Regarding Torture
We've destroyed our moral high ground via torture and unconstitutional suspension of habias corpus.
The "torture" amounted to putting panties on their heads. The unconstitutionality is true in the sense of being the result of a vote on the Supreme court, but that ignored a plain reading of the Geneva Convention of the treatment of fighters that endanger civilians.
We provoked a war in a nearly unilateral manner.
That's what happens when the rest of the world shirks its responsibility and leaves the US, UK, and a few others to do the dirty work. I've read that there are fewer wars now overall than there has been at any other time.
Our chief import (debt) has proven to be toxic.
The rest of the world was doing the same. They are entitled to their opinions if they think otherwise.
We are the lynch pin that set off a global market collapse.
Its a correction, not a collapse.
My worry is that the country is going to wakeup from its current binge and look over and see that the guy in charge of Supreme Court appointments is the one whose lifetime pattern of associations is Ayers, Wright, Resko, etc.
Comments
Waterboarding is torture. John McCain calls what we are doing torture. You might not like it, I know I don't, but we look really bad as a nation because of this.
Yes, there are fewer wars than at any time in history, but the US is culpable in starting more of them than at any time in our history. Starting a war due to terrorism is an overreaction akin to shooting a friend if they push you and you sprain an ankle.
The buyers of our debt are certainly proven to be fools. My point was not how dumb their move looks, but how untrustworthy we now look.
A typical bear market is usually defined as 20% decline. We are nearing 40% declines. I may be premature in my appraisal, but this is more significant than a typical correction. But then, the term correction is so vague as to be meaningless. Is -1% a correction? How about -80%?
We've got another thread for this discussion. I recommend you join it, as it kind of died once most of the McCain pushers bored of Palin.
We did it a total of three times to Al Qaeda members.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/200 ... only-.html
If all three prevented just one beheading or car bombing, I'm fine with that, and if other countries think less of the US because of it, I'm OK with that also.
The point I was replying to was "We've destroyed our moral high ground via torture."
According to http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18399660/page/2/, in 2006 there were 58,000 people killed or wounded in terrorist attacks world wide. Of those, 55 were US citizens. Who can say whether the sociopaths who are conducting that campaign would have responded differently if we had tortured more people or fewer people. I think it is more of a Western affliction to view 90 seconds of a mistaken feeling of drowning as not being worth saving a large number of lives. The people living in the countries where tens of thousands are killed each year will be willing to take more drastic measures to put a stop to it. If there had never been a single waterboarding or Abu Ghraib, it would have not made one bit of difference to the people who set off nail bombs in crowded marketplaces.
Here we go... Guilt by association. "Palling around!", they cry in desperation...
On a related topic, I heard that McCain once spent several years hanging out with enemies of the United States, people that killed our babies and hate our freedoms! He HATES 'MERICA!
Could you pass the freedom fries, please?
It is very true that smaller and less powerful countries DO leave the larger countries to "do the dirty work". This bothers me immensely.
The issue with the *Iraq* war, however, is that the dirty work wasn't just dirty, it was the wrong work! It was a war built on lies, misleading representations of information, omission of facts.
If we're going to do the dirty work (which I believe we should) then let's at least pick the right damn place to do it. The current administration (and McCain at the time) said the war would be short, we'd be victorious, and we'd be treating as liberators. They lacked judgment, made bad decisions, and lied to the public.
The dirty work should be work to help the people of other nations, not just Republican campaign supporters.
We were treated as liberators, at first. Then we started shooting protestors; detaining thousands & torturing them for no good reason; set the minimum wage at 25 cents an hour, same as Saddam (30 cents if they'll risk taking a bullet to guard Halliburton employees!); laid off 400K workers because of their Baath party association, and on & on in a long list of evil deeds that made it obvious to the Iraqis that our true purpose there was to enslave them in a puppet dictatorship.
I believe one might call this an argument from the ends, or "the ends justifies the means". In general, I am uncomfortable with such arguments as they stem from the belief that you have very limited options and some kind of completely knowledge of the effects each option will produce. I.E. if we waterboard, we will save X lives.
But in this case, you have a greater dilemma, which is that you are destroying foundational beliefs. I know that torture is evil. It absolutely shames me to know my tax dollars are being used by this administration to torture anyone. Further, I am ashamed we are holding people indefinately without trials. We are a nation ruled by law, but we have allowed a single terrorist act to turn our government into an organization that sometimes rules by law and sometimes rules by tyranny.
Ours is not the same country it was in 2000. It is a much worst one today because of what we have done; not because of what the terrorists have done.
I guess my question would be, do you think that Russians were justified in torturing and killing german soldiers? How about Japan with US, Chinese and Korean soldiers? Was it OK for Vietnamese to torture US POW's?
While most people in the US don't care about the Geneva Convention, or rather don't really understand it, most people in the world do.
If you are going to be a moral authority on ANYTHING as a person, group or country, then you need to be above reproach.
The damage that torturing has done to our standing in the world is going to take alot to repair.
I'm really encouraged lately to see that enough swing voters have woken up to what's going on. When I peruse comments on the MSM, I see that the majority of people are now shaming those who believe whatever the Republicans say, like "Obama's palling around with terrorists". Being gullible is now considered socially unacceptable behavior. I hope it sticks for the election.
Before this thread got spun off, my original point was that over the last eight years we have been exposed in a number of ways as a nation.
1) Our military power has been exposed as lacking in insurgency style wars.
2) Our financial strength has been exposed (along with Europe's BTW) as relying on leverage and shenanigans.
3) The actual American dream (being better off than one's parents, not owning a home) has lost its teeth as wage gaps have bloomed.
4) Most devastatingly, our moral high-ground has been destroyed. Ours has never been a perfect nation, but for centuries it stood for many things. America respected other nations right to rule. It led on moral issues as disparate as Geneva conventions, to U.N. creation, to cleaning up industrial waste, to donation of funds to the third world, to application of military force in protecting people groups from ethnic cleansing.
Now, we use torture. We circumvent U.N. policy when it seems inconvenient. We start wars on tenable evidence. We refuse to sign up for the Kyoto Protocol because we don't want to lead industrializing nations like India or China. We are one of the thriftiest nations in the globe towards Africa. And we are too busy with other wars to help out in real tragedies like Darfur.
Basically, we've grown tired of being world leaders, but we still want to reap the benefits. Sorry, but you've got to pick. Either we can truly lead, or we can go it our own way and accept the results. Unfortunately, I think we, as a nation, have already made the choice without realizing we were making it.
Agreed. My support for Obama has, from the beginning, been prefaced on the fact that I thought he was the only candidate with a credible shot at rebuilding our national character and our international standing. I'm not really voting on the economy, abortion, pulling out of Iraq, or even changing Washington. I'm voting on restoration of the constitution and a return to moral international policy; issues so basic that I never should have to choose a candidate based on them, but unfortunately that's where we are today.
That may seem silly to say in a war, since you're killing people, but if you are trying to fight a "moral" war then I say it again, you need to be above reproach.