The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it - Henry David Thoreau

Torture? I Promise to as President!

by Manwhore

Giuliani and McCain (two cantidates who have a ‘respect’ for one another) are heavily engaged now in the definition of torture as a campaign slogan. Not to be denied his GOP cred as being tougher than tough, Giuliani has brushed his shoulder off McCain: I’ll Waterboard them, what would you do? to an attack by McCain that he’s soft on torture.

MASON CITY, Iowa – The Republican debate over torture has become a debate over resumes, as John McCain warns from personal experience about the dangers of harsh questioning and Rudy Giuliani takes credit for his skill with it as a prosecutor.

“When someone says waterboarding is similar to harsh interrogation techniques used against the mafia in New York City, they do not have enough experience to lead our military,” McCain said Sunday night at a town-hall meeting here.

I’d expected a little more from a guy who was interned and tortured in Viet Nam himself (weren’t his teeth broken out during his tortured stay in a Viet Cong day spa?). Giuliani went on the defense by saying this:

“Intensive questioning works,” Giuliani told Bloomberg TV. “If I didn’t use intensive questioning, there would be a lot of Mafia guys running around New York right now, and crime would be a lot higher in New York than it is.”

As easy as this haymaker is to counter, I’d have to agree with G Spot at least in this much. Upping the ante in how we dole out justice in international law is a very slippery slope. Our society may have needed to have the ‘opportunity’ to hit below the belt to tackle our enemies, but we lose a LOT of moral high ground in doing so. It’s simply too dangerous to move the goalposts on this issue, and not have a shockwave of human rights abuses the world over, simply because the most just country in the world has condoned it when defending itself from what it considers harmful.

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