The NYT splashed the “confession” extracted under torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed all over its front page today.
Mr. Mohammed indicated in the transcript that some of his earlier statements to C.I.A. interrogators were the result of torture. But he said that his statements at the tribunal on Saturday were not made under duress or pressure.
Right. Mohammed has been tortured. He presumably will be again if he doesn’t cooperate. This story has as little credibility as the video interviews extracted from kidnapped reporter Jill Carroll by her tormenters in Baghdad. Mohammed would probably confess to being secret agent Jack Bauer if asked enough times.
At best, fatuous. At worst, propaganda. This item — it is not even a real story — was worth a mention inside the paper, ringed with caveats about torture. The Globe didn’t even mention that he was tortured, as if he just suddenly spontaneously decided to confess! A sad performance by the Fourth 3.25th Estate.
The timing was excellently chosen to get Alberto Gonzales below the fold.
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Alas, it is no longer merely cynical to make such calculations about the Bush Administration.
Thx for posting, EaboClipper!
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Wasn’t there a time where propaganda was an acceptable form of media during wartime? Or was it always worse than fatuous? Just curious on this one, did something about propaganda change or was it like never understood as such and then later thought of as bad? Anyway, here comes the trouble:
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I just can’t get indignant about the prospect of this guy having been tortured. The guy sent airplanes into the world trade center taking thousands of innocent lives and creating incaculable havoc. If there is anyone who should be tortured, its this guy.
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As for confessions / evidence – the primary value that could be extracted from him would be clues about existing AQ network and any future plans that might be disrupted. These things would be fairly easy to verify once extracted. As for the confession – well – I never really saw this as a criminal justice matter anyway.
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There.
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That’s the problem with it, in my view. Just look at the results it has brought here: on one side of the balance, a meaningless “confession;” on the other, millions and millions of people around the world who used to be willing to work with us, but now don’t care if we burn in part because of our treatment of a few hundred people at Gitmo. That matters: just look at how much more expensive Vietraq is since we have to fight it almost entirely on our own. Here is an interesting piece about how effective torture is.
I’ve read a gigantic article (in the Weekly Standard of all places) about how torture is totally ineffective, and seen umpteen additional citings as well. Trouble is, it just doesn’t make sense to me.
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Scenario: Bad guy sits there in the chair refusing to talk. Make conditions exceedingly bad for him, he wants bad conditions to end, this gives him an incentive to talk. Its carrot and stick stuff, really simple stuff. No amount of studies can overturn that logic in my mind.
If studies don’t work, perhaps psychotherapy will.
Yes, you can force a guy to talk, but can you force him to tell you the truth?
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Also consider that interrogators may want particular information that either does not exist or is not in the possession of the person being interrogated. In that case the interrogator is going to get entirely fabricated material.
That’s exactly the problem. It gives the “bad guy” incentive to say whatever he thinks the interrogators want to hear to get the “bad conditions” to end. This does not necessarily match with the truth, unless you believe that all those people who confessed to witchcraft actually made pacts with the devil. Let’s see what you’ll cop to once you get put on the waterboard.
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Torture is ineffective because “no” and “i don’t know” are not acceptable answers, even if they are the truth. So, you necessarily extract falsehoods.
… the opinions of experts, the opinions of most professional ex-torturers, the experience of other countries, our own country’s experience with torture but let me try logic:
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1) Bad guy sits there, refusing to talk.
2) Bad guy is tortured.
3) Bad guy wans bad conditions to end.
4) This gives him an incentive to talk.
5) Bad guy lies, telling torturers whatever they want to hear in order to make the torture stop. Resulting information (like that Saddamn definitely has nuclear weapons) is notoriusly unreliable. Less valuable than information recieved from traditional interrogation.
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It’s carrot and stick stuff, really simple stuff. No amount of watching 24 can overturn that logic in my mind.
Yet I watch it just the same.
