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ThatDamnedPanda -> RE: Right Wing Radio Host Water-boarded.."it`s absolutely torture" (5/23/2009 12:39:47 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: TheHeretic
That's a position I can respect, Ken. I disagree, though. The use of torture lies way out in the gray area. It is an awful thing, and should never be standard practice, but having it on the shelf, and having the interrogatees know it is on the shelf, isn't something we should declare a grand ban on. In those moments when we have to ask ourselves if the Constitution is a suicide pact, I prefer for the potential recipient to know that we just might go there.
There's no gray area at all. This country got along just fine for over 2 centuries without ever having to resort to torture as an official instrument of policy. We drove off the British attempt to take back the country in 1812, pulled the nation back together again after a horrendous civil war that came within a few battles of tearing it apart it forever, fought and helped win World War I, fought and helped win World War II, the bloodiest, most catastrophic war in the history of the human race, and then for 4 decades stared eyeball to eyeball with the Soviet Union on the edge of armageddon, all without ever having to sanction torture. Now a handful of ignorant, semi-literate goat farmers fly a couple of airliners into the sides of a couple of skyscrapers and suddenly our civilization is in mortal peril, and the only thing saving us from certain destruction is the option of torturing more ignorant, semi-literate goat farmers? Is your faith in this nation and the principles upon which it was founded really that shaky?
Rich, with all due respect, you guys really need to get a grip. The Islamasociopaths represent a threat, a serious threat, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But they can never possibly, in any conceivable apolcalyptic fantasy, inflict upon our society the kind of catastrophic damage we have faced, and driven back, many times in the past. No matter what they do, we as a nation will easily survive it, without having to throw our principles out the window.
Will we take a few extra hits by not abandoning our principles? Yeah, quite possibly. Tough shit. That's part of the tradeoff for living in what so many conservatives are constantly bragging is the greatest society in the world, and it's a tradeoff countless generations of Americans before us have gladly made so that you and I could live in the world we enjoy today. It's the tradeoff that the men who gave us this country - the Founding Fathers who literally risked their lives to launch this nation - deliberately wrote into the fabric of our Constitution, even though it put them at even greater mortal peril, because they understood that the price of a society as noble as that to which they aspired is that one must take greater personal risks in defense of the loftier principles they wished for us. They were willing to put their lives on the line to advance that principle, and the generations of Americans who built this country between that generation and our generation were willing to do the same, and frankly I find it disgusting that so many Americans today are so willing to piss all over what they risked and what they sacrificed because they're scared to death of a bunch of fucking goat farmers. I seriously question whether some of the people willing to accept this barbarity in order to feel a little greater illusion of safety are even worthy of living in the country those brave men and women left us.
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