At least seven killed in shooting at Fort Hood, Tex.

@msolga,

msolga wrote:

Quote:

Well, aidan, it seems to me that you have quite a bit of
(quite justifiable, in my opinion) anger about "gun issues" in the US.

However, you constantly "go soft" on David,
some of whose comments have been the most inflammatory & unhelpful
(to say the least) I've seen on this board, on this particular issue.

Being HELPFUL is supporting the defenses of the victims.
Gun control renders victims HELPLESS when confronted by predatory violence.

msolga wrote:

Quote:

I fully agree that you have no reason to feel anger at maporsche.
His contributions here have been straight-forward & unambiguous
& I've found them very helpful in coming to grips with "the other side" of this issue.

Do u acccuse me of being ambiguous on freedom to use guns in self defense, Olga ?

David

1 Reply

@OmSigDAVID,

David

I haven't the time nor the inclination to go down the road of interpreting the exact the meaning of your statements right now.

I think I'm pretty clear on your views on gun use & ownership, anyway.

If anyone else wants further discussion with you about these issues, they're most welcome.

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Ummm, no. I don't condone torture. I think the Americans have done a great disservice to their enlisted men and citizens by going ahead with all these torture camps... Remember they had them across Europe as well. It's a huge stain on your country.
I do however think that if the government asked me to come out, I would have. I strongly believe no matter what you do in life, you must accept the rewards and the consequences of your actions. Like I said, the women and children who did come out weren't executed. Some of them might have done a little jail time, but they were still alive and breathing when the others collectively began shooting their own children.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I'm not in favour of guns, but of you insist on owning them, I don't believe anyone or group needs a stockpile. I'm not sure anyone ever need a machine gun. What good is it. You can't hunt with them or carry them as a concealed weapon. They're not for protection unless your a criminal, and then only in the mafia sense, I'm assuming..
That doesn't mean I want to see a massacre. But, while David and others blame the victims in shooting rampages, why are we blaming the government for something they didn't do. The davidians always had the option of surrendering peacefully, they chose not to. Again, how long did you expect the government agents to sit out there? Forever?
They obviously had just cause, so I guess this means, in all fairness... that you believe it's justifiable to break the law and flaunt your indiscretions..

1 Reply

@aidan,

aidan wrote:

Quote:

I don't know that it's my job to 'be hard' on anyone about anything.

I try to treat everyone with the same courtesy and respect that I
would enjoy being treated with myself.

I don't call anyone names or malign anyone's character - so I don't
know how it appears that I 'go soft' on David on opposed to anyone else on this forum.

I have been confused and disappointed by what appears to be David's continued insistence
on minimizing the effect that guns have had in our society.

Stated as succinctly as possible:
in every violent confrontation with man or beast,
I want the victim of the aggression to prevail.
In order for that to happen, the victim must have the right gear.
The victim needs to have the preponderance of power; more power than the predator.

Guns are health insurance.

aidan wrote:

Quote:

But I also do understand that he feels that he needs to have protection.
Apparently so does maporsche. I don't.

I have already had it for a long time.
I want my fellow citizens to have it.

Have u considered how u 'd feel if u or someone dear to u
were caught without defensive equipment
when it is needed?
That can be a very, very serious matter.

David

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@Ceili,

I would take your comment and apply it to everyone, so dont take all of the following as a reflection on your comment....

Quote:

I don't condone torture.

I am always surprised when people say this. Imagine your loved ones will die unless you slap someone. Will you slap them to get information or will you let people die ? What about training our own soldiers ...where is the line between changing their thinking by sleep deprivation, exposure and exertion, and by torture ?

People are only concerned about the enemy so they can improve their status within their own community. Ever heard about the Eichmann experiments ? Ordinary Americans (it could have been held anywhere in the world) were asked to administer electric shocks to a volunteer. In fact he was an actor not recieving any pain but cued by a light as to how much to act. About 95% of people had no trouble with it and many went straight to the kill levels, despite being urged to use caution.

How many people use mental torture quite happily everyday ? Ever been through a divorce ? Heard of abused children ?

I have 24 years army service and I know from experience we do torture our own troops, to train them for what the enemy might do.

