Within reason? WTF? What is “reasonable torture?” And who gets to define it?

When will these people realize that torture does NOT work? Pulling some poor schmo’s fingernails out is not going to save American lives.

Pulling the troops out of Iraq… now that’s a way to save American lives.

Jeez.

My “tea” is now all over! My keyboard.

“Reasonable torture” = listening to Kaye’s poetry.

Uh, but Hussein did allow the inspectors in the run-up to BushWar II: The CF. (As the report noted, he had little reason not to after Clinton destroyed the last of his WMD capability in that 1998 strike. Anyone have a copy of what Ms. G. wrote then??)

Complete with Vogon Poetry Appreciation Chairs – oy. Torture of the worst order.

Everytime I click the link to read her drivel, I literally jump at that picture on her site. What is up with that picture? I mean, it really is frightening.

“It’s obvious these people have never been accused (unfairly) of engaging in a crime they are innocent of ? or they would be more understanding of how stressful it is to be in the shoes of Mr. Rove.” Uhhhh… uh… I…. am! “speechless” at the – short memories, and – ability to “delude” them-selves… that these “people” are capable “of”.

Kaye Grogan is an illiterate brainless shill. “And that’s just my opinion!”

My favorite Kayism from the piece (besides the claim that if torture could possibly help in our War on Terror, we should damn well torture frequently and enthusiastically) was this bit:

I can’t help but notice how the liberal news media have turned into bloodhounds. They go one step past just smelling blood, they are going after the jugular.

Wow, killer, vampire hounds! You don’t get that in the columns of lesser writers!

“…Bill Clinton…ordered the bombing of Iraq when Hussein refused to allow the Weapon’s Inspectors into the country…”

Isn’t this backwards? The Weapons Inspectors were already in Iraq. Clinton ordered them to leave in advance of his decision to start bombing. Hussein refused to let them come back in afterwards.

What is amazing about the pro-torture wingnuts (aside from their tortuous logic) is they seem to assume that torture will produce the truth. That all you need to get the Al-Queda dirty bomb memo is the green light to attach a Die Hard battery to a detainee’s nuts.

The Atlantic Monthly ran a good article about why physical torture is actually a poor interrogation method. The person tortured will eventually tell you what you want to hear to make the pain stop, which may or may not be the truth. If you grab a guy who doesn’t know about an imminent attack, and start inflicting pain, he is going to make something up, which could then distract you from other legitimate threats.

Which is why this whole debate is more about sadism than information retrieval.

Can we chip in and get her a book on punctuation or something? Cause maybe she should know that when she writes ‘”senseless” attack’ she’s actually saying that the attacks aren’t senseless and implying somehow that they’re justified. Which strikes me as downright anti-American.

Also, can we get more posts about homo-nups, please? I just love them homo-nups.

Brando, great points; they also seem to assume that everyone being tortured just has to be some kind of “bad guy,” because otherwise why would he have been captured?

Hey: Whatever happened to the “It’s not torture” meme? Have they given up on that one totally or did they forget?

I think saying that torture is ineffective is ignoring the elephant in the room. That being that toture is not only immoral, it’s downright evil.
If nut jobs like Kaye think that torture is reasonable, then hand them the electrodes, give her the garden shears and tell her to start lopping off fingers. Won’t happen. Why? People who advocate this kind of shit don’t have the balls or the convictions to actually get their hands dirty with it. They want their tough, butch soldier boys to take care of it. Except they probably want to do it less than anyone, because it sets a dangerous precedent for treatment of prisioners.

Which leads me to my next point, which is that if we are going to go ahead and start torturing Iraqi farmers and children, then what gives us the right to condemn the kidnappers who take american contractors and torture and kill them. What gives us the moral highground on anything militarily anymore? Has anyone heard of the allegatons the american military is using white phospherous as a weapon? How long can braindead cunts like kaye grogan lecture the world about the evils of sexual promiscuity and abortion while we rain chemical death down upon innocent civilians and subsequently torture the ones that manage to survive?

what all this ‘we’ stuff, Canada? I am sick and tired of you canucks trying to take credit for American acheivements!

“Torture (within reason)” sounds like a BDSM flick for beginners.

Timmah420

You’re right, of course. Torture should be outlawed simply on the basis of it being wrong, evil, unethical, immoral. That’s if you’re a humanist. Those advocating torture seem less concerned with torturing suspected terrorists. It’s a basic racism, or maybe patriotism taken to an extreme is a better term. To these people one American life is of more consequence than 100,000 Iraqis, or Vietnamese, or Serbians, or Turks, or Africans. So I use the “It doesn’t work” argument because there’s a chance, however slim, that they might let that sink in. NO way are they going to go for the ethical argument.

Funny thing, though. They don’t count the soldiers that they claim to support in the equation. If the troops die to save an American life, that’s ok.

And we get called unamerican if we’re against the war because we want the soldiers safe at home. Go figure.

