Jesse volunteered to be a Navy S.E.A.L.:
KING: You were a Navy SEAL.VENTURA: That's right. I was water boarded, so I know -- at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence -- every one of us was water boarded. It is torture.
KING: What was it like?
VENTURA: It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.
And, back to the real world, here's our new man in Afghanistan:
“If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal,” said Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the council, “I think of no body fat.”Seriously, McChrystal has Spock ears, check out the photo in the Times link above.
It's the Spock Administration.
9 comments:
Chancellor Cheney is rapidly becoming an Army of One.
It's torture, but somehow someway Jesse Ventura had all toes, fingers, limbs in tact and went on to govern the great state of Minnesota.
知彼知己，百戰不殆；不知彼而知己，一勝一負；不知彼，不知己，每戰必殆
It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
Information is key to winning any war. How else would you extract this information?
Bro, you're kidding, right? Let's forget the fact that torture is a war crime, by international law & multiple treaties to which we are signatories. This fact makes all other arguments irrelevant, but let's just ignore it for now.
The question is: Do you actually think that torturing people is the best way to get accurate information from them? Or does it seem that a reasonable person would surmise that under torture anyone would say anything?
For instance, do you think that the thousands of people during the 15th-17th centuries who confessed to say, having sex with Satan or flying through the air at night, were telling the truth?
Torture is about a lot of things, but getting accurate info isn't near the top of the list.
The list of security organizations who've forsworn torture for reasons of efficacy (like the FBI, MI5, Shin Bet, etc) is long and prestigious. The list of those who claim it works is Dick Cheney and Jack Bauer.
Already, docs are leaking out all over the place contradicting Cheney's claims of the great info that torture yielded, and you should expect that to continue for as long as Cheney continues to blanket the airwaves with his usual self-serving bullshit.
As an example of the prevalent and informed thinking regarding torture, I pass along the following for your consideration:
"Torture "works" in that torture victims speak. The information gained is notoriously unreliable, however, as noted since the time of Aristotle. Accounts of torture from the Inquisitions exhibit how the most delirious tales were elicited from the victims. This information served to confirm the prior beliefs of the torturers. Bad weather, for instance, was thought at the time to be caused by airborne demons in consort with human "witches." In the delirium of torture, torture victims - those accused of being witches - confirmed these beliefs while providing the names of other "witches" who would reconfirm both the preposterous prior beliefs and the inquisitors' authority. The information was, of course, not true . Yet, it was meaningful information in that it fit extant prior beliefs in a historical context framed as a medieval version of the state of necessity," - Professor Thomas C. Hilde, Testimony before the U.S. Helsinki Commission, Field Hearing, University of Maryland , College Park, December 10, 2007.
Look "Bro", the fact remains is everything we know about the enemy in the war on terror has been extracted using these techniques.
See what the FBI, CIA, is telling you is it doesn't work, except for you know, when it does. So you can spit all the rhetoric you want about witches, that's religion vs. a government searching for information during wartime.
See what you don't understand is that the FBI and the CIA have interrogation techniques, they've studied psychology, I've read some of the papers, and they have a lot better clue when the individual is telling the truth or not.
But here's an Obama advisor who's telling us, hey we may not approve, but it's the tool that's gotten us here so far. Admiral Blair's assessment:
"“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”And if you're up in arms about it so much, every member in congress was briefed about this, in 2002, they didn't speak out against it then. Because we were in the thick of things, and it was important to answer questions right away.
But hey bro, it's time to get off your high and mighty horse, ANSWER THE GOD DAMN QUESTION! Do you have a better way, to extract information?
Hey I wouldn't want to get waterboarded, don't get me wrong, but I think it's pretty civil in comparison to a public beheading.
The United States no longer is the nation of pioneers and cowboys, we've grown fat, and slow without the ability to stomach this. Our enemies know this.
I'm not an expert, Bro, but I'm pretty sure you can't get much info out of someone after you've publicly beheaded him.
Better way, from someone who's an actual expert:
http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=3842&wit_id=7906
Amazing I would of thought the Director of National Intelligence was an expert. I must be wrong.
But here you go where were you 7 years ago? I say we prosecute the rest of congress that served when they were briefed.
"Bro"fully yours,
I have a feeling you're not going to watch the video, so I'll leave you with the last quote, after the fact she didn't condemn the then dubbed "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques".
"It is our first priority to protect the American people, it is in the preamble of the Constitution to provide for the common defense." -- Nancy Pelosi
I couldn't agree with her more.
BTW, going over what Jesse "The Mind" said, about how they had to go through it in SERE school, if the technique didn't work, then why would the military make their S.E.A.L.s go through it before going into a combat zone. This whole logic thing, it sounds like it might be tough to grasp.
Great! We're in agreement! I say: Let's prosecute everyone involved.
Of course, rather than starting with a minority member of the House who actually had no power to stop any of this depravity, we should probably start with the guys who ordered it and work our way down the ladder, right?
Actually we're not. I applaud the people with the fortitude to defend this country and not change their stance due to the current temperament of society.
Let's kick it up a notch, into the land of the hypothetical. You have a child that is kidnapped, and you know he is strapped in some basement with a pile of explosives, you don't know where the basement is, but you have someone in custody who does. What do you do? What do you think Obama would do?
I know what I would do.
I have an idea what you're going to say, so I'll leave it at this, we're never going to agree with each other Anonymous. If it comes between the rights of a known terrorist and the ability to save an American life, I'm choosing the American life every time. Maybe because like my sports teams I'm a die hard fan of the U.S., no matter who's running the country I'm a fan, I don't start rooting for other teams against my team. I don't want anything bad happen to my team, or it's players. If there's something that can give my team the edge I hope the coach at the time does it.
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