Casca: You compared my military service to someone taking a ferry trip and claiming to know the ocean. Hence my use of the term “jaunt”. I accept that there are many others out there with greater experiences than my own (and some of them might even be women!). My point in referencing military service was to opine that it is wrong, IN MY OPINION, to be so cavalier on the topics of torture and war when one is either unwilling to put their money where their mouth is or has not gone out in the service of their country. Don’t agitate for war if you’re unwilling to fight.
I did not refer to you as feckless. I do not know your background, so I have not commented upon it. You, on the other hand, seem perfectly willing to pillory or castigate freely those who disagree with you, as well as referring to people as idiots in the course of the discussion.
Being of German descent (on both sides of the family), I have a very high opinion of German efficiency, as well as German ruthlessness. The Germans on my dad’s side were of the friendly East Prussian variety (Konigsberg and Stettin), so I am very familiar with the vaunted Teutonic style of “handling things”, especially opposition.
Again, as to hair splitting: We are clearly not communicating when it comes to “stress techniques”. Waterboarding, and this is personal opinion and not something out of an Army FM, is torture as far as I am concerned.
Rendition to places like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi is torture, again, as far as I am concerned. Those individuals that are sent to Egypt, for instance, are, by and large, never heard from again. The methods used in extracting information are vicious. You and I can quibble over whether or not waterboarding is torture, but the fact remains that waterboarding is the least of the privations that these individuals will suffer at the hands of our titular “allies”.
Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and rendition diminish our stature in the eyes of the world. If we have to stoop to the methods used by Nazis in order to win, then how is that victory? I understand that you are professing an admiration for the German way of doing things, but I am taking a more sanguine view and one with a longer time horizon. The minute we start conflating the US with Nazi Germany, we have lost far more than just the War on Terror. Which, more correctly, should be the War on Terrorism.
Based on personal experience, I don’t find torture to be an effective method of extracting information. One key point that has been missed in this discussion is whether or not the individual in question even has information to give. In the case of the Nazis, they discarded thousands of individuals in their quest for information, the vast number of which had absolutely nothing of value in terms of information. Using this logic, we should indeed keep all the people currently being held at Gitmo, torture them and discard those of no value. Again, it is not an apples to apples comparison between the present conflict (or any counterinsurgency operation) and WWII.
As to my “condenscending” to you: Really? You can heap scorn and derision on me and others on this post, but cry foul at this? Please, Casca, let’s have something of an objective standard here, alright? You are calling people idiots, but call me on the carpet for some point of punctilio?
