The Glade 4.0

The Senate report is out. In case anyone still had doubts: Yes, we tortured people. Yes, we tortured some of them to death. No, it wasn't just the waterboarding. No, it wasn't just a few high-value targets. Yes, some of them were detained and tortured solely because other detainees had accused them while they were being tortured. Yes, some of them turned out to be innocent. Yes, most of this was actively approved, and excesses were willfully and explicitly covered up. Yes, all of this is in violation of international treaties to which the United States is a signatory. Yes, it is also a violation of US federal law. No, none of the people involved have been charged with anything.

God bless America.

You'll forgive me if I remain skeptical of the report's analysis and findings, as it was partisan in nature from the word go. You'll also forgive me for remaining skeptical when the Senate Intelligence Committee violated clearance level statutes and document protocols in producing said report. Finally, you'll forgive me for not endorsing a document that constitutes a legitimate national security threat.

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I can forgive skepticism, though I do not believe it is warranted here, and your stated reasons for it are laughable. However, refusing to endorse even this paltry accounting of governmental war crimes because admitting our crimes could pose problems for us is not forgivable, as it reflects a profound moral failure. The damage to national security is a result of our having committed war crimes in the first place, not of holding the perpetrators to account.

Diamondeye?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

It was partisan. Republican staffers and Senators were excluded from working on the report, ostensibly to eliminate partisan defenses. That said, the CIA has been on the record for months as having issues with who was given access to classified, secret, and otherwise restricted information in producing the report. Staffers without appropriate clearances were allowed to read documents they had no business reading. That said, we know the report constitutes a legitimate national security threat: every international post was placed in a state of heightened security and threat probability prior to the report's release.

But, none of that really matters ...

The report contains no information any reasonable citizen did not already know. You are fooling yourself if you ever thought the United States was above torture and ethically questionable interrogation techniques. You live in a country that built its empire supplying arms and armaments to the rest of the world. You live in a country whose power and place came from war profiteering. The United States has always been about its own best interests. We didn't need the Senate Intelligence Committee to tell us the United States used torture. We didn't even have to ask the question, much less make a public spectacle of something every government in the world does.

The United States tortured people. The United States has been torturing people for two and a half centuries. If you think it is a moral blot on America, what do you think of the rest of the world? The real problem here isn't what our government has done, it's that our government pretends to be above its Machiavellian behavior.

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I'm sorry, was there some deadline I missed to have read the report and be ready to comment on it? I'll get right on that so that tomorrow I can post something for you to be suitably outraged at and talk about how people need to be shot. From what I understand it's 480 pages long, and I do have things to do besides read it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It's nice that someone is finally getting the picture.



Hell, even the rest of the world does that. Putin's been on TV whining about how the NYC and Ferguson situations reflect on human rights in America. Russia has no room to talk, and Putin does not actually care. He cares about the political advantage.

European countries act outraged about NSA spying - then Germany gets caught spying on Turkey. France preaches at us - but sinks the Rainbow Warrior. (I'd have sunk the **** too, by the way - with a torpedo) Our allies talk about disarmament and our supposedly outsized military spending - but beg us to help bomb Libya and remain involved in a plan to "share" tactical nuclear weapons with us, so they can pretend to be non-nuclear weapons states.

There are three kinds of countries in the world - most of the West that genuinely does care about human rights, but regularly **** it up, often badly because "reality", most of the rest of the world for whom "human rights" are a propaganda stick to hit the west with for our supposed hypocrisy, and those countries that are too inconsequential to have their views seriously considered in the first place, such as New Zealand.

The people sleep safely in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. Nations do not survive by setting examples for other nations. Nations survive by making examples of other nations.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Bullshit. The Republican members of the committee refused to participate because they didn't want to have the investigation at all. Instead, they chose to put out their own "rebuttal" report. Also, there's nothing partisan about revealing crimes committed by the CIA under a program that had enthusiastic, public support of Senators and Congressman from both parties and which Obama has continued to cover for since he took office.


Again, the problem is that all this **** happened in the first place, not that we're starting to hold the perps to account. Let me put it this way: if the CFO of a company embezzles a bunch of money and gets publicly investigated for it, is the resulting drop in the company's stock price the fault of the prosecutor for not agreeing to cover up the crime or the CFO's for embezzling the money in the first place?

Lol, yeah Lenas.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Oh, you were confused?

Yes, the part about "acting suitably outraged" applies to you too, even if not the "shooting people" part.

