Goedel or Godwin?

Godwin, thanks.

When they came for Allah's blog, I said nothing as I was not a blogger.

When they came for Ace's blog, I said nothing as it meant more Val U Rite Vodka for me.

But when they came for Andrew Sullivan's blog I said "good riddance to that hissy fit hack of a drama-queen douchebag".

And when they came for my blog? I told them I was Ardolino.

I take it the ASFO advisory will remain pegged at "Heartsick"?

the master

Loose shit.

ah, filled with heart-ache". loose shit.

Let me pull up another relevant quote:

"Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?" - Captain Clarence Oveur

I take it the ASFO advisory will remain pegged at "Heartsick"?

I've been thinking that the advisory is outdated. A better gauge for Sullivan would be to have a meter; one side reads "illusion," the other "disillusion." Because those are Sully's only two modes. The trick is in reading him every day and spotting the illusions so that you can refer back to it when the meter eventually flips to the other side.

A perfect example would be his embarrassing gushing over Bush in late '01/early '02 versus his embarrassing demonizing of Bush now. Anyway, fun!

You forgot "volume."

moral peacockery

Damn that's good! It's Hitchens-like!

Plus he got to say cock.

Ahh, it just sounds like the excitable one ain't gettin' enough love for his mangina.

Hey whatever happened to the "He Who Shall Not be Named" rule?

Sure, they are against torture when it's the eeeeevil soldiers, an extension of the eeeeeevil Rove/Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld junta doing it. Odd that the actions of Zarqawi and his murderous ilk never register on the outrage scale. The usual excuse is because it's 'expected'.

So we are clear, it's ok for our enemy to saw the heads off of captured soldiers/civilians as they don't know any better, but any action short of peeling grapes for our captured prisoners is going to bring JUSTIFIED OUTRAGE.

I swear I don't even know who these people are anymore.

Dr. Evil clone livin' the AOS ™ lifestyle

Allah = Hitler

Ace = Devil

Bush = Hitler

Hitler = Devil

Ace = Bush

Doesn't the above equation also make Ace=Allah as they both equal Hitler?

And here I thought Karl Rove was the common denominator between all these bloggers....

I think we should use all means available to obtain information, short of actual torture. Shoving bamboo under the fingernails is torture. Bright lights, loud music and uncomfortable positions are not torture. The problem is coming to a national consensus about where to draw the line. The one method that I think straddles that line is waterboarding (creating the feeling of drowning, without actually causing physical harm to the detainee.) Unfortunately, we don't have a political climate right now where we can have a reasoned discussion about anything.

There are reports that guards raped several children on videotape. I don't know if the reports are true. But if it is and if the tape gets out, well, I think that goes beyond what justifies torture. If this information is true I think we should shut the prison down. I'm not saying shut the war down. I'm saying, shut the prison down.

There are reports that guards raped several children on videotape.

Where did they rape them? On top of the mountains of bodies in the Superdome?

I'm skeptical.

Well, ChrisG, if I was crass, I could argue that sometimes raping children works! I believe that the Soviets finally broke the Old Bolshevik S.V. Kossior by bringing in his teenage daughter and raping her in front of him, after other tortures failed.

I agree that definite limits should be set, and the penalties for transgressing them should be draconian. The first I ever heard about "waterboarding", it was a popular Gestapo method used against the French Resistance during WWII, right alongside electric shocks. I worry more about the US government getting a taste for torture and extralegal detention than I do about radical Islam, frankly.

I read that some of the prisoners photographed were alleged to have raped a 15 year old prisoner and that is why they were being interrogated.

"Odd that the actions of Zarqawi and his murderous ilk never register on the outrage scale."

Come now. I get as tired of Sullivan as the next dude, but he's got plenty of outrage to spare for Zarqawi. He's an equal-opportunity Cassandra.

I worry more about the US government getting a taste for torture and extralegal detention than I do about radical Islam, frankly.

