The trouble is not that the Bush administration hasn't been fighting the shadow war at all, Ehran; the trouble is that the Bush administration hasn't been fighting the shadow war WELL.

WELL.  something of a novel take on a guy whose single handedly managed to increase the world supply of actively po'ed radicals several fold, started a largely pointless war in iraq while ignoring the problems in afghanistan and supporting the nice folks in saudi who have been largely responsible for funding the whole damn problem in the first place.  yeah he's doing a brilliant job on that front.

And your trouble is that you are naive, Ehran. If you think for one moment that I don't know about the crap the US had to pull to keep the lid on this slaughterhouse of a planet for the last fifty years, then you must really think I am one of those guys who believes in anybody's mythology and propaganda.

I have no illusions. NONE.

Herald  

hmm usually i'm accused of excess cynicism.  it's not whether you know about the assorted skullduggery herald it's whether you approve of it.  to my mind there are standards to uphold that even if they cost you from time to time separate you from the barbarians baying at the gates.  not a lot of point in winning is there if in the end you are just another of the barbs.

there are also the practical considerations on just how well this sort of stuff actually works vs the kinder gentler approaches as well as the effects on your own people of doing this stuff. 

mea culpa on that punctuation issue panther.  sorry for the confusion.

 

I have a ROMAN attitude toward maintaining the pax, Ehran. War is immoral as it is mass indiscriminate murder. So if I murder the actual troublemakers through covert assassination and bribe the wrong people to do the right things for me, and generally corrupt my enemies into doing what I want them to do, then I have less trouble with doing that morally, including using the tools of selective torture and murder, than if I send over a quarter million soldiers and sailors, blow up an entire country, and kill up to 50,000 people more or less indiscriminately in the process. Its also cheaper to spend $2 billion dollars in a brutal shadow war than $2 trillion dollars in a moral "just" war. 

Herald 

was that the way things had been approached in the first place things would have been a lot better today.

i suspect our differences are more about the threshold at which action needs to be initiated and perhaps our definitions of who exactly the bad actors really are.  i for instance would be deeply interested in the money guys more so than the actual bad guys in the field.

 

course one of the questions is whether the humint resources of the usg are up to something like this.

Just to be clear, Herald, these are the same Romans who not only beat Carthage in a war but erased the entire city, and the entire civilization? Whose answer to the revolt in Israel was to exile the population?  Who exterminated the Druids for their support of Celtic rebels?   75% of the Helvetti population?  And the Eburones?   You haven't heard of the Eburones, have you?  Guess why. 

 

Not that I am categorically against these methods.  Sometimes, you have no choice but to drain the swamp if you want to be rid of the alligators. 

 

The West may face the same choice.

 

SGTObvious

I know exactly why I wrote what I wrote and what I meant when I wrote ROMAN.

 

In modern terms; if there are no bandits, then there is no banditry.

 

I choose to make the modern distinction, though, between the bandits, their supporters and the oppressed from whom they rob, steal, enslave, murder, and otherwise abuse.

 

The Romans erased Carthage and their allies/stooges, but not the Nubian tribes that the Carthaginians enslaved and oppressed.

 

Israel was dispersed, or there would be no Israel.   

 

QED. 

 

Herald 

For some reason I wouldn't call open hand smacks, waterboarding, and stress positions torture. Hell, we do the same shit to our own military personell in SERE courses. Now wether or not the US government is giving terrorists to afghan or arab authorities to have a hot sterilised wire jammed up their eurethra like in Sleeper Cell, what does it matter(other than the obvious fact that such an act would make anyone talk)? We have already proved moral superiority to terrorists in that we do not intentionally attack or torture civilians and non combatants. Personally, if I arrest a sunni terrorist who thinks it's his God given right to torture and kill his shia neighbor's kids, i really don't care about his rights as an individual, and I'm not welcoming him with open arms into a cozy prison cell and ask him to please tell me where his friends are and what they are doing. .

 

Also, this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The Canadian government did not start prosecuting foreign nationals for war crimes until the late 90's. Canada was known until then the best place to hide from being tried for crimes agianst humanity.

waterboarding isn't by a long shot the worst that's done to prisoners DK.  we still do not know the extent of abuse of prisoners by the usg in their clandestine prisons.  we can however be awfully sure of what was done to prisoners turned over to american proxies. 

 

thing about stuffing skeletons into closets is that they tend to fall out again at the most embarassing times.

Waterboarding leaves the suspect alive and unharmed.  The "Worst" things do not.  Try it yourself.  Have someone waterboard you, then ask, would you rather go through that AGAIN, or be fed into the wood chipper?   If Waterboarding is torture, and I was captured by Al Queda and given a list of their usual tortures, plus waterboarding, and asked to pick one, waterboarding would be my choice every time.   If they were really generous, I would ask for the Abu Graib treatment, and pose with underwear on my head.   It is a modern propaganda tactic to blur "fear and discomfort" with torture.  It's sort of like the feminists who add verbal taunting and staring to the definition of rape.  No, Ehran, when you get tortured, you don't come out intact.  We don't allow the torture thing.

You don't know the extent of abuse in US clandestine prisons largely because you haven't proved ANY abuse in US clandestine prisons, largely because you haven't proved the EXISTENCE of any US clandestine prisons.  All we get is "I heard of someone who knew someone who knew someone who saw something in Romania... or maybe Bulgaria..."  Saying "we don't know the extent of the abuse..." is sort of like saying "we don't know how many people have been abducted by UFO's" or "we don't know how many innocent puppies Ehran has killed."

 

And we have no proxies.  No one reliably does what we tell them to, not even the Isrealis.  Hell, it's hard enough getting Vermont to shut up and go along with us, and they're a state.  You really think we could foreigners to do it?

 

SGTObvious