That's ok though. In regard to the issue of torture allegations, let's not lose site of what's truly important - making sure you have some snarky comment to make about my views on the subject.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I think you and I will just have to disagree on this point. While I am not a Republican, nor do I support them, this report was a partisan hit piece from the word go. Had they been able to produce it ahead of the mid-term elections, it would have been in the news 60 days ago. You can choose to believe this is about holding individuals accountable for crimes, but the reality is that it was motivated by politics and partisanship. You'll note, incidentally, that the period investigated was confined to the first 6 years of George W. Bush's presidency. The Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program was not suspended until after the very public capture of Osama Bin Laden. It wouldn't do to admit that Obama continued said policies for several years, would it?

I think you fail to understand what happened here. The Senate Intelligence Committee broke wholly domestic laws to produce this report and exposed individuals without proper clearance to State Secrets. They did so because of partisan motivations, as evidenced by how limited the investigation's scope happens to be. It was confined to a period of time in which the Republican Party held both the Presidency and the Senate. Likewise, you're ignoring the fact that governments do these things. Nothing contained within the report is surprising to anyone with any amount of skepticism about government behavior. Likewise, what constitutes torture in the United States is relatively tame compared to other nations professing outrage at our behavior.

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I do believe Elmo meant to imply that I was posting the response expected of you.

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Companies do not have strategic imperatives. Is your problem with the legalities, or the morality of it?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Perhaps. Either way, Nathan Jessup has something to say to Elmo, Lenas, and quite a few other people. Nathan Jessup's appalling handling of Private Santiago's situation is a matter of authorial fiat. The validity of his points are not.

you also might think, given our frequent disagreements, that Elmo would learn something from that, but he seems to have forgotten that 6 or 7 years ago we were not far apart on this issue when it was Monty playing the outraged part.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Thats great. Every study every done on the effectiveness of torture have revealed it has none.

I skipped the moral case because I know you don't care about morality.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

What studies would those be? How does one conduct a scientifically controlled study on torture? What assumptions do they make?



I don't care about anything you would describe as morality, certainly.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

If you were any more dense you'd be a neutron star. You just fire off replies from the hip, don't you?

For the record I am pretty indifferent regarding torture and have nothing to be upset about here.

A big reason Europe gets so pissed off about it is because the US basically gets special treatment in this regard and is allowed to **** up while they are not. Here's a question: How many innocent US citizens were detained and tortured by European countries doing terrorism investigations in the past 15 years? The list of innocent EU citizens that was detained and tortured by the US is fairly long, and the Supreme Court shut the door on them in regards to any kind of compensation. The fact is that if Europe had tortured a US citizen by mistake, the US would make a major international incident out of it and there would be restitution in the millions at minimum. When the reverse happens, the response is pretty much, "Our stick is bigger than yours, so go **** yourself."

And if Europe would actually have their own sticks instead of hiding under the protection of ours, we'd give more shits.

But they don't. So we don't. Suck it up buttercup.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I'm all for us holding ourselves to a higher standard.

If we're going to hold ourselves to a higher moral standard, I have no problem with us going after those who have violated it.

I'm not for pretending this anything new and/or is the fault of one man, party or administration; or that all members of said party and administration are "bad" because of it.

I'm not for Anyone outside the US holding us to a higher standard than they've practiced.

I'm not for pretending Torture is a great moral evil while ignoring other evils. (Maybe we just need some "Science" to prove those we tortured "aren't fully human")

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

No, only when people post stupid picutres in place of an actual response. You're the one with the history of making one-liners about "DE will be along to say such-and-such", so when Elmo did essentially the same thing and you responded with a pointless picture about nothing, there's no reason you should expect differently.



Fair enough.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Allowed by whom? Who is Europe answering to in this regard?



I don't know. Do you? You may think the answer is zero... but you don't actually know that do you?



Where is this list, what makes it "fairly long", and how do we know these people are innocent? In fact,. why do we even care? These operations are not about innocence or guilt, they're about defeating the enemy.



Tough ****.



Then maybe Europe should get itself a bigger stick, or at a minimum stop borrowing the American stick. Europe is pretty much willing to whore itself out to the U.S. defense cock to avoid having to stop buying votes with social programs, so they have nothing to whine about when that same schlong finds itself in Europe's self-righteous rectum.

Go try slobbering on some Russian knob for a change and see if you get a better deal. I mean, shop around. Where's the harm in that?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Even doing this, we pretty much STILL hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than anyone else. Our allies hide behind our defensive skirts, then whine about these activities all the while enjoying not having to do such things themselves.. or at least not as much. Everyone else is either worse than them, or complaining from the high horse of being a tiny irrelevant island somewhere.

Much like WWII - our behavior was far from perfect, but we were still by far the good guys.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Oh, man, I know! You never let me down, either.



He didn't do essentially the same thing, he just found Khross' unintentional similarities to you humorous. My picture was neither pointless or meaningless, it was a very succinct way of pointing at you and laughing like the kid that doesn't know they have a "kick me" note stuck on their back. Only instead of laughing about it behind your back, I tried to hold up a mirror so you could see it.