Bloodthirsty Liberal

Nearly three out of five of us:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 30% oppose the use of such techniques, and another 12% are not sure.

Men and younger voters are more strongly supportive of the aggressive interrogation techniques than women and those who are older.

Well, real men are, anyway. The rest of you might as well be women. (Excuse me while I scratch myself.)

And what’s the matter with you 12% who “are not sure”? Someone’s getting water poured down his gullet, thinks he’s drowning (though he’s fine actually), and you’re scratching your head, scrunching up your face, and going hummana-hummana? Take a [bleeping] stand, why don’t ya? Honest to God.

I’m happy to see I’m solidly in the majority on this one, although I’d probably waterboard the entire nation of Nigeria and their dogs to get information (well, maybe not their dogs). So maybe I am still an outlier.

Anyhow, more interesting stuff at the link, very little of it showing confidence in President Pantywaist.

While guest-hosting for Rush yesterday, Mark Steyn interviewed Connie Hair of Human Events, and they recalled this interesting exchange between Eric Holder and members of the House Judiciary Committee from last may, which I had quite forgotten:

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) then switched gears to a line of questioning aimed at clarifying the Obama Justice Department’s definition of torture. In one of the rare times he gave a straight answer, Holder stated at the hearing that in his view water-boarding is torture. Lundgren asked if it was the Justice Department’s position that Navy SEALS subjected to waterboarding as part of their training were being tortured.

Holder: No, it’s not torture in the legal sense because you’re not doing it with the intention of harming these people physically or mentally, all we’re trying to do is train them —

Lungren: So it’s the question of intent?

Holder: Intent is a huge part.

Lungren: So if the intent was to solicit information but not do permanent harm, how is that torture?

Holder: Well, it… uh… it… one has to look at… ah…

I’m sorry, would you repeat that?

Well, it… uh… it… one has to look at… ah…

I see. Can you elaborate?

Well, it… uh… it… one has to look at… ah…

Yes, I got that part, General Holder. Anything else?

Well, it… uh… it… one has to look at… ah… it comes out to question of fact as one is determining the intention of the person who is administering the waterboarding. When the Communist Chinese did it, when the Japanese did it, when they did it in the Spanish Inquisition we knew then that was not a training exercise they were engaging in. They were doing it in a way that was violative of all of the statutes recognizing what torture is. What we are doing to our own troops to equip them to deal with any illegal act — that is not torture.

So, if “it comes out to question of fact as one is determining the intention of the person who is administering the waterboarding”, as you so eloquently put it—leaving aside the Spanish Inquisition for moment, if that’s okay—waterboarding with the intent of discovering plots of mass murder is torture, is that right? Training Navy SEALS, no problem; saving hundreds or thousands of lives, no way. Do we understand that to be your position?

Holder: The intent is in the person who would be charged with the offense, the actor, as determined by a trier of fact looking at all of the circumstances. That is ultimately how one decides whether or not that person has the requisite intent.

Thank you, that’s much clearer now.

I think I’d be safer driving after midnight on New Years’ Eve than flying under the watchful gaze of these criminal buffoons.

Go ahead, twist my arm:

Often/sometimes is up 10 points since Obama became president and five points since he and Cheney started tangling over this, with support at a clear majority for the first time since Pew began polling it.

What’s more, the increase has been stronger among Independents than Republicans—most of whom already had the electrodes charged, it must be admitted—and strongest of all among Democrats!

The cherry on top: the number of people who think President Obama is a pansy (not their word, mine) is equal to the number who think he’s either too tough or just right.

We thought we elected a Messiah, but we got a metrosexual.

Cheney/Palin ‘12!

Cue the evil laughter:

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”

Standing? The horror! Stress positions? Oh, the humanity!

What part of “suspected al-Qaeda terrorists” do these people not get?

Besides:

The prison pods inside the barn were not visible to locals.

So for all we know, the CIA could have been riding English and sipping tea. This story is as empty as Al Capone’s vault.

President Obama must hate Muslims, loathe them.

Else why would he want to dispatch the Guantanamo inmates from their Caribbean island paradise to cold, hardened maximum security prisons around the country?

Judith Miller explains here.

And summarizes here:

In an interview with PJTV’s Bill Whittle on Friday, former New York Times reporter and now Fox News pundit Judith Miller had nothing but praise for the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and claimed that not only was no one ever subjected waterboarding there, but that any harsh treatment took place only during the first four months of its opening.

Miller has joined the ranks of former Vice-President Dick Cheney and daughter Liz Cheney this week with as she defends Gitmo, and calls for President Obama to keep the facility open to house detainees there rather than bring them into prisons within the United States mainland.

