Not sure myself, but let’s ask Starving Artist. He seems to know.
You did read the part where his torturer was convicted for torture, right? Do you still wish to claim water boarding isn’t legally torture?
Answer the fucking question, you illiterate craven coward, are you morally okay with imperial Japan water boarding allied prisoners?
The Clinton Administration.
Well, if we’re being technical, Japan was torturing prisoners of war, which is wrong. If you can define the people you captured as something else, like enemy combatants, then what you do to them isn’t torture, it’s redefined as something else, like freedom-questioning.
Well, Die Geisterjäger, actually.
Of course not–if they do it it’s bad. But that doesn’t meant that if we do it it’s also bad. We are we and they are they, after all.
You don’t want to get me started on Japan and Germany, really. I think they should thank their lucky stars that they are both not glowing parking lots right now.
I want to get you started on Germany and Japan. It should be good for a few laughs.
Well, I think I blew my wad in my first post on the subject, unfortunately. I’m not sure where to go from “glowing parking lots.”
You know, they wouldn’t actually be glowing parking lots until a judge said they were…
It wasn’t just Bush who had a policy of torture. Ask a Salvadora circa. 1983.
And if you think America was good at a time prior, you must not be an 18th century African in the south or a 19th century Native American on the plains.
America being good is a myth we are fed from childhood. Its hard to let go.
hahahahahahaahahaha. Thanks for the laughs.
We did plenty wrong in the old days but we were not proud of it. We did not flaunt the atrocities we did in WW1, Vietnam or any other war. We still did some. But Bush/Cheney were proud to announce we would torture and take away peoples rights. They were happy to be the group that would ignore the old values. It was not doing the acts that changed. it was saying we would and we liked it.
The example of America being different and something to strive for has been killed.
It’s always been dead for everyone except us.
Oh boy, gonzomax is here. I’d better bow out of this thred. It has reaxched intellectual heights for which I am no match.
Also, sinjin, it’s the twoof.
Why is it okay if we torture, but not them?
This aught to be good.
You are old.
That’s true. I also remember penny candy, vacuum tube diagnosers at the drug stores, Coke in small green bottles, and a responsible news media.
Historical context, dude. It’s much worse when the atrocities you are committing are deplorable by the standards of the time in which you commit them. The world has pretty much united in opposition to torture, but there was no such consensus with firebombing.
A responsible news media compared to when? Information is so much more easily accessible now that it’s hard to take that last comment seriously. Reporters are cracking open news-worthy political bombshells at least as vigorously as any time in history.
Those innocent civilians were at least working to keep Hitler’s war machine alive. You can’t make the same justification for torturing people you have already taken out of action, or haven’t even bothered to determine that they’re your enemy at all.