Conservative pundits advocating murder against fellow Americans

The BBQ Pit
121

I’ve been arguing against detaining people without due process, I haven’t said anything in this thread about interrogation. Did you confuse me another poster?

Are you going answer my question about the 7 citizens in my cite? Do they have the standing to invoke constitutional rights? Or does due process only apply for certain accusations, and not others?

And the fact that you say these are people who are “actively engaged in behavior to attack our society” shows that your biggest problem is that you are assuming everybody they took into custody is automatically guilty. If law enforcement is so perfect, why have due process at all? Why not just have the cop or agent pass sentence in all matters? Or are they magically more skilled and less prone to error or corruption only when terrorists are involved?

122

Well, we could put everyone under house arrest, requiring them to stay in their homes at all times. We’d then bring back all of our soldiers and have them patrol the streets – anyone caught outside must be a potential terrorist, violating the law to do us harm, and should be shon on sight. Maybe arrange for weekly delivery of groceries and trash removal, don’t bother me with logistics.

Now everyone is safe. But is that any way to live?

“Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither
liberty nor safety.” --Benjamin Franklin

123

Who says we have to just sit back and let the terrorists win? You’re engaging in the fallacy of the excluded middle…either we allow “extraordinary measures”…that is, torture…or the terrorists win.

But of course that is not the case. How many people detained in Iraq, or Afganistan, or here in the US are actually terrorists? The trouble is that you can’t know beforehand which guys are terrorists just based on the fact that they’ve been detained. How do you know which guys it would be OK to torture, and which guys were innocent?

Look, frequently we detain people over there based on tips from local informants. Obviously we should investigate these tips. But should we start torturing those detained people to find out if they really are terrorists? Or even “aggressively interrogate” them? Think about how people get detained in the first place. How do we decide which people to detain? If your standard is that all detainees get subjected to aggressive interrogation, what are the consequences of that?

Bottom line, your proposed methods (and it seems that the Bush administration is following your guidelines) will make it harder to find and kill the actual terrorists, because every detainee is going to remember how they were treated by the interrogators. Innocent people who go through aggressive interrogation are going to turn into people who have a grudge against the US. How many of them are going to help us fight the terrorists in the future? How many of them are going to actively help the anti-US forces? How many family members are they goign to convince to work against us?

In short, we are fighting a fundamentally political battle here. I know that there is a kind of revisionism regarding, say, Vietnam, that says that if only we had put political considerations aside and let the military do their jobs we would have won. But the trouble is that political considerations are impossible to put aside. How do we win in Iraq? By creating a critical number of people in Iraq who want us to win, and want the anti-US forces to lose. Torturing or aggressively interrogating all detainees as a matter of course will make that number smaller rather than larger. We aren’t going to win just by killing all the bad guys in Iraq and walking away, we are trying to create a society that functions on its own with only a minimal amount of help from us, a society that won’t allow terrorists to operate.

If our actions alienate the Iraqis, that means that terrorists find it easier to operate in Iraq. If Iraq doesn’t have a fair system of justice, why should ordinary Iraqis support it? If you can get rid of your enemies by claiming they are terrorists, and the US military goes in and kills them, tortures them, aggressively interrogates them, or detains them indefinately, how will the new Iraqi state function?

The reality is that we are in a war of liberal democracy vs Islamic-style fascism. Liberal democracy defeated fascism in WWII, liberal democracy defeated communist dictatorship in the cold war. We won because liberal democratic values create strong societies. Liberal democratic values aren’t luxuries that must be cast aside when the going gets tough. Liberal democratic values make us strong, not weak. They are the key to our success. Throwing them away will ensure that we will eventually lose to the fundamentalist fascists. They are what make our country worth fighting for. If our country isn’t worth fighting for, fewer people are going to fight for it. And so we will be destroyed.

124

Yeah, it’s not like anybody has signed anything like Executive Order 9066. How anybody could envision incarcerating 120,000 citizens with no due process is just beyond the pale of civilized society.

Oh? We did? Just 60 years ago? Well I’ll be…

125

Yes. What a travesty that was. We should never have let it happen, and we should make sure that it never happens again. Thanks for pointing out the dangers of the type of thinking that Evil One is engaged in.

Or did you have some other point you were grasping for?

126

No, just that people seem to think that this type of thing has never happened in this country before, that this administration is the only one evil enough to perpetrate such an atrocity. Not much to grasp.

127

You’re missing the point, **Duke ** - the complaint is that Bush, and his supporters, refuse to learn from mistakes others have made, and therefore are repeating them.

128

But here’s the thing. The internment of americans of japanese descent didn’t help the war effort one bit, in fact it undermined it because those interned ethnic japanese could have helped us quite a bit. The internment took away from the war effort. Those people could have been working in factories with no guards, instead they were stuck in camps, guards were taken away from other jobs, etc etc.

Or are you arguing that if we hadn’t detained them, we’d all be speaking Japanese right now in some Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere gulag?

