Should civilized nations use "Enhanced Interrogation" techni

[kandrathe]

Not quite. I said that there are activities, terrorism being one, that are not suitable targets for the military. To declare a 'war on terror' is great rhetoric but poor strategy.

We agree on the "rhetorical wars" front. We should ends the "War on" everything except for those nations that we have declared war upon. Everything else is merely a "program" or "agenda" of interest. A program to end hunger, a program to reduce crime, a program to reduce drug use, and a program to make the USA safe from terrorism.

It is a poor strategy not because of morality. It's a poor strategy because, as has been shown over the past seven years, it does not work.

I went one step past what you said, and included my own spin on it. The objective of war is to crush your enemy until they either submit or are destroyed utterly. Usually those strategies are less concerned with collateral damage, and the rules of civility are set aside. A moral nation, like the USA, or Britain, or Canada, can reflect back in disgust at those things that were done during the war to achieve victory. For the US, we imposed on civil liberties of citizens, we bombed cities (including unleashing nuclear weapons) killing many civilians, and we turned a blind eye to what our soldiers did to Japanese soldiers in the Pacific theater. We brought to the enemy the level of hell and horror that they brought against us, and maybe more.

So, when I connect that to the war on terror, what I saw the Bush administration doing was to go into "war mode". But, rather than having a nation, and an opposing army wearing black uniforms, what we have is mostly a hidden enemy with no defined territory. Again, using the twisted logic and rhetoric, they began to do those things that happen in a war, such as restricting civil liberties, bringing extremes against the enemy, and engaging in the "war" no matter whose territory we violated. I also *do* buy the Dick Cheney argument from his speech to the AEI, in that, this is not exactly a law enforcement exercise either. We can't just wait for "crimes" to happen, then go arrest the ones who did it, then build a case against them, then perhaps put some of them in prison. Rinse repeat, until the middle east runs out of young martyrs, and we run out of prison space.

What we agree upon, I think, is that the challenge is to convince all the would be martyrs that terrorist actions against the "west" are useless. Israel does this actually in a number of ways. They tear down the houses of any martyr's family, they engage in "eye for an eye" retaliation with guided missiles into the apartment complexes of their enemy, and they perform up close assassinations outside of the middle east. They provide extreme consequences against those who commit crimes against them, but they also work to prevent attacks as well. Also, the people of Israel have numbed themselves to the violence, so that the market that was bombed yesterday reopens and business carries on as usual. They hardly flinch anymore when a bomb explodes, which denies the terrorists the "terror" upon which they need to demoralize their enemy.

I believe that the liberal approach is to make friends with the terrorists. If we hug them enough they will stop killing us. If we change our policy to condemn our good friend Israel, and if we help them kick our good friend Israel off the Palestinian land, then they will be our friends. If we capitulate to their "no infidels can step on our sacred soil even when invited by the legitimate government" dictum, and make smooth the way for their expansion of "The Jihad" into every nation, then maybe they will stop killing us. The Islamic terrorist message to me seems to be, "do everything the way we want", or the consequences will be a random bombing. It seems to me that the "terror" has worked upon the liberals (or they already agree with them), and they are ready to give in to their demands.

So, there probably does need to be a third way which; A) works to prevent terrorist attacks, B) utilizes appropriate parts of law enforcement, C) utilizes parts of the military for covert missions to gather intelligence, destroy a stronghold, or capture an enemy, D) respects our alliances and works to build a network of interdependence, and E) communicates clearly to the people what is happening and why. Mostly, the resistance to terrorism will not be something that is completed in seven years, or seventy years. The mindset of people in the US needs to change from the innocent open borders and wide welcoming arms of Lady Liberty, to one that scrutinizes the actions of their visitors, neighbors, strangers, and even friends. I'm not thinking the extremes of McCarthy, but just the mature recognition that not everything may be what it appears to be.

I think we might also petition all sides to adopt a shorter memory, and try to forgive their enemies for the things that happened decades, centuries, or eons ago. In Judaism and Islam, you have two religions whose mechanisms for forgiveness are very strict where there are usually conditions to be met before forgiveness is given. Which is why, it seems, that the US always needs to step in between and negotiate the conditions for forgiveness between Israel and her enemies.

But, whatever happens, I don't see that there will be an end to terrorism until the problem of Palestine is resolved. Secondary to that, we need to be concerned about the spread of radical and fundamentalist Islamic philosophy. If you view the Palestine issue as the tumor, radical Islam is the metastasis of it. I believe that even if we eradicated the original problem, the cancer will remain.