CIA torture report

I never said that. I said it's asinine to equate the CIA with the terrorists. It's also incredibly naive to think that the world is going to operate in a way in which some ideal of goodness is magically going to trump evil.

There are bad people and worse people. Sometimes, the bad people are necessary.

 

That is taking "straw man" to unprecedented levels.

Terrorists are taking the first action, which is hundreds of times worse. We are reacting to what they are doing in an attempt to stop them from doing it again and again and again and again and again, etc.

When people who are not US citizens are willing to do this --



-- I'm not really worried too much about reading them their Fourth Amendment rights.

 

For you is torture about getting useful information that can prevent future attacks or find the people who are responsible for attacks or is it just about making the bad guys suffer?

 

The former, first and foremost. The latter is just a bonus.

 

So the CIA is taken to task about their actions and interfered with a congressional committee's investigation.

Color me shocked. I mean, they've never done anything like that before, right? Oh, wait......

 

The former doesn't work, so for you, it's pretty much just the latter. And you don't mind that some of the detainees who suffered aren't the bad guys.

 

Psssst, Tony: Maybe there wouldn't BE as many terrorists had we HELPED the Russians beat them back in the 1980s instead of, you know, aiding the fucking terrorists.

 

Heck, why not go all the way back to when the CIA was sending operatives into Iran simply because the United States and Britain didn't want the Soviets getting any oil from Iran.

But just like any other country in history, we always focus on the biggest bad guy at the time and never worry about what it might lead to down the road.

 

Yeah, but then we'd have been helping those damn Commies.

 

Yup. Our government made some big-time miscalculations back in the 50's when they treated all these nationalists like communists. Maybe if we hadn't backed England -- and, to be more specific, British Petroleum -- in the coup of Mossadegh, we don't see the fundamentalists take control in 1979-80.
Bad policy, long reaching ramifications. And the CIA was the tip of the spear.

 

Yes, we were on such great terms with the Soviet Union back then. :

 

That's kind of the point. It NEVER had to be that way. It really didn't.

We just automatically expected the worst from each other, so much so that the idea that what they were doing may have been historically correct was just unacceptable. "Russians? 100 percent wrong 100 percent of the time" was our fucked-up foreign policy. Hell, it still IS our foreign policy.

They were simply aiding a puppet Afghan government that had ASKED for their help against the rebel mujahideen. Nothing really extraordinary at all. The exact move we would have made had one of our puppet governments in another nation been threatened.

So what did we do? Instead of just sitting on the sidelines and letting the events play out --- with the USA having little to gain or lose regardless of the result --- we boycott the Olympics, call the USSR an "evil Empire" and aid the rebels.

Fast-forward 35 years, and it's the same shit all over again. We aid the rebels in Ukraine, send our government officials over there, spend $5 billion to topple their democratically elected leader --- and then react with horror when Putin is offended by our actions and takes steps to protect his own interests on his own border. "Evil Putin!" we scream. Had we sat on the sidelines and done nothing, the rebellion in Ukraine likely would have died down, and the country would have been able to decide ON ITS OWN last September whether to keep its president. Instead, we have a Ukraine today that is in FAR WORSE shape than it would have been had we left it alone. Not that we really give a shit, of course. It's now a puppet NATO/USA government, so that's all that really matters.