OK so you’ve all basically said that if the subject doesn’t know the answer then torture is ineffective. You got me there. If he doesn’t know the answer then I can’t think of an effective method to get the answer from him.
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You’ve also said that he will lie even if he does know the answer. In this case, if we are looking for strategic information, the lie will be exposed in short order by direct follow up. Back to carrot and stick, with appropriate adjustments, well known in advance in the case of lying. Would he really lie? Maybe, I guess, but then wouldn’t he lie anyway? Wouldn’t he be less likely to lie if he knew he was gonna catch some serious negative experience as a result? Or do you think there is no follow up that could prove/disprove the strategic intel?
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Look, be opposed to torture all you want – but to claim that it is useless or ineffective for getting fast answers from a subject who knows the answers but doesn’t want to give them seems rather blind.
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if those who advocate for torture would be willing to prove it’s efficacy by submitting to it. any takers? oh, and i’ll state up front the info demanded by the torturers: give us the final digit of pi. i know you know the answer. it is useless to tell us you don’t.
You don’t believe any of the studies or actual, you know, evidence, but the “logic in your head” is convincing enough to tell you that it can get fast answers. (True answers? Well maybe.)
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And you call us blind?
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I’m hoping hoping hoping that you are not an opthamologist in real life.
Disprove the statement that there are a number of people, positioned in various eastern cities, poised to hijack airliners and crash them into buildings within the next 48 hours.
That wouldn’t bring down Western Civilization even if it happened.
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The fact is that a small number of terrorists could spread havoc by doing things much easier than hijacking planes. The fact that they have not done anything since 9/11 indicates to me that such terrorists simply do not exist in this country.
we stopped their attack
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ever hear of the word “thwart”
There are a lot of things terrorists could do that would be pretty much impossible to stop. Furthermore, does anything doubt for a second that Bush administration would hesitate for a second to claim bragging rights for stopping an attack.
“There are a lot of things terrorists could do that would be pretty much impossible to stop”
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I strongly agree with that statement…….
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QUESTION: or should I say
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QUESTION: If you dare to answer it . . .
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Why do you think there hasn’t been a terrorist event (not 1) since 9/11??
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ANY TAKERS AT THE BMG????
Or at least, not very many.
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Technically, there was the still unexplained anthrax attacks after 9/11 and the thwarted shoe-bomber attack, but not much else I can think of.
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I suppose you can consider all of those church arsons as a form of terrorism, although the perpetrators claim it was just a “prank” that went out of control.
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Frankly, I am more afraid of home-grown terrorists than ones from abroad.
but they seem to generally prefer to bar segments of the population from civil rights, rather than kill people. however, they will make exceptions.
Come on Laurel you are not even in the same time zone with that comparison.
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“There are terrorists here”
“But they seem to generally prefer to bar segments of the population from civil rights”
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I am against gay marriage – that somehow makes me a “terrorist” now? ….. I don’t follow.
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Please explain (I gotta hear this one).
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Still Waiting
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“Please explain (I gotta hear this one).”
“The fact that they have not done anything since 9/11 indicates to me that such terrorists simply do not exist in this country.”
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WOW – no terrorists guys. I would love to see the democratic front runner’s campaign on that silly idea.
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LOL
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“There are no terrorists everyone.” We can all go about our business like 9/11 never happened.
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No terrorists in the US sure my friend sure
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….
How do you know Mr CMD? What other details can you give? Is this useful? Is it testable? If not testable then probably not terribly useful (because not actionable). However, if it was Joey Smith staying at the Newark Marriott who was going to hijack flight 942 next Thursday, then you might have something. Might even be able to follow up on that. Then it would all hinge on what he has on him when he gets picked up going through security (or whatever else might be found).
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This stuff isnt perfect but neither is it out of the question.
…pseudo-HTML tags such as /sarcasm and /tic
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It was fairly obvious to me that the comment to which this commenter was commenting was intended to be sarcastic. But obviously not to everyone, particularly this commenter.
