McCain At His Best
He did give us Sarah Palin but when it comes to torture, few politicians are more eloquent:
Click here for reuse options!The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless.They must know when the values that define our nation are intentionally disregarded by our security policies, even those policies that are conducted in secret. They must be able to make informed judgments about whether those policies and the personnel who supported them were justified in compromising our values; whether they served a greater good; or whether, as I believe, they stained our national honor, did much harm and little practical good. . .I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored.
Copyright 2014 Liberaland
By: Stuart Shapiro
Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.
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anothertoothpick December 10th, 2014 at 12:49
When General Curtis LeMay ran on the presidential ticket with George Wallace, LeMay’s image was ruined in most American’s eyes.
When McCain selected the nut job sister Palin, his image if he had one, went right into the crapper.
burqa December 10th, 2014 at 20:50
At times McCain has been a maverick for maverick’s sake, but he’s right on the money with this one. I think we should discuss the content of what he said and the subject at hand, which is torture and abuse of prisoners.
anothertoothpick December 10th, 2014 at 13:49
When General Curtis LeMay ran on the presidential ticket with George Wallace, LeMay’s image was ruined in most American’s eyes.
When McCain selected the nut job sister Palin, his image if he had one, went right into the crapper.
burqa December 10th, 2014 at 21:50
At times McCain has been a maverick for maverick’s sake, but he’s right on the money with this one. I think we should discuss the content of what he said and the subject at hand, which is torture and abuse of prisoners.
Hass December 10th, 2014 at 12:53
Fox News Host says America tortures because we are awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PgIKAukheo
Hass December 10th, 2014 at 13:53
Fox News Host says America tortures because we are awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PgIKAukheo
burqa December 10th, 2014 at 17:22
There are two arguments here. One is an expedient one concerning the effectiveness of abuse and torture of prisoners (and it’s important we include abuse with torture). The second argument is the moral one concerning who we are as a people and what moral standards we have. Even if torture and abuse yielded results, we should still determine we will not go there.
It is sickening to me that many of our fellow citizens are willing to countenance torture. They’re all over the media these days.
I keep remembering how this was an ace in the hole for us during the Cold War. Sure, we made mistakes and had problems to deal with, but when compared to the commies this thing always distinguished us – we didn’t torture and they had a whole state-approved policy and apparatus to carry it out. This horrified us and we beat the Soviets and other commies over the head with it time and time again.
I have a good quote on it I’ll try to dig up and post here. It’s by a guy who admitted he tortured prisoners in Iraq.
burqa December 10th, 2014 at 17:40
The following is the quote mentioned in my post, above. It is from the book FEAR UP HARSH An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey Through
Iraq, by Tony Lagournis, pages 246-249. Lagournis did a lot of work out in the field, away from a major base and found himself going over the line in how he treated prisoners to where he used torture. He was pretty messed up by it, psychologivally and stopped, but needed a lot of psychological help when he came back to the States.:
“Once introduced into war, torture will inevitably spread because the ticking time bombs are everywhere. Each and every prisoner, without exception, has the potential to be the one that provides the information that will save American lives. So if you accept the logic that we have to perform torture to prevent deaths, each and every prisoner is deserving of torture. In a situation like Iraq, it wasn’t just a few abstract lives that might be saved somewhere, at some future time. The mortars came almost every day. The life in question was my own.
Once we accepted that any prisoner might be holding information that could save lives, we gladly used everything in our toolbox on everyone. This resulted in an expansion of the class of people who could be tortured. Now it included people who had been picked up for questioning but were not suspected of being insurgents, and it included people who were picked up on hunches – people against whom we had no solid evidence – and it included relatives of our real targets. Again, I see the spread of torture to these groups as natural and inevitable. At the time, I barely noticed it happening.
We should be very concerned about this steady progression and where it will lead, because the essence of torture – tyrannical control over the will of [247] another – is everything that a free and democratic society is supposed to stand against. We should be very skeptical of the idea that our use of torture overseas will never come home….”
[Speaking of 9/11] “ … Those attacks, coming as they did from people who rejected the rules of civilization, made us want to respond in kind. Suddenly, their defeat was not enough. Standard military operations using high-tech weaponry and the utter obliteration of the enemy via cruise missiles and five-thousand-pound bombs was not enough. They should be made to feel the same pain we felt, and America, the mightiest power in history, should be able to dominate this enemy utterly and tyrannically. It came to be perceived as our right, due to us as a hegemonic power. So we suddenly had no problem putting absolutely tyrannical power in the hands of army specialists. They would show each terrorist the face of America, and they would dominate the terrorists’ very souls as much as our military dominates the battlefield. That’s the kind of victory I believe many Americans want.
As I discovered in Mosul, this kind of dominance requires evil. The prisoner will not break unless he believes the potential for escalation is endless, and the only way to convince him of that is to be the embodiment of evil. For [248] a truly evil person, the rules of civilization do not apply and any course of action is possible. The prisoner who faces an evil captor is transported to a totally alien world that makes no sense and that he finds impossible to fathom. This is where true terror and panic set in, for the prisoner can never know or even imagine, what is next. If we want torture to “work,” this is where we have to go. So we have to ask ourselves: Is this what we want?
This kind of evil is true of al-Qaeda. They have convinced us that they are evil people who ignore the rules of civilization, and their evil has an effect on us. All they lack is the absolute power over us that a torturer has over a captive. Many Americans, on the other hand, believe that we do have that power, and that using it is a perfectly legitimate response.
