“Let the world change you, and you can change the world”

~Ernesto Che Guevara

enough said.

Third-hand reocunts of what he did and what happened that one time with those guys doesn’t really make for good arguements either. Digging up dirt on famous people that have been involved in politics as well as armed conflicts isn’t all that hard, especially when you go for the first thing that pops up when googling. Try your favorite hero on any “side”.

Got that? LAWYERS WROTE THE CONSTITUTION.

But tell yourself what you need to hear so you can keep on shooting little brown kids. There’s a reason I’m no longer in. I don’t like being anyon’es pawn. The military is supposed to be for national defense.

And we’re supposed to be the good guys. That means we honor human rights NO MATTER WHAT. It’s called having good character. I don’t think we’ve ever had that. But I sure wish we did. We were supposed to be the shining beacon on the hill or some crap like that. We were supposed to be the example to everyone else. Example of what? How to be flaming a-holes?

funny how certain people are for inalienable rights except when it means they don’t get their way.

some people have an evil agenda and they don’t even know it.

Meh.

You want context? Here’s the search page I worked from. You could have done the same; instead you chose to make a generalization about something–without context. Is that typical of you?

It has just occurred to me–*I* was trained as a tactical interrogator in the Army during the early 70s. By the grace of God, I never had to use those skills. (Vietnam was winding down, and I was in Germany having been trained as a Polish linguist (hence my username)). I was taught to be much more aggressive than is my nature, but everything was verbal. I have no idea what might have taken place in the field. I have a feeling that your typical strongly-Catholic Pole would have responded better to an appeal to his faith than to intimidation.

Regarding your opinion, here is one of mine. I agree with your final statement–to a point. (Please bear in mind as I say what follows that I may not have better information than you, but I have been trained to process it differently.)

“Snark” raised a point earlier. You have captured someone who has time-critical information. If he doesn’t call in somewhere in two hours, other bad guys are going to destroy information, weapons, whatever, and move. You *have* to have that information *now* or it is useless. If you don’t get that information, untold numbers of good guys–including civilian populations–could die.

Unlike many of the left–I except you–I begin with the assumption that the US is working for the greater good. Dwight Eisenhower said that, in order to be a good general, you had to be willing to sacrifice 10,000 lives in order to save 20,000. That said, I have little trouble with making one of the enemy extremely uncomfortable for a short time in order to preserve the lives of untold numbers. And also having said that, I would not know how to do that myself.

My feeling [OPINION] is that, while Islamic murderers have prepared themselves for the intellectual concept of dying and then going on to Paradise, they are *not* prepared for the short-term, extreme discomfort of not knowing when or whether they will die in the next few minutes. During interrogator training I was shown movies of a technique resembling waterboarding–performed upon a US interrogator–so I know EXACTLY what is involved. I have no problem with that, nor would I have any difficulty administering it myself. It is possible to determine almost immediately whether or not the information we are given is good–*and we do*. We do not do the things we do gratuitously. They are done in the interest of true liberty.

This could become a dissertation, but I’ll stop now. Again, CF, thanks for your thoughtful reply, and I look forward to our dialogue in the future.

Howmsoever–nice of you to simply dismiss everything I said, then throw in an assertion which cannot be supported. It’s why I stopped the dialogue with Herb and Piman: How can you, or they, claim to know what is or was in the President’s mind? In their case it is clearly delusional. I know you’re capable of better, and I’d love to hear some actual facts from you. And an actual response to what I am setting forth by any of you lefties, instead of just changing the subject.

“Gotta work on those communication skills.” General Munro, “The Fifth Element”

Were the Crusaders misguided adventurers who slaughtered innocents in the Holy Land? Of course they were–in turn with the equally brutal Muslim Saracens. Each party was responsible on many occasions for “depopulating” towns and villages.

But the prize for depopulating *regions* would go to the Turks (not present-day Turkey, the Turkic people whose empire at times extended from Asia Minor to China), the Persians, (who have always made a specialty of playing two sides against each other and moving in to take advantage of the vacuum), the Mongols and Huns, the Chinese from the second millennium BC (400,000 enemy soldiers executed after *one battle*) to the present (25 million dead of starvation in the early 1960s during a famine to which the Communist government did not want to admit, plus however many are dying in their version of the Gulag), Nazi Germany (tens of millions), the leaders of Soviet Russia (70 million murdered in their own country from the October Revolution until the dismantling of the Union under Reagan/Bush, and not counting Afghanistan and their satellite states). We don’t know how many are dying each day in North Korea due to starvation, or in the various nations of Africa and southeast Asia due to disease, starvation, war, and genocide *for which their own governments are responsible*. And of course, the death toll is always rising from the thousands of attacks by those acting in the name of the “peaceful religion of Islam” from the first highjacking in the late 1960s to the most recent carbombing wherever these pathological cowards have chosen to strike.

Not the Church. Not the United States or the evil West.

Get me some numbers on how many have died in the name of the Cross and maybe we can talk.

R.

After all the business with Rev Wright — “how can he stand for that?” “Why doesn’t he speak out against him?” “Why hasn’t Obama denounced his minister?” “Look at how he just threw his pastor under the bus…” — I’m just a little tired of this one-sided push to decry anything that offends the delicate-yet-selectable sensibilities of the right.

(Yet McCain needn’t distance himself from anyone.)