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Pseudo-HTML tags /sarcasm (end sarcasm) and /tic (end tongue in cheek) have their uses. They serve to notify even the most craven of morons when they are being poked fun at.
But I can get up in arms about the consequences of deciding to torture.
1) It lowered the moral authority of America to call for better human rights in the world.
2) His torture helped some U.S. agents and troops and leaders become more accepting of cruelty as a way to deal with foreigners.
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Torture didn’t just happen to Khalid Sheik Mohammed. One of our agents or soldiers had to strap him to the board, pour water on his mouth even as he struggled to breathe. Our agents had to engage in cruelty, and they run the risk of severe guilt or a loss of their own humanity.
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It is easy to say, “If there is anyone who should be tortured, it’s this guy.”
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Is it as easy to say, “If there is anyone who should be torturing a human, it’s American troops and agents?”
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Sentences in passive voice help to avoid the full ugliness of a thought.
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I recommend, if you’re indifferent to this torture, reading Jonathan Glover’s book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. If you’re not in the mood for a thick academic book, there’s also the movie Battle of Algiers. The DVD extras include an interesting discussion of torture with Richard Clarke.
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And on KBusch’s earlier point–it is interesting to see the Bush Administration milk more media attention out of a prisoner’s torture to draw spotlights off of calls for Alberto Gonzales to resign, considering how Gonzales wrote papers to give cover for torture.
Rosie O’Donnell seems to have sympathy for the terrorists. She even said calling them a terrorist “robs them of their humanity”
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Nice Rosie, nice…..
The Catholic in me sees it as inhumane and wants him to be locked up for life and forgotten, but the red-blooded angry American wants to see him have his eyes sewn open and forced to watch Gigli and Glitter over and over til be becomes a blubbering mess.
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What’s a guy to do?
I can’t see how this is going to be credible unless we have more information than just the confession.
As for us Americans who find such practices abhorrent, what color do you think our blood is?
This looks like a story planted at the behest of the government to show the success of torture. “Everybody on the bandwagon, Its not just for local police anymore!”
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Imagine what great confessions could be gained from corporate America if the CEOs and CFOs were tortured. Oil company execs? Or gang leaders to include organized crime. Why not suspected serial killers or rapists and child molesters?
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Those loud neighbors next door. I bet they are hiding something… Those bloggers, are they really looking to make the truth be known? I suspect the rack could change their keyboarding habits.
Comcast very appropriately had the story on their front page yesterday right up alongside other crdible news like the latest Brittney sighting and the shocking news that another Survivor player has been canned. And that’a about all its worth. Actually, come to think of it, the fact of his torture-induced “confession” is so disgusting that I’m starting to think it an insult that they would sully Brittneywatch with it.
How would you get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
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Or would you be too busy worrying about where his children were before bringing him in.
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Just sounds like you guys want to fight the war on terror the same way we are fighting the war on drugs ….. and let’s face it we all know how well the war on drugs has been going over the past few generations.
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seriously – how would you BMG’ers interrogate Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Lets hear some answers. . . .
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How do you get information from someone who refuses to give it to you?
if those who advocate for torture would be willing to prove it’s efficacy by submitting to it. any takers? oh, and i’ll state up front the info demanded by the torturers: give us the final digit of pi. i know you know the answer. it is useless to tell us you don’t.
…and I doubt very seriously that it is, it strikes me that the fact that KSM allowed himself to be captured before suiciding is just another indication that these terrorists are pretty much incompetent. At least Hermann Goering had the wherewithal to suicide before he could be dispatched at Nuernberg.
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What is being dealt with here is a bunch of incompetents. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t annoying, but they aren’t going to be bringing down Western civilization any time soon. Western Europe was dealing with annoying terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s. The Rote Armee Fraktion/Baader Meinhof gang in German. The Red Brigades in Italy. The IRA in Northern Ireland. Yada, yada, yada.
