You know the Republican's hatred for Obama is irrational when...

Yes, we must be the "good guys" because when we torture people God is on our side right? And conflating torture of the suspected 911 perpetrators with ISIS speaks volumes about your naive view of the world. Cartoonish nonsense seems to dominate the ranks of the Right wing. If pretending that your government is saving innocent lives by torturing people lets you sleep at night, you join the ranks of those that looked the other way while Nazis committed atrocities in the name of Nationalism and the superior race. Enjoy your superiority while it lasts. Look to Nazi Germany for why it won't.

 

A terrorist is a terrorist regardless of their weapon of choice. Call them Al Queda, ISIS or whatever...their intent is clear.
....and yes, the intel gathered to take out bin Laden saved innocent lives. Are you implying bin Laden wasn't a threat to American lives?

 

Comparing terrorist mass killings and beheadings of innocent people and Nazi atrocities to water boarding terrorists is absolutely the stupidest thing I've heard out of you....and I've heard some awfully stupid things from you.

 

Oh, this explains the torture apologists desperate rationalizations.... At least Fox told them that they were "awesome".

THE NATIONAL INTEREST
December 12, 20141:23 p.m.
The Torture Party: Why Republicans Defend the Most Sadistic Government Program in Recent History
By Jonathan Chait Follow @jonathanchait

Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture, released this week, describes practices few conservative politicians or intellectuals had prepared themselves to justify. Men were shackled to walls or ceilings for days, in diapers, locked in coffins, rectally violated, subject to days of sleep deprivation, beaten, and (in one instance) murdered. Several intelligence staffers reported being traumatized by the experience.

For a leader long obsessed with the cruelty of communist regimes and jihadist movements, Cheney has always been complacent about mimicking that cruelty himself. In May 2009, he gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, an esteemed conservative think tank in Washington. Radiating gravitas, he referred repeatedly to the subjects of “enhanced interrogation” as “terrorists.” “In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists,” he announced. And: “On the left wing of the president’s party, there appears to be little curiosity in finding out what was learned from the terrorists.” And: “You’ve heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists.” And: “Few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.”That is more than one can say for the torture apologists. Having dug in to mount an extended, pointillistic defense of waterboarding, they have found their position suddenly overrun, and have retreated to new ground. “Every civilized nation agrees that torture is wrong,” Senator Ted Cruz complained after the report was released, but, “after six years, enough with saying ‘everything is George W. Bush’s fault.’ ” To Cruz and other Republicans still in office, the allegation that the Bush administration used torture had gone from outrageous smear to tired news without ever having passed through the stage of acceptable topic of discussion. Senator Marco Rubio insisted on Twitter, “Those who served us in aftermath of 9/11 deserve our thanks not one-sided partisan Senate report that now places American lives in danger.” Rubio’s previous tweet boasted that the Senate has passed “our bill imposing sanctions against human-rights violators” in Venezuela. The cognitive dissonance surely whooshed right over Rubio’s elegantly coiffed head.

The nature of evil has been a Republican obsession since immediately after 9/11. Evil is not only present in our enemies but, at times, their most distinguishing characteristic. (Bush’s “Axis of Evil” conveniently lumped together the otherwise unallied Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.) Human-rights violations are things bad guys do. We’re the good guys. “The United States of America is awesome. We are awesome,” insisted the apparently sincere Fox News host Andrea Tantaros last week. “This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome.” As a frank display of unreasoning chauvinistic bellicosity, this was, in its own way, awesome. It was also no less sophisticated a response than Dick Cheney’s, who quickly dismissed the Senate’s detail-laden report as “hooey,” “full of crap,” and “a crock.”


At no point did Cheney even approach a cursory answer to questions like: How did he know that those subjected to these techniques were, in fact, terrorists? Did some elaborate judicial process exist that contained even stronger safeguards against false conviction than the imperfect American legal system? How could American intelligence staffers, dropped into foreign lands, reliably pluck out the guilty while sparing the innocent?

As we now know, they could not. Twenty-six of the 119 detainees turned out to be innocent. One of them was a Pakistani or Afghan man named Janat Gul. In July 2004, the CIA seized Gul, acting on a tip from local informants who claimed he knew of a terror plot. His interrogators subjected him to sleep deprivation, slammed him into walls, and forced him to stand for as long as 47 hours in a row until he suffered hallucinations that he could see and hear his wife and children. He begged to be killed. Eventually, the informant who fingered Gul admitted to fabricating his story.

The Americans who engaged in this sadism should not necessarily be considered sadists. As their Republican defenders point out, they lived in terror of another mass-casualty attack. Their brutality arose from an attempt to prevent brutality on an even wider scale.

