Jon Stewart lays the smack down on Obama and exposes all the promises he hasn't kept

[devilock76]

I would take a few hits with a billy club over the chance of having my heart stop with a taser. With the number of deaths they have caused over the years they should be deemed illegal for police use.

Note I said less lethal. You can also die from a crack to the skull from a billy club.

Ken

[truthwolf1]

Note I said less lethal. You can also die from a crack to the skull from a billy club.

Ken

Yes, agreed. But for a officer to pull out a billy club you will probably be actually doing something to deserve it. I have seen countless clips where a taser is used when the officer could of simply restrained the person with a little muscle. In my opinion they have been overused and not studied enough.

[sgreger1]

A non intoxicated violent criminal, well not intoxicated with something like PCP will not have the same adrenaline level as a person whose body is literally tricked into thinking it is dying will. Hence the struggle against the restraints could exceed the limits of their skeletal structure which typically will not happen in a basic restraint situation.

However both restraining and tazering have significant differences, they are techniques used to bring a person under control, not to inflict pain upon someone already under control. They are less lethal alternatives to the side arm and the billy club. In the case of someone you already have subdued, well that is torture. Now granted you could use a taser to torture someone, but since they are already restrained a car battery and some jumper cables is much more cost effective.

Ken

But your talking about what method the taser is used for. I am saying a tazer is more deadly than waterboarding, to back up my comment that I don't consider waterboarding torture. My point is that they are using a method that is less dangerous than what are police use to subdue unruly criminals. So why should it be illegal or condemned for that matter? What about if they had a midget come in an slap the guys face repeatedly, he won't ever die, and no lasting injury would occur, but is it torture just because it's "purpose" is to extract information from him? Tell me why that should be illegal to use on someone in the middle of a war, but tazers should be legal to use against anyone who resists the police? Where do we get these rules from?


I'm just saying, the word torture comes along with a certain stigma, and blowing cigar smoke in someones face, spraying cold water on them, pouring water on a cloth over their mouth etc is not torture. It's really annoying and uncomfortable treatment done deliberately to break someones soul. These events have been going on in our domestic prisons for decades but no one ever made a national scene out of it, but as soon as bush started doing it to enemy troops, it's torture? This is the problem, our police officers have more authority to use force than our soldiers do. If we captured Osama Bin Laden and he had information about a pending terrorist attack, you would likely say that he should get a lawyer and not have to talk if he doesn't want to. These people are A) Not US citizens, and B) actively engaged as enemy combatants in a war against us. I don't see why some discomfort should be off the table.

[MGX]

Obama made the right choice via rendition. Clinton/Gore started outsourcing our torture and it makes for good PR. Keeps the hands clean.

[raptor]

sgreger, go get yourself waterboarded then report back.

[sgreger1]

sgreger, go get yourself waterboarded then report back.

If I had volunteered for special forces instead of special ops than I would have had that oppertunity.

It is not about whether it is pleasant or not. It is not designed to be pleasant. It is designed to (in theory) make bad people start to wonder if giving up their life is worth their cause, and hope that they break and tell you something that you didn't know before. I don't understand, do you expect them to just give up intel? What is your plan for winning a war against a people who have no rules, and swear allegiance to no country. We go over and above any other country with how we treat people, and we do it with pride, but we will not allow ourselves to suffer defeat so we could say we took the high road.



No one "wants" to be waterboarded. But when you pick up a rifle with the intent of murdering people from the world's best army, death and dismemberment are things you have to worry about. Getting water poured over your head is best case scenario and they are lucky that we give them that much respect.

[raptor]

It is not about whether it is pleasant or not. It is not designed to be pleasant. It is designed to (in theory) make bad people start to wonder if giving up their life is worth their cause, and hope that they break and tell you something that you didn't know before. I don't understand, do you expect them to just give up intel? What is your plan for winning a war against a people who have no rules, and swear allegiance to no country. We go over and above any other country with how we treat people, and we do it with pride, but we will not allow ourselves to suffer defeat so we could say we took the high road.

Yes, we should stoop down to their level by justifying torture like waterboarding and razors on scrotums.

[sgreger1]

Yes, we should stoop down to their level by justifying torture like waterboarding and razors on scrotums.

Note that I never said anything about razors other than condemning that practice. But hey, maybe your right, why should we stoop down to their level by killing people in a war. I mean it's murder afterall, right? We should no longer stoop to their barbaric level of using guns to kill people during a war anyways, it's 2010 now, let's just sit here with our legs crossed and sing songs to each other. No reason to stoop to their level, aka "win the war", just to save America lives.


I am glad we don't have people like that coordinating our combat forces. Let's not forget what we are talking about here: war. War condones the killing of others to obtain victory. All sides accept this as reasonable. If the baseline expectation is that killing is justified, than exactly how is making people uncormfortable not justified or somehow more inhumane? A rag over your face and a glass of water is worse than a 50 cal ripping up your city block, or a JDAM going off at the capitol? Because I don't see anyone calling guns and bombs some inhumane practice which we "shouldn't stoop to" in order to win.



Thanks.

[raptor]

I suggest you read up on international law concerning POWs.

[sgreger1]

I suggest you read up on international law concerning POWs.

I am well aware of the stupid laws that no one follows. Riddle me this, do insurgents follow by these laws? Is beheading a proper treatment of a POW? Oh wait, they are enemy combatants in an insurgency, the geneva conventions only recognizes rules for two countries formally at war, and in both the iraq and afghanistan wars we did no such torture to any uniformed troops. So much for laws i guess.


I suggest you do some reading on recognizing how things are in the real world.

[raptor]

As the most powerful country in the world, we should take the honorable route and minimize civilian casualties and mistreatment of POWs. That gives us the moral upper hand. What you've managed to do is downplay torture to making enemy POWs "uncomfortable" when obviously that's not what's happening, while taking a stance against waterboarding being torture, and then justify the whole charade because "our enemy fights unconventional war, therefore geneva conventions don't apply to us, boo hoo let's kill more plebs/torture ununiformed jihadists". The same sort of logic where people get their panties in a knot because they know someone (possibly) exploits a system so it's ok that they do too.

[Owens187]

raptor should move to france.



/justsayin

[bipolarbear1968]

[bipolarbear1968]

[bipolarbear1968]