I find the appointment of a new CO for Afghanistan interesting - in that his expertise, his career path was defined by special operations, particularly the HVT campaign in Iraq - interesting because that outfit has been accused of using some unsavory tactics to elicit info from insurgents: how does that sit with liberals? They just sort of look the other way? Obama goes on and on about how the Bush administration was corrupted by torture and shamed America - and then promotes a general to run his war in Ahganistan who may have engaged in something resembling torture? But forget that, those allegations have not been proven - how about the tribal leaders and associated operatives that the HVT program relied on for intel and almost certainly engaged in some bad behaviour - what about that, liberals? Don't see any complicity there? no contradictions, no hypocrisy? Need more jokes from Jon Stewart about evil Darth Cheney. Assholes.
[why are you defending torture? I'm not defending torture - I'm defending the defense of torture against a naive leftist agenda - big difference. Point of fact, I'm highly skeptical re the use of extreme persuasion during interrogations - mainly for reasons that I doubt the efficacy of such, partially because I'm sympathetic to the argument but not convinced by it that we need to maintain the 'high moral ground': If truth is the first victim in war precise notions of right and wrong are next: our enemies draw strength from their brutality and are encouraged that in comparison we seem weak - which is not to argue that we must match their brutality but rather to point out that perceptions matter, not only theirs of us but ours of ourselves. Innocent people die in war but, to speak hypothetically, we don't allow anti-war types, who are motivated by a shallow sort of empathy with 'victims', a seat at the table every time a military decision is made and that is because we might as well disband the army right now if we're going to allow every necessary misfortune to be debated - in other words, if we're going to allow perceptions to be compromised to an untenable degree. So, does Obama talk torture because we are a nation of laws and must draw our strength from that? Or does he do it to satisfy a pacifist liberal agenda? To me it's quite clearly the latter - and thus why I defend the defense of torture - rather, extreme persuasion - as I've said before what Cheney sanctioned devolved into something that was demeaning, unwise, impractical and at some point verged on cruel - but was not torture]
[and for a case point in why we should fear a pacifist liberal agenda look how Obama fucked up the Gitmo question: made some hasty decisions to satisfy the lefties and now has had to reverse himself because reality stepped in and said stop being stupid - he's fucked up the torture issue in exact same way - although it's nice seeing uber lefty Pelosi wriggling on that hook - yet another example of why democrats playing lefty poltics with national security issues holds such hazards]