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All of a sudden, terrorism comes to the USofA Heimat, and everyone in the US gets in a tizzy. And gets the US government to spend oodles of buck protecting all of the terrorist targets in Indiana–more than in New York.
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Follow the money, people.
“but they aren’t going to be bringing down Western civilization any time soon.”
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You don’t know that. PERIOD
if those who advocate for torture would be willing to prove it’s efficacy by submitting to it. any takers? oh, and i’ll state up front the info demanded by the torturers: give us the final digit of pi. i know you know the answer. it is useless to tell us you don’t.
You don’t know that. PERIOD
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And just what FABULOUS second act has happened since 9/11?
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I’m sorry, but you Chicken Little “Sky is falling” bloviators are getting to be annoying.
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Let’s understand something, and let’s understand it well. The Bush malAdministration’s WOsT (War On some Terror) is a fraud. The Bush malAdministration showed that a couple of years ago when it refused to cooperate with the German government after the German government had apprehended several of the alleged Hamburg terrorists.
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The Bush malAdministration refused to cooperate in the prosecution of the alleged Hamburg terroists If I could put that in 20 point type, I would, They refused. They refused to cooperate. They refused to cooperate with a Nato ally–one that is active in helping the US efforts in Afghanistan.
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They refused. The Bush malAdministration refused to cooperate.
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And that’s what let me to conclude that even the Bush malAdministration recognizes that, despite their dog and pony show, despite their bloviations, and despite the fact that they send out Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, Edgar recognizes that it’s a fraud.
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Regarding Edgar, I’m sure he’ll have a wonderful retirement in Dubai.
Alright Home Land Security….you can all go home now. raj who is a terrorism expert and part time “blogger” has cleared the US of any potential danger.
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No need for homeland security and frankly no need to worry about al Qaeda. Just go back to what you were doing before 9/11.
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Seriously raj – just like yesterday when you argued the Excise tax was by definition a property tax. And we had to slam a Webster’s dictionary over your head for you to see the light. Come on – keep up
n/t
“I don’t know what rock occupies your cranium, but even Ms. Porcupine admitted that the auto excise tax is a property tax.”
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I don’t care what Ms Porcupine thinks . . . she is wrong and so are you.
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Dictionary.com says . . . .
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excise tax
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noun
a tax that is measured by the amount of business done (not on property or income from real estate)
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and here is the link, Sir
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http://dictionary.re…
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Also – we had this conversation last week….It was on Thursday 3/14 one day BEFORE you wrote this last post. Here is the link . . .
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http://www.bluemassg…
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You replied . . . “I suppose you have a point”
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So remember RAJ — I don’t care if you get your information from Ms Porcupine, Ms Piggy, or Kermit the Frog . . . Better document your crap
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So go to hell…ya hear me GO TO HELL!!!!!!!
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But not the hell I’m going to….That’s the “cool” hell. You my friend will go to the “Crappy” Hell. The one that is hot and has no chics.
Assinine argument, Republican Rock Radio Machine.
Raj, like many other people, can be sufficiently certain that Al Qaeda will not bring down Western Civilization any time soon. Al Qaeda does not possess anywhere near the arsenal or warmaking capability of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany (which, at the time, was 2nd largest economy in the world).
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Read a history book, RRRM. ANY history book that isn’t published by Regnery.
(sniff) It’s hard to do (sniff) because I like you and Laurel (sniff sniff) but I have to.
if i downrated something of yours? 😉
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as you can see, i’m trying something new – think of it as blogger’s performance art. you don’t have to try to argue me in or out of it. just appreciate it, or not, for what it is, which you will also determine for yourself. art is, after all, what one makes of it.
I think you get many more sixes from me than I get from you.
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I just counted. I’ve given you 14 sixes since March 1 and two troll-chow downratings. I may have gotten 4 sixes from you in the same period. That makes you a Winner!
and you complain. some people… 😀
…your comment is nothing more than another confirmation that ratings here are little more than popularity contests.
