“If Waterboarding Is Okay, Then Why Don’t We Let Our Police Do It?”
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Torture, VideoJesse Ventura on The View recently…
By the way, I don’t agree with Hasselbeck being called a “right wing idiot” on the title of this video, but I can’t take it off and I think the point is valid enough to post.
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This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 and is filed under Torture, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 18th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
It’s really an absurd question: our police may not “wall slam” suspects either because they are bound by the due process requirements of our criminal laws including all those encompassed by “Miranda rights.”
Merely posing such a question indicates that the person asking does not comprehend that the whole issue with respect tol al Qaeda detainees is precisely whether they are criminal suspects or some thing else.
May 18th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
The Police would be charged and later sued in a civil lawsuit. It seems like thugs get a lot of breaks.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:10 am
Never cared much for Ventura. This video has changed that for me, I passionately agree with everything he says.
May 19th, 2009 at 5:13 am
Yes, it is a logical extention.
http://pavlovianobeisance.com/mayberry_machiavellis.htm
May 19th, 2009 at 5:58 am
Ventura may be the only politician who, when he speaks you always hear what he truly believes. I find it refreshing..
As to John’s point, until Cheney and Bush, our nation also had standards so it is far from an absurd question. You can’t say that it is beneficial without taking it the next logical step. Much of what they did was parse words to make black look white. Enhanced interrogation was torture and any honest view of history would indicate that.
May 19th, 2009 at 8:31 am
Justin, as someone who is constantly on your @ss about being biased against conservatives, let me say this.
Hasselbeck IS a right wing idiot.
She is in no respect a thoughtful person, at least not on the air. She demonstrates ZERO in the way of strong-sense critical thinking. What VERY little critical thinking she does perform is limited to weak-sense critical thinking. That’s what you get when you begin by assuming that your premise is correct, and then you defend that premise only by marshaling whatever justifications you can find. You do your best to make the available facts fit the interpretation that you have already taken on faith to be true.
Nice to see Jess Ventura mop up the floor with these clucking hens. He’s far from a perfect figure, but at least he has some insight and some informed passion about important things. I can’t bear the kind of laughing glad-handing trivializing that shows like this foster. Here they try to have it both ways by laughing and smiling while trying to obscure insight into the heart of these issues. Ventura rolled right over this attempted fluff, which is one of his best features, warts and all.
May 19th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Ventura’s point is one that right-wing parrot (Hasselbeck) could not avoid. I could start referring to DDT as “happy sunshine spray”, but that wont make it any less carcinogenic. You can call water boarding an “enhanced interrogation technique”, but that doesn’t change what it fundamentally is. If you want to try to defend water boarding call a spade a spade. Don’t do a thesaurus dance to try to make it more palatable. If it were so easy to defend it on it’s description alone one wouldn’t need to rename it. Just a move from the Karl Rove playbook.
Hasselbeck and water boarding defenders cannot ignore history either. The Japanese and Germans both used water boarding during WWII. During war crimes trials a member of the Doolittle Raid testified that his Japanese captors used water boarding during interrogation. Those who used water boarding were considered torturers and hanged.
As Ventura mentions, during the Vietnam War the North Vietnamese regularly used water boarding, and other torture methods, to interrogate POWS in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. The US military court-martialled a soldier in 1968 after the Washington Post ran a picture showing the soldier and two South Vietnamese performing water boarding.
These are just two instances where we have said water boarding was torture. We have recognized that water boarding is unacceptable, to put it mildly. Remember your history. Ditch the propaganda. If we are going to assume the moral high ground then we must walk the walk as well as talk the talk. Terrorists will see through the BS and we will provide them with yet another recruitment tool. Do we really want to do that?
May 19th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I could claim that waterboarding is not torture, just an “enhanced interrogation technique.” I could also claim that the bozos who sent me a dozen emails about erectile dysfunction remedies aren’t spammers, just “high volume email deployers.”
May 20th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
this video made my morning yesterday, and this next one made my morning today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeMuDN9Ewyc
he’s a breath of fresh air, I can see why MN voted for him. I think we need people like that to rape the current system, tear it down and start afresh.
Anyway, back to the point. Hasselbeck is an idiot. seriously, she is. It’s not just name calling, it’s a description of someone with a low level intelligence.
On the second video, i have this perverse desire to see that weasel hannity waterboarded by ventura. that’s about as far as I can go with that idea before JG deletes my post :P