I have represented the Army in Rifle Shooting competitions and I will not have a gun in the house. Anyone who needs to feel more of a man by having a gun should consider penis enlargement surgery. I am only too happy to pry a gun from anyone's cold dead hands.

As for this man's religion, who ever said mixing religions was a good idea ? Since the split from the Jewish Church 2,000 years ago, the Catholics have been killing Jews. Catholics became the dominant form of Christianity by killing other Christians. Then came the Crusades and Catholics were enthused to go and kill Muslims, who had been quite reasonable up till then. Then the Catholics fractured into Catholics and Protestants who killed each other for centuries. A short respite, then the industrial killing of Jews. Now the Muslims have been brainwashed into their crusade, and it is a war that they will lose.

What in God's name leads people to believe religions can get along together ? Some sort of hippy dogma ?

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@aidan,

David wrote:

Quote:

Incidentally, this is not limited to humans, but is seen in other species of life

aidan wrote:

Quote:

I'm trying to think of one and I can't...as far as the malice aforethought angle
in another species- fill me in.

I saw on the National Geographic Channel that groups of male
chimps have made a practice of going to the encampments of rival groups of chimps
and grabbing a solitary male, who thay then pull down to the ground
and tear him apart, for the hell of it.
Gorillas have also held down and tortured chimps.

I believe that there are other species, that I don't think of right now.

David wrote:

Quote:

My point is that human error is among the unpredictable uncertainties of life,
the same as getting hit by lightning. Human errrors are part of nature.

Accordingly, I re-iterate the timeless dictum of Mayor Rudy Giuliani:
" who KNOWS Y crazy people do things? "

aidan wrote:

Quote:

Yes, but if we take the attitude that we can't learn from previous incidents and just throw up our hands and ask, 'Who knows y crazy people do things?' when another crazy person does another crazy thing - we're doomed to continue to always be on the receiving end of this sort of craziness.
Knowledge and understanding are just as (and I think more) important a tool in defending oneself before the fact and often save one from having to retaliate with a weapon from a defensive position after the fact.

I favor the study of psychology.
I always have.

David

0 Replies

@Ionus,

So then as a soldier on a mission in another country and you have sensitive information on troop positions and artillery. Let's say you know about a air strike that is on it's way or a push to take some area.

You get captured, and some other too.

They torture you. Between you and the others they capture and torture, they extract actionable intelligence on our mission and our capabilities and our weaknesses.

One of your fellow soldiers dies in captivity from injuries sustained in torture. Several other soldiers die in a counter attack planned from the intel they got off of you.

Lets say you survive. Even better, later on a different raid of a small town you manage to capture the exact men who captured and tortured you and your fellow soldier including the one that died.

So we put them on war trial at some later point.

When they defend themselves they say that they believed the intel they could get off of you could save civilians and that if they didn't act to get that intel, there would have been a large civilian death count due to our strike and plans. They say this was the only way to get the information, and that lives were on the line.

I guess you'd have to let them go huh? I mean that defense is solid right? I mean, you'd do the same thing. Water under the bridge. It was just your turn to be tortured. Your friend who died was just an unfortunate accident but because he gave up intel that maybe saved civilians it's all fair.

I absolutely adore the naive and juvenille Jack Bauer ticking clock fantasies that people think pass for rational arguments.

I'll make it even simpler. If you torture a man 99 times, and he say he gave you all he knew on the 3rd torture session, how can you know for sure that he told you everything? How many more times would you need to torture him to be convinced he doesn't know something else or that he has sent you on a wrong path?

Torture is illogical
K
O

1 Reply

@Diest TKO,

What a lovely world you must live in....

Quote:

They torture you. Between you and the others they capture and torture, they extract actionable intelligence on our mission and our capabilities and our weaknesses.

You seem to have totally missed the point. Our soldiers are tortured. It is not hypothetical. Are we to give up gaining information so others will die and you will feel morally superior ? To who will you feel superior ? Not to the enemy, but superior to us.

Quote:

I absolutely adore the naive and juvenille Jack Bauer ticking clock fantasies that people think pass for rational arguments.

Obviously you are suited for an academic world and not reality. Where you can philosphise and "tut-tut " others. Sip chardonnay and say how awful things are, and if only you were in charge...I live in the real world.
The winner decides war crimes, the winner decides what was torture. Dont tell me you would refuse to slap someone to save your loved ones ? Do you have loved ones ?

