anna belle @ 21

Somewhere I have gotten the notion that there is tacit agreement between the parties that investigations will not be pursued once the office of the president flips party-wise. Sort of a “catch ‘em in the act or not at all” kinda deal. Is that true?

But we did catch them in the act. Hundreds of times.

—–

Abu Ghraib photos and stories to match care of an Army sergeant are the smoking gun.

GSD @ 108

Hypothetical.

There is a ticking nuclear bomb in LA or NY.

You are a special agent and you find one of the culprits who knows where the bomb is and how to defuse it.

After hearing about the wonderful benefits of torture in solving this very scenario, you then torture the subject.

The subject is a plump, guy, sort of like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad who promptly goes into cardiac arrest after severe beatings and waterboarding.

He dies and the bomb blows up killing hundreds of thousands.

Do you tell anyone or do you just kill yourself?

-GSD

Ok, then on the flip side of this, what do you do if the “plump guy” is tight lipped and just waits out the timer on the weapon and it goes off. Either way in your scenario the bomb goes off. The common factor here is time.

The information you get may be bad information, but you also may get useful information. That has apparently helped in the capture of various high-rollers in Iraq, and even with the Iranian Republican Guard operatives.

The “ticking time bomb” scenario seems to be the favorite argument in support of torture. Well, according to an intelligence officer interviewed on NPR who was involved in three wars, this situation was never encountered in real life. It’s a chimera, advanced to win an argument. This man also said young interrogators in Iraq took their cues from “24!”where the “ticking time bomb” scenario gets a lot of play, so I hear. Get it, fiction!

An open secret in San Fran; Dianne loooves a man in uniform.

Well, it’s simply understood that IOKIYAR, plus there’s no expectation that ReThugs will honor openness.

Arrrrgh.

This Mukasey thing has me in a really bad mood–where are the Dems who will honor our nation’s values? the Party’s values? The Constitution?

Speaking of Presidential records, anybody recall how one of Bush’s first acts as President was to block the scheduled release of papers from Reagan’s presidency?

Actually, you probably don’t recall, largely because right-wing boot-licking pieces of crap like Timmeh completely ignored it and gave Bush the usual pass. Timmeh is the last person who has any right to ask anybody else about the release of Presidential records.

I agree this sounds like a 24 episode, and that it doesn’t happen all that often….but it has happened. We had our’s on 9/11, the Japanese had their’s, and Spain just recently had an episode. Thats 3 in the last few years and it should be alarming the hell out of everyone. On the flip side to that argument, waterboarding/torture is not used all that much either. It is being used on targeted individuals to extract information to hopefully avoid the attacks I listed previously.

Kurt…in none of the scenarios above was

a) foreknowledge of an imminent terrorist attack

(unless you are suggesting that the CIA, Condi Rice, and George Bush did know of an imminent attack on 9/11 and did nothing about it?).

b) a terrorist in custody who would have knowledge of such attacks

So your idea that 9/11, the Spanish Railroad attacks, or the japanese subway attacks could have been averted by torturing anyone is, quite frankly, absurd. The situation you are suggesting are likely to occur only one in a hundred thousand cases. And the risk is that the application of torture will result in misleading information that strains resources from factual leads (after all one has actually arrested a suspect). If that suspect is actually trained s/he WILL give false information. If they are innocent they will also give false information under torture.

In fact, if one really knows that an individual is involved in an imminent terrorist attack (and isn’t carrying the bomb himself…in which apprehension solves that issue) the best thing is to TAIL the suspect to acquire as much information , without false leads, as possible.