should not be bound by a mistake made in an overwhelmingly just cause

equated it with that case, and the main thing is to substantively address why waterboarding is NOT torture on the merits, rather than making the case that it is not as bad as what the japanese in that case did.

One of the techniques of the left is to divert the subject from the merits to get into a what was worse argument.

by mistaken actions in the past? For instance, since the US at one time was an ally with Saddam, does that mean that he should have been given carte blanch to kill hundreds of thousands of innocents; publicly fund suicide bombers and openly defy the UN and the US ceasefire and fire on US planes with impunity?

moral posturing.

definitely not necessarily accurate, said during the campaign that we had convicted Japanese of water-boarding in WWII and my point is not dependent on the accuracy of same.

My point is to examine what reasonable people would consider to be torture and the facts of what waterboarding is.

That a WWII commission may have defined waterboarding as torture in 1945 is not dispositive and binding.

substantive facts are about waterboarding and what a fair definition of torture is and on that, the left can point to McCain et all on their side, so we must and should refute that argument.

we can and we must

first fallback position. And Aaron, this gets to the heart of my aversion to focusing on tactics of trolls while avoiding the opportunity to win over lurkers. My lifelong experience in winning over lurkers at parties, courtrooms and on the net informs my position as does my goal of winning elections.

The fact is that Americans are war ignorant and soft, esp due to war vets like McCain that give cover to the wrong lessons from Vietnam and war and postmodernism.

Also, given the timidity of even our best elected repub pols in DC that feared Mccain and who fear the PC police and Obama, we simply must make the case of what torture really is.

Jeff said it best when he said that to define torture to include waterboarding is to make the definition meaningless given what we know about actual torture.

So, my point is that even with disingenuous trolls, we should welcome the opportunity to refute the talking points that so many ignorant Americans accept as fact and that with this particular guy, he does raise the issues well and deserves an answer.

I don’t care to assume motives. I like to read the english language and respond with a refutation.

for awhile anyway…

I have a lot of experience with winning over people that heard me refute libs

what matters most os the substance and the fact that McCain is so wrong and that Bush would not take this issue on, and tangentially, that the democrats said and did for free with their bushlied mantra for 5 years, what our enemies would have paid them to do, shows just how far we have fallen and how weak we have become.

I very much live to REFUTE lefty talking points because i want to win over others and have done so regularly for 8 years.

decides to levy war out of uniform and targets civilians.

And my columns for the past 7 years, in fact, my FIRST column ever (in the Atlanta newspaper) was a few weeks after 911 and it was the first in the nation that suggested that captured terrorists would not be entitled to POW status under Geneva.

The Geneva conventions were promulgated primarily for the purpose of EXCLUDING form its protections, those that operated as terrorists and spies without uniforms and amidst and against innocent civilian populations.

Lawful POWs may not be interrogated except as to name, rank and serial number absent consent.

Hence, unlawful combatants have no such protections.

Article 4

A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:

1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.

2. Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:

(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;

(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;

(c) That of carrying arms openly;

(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

3. Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.

http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm

though not even the euro libs and us ever recognized the Taliban as legitimate and no one ever applied #3 to al qaeda due to the understanding of the term “authority”.

Even the Supreme Court case here that applied another limited section to illegal enemy combatents concerning the right to a status hearing (not the provisions concerning interrogation, significantly) did not rely upon #3 because of the admitted definition of “authority” did not include terrorist orgs.

and the way that was done was to prescribe that ordinary soldiers could not be coerced in any way. One of the underlying principles re the law of war that informed the drafters was the fact that spies and illegal enemy combatents could be summarily executed when caught.

insurance cases soon after 911 that led me to conclude, in my very first published column ever, in the Atlanta paper, that terrorists captured after 911 would not be entitled to POW status. That column and the publicity that followed is what launched my writing career.

that is why redstate has forever since been tortured by me!