2 Replies

@Ionus,

Quote:

Obviously you are suited for an academic world and not reality. Where you can philosphise and "tut-tut " others. Sip chardonnay and say how awful things are, and if only you were in charge...I live in the real world

Two years ago my wife ran the detention center in Mosul....if she caught you pulling that **** in one of her cages you would have faced UCMJ action. Your "world" is not universally acceptable in this Army.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

Quote:

Your "world" is not universally acceptable in this Army.

Are you sure ? If it is condoned from the commanders, but only the soldiers go to jail, what does that tell you ? If we torture our own soldiers for training but wont do it to the enemy, doesnt that sound like an internal struggle for power ?
How is it more pleasant to use napalm and high explosives, knowing people will slowly and painfully die but to torture them is unethical ?

1 Reply

@Ionus,

Quote:

Are you sure ? If it is condoned from the commanders, but only the soldiers go to jail

The commander of the brigade cav (it was a SBCT) let his guys "get rough" before the detainees hit the FOB, which made interrogating them very difficult, so my wife was not in favor of the practice. The commander was investigated and his career mysteriously hit the crapper, so he paid a price. He was warned at the time to cut that **** out, but he refused...bye bye career

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

Fair enough. But why do we torture our soldiers for training ?

2 Replies

@Ionus,

what do you consider torture? preparing soldiers for the rigor of war is not abuse, it is in his best interests as well as in the interest of the collective that he be ready for what he might face. Chemical warfare, 20 hour days, little food, constant noise are all common elements of war.

The only systemic training that boarders on abuse is a couple of the specialty schools. The stuff that the run of the mill soldier ever sees such as Basic and Warrior Forge (ROTC) here at Ft Lewis have gotten down right cushy, so I am unclear what it is you are talking about.

I am well aware of the huge number of rapes in Iraq and Kuwait, and of the explosion of cases where soldiers domestically abuse their mates, but this is not what you are talking about.

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@hawkeye10,

if you are talking about SERE very few soldiers go though level C, and it aims to teach them to resist the most harsh conditions that the Geneva Conventions allow. It is preparation for being in those conditions

If you are talking all of the various "hell weeks" those are designed to push you, to see what you are made of, so that weak links can be found and either reformed or drummed out. These are not torture, they are a necessary part of training. The weak must be found before they can be allowed to cause damage.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

Quote:

what do you consider torture?

Actually hawkeye, that was my question to you. Why cant we deprive the enemy of sleep etc when we can do it to our own ?
How about having a bag over your head in 40 plus degrees and a rope around your neck tying you to a group of soldiers with your hands tied behind your back ? When one falls over you all fall over and take forever to get organised to get back up. After a day of that and you are bloodied and bruised, then you spend half the night doing... stand up..kneel down...in full kit at the pace of 1 every 2 secs. Then a near naked interogation female officer sits on your lap and talks about sex. Or how about having to run for 3 days and 2 nights with about 3 hrs sleep a night ? You might be too young to know, but during Vietnam it was worse. Soldiers died from excessive training torture.

Finally, if training is not torture, why do some crack up ? What about the aspects of war that causes PTSD ? Is this torture ? Are we being selective in calling some things torture and not others ? What made the Major, a man who had committed himself to helping others, take their lives indiscriminately ?

Quote:

but this is not what you are talking about.

Thank you for being reasonable. It is surprising how many would not have been.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

It seems that in the case of the Major they did not find the weak.

The medics who worked to save the life of the Major showed the Army at its finest. Me ? I would have knelt on his throat. But it was a proud day in some respects...many acts of courage, of helping, of simple humanity in the face of terror and cold murder.

0 Replies

@Ionus,

some among us do not have the physical strength to be a warrior, others do not have the mental strength. Finding out those who are mentally to weak to serve is not torture, for what is necessary is not cruel and unusual punishment.

I don't accept your premise that we can not push enemy pow's as hard as we push our own in training. And I do not believe that we torture our own. We do have training errors that result in death, as happened a few years back in a river at a ranger school, those who died of hypothermia.