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If the administrators of the site want to delete comments, because they believe they are by trolls, they are free to do so. It is their site. But I for one am not going to let a comment with which I vehemently disagree go unanswered, regardless of your rating.
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Verstehest du?
Laurel and KBush got called out
“Al Qaeda will not bring down Western Civilization any time soon.”
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OH BOY… of course, joel and raj LITERALLY mean ALL of “Western Civilization.” Of course they do….because that would mean – – E V E R Y T H I N G – – which would be harder for al Qaeda to pull off than say landing a space shuttle on Mars.
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So good work guys. Nicely played.
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I just wonder if you can be certain that al Qaeda will not kill another 3K people like they did on 9/11. Sure 3,000 dead is a far cry from the fall of “Western Civilization” but still very meaningful at least to guys like me.
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…the fact is that KSM has been in US detention for about four years. Regardless of how much he’s tortured, it’s doubtful that he would be able to tell us much of anything about what his terrorist group might be up to in the near future. It strikes me that, any terrorist group that is in any way even semi-intelligent would have changed its plans based on the fact that one of its leaders had been detained.
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Regarding your
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I just wonder if you can be certain that al Qaeda will not kill another 3K people like they did on 9/11.
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Hell, I can’t be certain that the sun will come up tomorrow, or that a bus won’t run over me when I cross the street. But, what do you suggest regarding al Qaeda? Bomb the smithereens out of the Middle East? Burn down the house to try–just try–to kill a fly? When you don’t even know whether the fly is even in the house?
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Give me a frigging break. The only way to defend against it is good old-fashioned police-style work. It isn’t as fancy as a lot of bomb blasts (I recognize that that’s what gets right wingnuts’ hormones running), but it would probably be a lot more effective.
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Incompetent as they may seem to you, Al Qeda pulled off an action that murdered over 150 innocents per terrorist. And they succeeded in changing our way of life.
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Incrementalism is the tactic of the terrorist.
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20 at a time, over time, they most certainly could significantly change our civilization. And they don’t need to be a brain trust to do it. Just use your imagination, that’s what they do.
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If a few of them have to get their faces wet to prevent that from happening, I have no problem with that at all.
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None.
…now, would it?
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My point.
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The German government had reason to know who in Hamburg to apprehend. The US government refused to cooperate with them. I suppose that the German government could have bombed Hamburg, like the Philadelphia city government did a few years ago against the block in which the Move operation, but that wouldn’t have been particularly productive, would it?
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There are more than a billion Muslims. If you would want to kill them all, say so. If you don’t, tell us what you believe the USofA should do against terrorism. And, by the way, while you’re at it, tell us what we should do against home-grown christianist terrorists like Eric Frank Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh.
to continually by this – pardon my language – shit. I wonder how long we’ve had him?
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Torture isn’t fun. I don’t care that this guy probably is a very, very bad guy. Suddenly, they found someone who planned 31 attacks, including 9/11? Jeez, they fail to catch Osama and will make anyone say anything. But, remember, water isn’t a form of torture. Heck, it’s like a baptism or something! They’re just cleaning the victims criminals with fresh splashes of cool, Poland Springs.
Mr. Mohammed knows he isn’t going anywhere. What’s he gonna do, get off on parole? Might as well confess to anything they throw at you. Makes you look like a bigger fish, adds prestige to your job and your interrogators’ and gets some pressure off the good ol’ boys back at the farm.
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Heck, he might use whatever he learned in Creative Writing, 101 to bring his exploits up a few more rungs. Maybe his PR man can help out.
Reality check.
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What do the advocates of torture of KSM want? Information as to future terrorist plots? As I’ve described above, since he’s been in custody for about four years, the likelihood that he would have as to such plots is likely slightly between nill and nada.
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An admission by him of guilt regarding things past? Hell, he’ll say anything. He probably knows he’s a dead man walking–what does he have to lose.
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If it’s the latter that you want, why don’t you just say so. And stop pretending that you have any reason to believe he’ll spill the beans on another 9/11 style operation.