I know a guy who has a son in the CIA…they know what Obama’s speech meant. They know they are not safe.

BAD THINGS are happening people!! Pay attention!!

“The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us”

you don’t believe that do you? they’ve done ‘damage to our interests” outweighed benefits? Those several thousand people that were saved by avoiding the terrorism in LA would probably think that America’s image overseas has always been crap and always will be. Notice didn’t you that Obama didn’t get anything, mark that, zip point nothing from all our great allies that love us so much.

so let me get this straight, a terrorist has info that your family is going to be wiped out, but if you waterboard him, they will be saved. You opt to not waterboard him, too inhumane, better off that he kill all your relatives. that’s more humane.

now, convince all of us that is the option you would take.

Now substitute someone else’s relatives for yours, totally different, let them all die, won’t affect you. Somebody’s else’s problem.

However, considering the fact that the Clinton administration used rendition for years and allowed other people to do what they deemed necessary to get information…and considering the fact that Democrats like Nancy Pelosi signed off on this I really don’t see how the Democrats are in any position to complain about all this at all. They just want to appease certain members of their base in an effort to maintain dwindling support.

Don’t resort to projection once you’ve lost an argument. It looks bad.

1. We did not use interrogation techniques on KSM and the others because they were ruthless killers, but because we had actionable intelligence that they were highly connected to bin laden and could connect us to other plots.

2. Nobody said that this was the only way to interrogate, If you read the memos at “gateway Pundit” you will see that other methods were tried and they would not talk. You will also read why.

3. The blacked portion of the memos state what intelligence was gleamed, Cheney ask that it be published as well so we could judge for our selves.

4. If we pick up another high value target, these techniques will no longer work. Explained in “Gateway Pundit” as to why.

5. Soldiers at Abu Grahb were not using EIT”s, given permission to be used by the President. That is a false analogy, one circumstance has nothing to do with the other, it is a political story. The memos make that very clear.

If you want to believe a political story, or if you would rather contemplate the facts and then say it was wrong, that is find. What I’m finding that the political story is more fun for those who hate Bush.

But there’s just a few things about him that are so confounding. His stance on “torture”, especially given that he would have apparently been aware that it did indeed work, and supposed global warming/cap & trade to name a couple. Nobody’s perfect on every issue, but these are big ones, with big bad consequences if you get them wrong. Still definitely would have preferred he and Sarah to what we’re getting now.

As for Blair’s “clarification”, he says he doesn’t know if other things wouldn’t have worked. Well, I think they did try other things, presumably everything they had in their arsenal of techniques built up over decades. A little water in the face DID do the trick. Did we have time to conduct an in depth study on what can we do now that we haven’t already developed over the past 60 years? Certainly not.

To demonize people who were doing their very best to (successfully) protect against another attack, which most people thought was very likely to occur, and who were also doing what I see as an admirable job of balancing the amount of force administered with the need to know, is profoundly unfair, and is looking to me as being done for purely selfish, political reasons — the security of the country be damned.

And yes, if they didn’t have waterboarding and Abu Graib to use against us, they would have found something else. Or they would have MADE UP something else, like the Koran in the toilet. And are the good folks at the NYTimes who ran the non-stop front page articles on Abu blameless and factor-less? Are we to forgive and forget the people within the CIA/FBI who leaked damaging info to the press?

Radical Islam has GOT to be laughing its collective butt off at all this. Not to mention training to what they now know for sure is our new, refined revelation on our limit on interrogation.

Heard them? I see bedwetters like you live them every day.

Are any of these “arguments” you list things that you’ve actually heard, or did it happen in a conversation with yourself?

Anti-American propagandists have used these techniques as an excuse to hurt America’s image in the world. Which of course they were going to do anyways regardless of any specifics. Fixed.

Admiral Blair clarified the statement you quoted above as follows:

“The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means,” Admiral Blair said in a written statement issued last night. “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22blair.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss