You know what one of the key things is about any struggle predicated on moral authority?
Don’t. Sink. To. Their. Level.
If the reason we’re going after the Taliban is because they’re evil motherfuckers (which they are), it’s pretty important that we not also become evil motherfuckers. I don’t think this is a complicated concept. The reason we don’t commit atrocities is because we’re better than them. It has nothing to do with impressing them, it has to do with us keeping the moral high ground, with us not becoming monsters in the eyes of our allies, with us being better than them.
Torture might be justified in* very extreme *situations, but like many exceptions, pretty soon that tiny window of justifiability gets taken further and further.
Their “level” last month killed 5000 people. That’s just last month. Where’s the comparison exactly? You’re comparing physical discomfort to mass murder?
Let me know when your moral outrage catches up to the current use of drones to kill terrorists and the collateral deaths that come with it.
Interesting: so you Americans executed as war criminals the Nazi agents for the crime of “physical discomfort”? That is a new fact in the american interpretation of history.
It seems if an american follows the gestapo and the KGB torture regime it is ‘physical discomfort’ but if it is done by foreigners it is clearly the torture and has the penalty of death.
it is an interesting morality some americans have, or the lack of morality.
Why he makes a difference from the torture and the drone killings of the civilians, I think it is only primitive tribalism of politics.
It is hard to see a great difference between this thinking and the thinking of the takfiri, it is only resources that seperate the lack of humanity between them.
Torture to mass murder, thank you. And how is this an argument? “See, we’re doing something morally reprehensible, inexcusable, and terrible, but they do worse things, so we’re fine!” How far above their level do you think we should be, Magiver? One notch? Three notches? Is it okay if our government randomly murdered 4000 people for dissenting? Would we have been justified in systematically wiping out the wives and children of everyone in the German army ca. 1944, so long as the death toll was lower than 6.000.000 and there was no racism involved?
Here’s a revolutionary idea. How about, instead of trying to excuse the inexcusable by pointing to how evil our enemies are, we judge what we do on our own merit? Torture is WRONG. Big, all-caps, write-it-in-500-foot-tall-flaming-letters-on-the-moon WRONG. Anyone seeing our government commit such vile acts institutionally would be entirely justified in seeing our government as a group of morally reprehensible thugs, regardless of whether our enemy was the Taliban, or Russia, or fucking Hitler. Isn’t that our claim to fame here? That we’re the moral high ground? We’re the good guys.
Good guys don’t torture.
Personally,I really like the way clairobscure put it in the pit thread, and I feel that this should be repeated.
And no, the collateral damage from the drone strikes is not comparable.
I’m comparing torture to torture. They torture, we shouldn’t. Not for their respect, but for our own, and for the respect of the rest of the world. Being known as a torturing country would be very, very damaging.
So in your world, as long as the other guy is “worse” doing" one thin g or another, we are fine doing anything we want. Under your logic, it would be fine to simply anally rape anyone we capture, since that is not as bad as killing them.
Your comparison has no basis in reality. Torturing people has not prevented anyone from being killed; it just shows that we, too, can be monsters.
And there is plenty of outrage against the indiscriminate use of drone assassinations. We should not be engaging in that, either. However, at least in that case you are comparing similar behavior. Torture, in which a person has already been detained and removed from the conflict, but will now be subjected to excruciating pain on the off chance that he or she might provide information, (with a better than average chance that the “information” will be bad), is not a comparable activity to drone strikes.
There isn’t a scale big enough to compare the 2 scenarios.
We waterboarded 20,000 of our own troops but the 3 [del] prisoners [/del] indefinitely held detainees who experienced the same thing are victims. And the poor things got an enema. Wow the horror. You should be picketing hospitals as we speak.
And it’s just a happy coincidence that the report was released the same time as the embarrassing inquiry of Gruber. And it’s a coincidence the report magically stopped at Bush because apparently the CIA has been baking cookies for the last 50 years prior to him. Can’t go back to previous president because it would drag Hilary into it.
But ultimately for some odd reason your moral outrage stops short of killing civilians in drone attacks. Zips right by you.
You don’t have to compare them. If you steal a million dollars, and some other guy steals a billion, you’re still a thief.
This is among the stupidest argument I’ve seen torture apologists make. We did highly controlled, and brief waterboarding of some troops, to prepare them for the possibility of torture.
The utter nonsense that you have to trot out should show you that your position is wrong.
Another vapid argument.
According to this standard rape doesn’t exist, because some people have sex sometimes.
Think about that. Seriously.
I don’t know if it’s a coincidence. Since the GOP is trumping up nonsense nonstop for the last six+ years, it makes sense that any release is going to abut against some trumped up nonsense.
Show me where civilians were targeted on purpose, and maybe you’ll have a point. Maybe not.
It is most amusing to see how the tribal politics distort in some people all understanding of the civilized morality, so that they can pretend that actions that their country executed the Germans and the Japenese for in doing are mere discomforts.
So the Germans and the Japense you executed, poor complaining Americans, they only expereicned discomfort and you committed murder against them in exeucting them for torture as war crimes because “poor things” americans were not tough enough
Of course it matters. If someone is coming at you with a knife and you shoot them, and the bullet leaves the back of their head and hits a child across the street. That’s different than someone walking up and shooting that child on purpose.
Also, how about the rest of my post? Can’t think up a rebuttal, so it doesn’t exist?