say that we're the "same as the Spanish Inquisition", rather than illustrate how we're "debating" whether this classic technique actually is torture in Bush's America. Pretty absurd, if you ask me. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, huh? __________________ -F- Beatnik

11-15-2007, 12:13 PM	#56 (permalink)
Beatnik Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Austin, TX Age: 33 Posts: 4,322	Re: Bush - most hated US president Touche, Tybalt. You win this round. __________________ -F- Beatnik

11-15-2007, 12:22 PM	#57 (permalink)
Gillespie Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Colorado Springs, CO Posts: 1,056	Re: Bush - most hated US president If I take a knife and and begin peeling back your skin, are you going to tell me what I want to know? Probably. The unreliability of torture is that the results produced are not inherently useful. Is the prisoner being tortured even the right guy to be talking to? Ignore all the moral standing stuff; physical torture is stupid and needless. You can extract the same information from a prisoner through non-invasive measures. Once a prisoner's been broken, the information flows freely. Something as simple as sensory deprivation can break a person's mental capabilities down. A tactic utilized by the KGB was the very simple process of disrupting the body's biological clock; take a windowless cell and turn the lights on and off at random times for random durations. __________________ <ArmA Information/SOPs> <ArmA Admin Team> <TG Req. Reading>

11-15-2007, 01:52 PM	#58 (permalink)
TheSkudDestroyer Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: NY Posts: 3,203	Re: Bush - most hated US president That would be considered "Torture" by many standards. do I consider if torture? Kinda, but thats a stretch. But if you get yourself into a situation where you're being put in that windowless cell... Think of it like portal: That damn cake. Did we ever get the cake? Were we physically abused? Yes. __________________ \|TG-6th\|Skud 6.5 weeks Lackland AFB 8 months Keesler AFB, 1W0X1 - Weather The 6th Devils - Now with MORE Air Force! "...I simply stated "Video Games". They thought I was joking..."

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