Originally Posted by djplong

Bucco - I was responding to a post and the only thing I'm guilty of is contributing to the topic drift. I've made no comment on drones for a few reasons, not the least of which is that I haven't really chased down details like what percentage of drone attacks are hitting civilians, how band (in general) are the casualties, are they from Taliban using human shields, etc. While I have opinions on the drones, I don't yet have a *really informed* opinion, to tell the truth.

Oh..okay.....ONE news report of just ONE attack...


‘18 Missiles,’ 14 Dead in Latest Drone Attack

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010...-drone-attack/

I suppose it is ok with you folks to just kill people with no due justice...no idea of who is innoncent or guilty of anything (I say that because you use the word "civilians" as if we are killing GUILTY folks). I recall the OUTRAGE for putting folks up in the hotel GTMO because they were not proven guilty of anything.

Now, as I understand it on both sides there is agreement that there were THREE folks waterboarded, albeit a number of times...but THREE !


Again, this is not a condoning of either action nor an approval of either....just pointing out that those who absolutely tore down anyone and everyone on this forum as well as in the press about the terrible country we had become by waterboarding THREE people and holding folks who actually had a past of terroist activty in a beautiful place with all the trappings in GTMO,

yet SILENCE on the droning....can anyone explain that to me ?

That terrible Bush administration and its terrible awful waterboarding...

"The Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of a terrorism suspect who is an American citizen has set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes, a mainstay of the campaign against terrorism."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/wo...awlaki.html?hp


Where are you folks who came on this forum and blasted the previous administration as Nazis etc ?

Bucco - I read the article. No real answers. 14 dead? Yeah. However - about the camp they attacked:

“run by militants attached to Taliban-linked Afghan warlord Hafiz Gul Bahadur, who is reputed to control up to 2,000 fighters who attack U.S.-led forces over the border in Afghanistan.”

This is what I mean about not having a fully informed opinion. I have no trouble with attacking Taliban camps. Civilians are another matter.

Originally Posted by djplong

Bucco - I read the article. No real answers. 14 dead? Yeah. However - about the camp they attacked:



This is what I mean about not having a fully informed opinion. I have no trouble with attacking Taliban camps. Civilians are another matter.

You are correct AND YOU ARE MAKING MY POINT !!!!

During the last administration, waterboarding of folks who attended these camps and had been involved in activity, at best, friendly with terrorist activity was simply attacked as barbaric, un american,....just plain terrible.

If I am following your reason, we now just kill them and we need more information !

I still cannot understand the lack of outrage by those who were outraged by GTMO and waterboarding....it makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.

Again, I am not condemning or condoning any of the actions, but asking you (if you were one of them) or any of those posters, and there were many....if you were on here condmning the country and the President about waterboarding of 3 people and the GTMO country club.......

WHY are you not shouting even louder about simply killing them because we think they are terrorists ?

Oh, its war...really.....the same folks said we were not at war !

Originally Posted by djplong

What it all boils down to is this.

We called waterboarding a war crime when the Japanese did in in World War 2.

Apparently now the rules are changed and a war crime is no longer a war crime.

We cannot trust anything you say if you will not back it up.
Pulling comments out of the air hoping the reader is not going to want to know your source is naive and a waste of our time. Your credibility is going fast like the boy who cried wolf.

The decision to go after Bush with the lame waterboarding charges was very weak but the left's reasoning was that the left had something to rally around. Just like the privacy thing involving wire-tapping. The media blew that out of proportion and it is still going on but they are silent now that Barry is in the WH.

What it all boils down to with the media:

Whatever the right does-it is wrong.

Whatever the Left does- it is automatically right.

The media wakes up in the morning with a that mantra

The media goes to sleep at night with that mantra.
It will be that way until America is transformed into something unrecognizable.
And after it is transformed, they will blame the Republicans!!!

Cashman: It took me 15 seconds to come up with an example:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...110201170.html

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.

It was considered torture when the Japanese did it.

Originally Posted by djplong

Cashman: It took me 15 seconds to come up with an example:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...110201170.html



It was considered torture when the Japanese did it.

Give us a break, if they did do the water torture thing, it was probably the least excruciating method they utilized.Read my previous post. The Japanese were brutal. They would torture for days while removing body parts of their prisoners. You should read the descriptions of the bodies of captured American soldiers when they were eventually found.

Oh, so you're using an excuse that WE can torture because when others did it, they also did worse?

So if I get robbed by someone, they can use the excuse that when another criminal robbed a house, they killed the occupant, therefore the guy who robbed my house should get away with it????

Good grief - that's the kind of excuse my KIDS used when they were SEVEN (well, someone else was worse!)

Originally Posted by djplong

Oh, so you're using an excuse that WE can torture because when others did it, they also did worse?

So if I get robbed by someone, they can use the excuse that when another criminal robbed a house, they killed the occupant, therefore the guy who robbed my house should get away with it????

