Go right ahead. If you feel your freedom is worth saving the lives of fellow Americans I applaud your sense of duty and responsibility to make a decision to take an action which you know to be illegal and be held accountable for it. If it was the right decision you can always ask for a Presidential Pardon and I would wager you would get it. If it was the wrong decision then you have to pay for it.
Musketeer, I implore you to stop with the false statements. There is no "pardon" issue here because there is no crime. Again, foreign terrorists in foreign nations. They have no rights under the constitution. Please stop pretending like they do.
So then where is Osama Bin Laden?
Again, another fallacy. Whether or not we have found Osama has nothing to do with whether waterboarding produced actionable intelligence that saved lives.
And that is where it gets sticky. How do we define a terrorist? How do we define enemy combatant. Is a suspected terrorist the same as a terrorist? Habeas Corpus is back on life support but does being called a suspected terrorist make it null and void? If so, that's dangerous for us all.
Well here's a novel idea. Don't get caught waging a war against US troops in a foreign nation. Don't get caught with a backpack full of cash and a cell phone full of al quaeda contacts.
And again this argument that if it happens to some guy picked up in downtown kabul it can happen to some guy in Virginia beach is ridiculous. We've already settled this issue with Padilla. The fact that all of the government screwups have been with convicted terrorists doesn't cause me to lose sleep at night.
Torturing and incarcerating them indefinitely is expensive, and also makes us look like savages to the rest of the world. Summary execution to those combatants we think deserve it is not cruel or unusual. It is also quick, and gets them out of the media spot light.
One of the reasons I know that the folks who support waterboarding are in the right is because the folks here who oppose it have to fabricate facts to support their argument. First, we don't torture people indefinitely. Nor do we hold them indefinately (though we probably should because of how many return to the fight). We have waterboarded 3 people. Thats it. Three.
Now I don't know what kind of logic it takes to make the argument that waterboarding 3 people is far more heinous than summarily executing hundreds but its certianly no logic I've ever heard of.
However I do know this. Anyone, and I mean anyone who thinks that Al jazeera or any other sympathetic media would let the fact that we killed these people "get out of the media spotlight" is as naive as they come.
You seem to think that barbarism is the most efective way to win the conflict.
It is when you're dealing with barbarians.
You should look up the history of insurgencies. Overreaction has never been the way to win. In fact, they WANT us to overreact. That is how insurgencies gain popular support. Look at the world after 9-11. We had support the world over, which we have thrown away by overreacting.
Actually its just the opposite. There is only one way to win a war of attrition and thats not by treating people with kid gloves.
Occasionally we gain intelligence, but at the cost of the cooperation of intelligence agencies and governments around the globe, not to mention the enmity of the populaitons on the ground who we need most to cooperate. Again, this follows the historical pattern of insurgencies.
Just more fabricated statements. 3 for 3 isn't "occasionally". Nor do our friends care that we waterboarded these people. That and I'm fairly certian that if the Iraqis are aware that we did waterboard these 3 people, they really could care less about what happens to 2 Saudis and a Paki.
You make the mistake of assuming that we can't win over the people of Iraq while getting information from terrorists. We can easily can because the terrorists are foreign fighters, not iraqis. They are very much disliked by the population over there.