Killing, torturing, aggressively interrogating, and detaining innocent people isn’t going to help the war on terrorism much and in fact is going to set back the war on terrorism. I’m for doing things to fight the terrorists, not for helping them. Which does torturing innocent people do?

129

And I am willing to fight to preserve those principles that make this a great society from those who would sacrifice them in the name of security.

130

No, I acknowledge that point. I never said what Bush was doing was right, just that he’s not the first to take ridiculously extreme measures to “preserve” security.

People just get so wrapped up in Bush bashing that they forget, or overlook, equally distasteful portions of our past. That’s all.

131

Jump to conclusions, much?

Read my previous post.

132

Not at all. Where did anyone say anything remotely suggesting that we have never experienced threats to liberty before? This was just a weak effort at tu coque that fell flat because everyone is already in agreement that the internment of Americans in America during WWII was unacceptable, and nobody is going to buy into your Dem/Rep baiting effort. In fact, I’d wager that the only folks who might even try to defend our actions back then will be folks very much like Evil One.

133

Well, it was beneath me. Then I ducked the issue and it was right at eye level. :smiley:

Of course, assuming that people are naive simply because they think that safety should not come at the expense of freedom should be beneath you. Live and learn I guess.

134

One of the primary problems is that the current battle is against a group of people, not a country. We do not have a flag to rally against. You can’t tell by looking who is a combatant and who is not.

Lemur866 makes some excellent points. It will be much easier to win hearts and minds in Iraq and elsewhere if we set a good example. That’s why the Abu Grhaib scandal pissed me off so much. The idiots were posing with prisoners for their own personal amusement…not thinking of the huge amount of damage that could and did result. I hope they bury those idiots under the jail.

The bottom line for me is there are some people out there that are going to have to be forced to talk for the good of everyone else. Should torture or even coercion be a first resort? No. But we have to keep that tool in the toolbox when we need it.

Some of you have apparently decided that I am for a totalitarian state. I’m not. I just think the view that we should never push anyone for information or make things difficult for them so they will talk is naive.

I am all for due process unless it appears that someone is involved in terrorist activity. Then I think different rules should apply…especially if it’s possible to get enough information out of them to roll up others or to prevent an attack.

135

Keeping torture in the toolbox for getting information is like keeping a shotgun in the kitchen drawer for meat tenderizing. What you get after you use it isn’t going to be very good.

136

The answer to the question of how much freedom to trade for safety is the biggest quandry of the current war on terror. The bar is constantly shifting. I believe that preserving the lives of the American people should be the standard by which decisions are made.

Like I said…things haven’t changed down at your local courthouse and they won’t. The government might watch you a little if you are from an Arab country on a work visa or if you frequent a radical Islamic website…but people who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear. Just because the government has the capability doesn’t mean they are going to use it.

That said…I think that if someone is held more than 30 days or so, the government should be forced to justify the detention. Even if it is a secret indictment, someone should not fall through the due process cracks.

137

The problem with this is that once those thirty days are up and the person has gone through the various “intelligence gathering techniques,” what they say upon release is more likely to foster more anger if the arrest cannot be justified.

138

Evil One, in reading your posts I am becoming convinced that we are already lost as a people. If, as I fear, you represent the majority point of view then I fear that it really doesn’t matter what we do or what we have done to us anymore. The America that I loved is dead.

139

Don’t be so melodramatic.

Besides, everyone knows that we were lost as a people when Fox married a midget.

140

There are no absolutes, and desparate times call for desparate measures. If the FBI learns with absolute confidence that Abdul Jones has smuggled a nuclear weapon into New York City and hidden it somewhere, and it’s going to detonate in 48 hours, and they catch him after he has already hidden the weapon, I think that the right decision for them to make is to do ANYTHING short of nuking his homeland to extract from him the information as to where that nuke is. But this is an INCREDIBLY extreme example where literally millions of people will certainly die in 48 hours if the nuke isn’t found.

Several important points about this hypothetical:
(1) In this hypothetical, if you torture abdul for 12 hours and then he says “ok, no more, the bomb is in a trashcan at the UN building”, then you can go look in that trashcan at the UN building and find out whether there’s a bomb there, and if there is, you know he was telling the truth, and if not, he was lying. Torture is notoriously unreliable as a method for extracting information, because if someone is being tortured, they’ll tell you want they think you want to hear, they’ll make up names, they’ll claim that totally innocent people are guilty, just to make the torture stop. So the information can’t be trusted. That’s not an issue in a situation like this one

(2) Even if, in a situation like this, I think torture is the right decision, it’s still not one that we should every be comfortable with. It’s something that should be reviewed, at least in retrospect, weighed, agonized over, and apologized for. Anyone who can make a decision like that without it making them sick isn’t the right person to be making that decision.

(3) In situations that are less extreme, which is, basically, all situations, we already have a justice system, a military system with checks and balances, courts, etc. We have them, and we should use them. I would be willing to torture a single nearly-certainly-guilty individual to stop a near-certain near-immediate nuclear disaster. I would not be willing to torture a probably-guilty individual who might or might not know about possible indeterminate future terrorist attacks of various sorts.