On the Senate floor, arguing for his antitorture amendment, Senator McCain made all the standard practical arguments about the inefficacy of torture that I think miss the point. But his most powerful argument was when he told an opponent, tersely, that this issue was “not about who they are,” meaning the terrorists. “It’s about who we are.” This is what we have to decide. Torture might be an effective way to gather intelligence. It can be a very emotionally satisfying response to the vicious 9/11 attacks. But it also has the power to define what America is in ways that we cannot fully control. …
[249] … And what if we feel no revulsion or feel torture is okay “sometimes”? I experienced this, and here is what happens. We see the evil, both outside and inside of us, and we accept it. We accept the evil, and it comes to us whole and it fills our being. We accept this evil in us, and then we accept all that it is capable of doing.”
burqa December 10th, 2014 at 18:22
There are two arguments here. One is an expedient one concerning the effectiveness of abuse and torture of prisoners (and it’s important we include abuse with torture). The second argument is the moral one concerning who we are as a people and what moral standards we have. Even if torture and abuse yielded results, we should still determine we will not go there.
It is sickening to me that many of our fellow citizens are willing to countenance torture. They’re all over the media these days.
I keep remembering how this was an ace in the hole for us during the Cold War. Sure, we made mistakes and had problems to deal with, but when compared to the commies this thing always distinguished us – we didn’t torture and they had a whole state-approved policy and apparatus to carry it out. This horrified us and we beat the Soviets and other commies over the head with it time and time again.
I have a good quote on it I’ll try to dig up and post here. It’s by a guy who admitted he tortured prisoners in Iraq.
burqa December 10th, 2014 at 18:40
The following is the quote mentioned in my post, above. It is from the book FEAR UP HARSH An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey Through
Iraq, by Tony Lagournis, pages 246-249. Lagournis did a lot of work out in the field, away from a major base and found himself going over the line in how he treated prisoners to where he used torture. He was pretty messed up by it, psychologivally and stopped, but needed a lot of psychological help when he came back to the States.:
“Once introduced into war, torture will inevitably spread because the ticking time bombs are everywhere. Each and every prisoner, without exception, has the potential to be the one that provides the information that will save American lives. So if you accept the logic that we have to perform torture to prevent deaths, each and every prisoner is deserving of torture. In a situation like Iraq, it wasn’t just a few abstract lives that might be saved somewhere, at some future time. The mortars came almost every day. The life in question was my own.
Once we accepted that any prisoner might be holding information that could save lives, we gladly used everything in our toolbox on everyone. This resulted in an expansion of the class of people who could be tortured. Now it included people who had been picked up for questioning but were not suspected of being insurgents, and it included people who were picked up on hunches – people against whom we had no solid evidence – and it included relatives of our real targets. Again, I see the spread of torture to these groups as natural and inevitable. At the time, I barely noticed it happening.
We should be very concerned about this steady progression and where it will lead, because the essence of torture – tyrannical control over the will of [247] another – is everything that a free and democratic society is supposed to stand against. We should be very skeptical of the idea that our use of torture overseas will never come home….”
[Speaking of 9/11] “ … Those attacks, coming as they did from people who rejected the rules of civilization, made us want to respond in kind. Suddenly, their defeat was not enough. Standard military operations using high-tech weaponry and the utter obliteration of the enemy via cruise missiles and five-thousand-pound bombs was not enough. They should be made to feel the same pain we felt, and America, the mightiest power in history, should be able to dominate this enemy utterly and tyrannically. It came to be perceived as our right, due to us as a hegemonic power. So we suddenly had no problem putting absolutely tyrannical power in the hands of army specialists. They would show each terrorist the face of America, and they would dominate the terrorists’ very souls as much as our military dominates the battlefield. That’s the kind of victory I believe many Americans want.
As I discovered in Mosul, this kind of dominance requires evil. The prisoner will not break unless he believes the potential for escalation is endless, and the only way to convince him of that is to be the embodiment of evil. For [248] a truly evil person, the rules of civilization do not apply and any course of action is possible. The prisoner who faces an evil captor is transported to a totally alien world that makes no sense and that he finds impossible to fathom. This is where true terror and panic set in, for the prisoner can never know or even imagine, what is next. If we want torture to “work,” this is where we have to go. So we have to ask ourselves: Is this what we want?
This kind of evil is true of al-Qaeda. They have convinced us that they are evil people who ignore the rules of civilization, and their evil has an effect on us. All they lack is the absolute power over us that a torturer has over a captive. Many Americans, on the other hand, believe that we do have that power, and that using it is a perfectly legitimate response.
On the Senate floor, arguing for his antitorture amendment, Senator McCain made all the standard practical arguments about the inefficacy of torture that I think miss the point. But his most powerful argument was when he told an opponent, tersely, that this issue was “not about who they are,” meaning the terrorists. “It’s about who we are.” This is what we have to decide. Torture might be an effective way to gather intelligence. It can be a very emotionally satisfying response to the vicious 9/11 attacks. But it also has the power to define what America is in ways that we cannot fully control. …
[249] … And what if we feel no revulsion or feel torture is okay “sometimes”? I experienced this, and here is what happens. We see the evil, both outside and inside of us, and we accept it. We accept the evil, and it comes to us whole and it fills our being. We accept this evil in us, and then we accept all that it is capable of doing.”
Tim Coolio December 13th, 2014 at 21:48
How lucky were we not to have Palin one senior heartbeat away from the Oval Office?
Tim Coolio December 13th, 2014 at 22:48
How lucky were we not to have Palin one senior heartbeat away from the Oval Office?