Referring to Gitmo as a “model prison,” that offers a wide variety of food and provides “extraordinary” health care that is “far, far better from what these people would get in a maximum security U.S. prison on American soil,” Miller expressed what she called concern for excess waste during a period of economic strife within the nation.

Asked by Whittle if Gitmo still had a bad reputation overseas, Miller expressed dismay that indeed, Gitmo carried the stigma of many media reports of torture and abuse at the facility, “Even though this hasn’t been true for many, many years now,” she explained. “No one was ever waterboarded at Guantanamo, according to Guantanamo officials,” Miller continued. “Torture as ordinary people would call it took place only during four months when it first opened…like sleep deprivation, being doused with ice cold water…things that don’t meet current standards.”

Millers only ‘gripe’ about the situation at Guantanamo Bay’s detention facility was the “legal limbo” many detainees face as they wait to actually be charged with a crime and granted a trial, the same situation that endured during the previous administration’s 8-year tenure.

Miller also wrote an opinion piece that was published in the Los Angeles Times today titled ‘Keep Gitmo,’ that echoed many of these praises, as well as denials of torture, and calls for continued operations at the facility:

“Although it’s true that a 2005 Pentagon report concluded, after examining 26 complaints from FBI agents involving a small portion of more than 24,000 interrogations at Gitmo, that a few “high-value detainees” had been subjected to treatment that was “degrading and abusive,” it “did not rise to the level of prohibited inhumane treatment” or torture. Furthermore, those techniques — such as loud music, sleep deprivation, temperature manipulation and prolonged shackling — ended long ago at Gitmo, officers say.”

Her only gripe is that the detainees are in a legal limbo. But that is entirely due to the hypocrisy of their home nations and other countries around the globe who scold us for holding them, but don’t want them anywhere near themselves.

But I’d like to address the part I highlighted above because it fuels the whole stupid controversy. What she calls torture—”sleep deprivation, being doused with ice cold water”, also strip searching and “humiliation”—I call college hazing. I’m serious. For a mere four months, immediately after their capture in battle in Afghanistan and elsewhere, we grilled these guys about what they knew. Ground Zero was still a steaming pile of human and construction rubble, dangers and threats still seemed to lurk in every alley, Osama promised more hurt to come. And we played Led Zeppelin.

I’ll even allow that there were abuses. But just as at Abu Ghraib, the abusers were punished. Severely. Miller testifies that no one was waterboarded at Gitmo, which surprises me. I thought we acknowledged waterboarding three times (for KS Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and another guy), and maybe we did, but maybe just not there. If you listen to the whole interview, she talks about the absurdity of all the improvements going on down there (soccer fields, etc.) even as Obama continues to promise to shutter it.

Much of what Miller reports was reported three and four years ago by Mark Steyn (can’t find the relevant column or columns on line). He actually had the effrontery to go see Gitmo for himself (horror!), and to report first hand. He was derided as a stooge for the military, but mostly he was right. Then, as now, the detainees were treated with excruciating… kindness, respect, and deference.

Good luck finding those qualities in Ft. Leavenworth.

Our readers don’t tend to get too sentimental about Saddam Hussein. But in case any liberals swing by and wonder how we ever could have supported the removal of him from his golden thrones, here’s a friendly reminder:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Abbas Khidr, an Iraqi-born poet currently living in Germany, which aired on Alaan TV, on June 19, 2009.

Interviewer: “What was your interrogation like, Abbas?”

Abbas Khidr: “The Iraqi interrogation? The Iraqis do not interrogate, brother. All they do is torture. For example, if you give them a piece of information, you get yourself into trouble, because they want more information. They begin by asking you: ‘Have you heard about us?’ Have you heard about the torture in Iraqi prisons?’ The interrogator asks you that, in these exact words. ‘Do you confess or not?’

“If you say that you are innocent, it begins. There are various methods of torture. There is no interrogation - only torture. They want information and names. The most important thing is names. You are forced to give names, and sometimes these are your friends, which is a problem because you are about to destroy their lives. So you have to endure the torture, and then the torture increases.

“The torture methods included what was known as ‘hanging.’ They hang you from the ceiling for three or four hours. To this day, I have a problem in my shoulders. They are dislocated here. This is ‘hanging.’ Foot whipping is carried out on a chair.”

…

“The worse kind of torture was electric shocks. I could endure anything but electric shocks. They really debilitated me. I was afraid I would give the names of many people. Electric shocks… Dear God… no language in the world can describe this.

“At first, when they torture you, you become very weak, but after a couple of days, the body learns to tolerate the beatings. It even learns to tolerate the electric shocks. A person who endures the first three days will endure the rest.

So, I guess it’s not so bad then. Saddam was all about toughening his people up. (There’s plenty more depraved violence at the link, believe me, if you need more.)

But if this is how he treated his poets… well, just imagine how bad it was for everyone else.

