Adam Carolla on torture...NSFW

[BaiHu]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/05/04/carolla_rips_60_minutes_the_left_over_ridiculous_s tandard_on_torture.html

[ford.304]

I have a real problem with that attitude. We shouldn't torture people because we are the United States of America. We're supposed to be the *expletive* good guys.

Especially when reams of science shows that torture gets you what you want to hear, not truthful information. We have better interrogation techniques than water boarding, or forced isolation, or any of the other horrible crap they're pulling on people.

If we are really that sure that some dude we dragged in has information of an imminent attack and we are so sure that torturing him will get that information, I want the president to go ahead and torture his ass. And as soon as that plot has been defeated, I want him to show up on national television and say "I did a horrible, illegal thing, and I did it for this specific reason, and it lead to this specific result. You all can start the impeachment proceedings and decide if it was worth it." I don't want him hiding behind ridiculous legal memos.

We beat the Nazi's without torturing people as a policy. I don't see why we can't beat a few hundred jerkoffs hiding in caves without it.

Note: I want to say that I have no problem with *killing* terrorists, provided that we have a reasonable way of figuring out that they are, in fact, terrorists. I'm not trying to say we needed to read Osama bin Laden his rights. But "not torturing people" is pretty darn universal.

[TGS]

We beat the Nazi's without torturing people as a policy. I don't see why we can't beat a few hundred jerkoffs hiding in caves without it.

I'm not saying I'm for or against torture, but this statement is utterly aloof. If you think that total war and COIN have anything in common, and that what is applicable in succeeding in one is thus applicable in succeeding in the other, I've got some bad news bears for you.....like decades worth of bad news bears.

[Al T.]

"I did a horrible, illegal thing, and I did it for this specific reason, and it lead to this specific result. You all can start the impeachment proceedings and decide if it was worth it."

The Alan West defense.

You hook me up to a generator and I'll tell you anything to keep me from frying, especially lies. Keep me up for a few days and sucking down Rip Its, no telling what you will hear.

From a strategic sense, torture is foolish. From a tactical or operational view, very, very debatable, especially as to what torture is "exactly".

[Mitchell, Esq.]

We beat the Nazi's without torturing people as a policy. I don't see why we can't beat a few hundred jerkoffs hiding in caves without it.



No. We just firebombed cities and attacked the civilian population of a country to terrorize people into surrender.

Not that it worked.

However...I'm sure that the US Army in 1944 would have quailed at the thought of making a nazi talk by getting rough if they needed some information...

[TCinVA]

What is "right" and "wrong" in war is a pretty fuzzy topic. Absolutes are difficult to come by.

What we know for sure is that the methods that many are referring to as "torture"...which I remind everyone we inflict on our own people during training...have been used in only a handful of instances on the worst of actors...and it seems to have produced real intelligence. There doesn't seem to be an institutional hunger for methods being described as "torture", if for no other reason than the folks we put into important national security positions may not be altar boys, but they do tend to operate by a basic moral construct that is shaped by our larger values in society. The result is that they operate with more humanity than any other identifiable group I their kind on earth as a whole.

I'm not fond of government agencies going anywhere near "torture", but at the same time I'm not in a hurry to take tools of last resort off the table for those dealing with literally the worst specimens of villainy in the world in the effort to frustrate their plans to massacre millions.

We have in our arsenal weapons of indiscriminate destructive power that boggles the mind. I doubt any of us lose any sleep over the knowledge that an element of our national security plan involves using those weapons to kill tens of millions of civilians, including women and children. And we've done precisely that on a smaller scale, the only nation in the world that has done so with those weapons.

The argument is that we'd have to be in desperate circumstances to actually use those weapons again and inflict that kind of carnage...but the point is that our rule about not killing innocents is apparently negotiable. Some would doubtless argue it isn't ever moral, but under the right circumstances it may be necessary.

I don't like the idea of the Airforce shooting down a passenger jet full of innocent people, but does anyone believe that we will allow another hijacked airliner to be flown into a skyscraper or the Pentagon? Is guaranteeing the death of all those passengers...mostly citizens...legal? Ethical? If you were in the F-16 that got the order, would you pull the trigger and call Fox 1? Again the argument would probably come down to the action being necessary...abhorrent in "normal" circumstances, but in extraordinary circumstances excusable.

If I am willing to vaporize women and children with an atom bomb to protect myself from obliteration, or to have a hijacked jetliner full of innocents shot down to prevent another WTC, can I really get morally outraged about the practice of snatching up a known terrorist and using limited "torture" techniques to make him give up intel?