Radical islam already HAS a taste for torture and extralegal detention. To say the least. So we have to be sensitive when interrogating them and "speak their language".

Is it me or does Andy's quote prove the exact opposite of the Bush = Hitler meme.

I mean, prior to the leak of the Abu Grahib photographs, you had a very quiet, presumably effective ongoing military investigation taking place.

The incidents of horror described and depicted are limited to a particular span of time, so it's not like there are reports from 2004/5 and an ongoing cover-up.

That makes it seem like there was confusion, which allowed this to take place, followed by correction. So, find, prosecute, send people to jail, but lighten up on the Bush=Hitler... Bush isn't the guy promoting Abu Grahib.

If Bush were Hitler, wouldn't Bush, Rove et cetera WANT to publicize the photos because 'The masses want torture'

Does this mean that the ACLU and the MSM are puppets of Rove because they're the ones giving the 'masses a thrill'?

I mean - damn - if that's the case, Rove's good.

btw - if you're looking for a good take on Sully's changes, read www.sullywatch.blogspot.com -- they've gone from savaging him in an entertaining fashion to 'welcome aboard, it's about time'

I don't see how you can have a discussion about torture. Either you believe we should be above certain things even if it makes us less secure, or you don't.

Can a logical fact-based argument be built around an idea that's more about emotions and personal values?

FWIW: I'm against torture, comfortable with discomfort, and not the slightest bit dismayed that Lynndie England pointed at some Iraqi's genitals.

Jack M.

And did they then beat you to a bloody pulp?

*i'm sorry, got caught up in a daydream there....

According to the hostage survival course I went through years ago as active duty Air Force, a determined torturer will either break you or kill you.

Or, to quote Ace, "torture works."

Speaking of equivocating a--holes, it's about time for another Sullivan meltdown.

Do you think that history would have spoken favorably or unfavorably to a few "rogue" Colonels in Patton's 3rd Army if they "coerced" a few captured SS officers to reveal the location of Dachau or Auschwitz earlier in the war?

As far as I'm concerned, terrorists still = Nazis. Put me on the record.

I'm not 100% on this, TF6S, but I believe that the locations of the death camps were not secret - once the Allies figured out their purpose, they already knew where they were. The Daily Telegraph was running headlines about massacres in Poland back in 1942, before the 3rd army would have had access to any SS officers who would have known about it.

Torturing SS captives wouldn't have produced any new workable intelligence, at least in this case.

SparcVark, actually you're right. I was pretty loose with that analogy.

My bad.

Could we have tortured those SS f**kers anyway?

There are reports that guards raped several children on videotape. I don't know if the reports are true. But if it is and if the tape gets out, well, I think that goes beyond what justifies torture.

I didn't know there were U.N. soldiers helping us with the war effort in Iraq!

According to the hostage survival course I went through years ago as active duty Air Force, a determined torturer will either break you or kill you.

Which is why it has a place - albeit limited and highly situationally specific.

Suppose a patrol snatches one of the bad guys who also out on a patrol? He doesn't want to say anything about the path ahead or any possible ambushes. So you get out the duct tape, pliers and coshs and give him a Jiffie-lube tune up that loosens his tougue enough to tell you there are indeed bad guys laying in ambush waiting for you.

You just avoided an ambush, some KIA's, and the perp just has a few bruises/contusions, maybe a smashed digit or two and a somewhat degraded sense of self-esteem - all of which he'll recover from eventually.

When given a choice between "us" versus "them", "them" has to lose every single time. To make any other choice is suicidaly stupid.

I can hardly wait until the Senate and House convene hearings on how to treat captured enemies. C-Span will never be the same when these august personages are reduced to trying to describe just what is acceptable torture. Loud music will be ok, but not above 120 decibels, Celine Dione is ok but not Britney Spears. You may break one arm but not both. Naked pictures of Hillary Clinton will be allowed but not Kate Moss. Ah, brave new world.