Good grief - that's the kind of excuse my KIDS used when they were SEVEN (well, someone else was worse!)

You said that not me. You made it it sound like all the Japanese did was water torture. All I'm saying is that if indeed they did that, I never heard of it. I have read two NON-fiction novels written by infantryman that participated on island invasions during WWII and you would not believe the depravity that the Japanese perpetrated.
Stop twisting things around.
By the way, many people in the field do not consider waterboarding as torture.

OMG We are fighting a brutal enemy and you libs focus on waterboarding? Pathetic IMHO.

Originally Posted by djplong

Oh, so you're using an excuse that WE can torture because when others did it, they also did worse?

So if I get robbed by someone, they can use the excuse that when another criminal robbed a house, they killed the occupant, therefore the guy who robbed my house should get away with it????

Good grief - that's the kind of excuse my KIDS used when they were SEVEN (well, someone else was worse!)

The question asked in this thread is...WHICH IS WORSE...

The waterboarding of THREE people who had distinct and clear terrorist crimes behind them and ties,

OR

The killing and maiming of faceless citizens that we deem as terroist because they live in a specific area of the country ?

If you think the first is the most severe as it seems you and others do, please explain how that difference is made....3 folks waterboarded to hopefully get information to save lives versus the killing of unknown and unknown folks because of where they live !!!

If you think the second is the worse, why are you not on here condemning that practice instead of still dwelling on the waterboarding of 3 people ?

The question is not simply for DJPLONG, but all of those who posted a few times a day to condemn the waterboarding and who still do but ignore the drone bombing ! It appears that most of you favor the killing of folks who may or may not be guilty of either terrorism or even the serious crime of living where they live ! DJPLONG, by his own admission is really up to date on the history of, and the law concerning waterboarding but has to have time to get some more facts on the killing by drones !

You may think this is minor...I think it is major. It speaks to the POLITICS, and POLITICS only of those self righteous folks who found it necessary to call the past president names and to blame him for crimes of treason and torture.

Please, respond....it actually speaks to a number of folks total credibility !

Here is my opinion:

I think waterboarding is completely acceptable. I would have no problem adding it to our system of interrogation.

Drones. I am very apprehensive about using them.

I do not relish the idea of people sitting in front of a screen and using hand controls or whatever they use, to destroy life and property. There is something inhuman about the whole thing.
Killing by remote control to me seems too sterile, at least on one end of it.

Sorry to get off subject again. I don't like to see the truth distorted.

"What Asano did to American POWs (who, unlike al-Qaeda terrorists, were lawful combatants and enjoyed full Geneva protections) does not remotely compare to the CIA’s handling of al-Qaeda terrorists.

"Some details: According to the records of Staff Judge Advocate in Asano’s case, Asano and three other Japanese officers took an American Prisoner of War, William O. Cash “and forced him to stretch himself upon a ladder and proceeded to strike him across the back from the shoulders to the hips.” In this same session, another American POW, Thomas B. Armitage, “was then beaten about 15 times across his back during which he was knocked to the ground several times. Armitage was then extended on a ladder, head down, and these accused then poured about two gallons of water from a pitcher into his nose and mouth until he lost consciousness. Each time he was revived, they repeated the same beating and ‘water cure.’” Asano and his accomplices then “took lighted cigarettes and pressed them against the cuticle of his fingernails of his left hand. Three of prisoner Armitage’s fingernails came off as a result of this torture. Both Cash and [American POW Dave] Woodall were similarly treated. These tortures lasted about six hours. Prisoner Woodall was hospitalized for about two days as a result of these treatments.”


http://corner.nationalreview.com/pos...IwNTFhMTA5NWY=

computerization is the fundamental power of warfare. Pilots pull triggers on missles to shoot down targets they rarely see up close and personal.
All ballistic missles, land and sub based. Space based intelligence. Laser target painted by ground troops killed by missles from afar. Etc.

So joy stick warfare is the day and age we live in. This new warfare is in it's infancy.

It is an interesting topic worthy of a thread all it's own.

The politics of the threads question...waterboarding is not lethal, and has no collatoral damage, but the Bush administration was hammerd by the Dems and the media for it's use....known or otherwise.

Remote killer planes are nothing but lethal and creates lethal collatoral damage...by descritption one would consider the latter to be worse. But not as viewed or ignored or hidden by Obama and the media.

Politics......nothing but politics.

btk

WHERE ARE ALL THOSE FOLKS WHO POSTED ON THIS BOARD IN VERY STRONG TERMS ...

about their feelings of disgust about the previous administration waterboarding a total of THREE people.

Are they FOR the drones ? Are they simply a creation of whatever their political party tells them ?

Very curious...many of those who posted strong thoughts on waterboarding still post here but are ABSOLUTELY QUIET on the drones !