They do not value human life at all. They gleefully murder their own children in order to take out everybody that disagrees. They aren’t going to surrender to harsh language. If you believe that acts of violence against them can never be performed, then you might as well hang out the white flag right now.

And in answer to your question, if I seriously believe it will keep millions of people from being killed, yes, I’ll personally torture the guy. And no, there is no moral equivalent. Torturing an individual to save millions is not even close to what our enemies do (torturing thousands for pleasure and as a prelude to murdering millions more.)

If you are incapable of seeing the difference, then you don’t deserve the freedom that millions of your fellow countrymen have sacrificed their lives for.

I’d also like to pose a question or three. Let’s say that a city from your own country is in danger of destruction. However, it may be in your power to save it if you perform the right actions.

Would there be any moral or ethical limit to the acts that you would personally perform to save that city? That is, would you ever reach a point where you would say, “I can’t do this; it isn’t right”?

Would you commit mental torture? Physical torture? Would you commit rape, or murder? Would you do it to one person, or a thousand, or a million? Would you destroy a city in another country that has about the same population of innocent people as your country’s city? If the foreign city was bigger than your city, but the people who lived there, while innocent, happened to hate your country, would it make a difference to you? Would you not only destroy that foreign city, but torture everyone in it to death, adults and children alike? Would there be any point at which you would stop?

If you say that there is no limit – that you would perform any action whatsoever to save that city, no matter how vile the act – then just how different is your morality from that of the people who are planning to destroy your city?

Call me when you find evidence of American interrogators pulling out fingernails, slipping bamboo slivers under nails, strapping electrodes to genitals, or pounding kidneys to pulp and I’ll agree that is torture and that those responsible should be prosecuted.

The amount of mindless complacency in this country is mind-boggling. We haven’t been attacked by a major terrorist attack on our soil for seven-and-one-half years. So naturally the great minds among the leftists assume that we will never again be attacked, that our safety is not due to the efforts of our intel and military people, and that they can go back to the 9/10 mindset where they think of no political issues other than the trivial. Got news for you ducky, it ain’t so.

In German class today we were asked to make up pithy sayings (like “Clothes make the man” but in German), One I devised was this, translated into English: When the wolf is at the door, don’t piss on the guardian. This Administration and its votaries are pissing on our guardians.

No I would not want my son to say I’d like to be a waterboarder. But that misses the point. If he would be in the army and he was tasked with the job is not the same thing as aspiring.

BDeevDad,

Did you read the account from Stephen Flatow? I’m guessing that the ineffectiveness of enhanced interrogation is a bit more ambiguous than the op-ed writer at the Times claims.