Bush vetoes bill banning waterboarding

GWB: "What's the big deal? I didn't ban Snowboarding, either. Okay?"

poor guy is confused..

Give me one example where waterboarding has prevented a terrorist attack... Just one!

Thank you GWB for NOT letting the ill informed make policy decisions for you.

un-frickin-believable...

lifestudentno83:

Give me one example where waterboarding has prevented a terrorist attack... Just one!



LMAO, it's great you take the seriousness of the situation so lightly that the government should be required to publicize intel gathered from known terrorists for the sake of satisfying some snivelling kid who listened to "err america" to form an opinion of US war tactics. If you want to get the info gained from coercive interrogation tactics I'd suggest you run for office, until then you should probably get back to your myspace account and beg to be added barack hussein obamas friend list.

disgraceful.

How does a so-called democratic administration justify allowing the CIA to use torture and then turn around and call the other guys terrorists?

Because these guys aren't innocents and the people that were murdered on 9/11 were?

Exactly how many people have been waterboarded?

countless civilians in developing nations all over the world, over the past 50 odd years have died either directly or indirectly at the hands of the US, they were as innocent as the people who died in 9/11

Once people become familiar with the Geneva Convention on Torture and the UN agreement they realize Al Queda prisoners do not qualifiy as POWs and are not entitled to treatment accorded POWs. Then it becomes an argument about "American values" and not law. I've had arguments about "values" with right-wing Christians. I reject many of theirs, like outlawing abortion and denying gay people the right to marry, as out of step and hypocritical. I reject arguments against waterboarding for the same reason.

Once people become familiar with the Geneva Convention on Torture and the UN agreement they realize Al Queda prisoners do not qualifiy as POWs and are not entitled to treatment accorded POWs.

Give me a break! What law school did you go to?

So you think: "I'm a right wing Christian who is against gay marriage and abortion" because I am opposed to human rights violations? You're a pretty broad minded individual Dickman... in fact you should probably run for office!

"Because these guys aren't innocents and the people that were murdered on 9/11 were?" Any assumptions going on here? We are innocent until proven guilty but those we nabbed from foreign countries are not? How about trials? Evidence...not gotten from a tortured soul? sheesh....what an argument full of holes.

Dickman is properly named I think....troll?

well...despite you nay-sayers...
waterboarding had an extremely high success rate when we used it to get confessions from evil, blasphemes witches back in the good 'ol days right before we burned them at the stake....
It was a necessary form of interrogation then...why not now? I personally find it to be a pacifistic approach though...the good 'ol days were much more entertaining for the public....the rack...and the good 'ol heated rat cage on the belly trick were much more fun...

LOLZ at violent minds that hide behind big words like "intelligence"....=P

"waterboarding had an extremely high success rate"...can you post the source for this statement? Facts?

Of course theres sources to back up the success rate of witch confessions when waterboarded...lol
Here's a nifty little interactive from discovery where you can learn about it...
http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/s...

I personally like the straight to the point version wiki has on dunking...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunking

we are sooo evolved...come a long way we have....

Waterboarding "extra-judicial prisoners" because they are deemed "high-value" for "intelligence purposes" is no more ethical than that same "interrogation tactic" used on a POW. In fact, it is less ethical. These "extra-judicial prisoners" are not fighting solders they are civilians captured by our military (often extradited and always held illegally) after invading their sovereign territory to satisfy the dubious suspicions of a fundamentalist sect within our own power structure.

extra-judicial prisoners....thats just another one of them yankee words for "witch"...evil blasphemers...
Cmon...who hasn't been at the pool and held their friend or little sister underwater for a good laugh? It's just good 'ol "boys will be boys" fun! Everybody gets a good laugh out of that don't they? well maybe except the dunkee?...
But seriously, we all love a good laugh at the expense of the personal safety of another human, RIGHT? Jackass is one of the finest examples of human behavior...we LOVE that shit! We laugh harder...the worst someone gets hurt...isn't that the norm in our "culture"?

In welsh, the "w" sounds like "oo" as in food. So GWB would sound like "Goob"

Yes, my friends, it's all there in the Geneva Convention on Torture and in the UN Protocols, available online. Al Queda....up for grabs. No POW protection. Hell, we could even use flame throwers if we wanted to.

