Tuesday, April 28, 2009

SERE Training

a rack, torture device


I don't know just exactly how unmitigated an ass you have to be to compare SERE training with intensive interrogation, but apparently Kit Bond is one. He asserts that waterboarding can't be torture because SERE does it to our own troops. I don't know exactly how large a truck would have to be for you to not be able to drive it through the hole in that logic, but damn big is for sure. You'd think that someone capable of getting elected could see how this doesn't work.

Hey Kit, let's just start right at the beginning with the SEREs thing, if you go there you're a volunteer and you know that the waterboarders are your friends. No kidding, butthead, there's a difference between a friend and an enemy - someone you eat chow with and somebody who tries to shoot you... Maybe I could understand how as a Republican you're confused about friends and enemies, you've sure made that mistake about the domestic opposition to the Iraq war. Something else that might occur to the victim of intense interrogation is that in the one case everybody, including you, knows you don't have any information they actually care about getting - not quite as likely in the other case. It might make a bit of difference that as a SERE you know you get to leave and do something else after just a bit of this treatment, in fact you will get respect and good treatment for having engaged in this bit of discomfort. One hundred eighty three in one month is a few dousings more than a bit, and still there is a long time.

I'm not sure what idiot at Republican central churned out this particular talking point, but when a five year old would laugh at it an experienced pol ought not take it up. I know I keep coming back to this mess, as tired as I am of it I just cannot leave it alone when this level of stupidity is presented publicly for my consumption. This is the Party of Values? I don't get it, what value particularly is this about? I can almost understand protecting marriage and some of the other stuff put forward as being about values, but not even a strong stomach gets you there from here. Why the hell is this Republican?

Kit, none of the electorate was born on 9/11, even the latest ones were born before that date by about a decade, this torture idea comes post most of a voter's experience and quite simply torture was done by the other guys - the bad guys. Really bad guys. The world did not change on 9/11, everything is not different. A couple buildings came down and over 3,000 died, would anyone care to compare that to the London Blitz, or some other rough times? All kinds of bad things have happened over our world experience called history and we did not torture people. We had an international reputation as one of the good guys, in the face of some long odds at times. Not very long ago you could not have made these kinds of statements in polite society and most likely not in rough society without getting a bad reaction. This was the kind of crime there just wasn't any debate about, it would be akin to excusing child rape in the popular mind.

Things were desperate after 9/11? One narrow slice of history says WTF? Pearl Harbor was blown to smithereens, our ships were sunk all over the Atlantic, we lost all over the Pacific, we got handed our heads in N Africa, stalled in Normandy, bombers shot to pieces over Germany - we were doing very badly in WWII. Desperately badly. Somehow we acted humanely through very dark days, and now?

If these people get re-elected after this nonsense you people in their constituency better start looking at your neighbors and wondering what these subhuman cretins will get up to - or move the hell out. If you think this is a bit strong, as furious as I am you could not force me to do this crap to these punks that are excusing it. Don't mistake me for a pacifist, either.

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