This guy was not strong enough, that is the whole of it. I see some trying to say that working with those who have suffered PTSD suffer from secondary abuse which can be nearly as bad as for the one who suffered directly. Maybe yes, maybe no, it does not matter. If this Major was suffering from PTSD then he had a duty to self report, which it does not appear that he did. His family claims that he fell apart when is mothered died, so I don't buy into the PTSD claim to begin with. Parents die, if he was too weak of mind to deal with that then he was not fit for service to begin with.

if he did not report that his brain was not functioning properly then the Army never had the opportunity to help him, to try to fix him, and if they could not fix him to get rid of him. The failure was this major, the talk about PTSD, or being harassed, of his religous conflict with his deployment orders is all sand being thrown in our eyes to get away from the fact that he killed 13 people, and that only he was in a position to keep him from killing 13 people but he did not do it.

the army could have done more to find out that he is weak, his training was likely lacking in the rigour necessary to break the mentally weak, and his bosses should have been in his face when he was mouthing anti-American views. This should be fixed, but i in no way blame the army for a unfit soldier shooting up Ft Hood when his mental pressures got to be more than he was willing to put up with. The Army with good processes and some luck could have found out that he is weak, but he knows that he is weak, he had a duty to report this.

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This is the dumbest thing I've ever read. The geneva convention expressly forbids torture. So, if I read this correctly... You're saying because the US Military teaches it soldiers how to deal with SOME aspects of torture, it's perfectly ok?
I've read and listened to different interrogation officers who've said the info they get from these sessions is crap. If you become friendly and treat the prisoner with decency, you are far more likely to get a honest, true answer. Not deception.
If US soldiers think any amount of torture is acceptable, then they must accept the inevitable in the future. I don't know if I would volunteer for such a force.

1 Reply

@Ionus,

Ionus wrote:

What a lovely world you must live in...

You don't know about the world I live in or the work I do. You'd bite your tongue if you did know, and you'd be thanking me.

Ionus wrote:

Quote:
They torture you. Between you and the others they capture and torture, they extract actionable intelligence on our mission and our capabilities and our weaknesses.
You seem to have totally missed the point. Our soldiers are tortured. It is not hypothetical. Are we to give up gaining information so others will die and you will feel morally superior ? To who will you feel superior ? Not to the enemy, but superior to us.

You offer a false dilemma. We do not have to give up gathering information. In your frantic and shallow thinking you turn to violence instead of using your brain. Opting for brutality in desperation illustrates the weakness of your mind. As Ceili pointed out, our intelligence professionals have had better and more actionable intel from non-violent interrogations. The data does not side with your fearful and emotional stance.

Ionus wrote:

Quote:
I absolutely adore the naive and juvenille Jack Bauer ticking clock fantasies that people think pass for rational arguments.
Obviously you are suited for an academic world and not reality. Where you can philosphise and "tut-tut " others.

I'm questioning if you are suited for either.

Ionus wrote:

Sip chardonnay and say how awful things are, and if only you were in charge...I live in the real world.

I prefer a nice Riesling and a sliced apple.

Ionus wrote:

The winner decides war crimes, the winner decides what was torture.

How courageous of you.

Are we still handing out awards for ethical fortitude here at A2K?

So then if WE decide an act is torture is it only torture when someone else does it? Let's take a lap with YOUR circular logic.

We won WWII. We decided water-boarding was torture. Therefore waterboarding is torture. We are in a fight that we have yet to become the victor. We used waterboarding, therefore we have tortured.

Ionus wrote:

Dont tell me you would refuse to slap someone to save your loved ones ? Do you have loved ones ?

I can't tell you I wouldn't. I think this is exactly why I should not be given access to the person. I would be emotionally compromised and my judgement would be clouded and a liability. If I was to torture someone, my desperation would not be a sufficient defense of my actions. I'd have consequences to pay.

So by all means. If you believe in torture, man up. Be the guy with the stick. It's pretty damn easy to say it's okay to do from the sidelines where you are clear of any consequences. Do it, and accept the price if you think it's worth it.

T
K
O

1 Reply

@Ionus,

Ionus wrote:

Fair enough. But why do we torture our soldiers for training ?

So they can be prepared if they are tortured. Mental preparation to help them in any way possible.

We don't do it so they know how to do it to others.

T
K
O

0 Replies

At least seven killed in shooting at Fort Hood, Tex.

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