We should have gone into Afganistan and Pakistan with a genuine multi national force, which would have been quite possible after 911 and before the invasion of Iraq, rooted out Bin Laden and his fellow cockroaches, and gone home. I've posted the above many times.
The whole thing should be over by now, with the planners and chiefs of the terrorist attack either dead or (preferably) behind bars.
I say preferably, since extremists like AlQaeda thrive on martyrs.
Officially sanctioning waterboarding would have been descending to the level of the perpetrators, yes, even if there had been no other form of torture. Perhaps it could have been justified by an end justifies the means kind of argument, but it would still have been compromising our values.
Hypothetically, of course.
No one knows how many were tortured, nor how much of the torture was water boarding and how much was something else. What is known is that there was a lot more going on than water boarding three known terrorists.
There have been several, but all of them seem to subscribe to the unsustainable argument that waterboarding was the only form of torture, and that only a few known terrorists were water boarded.
My position is what it has always been: Having compromised our values and engaged in torture was reprehensible and counterproductive in the war on terror. And yes, water boarding has been torture ever since Torquemada perfected the technique hundreds of years ago.
Excellent. We are in agreement on that point.
The legality of mistreatment of prisoners was based on labeling them with a new term that meant that they had no rights. It was a lot like calling slaves n****, which meant they weren't human. In fact, we have invented a term for every enemy we've fought in recent years that meant that the enemy wasn't made up of human beings like ourselves.
As for Bush and Cheney being war criminals, no, I wouldn't go that far. The former was simply incompetent to use the power he was given, the other a true believer that the end justifies the means.
The fact remains that had we done what I suggested in the first paragraph, there would have been no torturing of prisoners. Whether or not Bush et. al. sanctioned said torture or not, what happened was a direct result of having decided to start a war in the first place.
And yes, I understand that the Congress is partly to blame as well.