"...Could we have tortured those SS f**kers anyway?"

Officially, probably not, but the US military and civilian leadership of WWII wouldn't have spent a lot of time worrying about investigating any but the most egregious examples of abuse of Japanese or German POWs by US troops, particularly toward the end of the war. The "Greatest Generation" was a lot more realistic about things; they realized that they were in a fight to the death against ruthless enemies and sometimes it was necessary to get one's hands dirty. Our guys weren't torturing enemy POWs, but we did match the ruthlessness of our enemies in other ways. For example, atrocities like the "Rape of Nanking" and the German terror bombing of London were answered with firebombing raids on the major cities of Germany and Japan. By modern standards, something like the Dresden and Tokyo firebombing raids would be considered a war crime.

Another example of something that would be considered a war crime by modern standards - and of the WWII era, for that matter, was a story I came across some years ago while touring the museum at the (restored) Dachau concentration camp. It seems that a unit of Patton's Third Army, shortly after liberating the camp, found a detachment of SS guards hiding in the town next to the camp (also called Dachau). The "SS f**kers" promptly surrendered to the Americans; who accepted their surrender, disarmed them...and then the GIs stood them all against a wall and executed them on the spot.

With flamethrowers.

Yes, killing surrendered enemy combatants under such circumstances, without benefit of a trial, would probably be considered a war crime under the terms of the Geneva conventions. I also suspect that, under the circumstances, the superiors of those soldiers probably considered it nothing more than vermin extermination.

Andrew Sullivan with his walnut sized brain still figures to be the biggist liberal jerk around when he going to stop making such a idiot of himself?

I had a neighbor in Bookline MA who was a tanker during WWII during the battle of the bulge. He told of an incident during the battle where we captured quite a few Germans and had no means to handle them. The unit commander ordered all his tanks to load canister rounds, and that was the end of the "prisoner problem". That incident never made it into the history books.

Purple Avenger, I recall that Waffen SS troops under the command of General Peiper massacred captured Americans at Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. Was that payback for what Peiper's men did to ours?

"I worry more about the US government getting a taste for torture and extralegal detention than I do about radical Islam, frankly."

Can't we worry about both? Cos I do.

And we did torture Germans. A little bit. Certainly by these modern standards of torture. Ro-sham-bo ing, etc. McCarthy actually made his first name-recognition bones investigating American soldiers and interrogators for their ill treatment of Nuremberg defendants and assorted detainees. Cough. Dick Durbin. Cough.

And come to think of it, I haven't seen this analogy drawn *anywhere* in media New or Old. And if any of you pinch it without accreditation (that's Knemon with a K as in Sen. Byrd, thanks very much), I'll kick you in the nuts.

AS is an effeminate person with a silly foreign accent who used to be a play-pretend conservative but is now a full-bore liberal hack. I call him 'Andrianna Sullington.'

AS is an effeminate person with a silly foreign accent who used to be a play-pretend conservative but is now a full-bore liberal hack. I call him 'Andrianna Sullington.'

Homosexual journalist who got attention with some conservative writing, then obsessed on gay identity politics and now makes his bread shilling for the Left "as a matter of conscience." Must really frost him that David Brock got first dibs on the moonbat foundation money for that gig and Sully is just left with televangelism scams ("the Lord needs bandwidth") for his cash.

Rightwingsparkle....Nope, they just stood around with confused looks and said "Who?" over and over again.

You know what this means, don't you? "Filled with heartache at such gob-smacking vileness" now moves down to second position on the Andrew Sullivan Freak-Out Advisory, replaced at the top by "Machine-gunned and dumped in a mass grave".

Was that payback for what Peiper's men did to ours?

I didn't get that sense from this fellow. I came away with a feeling the commander was simply unwilling to cripple his unit's efforts by handling prisoners. Fighting with our backs to the wall, the Geneva Convention was a luxury we couldn't afford at the time.

The winner gets to write the history books...so this just never happened.