Obama '08?

@revel,

Here you go, revel

By http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123905667327594685.htmlVANESSA FUHRMANS and JANE ZHANG
The federal government made good on its plan to cut 2010 payments for private Medicare plans, whittling the subsidies to health insurers sooner than the industry originally expected.

The cuts, announced late Monday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, are slightly less severe than the 5% reduction the federal agency signaled in February, but still raise concerns about what has been a critical source of profit growth for many health insurers. Reimbursements to private insurers that administer so-called Medicare Advantage plans would fall by as much as 4% to 4.5% next year.[url][/url]

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@Cycloptichorn,

Lawyers who have studied domestic and international laws know that torture is illegal. Bush said "we don't torture," but we know he lied. What was he trying to hide? He must have known it was illegal too.

It would be very easy to prosecute this case.

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@cicerone imposter,

Quote:

It would be very easy to prosecute this case.

Then why isnt it?
If its such a slam dunk case, why isnt the World Court or the Justice Dept running out to prosecute?

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@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

okie wrote:

Again, you think it rises to torture, other people do not

Well, supporters of torture such as yourself do not, because you don't like to admit that you support torturing people for information. But you do.

Again, you twist the truth. I do not support torture. The disagreement here is what constitutes torture.

quote]

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including the best legal opinions in the previous administration.

Listen to you defend lawyers! These guys were told to produce a piece of paper, so that those who wanted to torture could cover their asses. And they did so. But they don't determine what is or isn't the law, the courts do.[/quote]
Again, twisting what likely happened. What probably happened is the military had methods that they know work, that were proposed as ways to extracting information, and the lawyers were asked about their legality, not told to come up with an opinion.

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I have not studied all of the methods, and I am not a legal expert, however some of the things labeled and talked about as torture, I don't know everthing that was used, but of some of them, such as playing loud music and imperfectly regulated temperatures in cells, I do not consider torture, otherwise I would say I am tortured every day.

How about locking people in coffins for days? Throwing a bunch of insects in there with them? Slamming their head into the wall over and over? Keeping them without sleep for 10 days at a time?

How about killing them? Please don't forget that we tortured and beat several prisoners to death in Abu Ghraib and Bagram AFB. Does death not count as torture?

Again, only the most severe methods were used against the most highly suspect, and apparently they worked, and the insects apparently were catepillars, now that is really bad, cyclops, that makes my job look like torture, that I had in college, I had to crawl around under houses with snakes, spiders, rats and mice, to dig trenches for chemical treatment of termites. I got paid for it, but it was voluntary torture. I've not heard of the coffins. And you bring in Abu Ghraib and Bagram, Bush did not authorize those things, and in fact it wast he administration that found out about it and stopped it. The next time we hear of a torture incident in the field, it will be Obama's fault, okay, is that a deal?

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Some of the arguments used by liberals these past 8 years strike me as totally assinine.

I'm sure they do, for they reveal the rotten thing you have in the middle of your heart, that wants to see pain inflicted on people so that you can be less afraid.

Cycloptichorn

You need to wake up to the fact that some people are not your garden variety of peaceniks sitting at Gitmo, cyclops. What do you want for them, a country club, with a full 18 hole golf course, steak and caviar every day? It is you that do not have compassion on the victims of their hatred.

To be clear, I am not in favor of torturing people, however, I am going to leave some of the interrogation methods up to the experts, the people that have studied this skill, and if the legal department says it does not rise to the level of torture, I would consider it, for the safety and well being of the citizenry that I have sworn to protect, if I was president. Thats a president that takes his job seriously.

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@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Quote:
Some of the arguments used by liberals these past 8 years strike me as totally assinine.

I'm sure they do, for they reveal the rotten thing you have in the middle of your heart, that wants to see pain inflicted on people so that you can be less afraid.

Cycloptichorn

Oh yes, from the liberal camp, as Obama, he doesn't think killing a helpless infant that survived an abortion is torture, but depriving a suspected terrorist of sleep is. Now that is true compassion.

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re: MysteryMan on Obama

Because, as he said, he is more interested in trying to get the economy and the country back on track than he is in stirring up a partisan hornet's nest by setting up a truth tribunal or prosecuting the Bush administration for its misdeeds (not his term). Which would just bring the government to a standstill.

While I don't agree with him there, I see the point. Obama is interested in getting results without drama, which is what the country needs. He IS the man.

However the Bush administration did screw up. Repeatedly. But the people who deserve to be prosecuted are not the CIA operatives, but the people who justified torture--John Yoo, Antonin Scalia, Dick Cheney, George Bush. not the lower-level flunkies who carried out what came down from the top.

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Yes, the credibility of the liberal elite is so wonderful, the same people that say its just fine to murder a helpless infant, if it just happened to survive a failed abortion. These are the experts on what constitutes torture. Give us all a break, please.

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Okie,When you say you're going to leave the level of interroation up to the experts, the actual experts, who had had extensive interrogation experience, said repeatedly that torture didn't work--that when it got people to say something, what they said was not reliable, because people tell you anything to get youto stop--they tell you what they think you want to hear--they invent anytthing, whatever they think will make it stop. The experts said they had far better, more reliable, information when they built a relationship of some sort with the person they were interrogating. Extreme interrogation just didn't work.

The Bush administrtation memos justifying extreme interrogation, and for that matter, Justice Antonin Scalia, cite the fictional Jack Bauer and the TV torture series "24" more than they do the Constitution in their tortured "justifications". Why do the Republicans seem unable to differentiate television from real life?

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@MontereyJack,

You missed Alberto Gonzales.