"LMAO, it's great you take the seriousness of the situation so lightly that the government should be required to publicize intel gathered from known terrorists for the sake of satisfying some snivelling kid who listened to "err america" to form an opinion of US war tactics. If you want to get the info gained from coercive interrogation tactics I'd suggest you run for office, until then you should probably get back to your myspace account and beg to be added barack hussein obamas friend list."

Wow, do you have me pegged and pigeon-holed... actually, no you don't.

BTW, you don't have to give away vital intel to tell if waterboarding works or not. Percentages showing success rates, an example of when waterboarding has given information that prevented terrorism... they could've given us SOMETHING instead of just saying "it works". Let's face it, there are no government statisics on waterboarding, and there probably never will be.

Again no one has managed to give me one example of how waterboarding prevented terrorism. How can you prove something without facts?

I wonder if there were enough votes to overturn the veto.

Could it be that the veto is another attempt by GWB and his kind to avoid being labeled war criminals?

Here is a fact for you.

We have not been attacked in our borders since 9/11.

You actually think that is because they have not tried or planned to attack us. You are naive if you think so.

The "so called terrorist" as you would have us call them waterboarded Daniel Pearl during his interrogation, and then put him in a clean cell and made sure he was fed food that was kosher to his culture three times a day; and you don't think we should use the same type tatics against them to stop them from hurting other people.

And Daniel is only one of thousands that they have treated the same way because they don't believe the the same religious thing that the "so called terrorist" do.

I tell you what when they put on a uniform and start fighting in genieve acceptable ways, they can then be called P.O.W .

Our constitution bans any cruel and unusual form of punishment, the army field manual for interrogation does not include waterboarding, and the U.S. had several internal reviews of waterboarding, the two most relevant were conducted by acting undersecretaries of defense and then an acting deputy atorney general in the 1940's and in 2003, both underwent waterboarding to gain personal perspectives on the argument and afterwards both came up with the same ruling, waterboarding is torture and was criminal. Once a personal perspective is gained on the practice there is none who say it isn't torture.

Early in lines of questioning Bush said that it wasn't torture and an AG report said it wouldn't constitute torture if used against an American servicemen by muddying the legal status of a torture tactic we only hurt our own servicemen. Despite the current legal debate the early statements could be seen as precedent by another country to use waterboarding against American POW's as well as American citizens I will never forgive that. Never, because that is a gutless tact that put Americans at risk out of political motivations which is what those who oppose waterboarding have been wrongly accused of.

If Bush felt that torture was needed to protect americans that is one thing, it vile but if he admited to that then we might have to accept the point or at least suspend the debate if it provided intelligence that saved thousands, the problem being that we are offered hypotheticals of that nature while being fed denials of the tactic while being told that the detainees have no legal standing. There is no fair accounting of these tacticts, nor straight answers on their efectiveness and indeed even on their legal status. The whitehouse defense is essentialy we did it but we can't say we did it other than the times we admited we did it but had to backtrack because the legal status of the tactics that we admited to using was in question, with their usual additional disclaimer that the U.S. government doesn't torture. I can't defend these tactics under almost any circumstances and certainly not these circumstances with this set of individuals in power and I believe by no means does this president who put soldiers and citezens at risk for torture with his careless words deserve any blanket authority for torture and a legislation such as the one he vetoed needs to be authorized soon so that there is no more murky legal atmosphere and in keeping with the Geneva conventions and our constitution we need to make that ruling an authoratative no to waterboarding.

LOL, CosmoPlavix,

I love being called un-American. I love hearing that term. It means You have no intelligent argument besides calling people names and insulting them yes that will turn me to the "right" way of thinking.

And coming up with "facts" that have nothing to do with how waterboarding does or does not work, is insulting to the debate at hand. He asked for facts for to prove waterboarding works, and that we have NOT been attacked again is a Pretty glaring FACT, whether you insult me and my opinion or not.

If you missed it, Daniel Pearl and thousands of innocents like him had their heads cut off, not a little water poured on his face.

It is the US who is housing the "POW's"(if that is what YOU want to call them) in clean facilities, and feeding them Kosher meals three times daily. And allowing them to pray to Allah three or more times a day.

