Bush is wrong, again!!

[JR]

there was a show on the history channel just yesterday about the 84 embassy bombing in beirut. lebonese authorities nabbed most of them within an hour (because they already knew who they were and what they were going to do).

they were interrogated by the CIA, trying to be nice etc. finally the interrogators went to their superiors and said "either we get rough with these guys or we should just go home because we are wasting our time". what happened? some new guys came in, beat the shit out of them. they starting finding more people. arrested one guy who was well connected and thought was untouchable and who actually organized the whole thing, they beat the shit out of him and broke him down until he started talking.

then they got to the bottom of everything pretty quickly. what if he was innocent? well, that would suck. the problem in all of this is that its not so black and white. bad people, who already do not fear death and are doing terrible shit and motivated by hatred dont talk very easily either.

my point is simply that there has to be some balance. you can't just categorically say "ok, we are not even going to go as far as sleep deprivation because we are very high and mighty and shining beacons of morality" -- when you have no other ways to get info and reliable info and particularly time sensitive info from them.

what you do is exactly what is being done now. you publically say you are the shining beacon of morality and in private you send teams of people in to kidnap and torture people or fly them to somewhere and let those security services do it. thats why i said the new bill is just a silly political game and theater for the public. somewhere in saudi arabia, there is a guy named habib right now getting his ass beaten within an inch of his life because he has info on the insurgency in iraq, terrorist plots or whatever. so be it. i am very ok with that. suggesting that some poor kid walking down 1st avenue in seattle is going to get mistakenly nabbed by men in black and tortured (which under the law, really means some pretty mild shit anyway) is no more troublesome to me than suggesting someone might die in a car wreck. shit happens.