If you think barking dogs and ladies panties are torture, you really should read it all. You got an education in the ingenuity of man’s inhumanity to man coming to you

Malaysia postpones woman’s caning until after Ramadan

They searched their hearts and minds and found compassion, wisdom, forgiveness.

A Malaysian model, who was set to become the first woman to be caned in the southeast Asian country for drinking beer in public, had her sentence postponed Monday until the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno’s punishment is unique in that she has opted to go through with it.

Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno’s punishment is unique in that she has opted to go through with it.

Authorities had picked up Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, 32, from her father’s house Monday morning and were taking her to a prison in the eastern state of Pahang when the van turned around and brought her back.

“They sent her back to the house. They said the top official asked them not to bring her to Kuala Lumpur,” said Kartika’s father, Shukarno Abdul Muttalib.

Authorities in Pahang said the delay would run until the month of fasting ends. Monday was the third day of Ramadan.

An Islamic, or sharia, court in Pahang had fined Kartika — a Muslim — $1,400 (5,000 Malaysian ringgit) and sentenced her to six strokes with a rattan cane for drinking at a hotel bar two years ago.

Kartika, a 32-year-old part-time model and mother of two, was visiting Malaysia from Singapore at the time.

She pleaded guilty, paid the fine, and wanted her caning to be carried out in public. Video
She said she lost her job as a nurse in Singapore and took up part-time modeling to support her husband in raising their two children. Her son has cerebral palsy; her daughter a heart condition.

“I want to move on. This case has been hanging over me for a long time,” she told CNN last week.

On Monday morning, Kartika hugged her children, bade a tearful goodbye to the throngs of people gathered at her father’s house, and boarded the van.

She was to be taken to a prison on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. The caning would have been carried out within seven days of that, making her the first woman to be caned in Malaysia under sharia law.

Kartika’s punishment is unique in that she has opted to go through with it. Two other Malaysians sentenced to the same fate have filed appeals, the Syariah (Sharia) Lawyers’ Association of Malaysia said.

The case drew widespread attention and condemnation, in and outside Malaysia.

The moderate Muslim country has a dual-track justice system, in which Islamic courts operate alongside civil courts.

By the way, the dual-track system is gaining popularity. Not long ago, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, (leader of the Anglican church), suggested some sort of accommodation for shari’a in England. With my great affection for the Brits, I’m pulling for this to happen ASAP. The Swedes should look into it too.

How would such a system work?

Muslims — who make up about 60 percent of the 28 million who populate the country — are forbidden from consuming alcohol. Other religious groups are exempt.

Though caning is used as a supplementary punishment in Malaysia for at least 40 crimes, such as rape or immigration violations, it is not meted out by Malaysia’s civil court for alcohol consumption.

But the country’s civil system also cannot overrule a sharia court sentence.

Geez, we’re all in big trouble if sha’aria comes to the US. On the other hand, maybe the unemployed can become official state sponsored torturers?

- Aggie

You know us Bloodthirstani—we spit in the punch, fart in a phone booth, clean our ears with our pinkie fingers. It’s part of our culture, like dismembering albinos.

Similarly, when we heard about rampant torture by US forces against innocent detainees, imagine our extre-e-e-me disappointment to learn that all the hype amounted to waterboarding three hardened mass murderers who had more human blood on their hands than Idi Amin’s personal chef.

But we held out hope for the secret photos of detainee abuse at Guantanamo. Your imagination would blanch at what our imagination came up with.

Our spirits have been crushed again. I don’t know how we’ll go on.

President Barack Obama reversed his decision to release detainee abuse photos from Iraq and Afghanistan after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki warned that Iraq would erupt into violence and that Iraqis would demand that U.S. troops withdraw from Iraq a year earlier than planned, two U.S. military officers, a senior defense official and a State Department official have told McClatchy.

In the days leading up to a May 28 deadline to release the photos in response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, U.S. officials, led by Christopher Hill, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told Maliki that the administration was preparing to release photos of suspected detainee abuse taken from 2003 to 2006.

When U.S. officials told Maliki, “he went pale in the face,” said a U.S. military official, who along with others requested anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

…

Maliki said, “Baghdad will burn” if the photos are released, said a second U.S. military official.

A U.S. official who’s knowledgeable about the photographs told McClatchy that at least two of them depict nudity; one is of a woman suggestively holding a broomstick; one shows a detainee with bruises but offered no explanation how he got them; and another is of hooded detainees with weapons pointed at their heads.

Some of the photos were of detainees being held in prisons, while others were taken at the time a detainee was captured.

Nudity??? Hoods??? That’s it? I’ll grant you the broomstick shows promise, but it sounds more like Abu Ghraib all over again—which is to say: nothing.

Oh, it’s abuse, all right (some of it, anyway). Prisoners, whoever they are and however they were captured, are not our playthings. The soldiers responsible should be, and I’m sure have been, punished. But these sound like “trophy shots”, pictures to show the guys back home what you got up to in the service.

Stupid, unprofessional, actionable—but hardly what we were expecting. Let others condemn, let Baghdad burn. The armed forces of the United States of America liberated Iraq from decades of real abuse, and have bloodied Al Qaeda’s nose wherever we’ve faced them. That’s not a bad plus-column. Ask me, it outweighs a little nudity, a little waterboarding, even a broomstick.

But then, I’m Bloodthirstani.

I wonder why?

WASHINGTON — The United States is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government officials.

The change represents a significant loosening of the reins for the United States, which has worked closely with allies to combat violent extremism since the 9/11 attacks but is now pushing that cooperation to new limits.

In the past 10 months, for example, about a half-dozen midlevel financiers and logistics experts working with Al Qaeda have been captured and are being held by intelligence services in four Middle Eastern countries after the United States provided information that led to their arrests by local security services, a former American counterterrorism official said.

In addition, Pakistan’s intelligence and security services captured a Saudi suspect and a Yemeni suspect this year with the help of American intelligence and logistical support, Pakistani officials said. The two are the highest-ranking Qaeda operatives captured since President Obama took office, but they are still being held by Pakistan, which has shared information from their interrogations with the United States, the official said.

I get it! This is what Obama means when he says that we won’t torture anybody any more!! We’ll let Pakistan do it. They’re much more accomplished at it than we are anyway. And, you can bet your last dollar that our fearless leader will not be explaining this to the pubic.

This policy started two years ago under Bush, but, according to the NY Times, has accelerated under Obama.

I bet it has.

- Aggie

Say what they will about Dick Cheney—and they do—the lactating liberals of the loony left respond with everything but… well, a response.

They call him names:

It appears CBS News’s Chief Legal Analyst doesn’t agree with his colleague Bob Schieffer that former Vice President Dick Cheney is winning the national security debate with Barack Obama.

Quite the contrary, Andrew Cohen thinks Cheney is still living in “the world of September 11, 2001, a world where hijacked planes are screaming toward their targets, chaos reigns, and anything goes.”

As a result, Cohen wondered in a Friday posting at his CBSNews.com blog “Court Watch” if Cheney is, “as many people say, just a d**k”.

Ha! I get it. He made a funny.

They question his mental health:

Neurotic, paranoid, false to fact and false to reason, forever self-rationalizing his inner rage at his own impotence, and failure dripping from every word, and as irrational, as separated from the real world, as dishonest, as insane as any terrorist; the former vice president has today humiliated himself beyond redemption.

…

You saved no one, sir. If the classified documents you seek released really did detail plots other than those manufactured by drowning men in order to get it to stop, or if they truly did know plans beyond the laughable ones you and President Bush have already revealed, hijackers without passports, targeting a building whose name Mr. Bush could not remember, clowns who thought they could destroy airports by dropping matches in fuel pipelines 30 miles away, men who planned to attack a military base dressed as pizza delivery boys, forgetting that every man there was armed, and today, the four would-be synagogue bombers, one of whom turns out to keep bottles of urine in his apartment, and is on schizophrenia medicine.

If those documents contain anything of value, you would have leaked those already, as you leaked those revenge fantasies of the Library Tower and the JFK Bomber and the Ft. Dix Six.

Do you think Olbermann imagines himself wearing a powdered wig and striped trousers as he drops in that “sir”? How pompous. Someone should tell him that Cheney is probably not watching the show, not while there’s a moose hunting episode on Wild Kingdom somewhere on satellite TV.

But nice to know all terrorists are incompetent buffoons. Nothing to worry about.

That’s the tenor of the Times, where debate is pretty much reduced to denial:

It certainly didn’t quiet former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was fear-mongering in full force on Thursday.

That’s all the editorial board had to say about Cheney’s speech—buried in a paean to President Obama’s wisdom and prudence.

But the OpEd columnists had more to say—not always in their own words (hello Maureen!):

Besides, the question of what Pelosi knew or didn’t, or when she did or didn’t know, is irrelevant to how W. and Cheney broke the law and authorized torture.

…

Torture […] is designed to force the subject to submit “through humiliation and cruelty” and “see the interrogator as the master who controls his pain.”

It’s a good description of the bullying approach Cheney and Rummy applied to the globe, and the Arab world.

…

Correction: May 18, 2009
Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

I side with Cheney, and I’m prepared to defend the position. But there’s little to say in response to nyah-nyah. Liberal commentators, it would seem, fit the classic description of the bully: tough and intimidating until you punch them in the nose. Then they blubber and sputter, and retreat to a safe distance to resume their taunting. In absence of any coherent response, the round goes to Cheney.