If you were "caught" by the "so-called terrorists" I am sure that they would simply ask for you name rank and serial number. Wouldn't they? Did not work out that way for Daniel and thousands others did it?

Yes, I am a PROUD moral American, I appreciate these Facts:
I can create my own business, and with my hard work, make something as big as a corporate agribusiness if I so choose. Don't hate big business for being sucessful, remember at one time it was a mom and pop store. Look at Wal-mart it started out as one little store in Arkansas owned by one man during his life it had already grown exponentially.
Do they have bad business practices? maybe no one is perfect.
But that is no reason for cutting anyones head off. period.


.

Ocanada,

Thank you, for you intelligently well formed opinion.

By the way my wife agrees waterboarding is torture.

I'm wearing a yellow shirt today, and I've not been set on fire. Therefore, yellow shirts protect you from fire.
Hell, I didn't get AIDs either, so yellow shirts MUST be safer than condoms.

The other thing about waterboarding is that the notion of it being used on him scares the enemy combatant into
losing control of his bowels even before its applied. Hence, the poor devil starts giving up information right out of the blocks before they have a chance to get the towel damp. Kalid Sheik Mohammed for example, because of his girth and general bad health, knew his heart would give out when he saw the bucket. So the scum had to talk. You see?

You know what they do to interrogate terrorists in Indonesia? They bring in Imam's in white robes, Muslim holy men, who then tell them about how wrong their actions were, and tell them that if they refuse to cooperate their souls will burn in hell or they even go so far as to hold a ceremony where they excommunicate them from Islam. These people have little or no fear for loss of life as they actualy seek martyrdom, they fear damnation, they fear rebuke from their peers. It is a serious sin to commit murder especially against another Muslim, the same is true of suicide and certainly of orchestrating such atacks Their is doubt, their is fear there, more powerful than any of their mortal fears, compared to waterboarding or sleep deprivation the psychological tools used in Indonesia have worked and provided us huge intelligence assets in Indonesia and in Pakistan where it was not our actionable intelligence that lead to significant captures in those regions but their own and they have drawn praise instead of criticism for thier actions not from just the muslim world, but the world community in general.


Talk about fear and psycological tactics all you want. We aren't debating whether or not to use them, we are debating on whether or not to use actual torture and if extracting dubious information unusable in court is worth allowing terrorists to hold U.S. torture over our heads as a tool for recruiting more members into thier groups. With what we know, both the Taliban and Alquaida six years after September 11th to be at the same strength if not greater strength than they were we must come to the conclusion that the benefits have not exceeded the risks and that our methods of interrogation must change.

much thanks ocanada...cosmo' and everyone else with common sense.

phuk these duma$$ sadistic neo-con loser mferz like dickman here who calls us "my friends" but happens to be the "poor devil" I'd like to see getting the shite "scared" out of him...("See?" pfff) making light of every wrong or harm's way our government puts our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters into. And for what???

They're too dam dum to ask for real truth, as if they've just accepted they're incapable of it, but they are smart enough to try hiding their questionable morals behind bs "legal" arguments (loopholes rather..mferz!) ala George Bush, like snakes in the phukn grass. What a brood!

Then there's this dumphuk liberal-extinction who believes the government should go completely unaccountable to the public it serves and "protects." Wha terrorism foo? The only people spying on me is my own dam government!!! Taking away more rights guaranteed by the constitution than if we were under taliban rule ourselves!!! What incredible and complete stupidity these guys think to front as "intelligence."

Freaks like these a$$holes will soon call *us* the "enemy combatants" people!!! beware these g'dam sob losers...

MY brother-in-law had the same argument and fear about the government listening and spying on the general populace. I pointed out that the shoebomber got on to the plane. He was not caught through the US listening in on phone calls. My point is I don't think they are listening in on the Smith and Jones from the US. If you have had contacts with Al Queda, you might have reason to fear. Now if it is ever proven that they are...sure I will be one of the first in line to stand up against such actions.

My friends, as long as we have waterboarding in our arsenal, we will continue to be a nation that has not suffered a major terrorist attack since 9/11.
By the way, getting back to Kalid Sheik Mohammed, the CIA released information about his waterboarding experience. It said he basically broke down and wept. Almost soiled himself too. And he could have avoided all of it.