Scott breaks with Obama, calls for prosecutions

Your hypothetical daughter's college calls to say two agents from the Department of Homeland Security took your daughter off campus 2 weeks ago and no one has seen her since. After a week of phone calls, you're told authorities were concerned about long distance phone calls made to her dorm room and a library book she'd checked out and you're told you should stop making waves.

Do you sit tight and let them water board her a couple dozen times or send her off to Bulgaria to be brutalized by someone other than official U.S. personnel to find out whether she's actually just a college student?

Discounting the unlikely problematic ticking bomb scenario there is no justification for torture.

Mr. Scott,

I would love to hear the answer to this question.

A 20 megatom nuclear warhead is set to detonate in the cargo hold of a ship in Newport News. We have captured the leader of the group that brought it in and armed it. We know there is less than one hour before it detonates. We have asked him nicely if he will tell us exactly where it is and how to disarm it and we have failed.

Now with the knowledge that if this warhead detonates it will kill hundreds of thousands and render hampton Roads uninhabitible for decades would you approve waterboarding or other methods to extract the information from this terrorist or would you stick to your position and allow the entire region and its inhabitants to perish in agony?

I await an answer for anyone against these interogation techniques.

How about we have a new rule that you cannot post unless you have a fundamental understanding of the issue being discussed? For the 100th time, please stop referencing the Geneva Convention as a disqualifier for protection against torture. It is utterly irrelevant to the discussion. We are also signatories to the 1984 UN Torture Convention. These knuckleheads we pick up are covered under its protections. Also, for the hundredth time, investigation and prosecution under the provisions of the convention are not optional. February Gallup poll showed over 60% of Americans wanted investigations / prosecutions, with over half of that total looking for criminal prosecution. If this is a political stunt by the current administration, why are they not pushing for these investigations / prosecutions?

Give the new administration time, people! 8 years of Bush/Cheney gutting our Constitution, stripping away American's civil rights, replacing logic and science with inflamatory propaganda slogans, and insipidly misleading the willingly uneducated to believe that torture and brutal repression are the new American way will not be corrected overnight.

We see that here, but we can't afford to let those fringe views hijack what the majority of Americans know to be true. The truth will always out.

Than the good old fashioned, Post-Electoral Perp-Walk & Congressional Show Trial... Where the new administration’s partisan healers, shamans & bag-men get to dance naked around the camp-fire in stylish war-paint & shake their juju sticks & mojos at the previous administration for “screwing everything up so badly.”

Not withstanding that it is factually a gross over-exaggeration to compare the G.W. Bush administration’s so-called ‘constitutional’ & ‘human rights’ violations, with Hitler’s systematic enslavements & genocidal slaughters of the civilian populations of Europe under the NAZI regime...

The hardline spin-meisters & policy wonks among the Democratic Party would love to have the rest of America believing that we desperately need to have a Nurembergesque public political bloodletting in order to cleanse our tainted souls & to save face with the rest of the world.

Now I've heard it all. Opposition to torture is an attack on the "AMERICAN WAY." Luckily this sort of hysteria fomented by the radical right is destroying the Republican party, the RR's path to power. All of their chicken-little xenophobic fear and smear will have no effect other than engineering their own irrelevance. Good night and good riddance.

Torture is not the Mercan way, although it had been since the Bush Admin... which is the anomaly. Call it "The Bush Way".

If you take a look at the list of Socialist countries (cuba, china, vietnam, North Korea), there is a propensity for their gubmints to torture. So with Obama recinding the Bush torture practices, Obama is moving the country away from Bush-era socialism.

Now, if you have a problem with the DOJ prosecuting people for crimes committed (ie war crimes), then thats a different story. And if the DOJ did prosecute, then that would illustrate that THE LAW DOES MATTER.

Doesn't everyone get it? This is simply another attack on the AMERICAN WAY. Everyone needs to recognize what is happening here, SOCIALISM. This is the same thing that all the other Socialist countries around the world do when political power changes hands, change the laws and prosecute the old party and their supporters to consolidate their position. The Law doesn't matter, only power.

It is indeed a slippery slope we walk on here, "Stop Terrosim" they cry "make us safe", then they cringe at waht had to be done to do so. But, on the other hand if an attack did happen then the same people would want to prosecute because 'they' "didn't do everything in their power to stop it".

This is a political argument and not one of logic and common sense.