The failings of the torture regimen were, in fact, every conservative nightmare of a failed, out-of-control government program come to life. Through banal bureaucratic dysfunction, the torturers stumbled into a practice that lacked any sound empirical basis. (The CIA—which simply reverse-engineered the resistance training its own elite soldiers underwent, which tought them to withstand torture from communist regimes attempting to solicit propagandist false confessions—never considered that a practice designed to elicit false confessions is poorly suited to drawing out true ones.) Officials covered up their own mistakes; soldiers carried out practices haphazardly—some subjects were tortured for weeks before being interrogated. These are all acts of cruelty that Republicans would surely find terrifying—evil, even—if enacted by foreign governments, or Democratic administrations. And yet a fixation on evil abroad rendered invisible the most egregious abuses of government powers at home.

The most important evidence of the Bush administration’s disposition toward torture may have come not from the Senate report but from Cheney’s second and more carefully considered reply. Appearing later that night on Fox News, the former vice-president was no longer merely dismissing the report’s conclusions out of hand. Nor was he retreating to the slick evasions or complaints about George W. Bush’s feelings that so many of his fellow Republicans had relied upon.

The host, Bret Baier, asked Cheney about Bush’s reported discomfort when told of a detainee’s having been chained to a dungeon ceiling, clothed only in a diaper, and forced to urinate and defecate on himself. “What are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks and say ‘Please, please, tell us what you know’?” Cheney said. “Of course not. We did exactly what needed to be done in order to catch those who were guilty on 9/11 and prevent a further attack, and we were successful on both parts.”

Here, finally, was the brutal moral logic of Cheneyism on bright display. The insistence by his fellow partisans on averting their eyes from the horrible truth at least grows out of a human reaction. Cheney does not even understand why somebody would look away. His soul is a cold, black void.

*This article appears in the December 15, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

 

He can't even define what he considers "torture", so what does he know? Nothing, actually.

 

I don't have to define anything you dumb ass, the Geneva Convention already does that. Geesh! Brainless to a fault.

The U.N. Convention against Torture defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in, or incidental to lawful sanctions.”

 

Learn to read, dumb ass. I didn't ask for the definition of torture, I said that YOU can't define what YOU consider torture. After all, you said that you would "torture the hell out of someone". I'd like to know what you meant by that. Please define.

 

This is horrible. Good thing we don't take prisoners anymore, now we just kill them with drones. Kill list, a kinder and less messy approach to the war on terrorism, brought to you by the Obama Administration.

 

Really? That is what you're going with? OK my definition of torture is reading anything YOU post because YOU ARE A TOTAL DUMB ASS!!!!!!!

 

You sound like a third-grader. Now, if you're through acting childish, would you please tell us what you consider and/or how YOU define torture? Also, tell us what you meant by "tortur[ing] the hell out of someone"? Please elucidate. Seriously, I'd like to know the extent you would go when you "torture the hell out of someone".

 

Just shut up and tell yourself that you are not a complete moron. Maybe you can convince you but shutting up is really the only chance you have of convincing anyone else.

 

Third grader? When and were I grew up, any third grader who talked like that would have been paddled in school and then either paddled or had his mouth washed out with soap when he got home.

 

Come on, Moron Joe... If you're going to tell us you're OK with torturing someone, at least tell us what you consider "torture". I'd like to know what a violent, hypocritical, racist, ultra-liberal, pro-baby killing, rape-watching asshole "thinks" torture is.

 

The people we "torture" are the sort of people who attack schools & kill 142 innocent people, the sort of people who hold & kill hostages in candy stores. If moron joe equates our treatment of terrorists with the way terrorists treat innocent people, well, that says more about him than I care to know.

 

What about all the innocent people we tortured? They don't count?

Dick Cheney: 'I have no problem' using torture program against innocent persons

 

Still comparing our torture of terrorists to the slaughter of 142 kids yesterday? You seem more outraged by the discomfort of a terrorist than the slaughter of all those innocent people at the hands of the terrorists.

 

I find it interesting how the left feels it is proper to twist people's word to make them say thing not really said.

 

Really? Because here is the interview transcript. Cheney doesn't seem to have a problem with torturing innocent people. How do you read what he is saying?

CHUCK TODD: Let me go to Gul Rahman. He was chained to the wall of his cell, doused with water, froze to death in C.I.A. custody. And it turned out it was a case of mistaken identity.

DICK CHENEY: --right. But the problem I had is with the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield. [...] I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.

CHUCK TODD: 25% of the detainees though, 25% turned out to be innocent. They were released.

DICK CHENEY: Where are you going to draw the line, Chuck? How are-- [...]

CHUCK TODD: Is that too high? You're okay with that margin for error?

DICK CHENEY: I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.

 

The point you keep avoiding is that regardless of what some insane ideologues do half way across the world, it shouldn't dictate what a civilized country should do and should never be used as a justification for torture. If you want to compare yesterday to anything, you can always compare it to New Town where the same thing happened and your "outrage" was only that there might be more restrictions on guns in this country. You're no better than the people that support the Taliban for yesterday's atrocity. You support murder and torture as long as it is your party doing it. I imagine the Taliban supporters feel the same way.

 

Just like Obama has no problem jailing political opponents, crony capitalism, etc.