Ianua Ditis – That put a smile on my face, even after seeing this yesterday, which is what has me so worked up. (I recommend showing that video to any pro-war “patriots” you know)
Cherizac – “Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
-An interview between US miliary chaplain and psychologist Gustave Gilbert and Hermann Goering, held at Goering’s cell in Nuremberg before he killed himself.

A thousand apologies, here is the working link.

When I saw Pat Robertson (man-o-god) on television being an apologist for torture, I had to rethink my position on the existence of satan.

Torture doesn’t work and it makes us … assholes.

Ok, yeah, torture (and Kaye’s language skills) are bad, but can we get more on homo-nups?

The Weapon’s Inspector? Is the Weapon the dread Clenis? Is the Inspector Monica L.?

Does Kaye not actually read her own work? In one sentence, she says:

Frankly speaking, if it takes torture (within reason) to gather information to thwart another “senseless” attack on Americans ? then so be it! For goodness sakes! …this is not some tea party folks!

In another, she says:

“It’s obvious these people have never been accused (unfairly) of engaging in a crime they are innocent of ? or they would be more understanding of how stressful it is to be in the shoes of Mr. Rove.”

Now, a self-aware person might step back and say something like, “Wow, if even a paragon of virtue and known patriot like Karl Rove can be falsely and unfairly accused of a crime, might it be possible for an innocent person to be falsely accused of terrorism and tortured when he didn’t know anything?”

But not our Kaye! The words just fly from her keyboard without any sort of coherent thought connecting them together in any way…

…which, when you think about it, kind of explains her punctuation, doesn’t it?

to thwart another “senseless” attack on Americans

I hate to sound like a wingnut, but I guess 9/11 wasn’t senseless enough for her, eh?

Maybe one day we’ll find out that in reality, Kaye Grogan is just an AI/robot who failed the Turing Test and the designer forgot about the “off” switch.

Of course, whether 9/11 was “senseless” or not, the next terrorist attack on the US won’t be (though the Kayes of the world will never figure it out). The perpetrators will likely be either relatives of people we killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, or else people we tortured. But torture’s OK otherwise. No cost associated with it at all! /sarcasm.

I think it’s official: The verdict is in: Kaye needs a fucking electrode shoved up her withered, warty snatch.

Stupid cnut.

Some tortured calculations:

Assume that there is a one in ten chance terrorists will explode a suitcase nuke in some American city in the near future, killing 100,000 people.

Assume that torture is a productive enough means of gathering information that by extensive use of torture we can cut the odds of that happening down to one in a hundred.

The expected savings in American lives through the use of torture, then, would be 9,000 (.10X10^5 -.01X10^5)

Figure the average victim of a terrorist attack could have expected to live another 40 years, so the expected savings in life-years is 360,000, which translates to 3,153,600,000 life-hours.

Divide this among an American population of approximately 280,000,000, and each American’s torture dividend becomes an added 11.26 hours of life.

But of course each American’s torture dividend is the product of many individual acts of torture. At a modest estimate of a hundred torturees, each torturee yields 11.26/100 hours or roughly 6 minutes and fifteen seconds of added lifespan for each of us.

I’m not a medical expert, but wouldn’t it be fair to say that the average keyboard commando could achieve an equivalent degree of extension of his or her life-expectancy if he simply spent the same amount of time in exercising that he would otherwise waste in typing out rationalizations for torture?

“”senseless” attack”

This is such a bizzarre statement that I can only say:

“What the fuck are you talking about you non-history learning dumbass motherfucker?!?”

hese idiots act like they have no idea what their government has been up too for the last 60yrs.

when he ordered the bombing of Iraq when Hussein refused to allow the Weapon’s Inspectors into the country to investigate just what Hussein was up to strategically for several years? The double standards here are quite nauseating to say the least.

Am I missing something or is her head so far up her ass she thinks people can’t remember that, unlike Clinton’s situation, weapon inspectors were in Iraq when Bush decided to invade anyway?

Why is it the case that so many of the objectively pro-torture folks are also the ones bemoaning how “America has lost its moral bearings?” Can anyone think torture is morally acceptible but homo-nups etc. aren’t?

They very thought of homo nups would lead to countless hours of sleep lost for these morons. So, torture we must!

What I want to know is this; who are these people Kaye calls “some tea party folks”?

Reading Kaye is like using the Wingnut-English feature on Babelfish.

But “torture (within reason)?” Does reasonable torture take place after the alligator clip is run from the battery and clamped onto the prisoner’s scrotum, but before we hunt his family down and use hooded state security figures to rape his daughter before his eyes? Or is it after the raping of family members but before we throw their limp bodies to the hogs? See, now I’m confused. But thank God this administration doesn’t listen to objectively pro-terrorist, anti-torture liberal moonbats like, er, Andrew Sullivan and John Derbyshire. I mean, that’d just be crazy.