The real crime that should be prosecuted is the stripping of liberties from United States citizens. Where now Christians, Libertarians, Rush Limbaugh listeners, etc. are labeled at "potential threats" and investigated at will, without cause or warrant.

Read history, this is what the Nazi party did pre-WWII, but wait...we can't because it has been removed from the history books.

My friends we are in trouble.

Besides the mind-boggling fact that people are advocating torture, equally mind-boggling is the supposedly "persuasive" arguments made by said law-breaking torture advocates.

The idea of NOT torturing & instead lawfully adhering to the Anti-torture convention of which the US is a signator supposedly means the following to a suprising # of posters:

Not torture = "hugging terrorists"
Not torture = "what next, rubber bullets"
Not torture = "Bobby Scotts heart is filled with hate"
Not tortuer = "Bobby scott does ungodly acts"
Not torture = What about JackBauer24 ticking timebombs?
Not torture = but others do!
Not torture = "Lets give terrorists a time out"

The "logic" is tortuous.

US Army Reserve 1970 - 1974 Army National Guard (Massachusetts) 1974 - 1976

How is waterboarding by the vietcong, chinese or anyone else torture and a war crime, but when Americans do it, hiding behind bogus legal memos, its OK? We prosecuted others for this war crime, and we signed the Geneva Convention that REQUIRES us to prosecute officials who order this crime. Torture brings our whole country into shame and degrades us - and for what? Useless intelligence because a person being tortured will say anything they think we want to hear. If we fail to prosecute, surely the International Courts will do so.

"One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.

It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohammed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not."

Whats next rubber bullets for our troops?

....but we are a nation at war. American soldiers are being killed and tortured. American citizens were killed in the 9/11 attacks. UNPROVOKED attacks. The methods used to obtain information from the detainees have so far prevented another attack on American soil. If you don't like the ways that information was collected I suggest you bury your head in the sand and pretend that all is right in the world. You are merely attempting to grab headlines since you have nothing else worthwhile to contribute to society. The self-serving crap promoted by our elected officials is appalling. I now rank you right up there with Senator LLL and yes- the man himself- BHO. It's politicians like you that are running this country into the ground. Excuse me now while I go puke. I am officially sick to my stomach after reading the tripe you spew.

OK, I **** everything that GWB did doing his presidency. He stole this first election, but some idiots voted him in because he had you scared of the boggey man, and you **** people love to do the dirt to someone else, torture is wrong. And like the Prez says that was not the only tatic that would have work. I just love my President. But, anyway prosecutions are in order. And I'm behind you Mr. Scott. Do what you were elected to do. Don't worry about negative publicity, Our President doesn't.

Scott, please put America first, rather than advancing your political ambition. What's next Scott; do we prosecute the armed service men and women who were ordered to carry out these acts? Scott should resign and allow someone with the courage to put our country first to serve. His acts are purely political. Scott does not have the courage or intestinal fortitude to make the types of decisions necessary to protect our country from terrorist. Terrorism is a dirty business and there is no room for political grandstanding when we're trying to save American lives. Scott was wrong about the troop surge: "The American people and our courageous men and women on the front lines deserve a clear, articulated and sensible approach to ending the war in Iraq. Starting with an escalation of military forces is a step in the wrong direction." (see: http://congress.org/congressorg/webreturn/?url=http://www.house.gov%2Fscott ) Scott is wrong about this prosecution.

Ferryrider and others want to discuss rule of law? Fine, you go ahead with your prosecutions and we will go ahead with ours. Starting with the tax evaders in this current admin. You try skipping out on your taxes for 4 years and see if you get a pass. Ask Wesley Snipes what happens. Funny how the supposed outing of Valerie Plame was such a crime: have any of you stop to think how many CIA operatives would be revealed? I guess in a left wing witch hunt its different rules. I hope Obama will take Scotts advise so we can watch the carnage in Nov. 2010.

Put a cork in it Scott. If you want to cuddle terrorists, go do it. Leave me out of it. You're not speaking for me.

I can't believe most of these comments. This country is in an agreement NOT to torture, regardless of whether we're in a war or not. This is about America holding true to its word, and during the Bush administration it did not. We lose respect when other countries with whom we are friendly start to question whether or not they can count on us upholding our word in treaties or other pacts with them.

And the actions of others do not justify our use of torture. We should be above that. I am sad that people from this and other countries have faced what they have. However, we're the ones who invaded a country that was not at war with us, and if we hadn't entered Irag to begin with, this wouldn't be happening. We really just need to get out of there.