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@MontereyJack,

Monterey, so somebody like Michael Hayden is not an expert? His opinion makes more sense than yours, and agrees with common sense. If none of this worked, nobody would advocate using it, but some of it does work. Even McCain, an opponent of extreme torture, admitted he had been broken in North Vietnam.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123993446103128041.html

Which brings us to the next of the justifications for disclosing and thus abandoning these measures: that they don't work anyway, and that those who are subjected to them will simply make up information in order to end their ordeal. This ignorant view of how interrogations are conducted is belied by both experience and common sense. If coercive interrogation had been administered to obtain confessions, one might understand the argument. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, among others, and who has boasted of having beheaded Daniel Pearl, could eventually have felt pressed to provide a false confession. But confessions aren't the point. Intelligence is. Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known. Moreover, intelligence can be verified, correlated and used to get information from other detainees, and has been; none of this information is used in isolation.

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@okie,

I consider Hayden to be one of enablers of the Bush administration in carrying out torture.

mos describe CIA's harsh interrogation program

Read the whole thing, it makes you sick to think this was done in our name. No matter what the other side does or does not do, we should be better than that. Even if the techniques succeeded in bring fourth information (and there is some dispute about that) , rules are made for when times are tough not just when it is easy enough to abide by them and you certainly can't just invent new ones at your own whim.

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@revel,

revel, Did you see this from the FBI?

Quote:

During the past decade we have witnessed dramatic changes in the nature of the terrorist threat. In the 1990s, right-wing extremism overtook left-wing terrorism as the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat to the country. During the past several years, special interest extremism, as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), has emerged as a serious terrorist threat. Generally, extremist groups engage in much activity that is protected by constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly. Law enforcement becomes involved when the volatile talk of these groups transgresses into unlawful action. The FBI estimates that the ALF/ELF have committed more than 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996, resulting in damages in excess of 43 million dollars.

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@okie,

okie wrote:

Yes, the credibility of the liberal elite is so wonderful, the same people that say its just fine to murder a helpless infant, if it just happened to survive a failed abortion. These are the experts on what constitutes torture. Give us all a break, please.

That sure sounds like the voice of reason there okie?

Ever shoot an abortion Dr? Ever threatened to shoot one? Are you sure you have enough ammunition for your needs in the next few years?

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@MontereyJack,

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However the Bush administration did screw up. Repeatedly. But the people who deserve to be prosecuted are not the CIA operatives, but the people who justified torture--John Yoo, Antonin Scalia, Dick Cheney, George Bush. not the lower-level flunkies who carried out what came down from the top.

So they were "just following orders", is that it?

Thats the same defense that was tried at Nuremburg.
It didnt work then, and it shouldnt work now.
Unless you are saying that it should have worked then.

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@parados,

Okie will not admit that a fetus is not an infant.

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@Advocate,

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Okie will not admit that a fetus is not an infant.

Will you admit that a fetus is alive?
Will you admit that killing a fetus is killing a living being?

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@mysteryman,

Are you saying all "living beings" have constitutional rights?
Are you saying it is illegal to kill any "living beings?"

Are you sure you aren't a member of ALF?

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@okie,

okie wrote:

Legal opinions said it wasn't torture, cyclops, you ignore that. If it clearly was, Holder would prosecute, but he knows it is not, so you are simply making this up, as libs have for the last 8 years.

Oh for crying out loud! Try to make some sense. Torture is Torture. You cannot magically convert torture into something else by giving it a different name. "Torture has long been recognized to be a violation of both national and international law, and no single legal opinion, no matter from what source, can change that."

LINK

Just because Bush enlisted the services of an unscrupulous lawyer to write an unconscionable "legal opinion" in his effort to justify his illegal actions does not make torture legal. The Obama Administration choose to provide the people who actually conducted the illegal torture with a "good faith" defense. Providing the bastards with a defense (which they do not deserve--because they knew better) is not the same as embracing the unconscionable legal opinion that the bastards allegedly relied on.

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@old europe,

old europe wrote:

okie wrote:
Legal opinions said it wasn't torture, cyclops, you ignore that.

I might be wrong about that, but it seems to me that as long as it isn't tested in court, a legal opinion is really just that: an opinion.

But it WAS tested after WWII when the Japanese, who subjected our soldiers to waterboarding and other methods of torture, were tried for war crimes.

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The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government -- whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community -- has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.

After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: "I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure." He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning," he replied, "just gasping between life and death."

Nielsen's experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.

LINK

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For all those conservatives who still believe waterboarding is not torture, here's the article from Wiki:

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Waterboarding
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Semi-protected
Waterboarding in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. Painting by a former prison inmate, Vann Nath, at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Waterboarding is a form of torture[1][2] that consists of immobilizing the victim on his or her back with the head inclined downwards, and then pouring water over the face and into the breathing passages. By forced suffocation and inhalation of water the subject experiences drowning and is caused to believe they are about to die.[3] It is considered a form of torture by legal experts,[4][5] politicians, war veterans,[6][7] intelligence officials,[8] military judges,[9] and human rights organizations.[10][11] As early as the Spanish Inquisition it was used for interrogation purposes, to punish and intimidate, and to force confessions.[12]

In contrast to submerging the head face-forward in water, waterboarding precipitates a gag reflex almost immediately.[13] The technique does not inevitably cause lasting physical damage. It can cause extreme pain, dry drowning, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage or, ultimately, death.[4] Adverse physical consequences can start manifesting months after the event; psychological effects can last for years.[14]

In 2007 it was reported that the CIA was using waterboarding on extrajudicial prisoners. The United States Department of Justice had authorized the procedure.[15][16] The revelation sparked a worldwide political scandal. Al-Qaeda suspects upon whom the CIA is known to have used waterboarding include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.[17][18]

1 Reply

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