Also, as flippant as your remark may have been, for the first time in history a small or singular number of people have the ability to kill massive amounts of people are their own, and that is something that history has dealt with before. 19 hijackers managed to kill 3000 people on their own.

I don’t think idealist are crazy at all. I think they are important and serve as reminder of what we all want, hope, and pray the world will end up like someday.

I would like to live in a country that says “We don’t torture people, ever.” Call me a crazy idealist.

I am not even trying to have the argument with you whether torture works or it doesn’t work. Just as you can point me to studies that shows it doesn’t work, I can point to cases where it has worked, where we have gotten reliable , high value intelligence. But arguing that it doesn’t work and therefore we shouldn’t sully our reputation implies that if it did work that maybe we could, which I am pretty sure you would dismiss right away.

You’re the one who doesn’t operate in the “real world.” Torture doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in the studies of it. It doesn’t work in Game Theory. It doesn’t work in gathering useful information.

If it doesn’t work, it isn’t worth further ruining the reputation of this country.

However it doesn’t work in the real world.

Oh, do tell of this real world, where torture is a reliable means for getting accurate information, let alone so much more consistently reliable than all other forms of intelligence-gathering that it is necessary to betray the soul and founding principles of our country so that we may use it. Do, I pray, tell.

See the other post to see my opinion on torture.

I don’t know where you draw the line for basic human rights, but it’s clearly drawn way way way below my own high standards. The difference between you and me is that I’d rather you raise your standards than I lower mine.

I think we’d all be better off if we stood a little taller and raised our standards a little higher.

Secondly, spreading American Style Democracy does require us to act like it. That doesn’t mean we need every Civil Liberty that poeple have defined for ourselves. Civil law is defined by the people, as is who is extended what rights and freedoms. Now its a perfectly valid point of view that all Civil Rights should be confered to everyone regardless of their citizenship/legal status. My point is that things we take as Civil Rights as Americans are not the same as Basic Human Rights, and that I am all for basic human rights for everyone, but I disagree with where the line for basic is drawn.

After reading your post, I don’t understand how you can say you are still “not defending the right to torture.” The sort of “I’m not defending torture, but you know, these people are trying to kill us, so we got to do what we got to do” argument does not fly.

If the Administration is for the spread of American-style Democracy (and that is what they claim), then it absolutely requires that we behave as the American-Style Democracy we pretend to be. Extending Civil Liberties AND THE BASIC HUMAN RIGHT NOT TO BE TORTURED seems like a great way to show the world that our way is best. That includes extending the rule of Civil Law to everyone.

The minute you create a separate class of people and how to behave towards them, you stop being the democracy you pretend you are being. It doesn’t matter if they are not citizens (cause oh my fucking god, what if the rest of the world followed that absurdist rule of thumb?). If we are to be the shining example of liberty, then we should act like it.

Placing feeding tubes in is a painful process. See the wikipedia article on how they are placed. These are people who use our sense of decency against us, who will behead people for simply existing, and then claim that they are the ones being abused. If they allowed prisoners to starve to death, you would also be crying bloody murder. They can’t leave the tubes in and they can’t do the other more surgical methods of feeding. This is not the Soviet Union however, and these are not political prisoner, and they are not using the feeding tubes to punish them.

I don’t think that having more coercive techinques on terrorist subjects captured outside the United States at all equals the path to Milosevic. I don’t agree that some of things that are being allowed are denying those captured ‘basic human rights’. Basic human rights are just that, basic. The rights afforded to citizens and people under the jurisdiction of the laws of the United States are not the same as the rights afforded to outside parties in war time. Things like jury trials and innocent until proven guilty, or guilty beyond a reasonable doubt are not basic human they are extended rights the people have decided to define.

Finally, since I don’t know Jennifer at all, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and I am going to assume she meant shutting up for once in the nicest way possible as opposed to the poeople who have opinions different than mine should not speak way.