[Professor S]

Originally Posted by TheGame

The problem is the constitution isn't a perfect document. He is directly following the laws that have been put into it, and you know it. If more rules needed to be added to the constitution or some clarification or changes made to adjust to the issues of this time... then I can agree with that. But don't go tossing out that what he's doing is unconstitutional if it isn't.

You really don't understand the Constitution of Constitutional law at all, and I'll leave it at that. That statement simply reflects ignorance of the intent and function of the document.

Which I'm going to give you a pass on since I can just educate you on it now.

First read this site: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=13307

Bush and Cheney were pushing to find a way to link Iraq to 911. And they used waterboarding to do so. They pushed to get a FALSE confession about the link. You know with torture you kinda want to say anyhting to make it stop right?

So every single man woman and child who has died due that war, died because we put to use torture. Anyone who says otherwise is full of shit, or ignorant to the facts. If someone was waterboardng you to try to get you to link Elvis prestley to watergate, you'd tell them that.

Bottom line? TORTURE DOESN'T WORK, NEVER HAS, AND NEVER WILL.

Don't let the right wing brainwash you into thinking otherwise.

Your evidence does not claim what you think it does.

Here is the info that your link used to justify the claim that water boarding was used to start the Iraq war.

Senator Levin, in commenting on the Senate Armed Services Committee report on torture declassified today, drops the following bombshell:

With last week's release of the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, it is now widely known that Bush administration officials distorted Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape "SERE" training - a legitimate program used by the military to train our troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations - by authorizing abusive techniques from SERE for use in detainee interrogations. Those decisions conveyed the message that abusive treatment was appropriate for detainees in U.S. custody. They were also an affront to the values articulated by General Petraeus.

In SERE training, U.S. troops are briefly exposed, in a highly controlled setting, to abusive interrogation techniques used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions. The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. Until recently, the Navy SERE school also used waterboarding. The purpose of the SERE program is to provide U.S. troops who might be captured a taste of the treatment they might face so that they might have a better chance of surviving captivity and resisting abusive and coercive interrogations.

Senator Levin then documents that SERE techniques were deployed as part of an official policy on detainees, and that SERE instructors helped to implement the interrogation programs.

The senior Army SERE psychologist warned in 2002 against using SERE training techniques during interrogations in an email to personnel at Guantanamo Bay, because:

[T]he use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects... When individuals are gradually exposed to increasing levels of discomfort, it is more common for them to resist harder... If individuals are put under enough discomfort, i.e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. This will increase the amount of information they tell the interrogator, but it does not mean the information is accurate. In fact, it usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain... Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low. The likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the level of resistance in a detainee is very high... (p. 53).
Given that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and other high-ranking Bush officials insisted that SERE techniques used by the communists to extract false confessions be used - even after the head psychologist and others warned that it would not provide accurate information - does this mean that the torture program was geared towards obtaining false confessions?

This question is bolstered by the fact that all of the top experts on interrogation say that torture doesn't work.

And why else would the U.S. waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month (about 6 times a day for 31 days straight)?

Aside from claim fro Senator Levin who has been pushing against the war from the beginning, where is the proof that these techniques were used to obtain false confessions? There isn't, only conjecture based on an opinion that since many believe enhanced interrogations don't work, that continuing them MUST have been to gain false evidence. Thats invented evidence created by a leap in logic and close association.

Another allegation taken from McClatchy (who are they?) never makes a link between a false confession and the Iraq war.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Excerpts from Burney's interview appeared in a full, declassified report on a two-year investigation into detainee abuse released on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., called Burney's statement "very significant."

"I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist."

Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

This states that they tried to get evidence from the interrogations to point to Iraq, but failed. If you want to blame something, blame Cheyney, but it wasn't a false confession. There is NO claim beyond a Senator's opinion that the interrogations were intended to create false evidence and NO ONE of import has claimed that we went to war over the interrogations. The Senate report even contradicts the claim that they helped make the claim for the war.

So, once again, water boarding did NOT help start the Iraq war. Remember the weapons of mass destruction arguments? Thats the one that started the war, and thats the one Colin Powell brought to the UN and that the administration harped on (erroneously, as it turns out). Since water boarding is so popular in the media now, if there was strong evidence that it was used to justify the Iraq war, wouldn't that be the main argument against it across all newspapers and cable news (besides Fox)?

And as for repeating the same mistakes... at this point we're so deep into the pool of mistakes that I honestly don't believe it can be fixed. I don't want to go all conspiracy theory on you, but you probably need to research the federal reserve and the national debt. The fed at this point will always have the strongest influence.

I think it can be fixed... at least we can avoid making it worse.