[QUOTE=Evil One]
The comfort level of someone who is planning to execute an attack on innocent people means nothing to me. I would not care if they began cutting off fingers joint by joint if that’s what it took to find out the location of a dirty bomb before it went off in the middle of any city in America.
I understand the “we’re better than they are” argument". Our country is built on the rule of law and we have created a wonderful society. The problem is, there are people with no conscience that want to destroy it.
One one side you have real terrorists with real information who are ready to kill real people.
On the other, you have philosophy.
I am willing to have someone who intends to kill my family tortured to prevent that from happening. And if push came to shove, you folks who are wrapping yourselves in the cloak of philisophical indignation would make the same choice.
I would encourage anyone who disagrees with the above statement to simply state that you would rather die or sacrifice your children than have water poured into a committed killers mouth for two minutes.
[/QUOTE]
Just to put everything into perspective, before 9/11 there have been between fewer than 1000 Americans killed in terrorist attacks. On average, 80 people get struck dead by lightning every year (about 250 people get hit by lightning every year). Before 9/11 there have only been 2 years when more Americans died in terrorist attacks than were strick dead by lightning.
On 9/11, death due to terrorism went from an incidental cause of death to a significant threat.
Terrorism has been with us longer than Christianity, so presumably we are not going to end terrorism once and for all, however we cannot afford to let 9/11 be the new standard for terrorist attacks either.
So we have to reduce and hopefully elimnate the likelihood of 9/11 type events. Right now Al Queda is the only terrorist organization I know of that has perpetrated this sort of atack and it is the only terrorist organization that has expressed a desire to do so in the future. So it seem to me that there are a few things we can to do to prevent 9/11 type events. We can punish state sponsors of terror like we did with Afghanistan, we can try to disrupt Al queda around the world and we can address the root causes of what drives men to kill thousands of innocent civilians.
Noone likes the idea of torture but it works, its been used for cneturies and for good reason. It worked for the French in Algeria (even though they eventually lost that war), it worked for the Italians when they had domestic terrotists, it works all the time in China. Sure you get a lot of innocent people being tortured and some false positives but you usually get the answers you want eventually.
Wiretapping works too, before the Warren court really put some teeth into the 4th amendment, we caught all sorts of criminals with warrantless search and seizure. Once again the problem is that you often get a lot of invasions of privacy that result in nothing other than the invasion of privacy.
They may be distasteful, immoral and unethical but they will probably help us get information that will disrupt Al Queda’s organization. The only problems are that torture and warrantless search tends to corrupt the organization that engages in it, at first it might be just the CIA and then it might be the military, hoepfully we can end this before it becomes and acceptable practice in the general population because I don’t know if Americans from 10 years ago would be able to recognize us as Americans anymore.
Maybe our society can handle this sort of moral slide for a short while but over a long enough time horizon, we turn into monsters. I mean really, if I told you 10 years ago that a country was using torture and warrantless searches for whatever reason, you would have thought that the contry in question had LONG way to go before becoming a real demoicracy.
I am on the fence about torture and warrantless searches. On the one hand, if you have nothing to hide, then what’s the problem and it might keep me from getting blown up. On the other hand, there are very few countries that use this standard of conduct that doesn’t eventually abuse its use for things we never intended.
What if we found out tomorrow that under the new law, the President torutured the journalist that published the story to disover the leak because he thought it was a national security concern (its not going to happen tomorrow but thats how a slippery slope works when you give the president such wide discretion), what if we found out that he started using torture as a form of political punishment. You have to trust your government a lot to grant it this sort of power and the entire point of the constitution was that we DON’T trust the government and the constitution protects us against abuses by the governemnt.
I dunno, but I certainly don’t want to stoop to torture and warrantless searches so that Iraq can have democracy even though the vast majority of Iraqis don’t want us there. Lets get out of Iraq, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t achieve any objective that will reduce terrorism. As a matter of fact, there is reason to believe that Iraq is only making things worse. Lets really fight the war on terrorism. The only people the Iraqis hate more than us is Al Queda. Al Queda is the bad guy we should be worried about, lets go after Al Queda. Ultimately we probably have to address the things that caused all this anger to begin with, we may not capitulate on all them but we have to at least think long and hard about them. At least some of this is caused by our military presence in Saudi Arabia, lets get out of Saudi Arabia. At least some of this is based on the Israeli issues, let work on trying to get past those issues, even if it means we push a little harder for a two state solution.
I know that a lot of people think that if we change our policies in response to terrorism, then the terrorists will have won. I guess that is a victory I wouldn’t begrudge them if the alternative is to keep torturing people forever in the face of increasing terrorist threats.
I shit you not when I say that on January, 1 2002 I was apolitical. The deception that I felt was used to get us into the Iraq war informs almost all my opinoons about politics. When we have a split congrss and we get past this problem I will probably go back to being mostly apolitical (I guess you can never really go back all the way). I predict that a lot of long time partisan Democrats will be surprised to find how many people go back to being almost apatheitc when this is all over. I mean really, I have never donated money to a campaign before in my life until 2002, I just never cared enough before that.