Don't bother to give any reasons for your contempt. Or are there any? It's so much more convincing to assume everyone sees the world the way you do.
Churchill would have had nothing but astonished disgust for the lily-livered way this war has been conducted. Ditto for DeGaulle and Roosevelt. I won't even get into Stalin's attitude.

Posted by: Robert Speirs at February 21, 2006 03:14 PM | Permalink to this comment

I thought the link would be a smoking gun linking him to some Pentagon torture policy. Imagine my disappointment.

Posted by: Chuck at February 21, 2006 04:53 PM | Permalink to this comment

I agree - your endless flogging of the torture "non-issue" is indeed beneath contempt

Your continued ignorance of the very real fact that Mr Yoo mentions is also beneath contempt

If you don't understand that "torture" ( I need the " " because I don't see your definition anywhere ) happens all the time in prisons all over the world - some by official policy and some, like in the US domestic and military prisons, by criminal acts not approved by policy

Transgressors are arrested and punished in our system

Of course, all these facts won't help in sensationalizing the issue yet again so you don't care

There are what now - 2 dozen or more dead in the Cartoon riots - what a great idea to flog this dead horse yet again

Beneath contempt - indeed you are

Posted by: poguemahone at February 21, 2006 06:38 PM | Permalink to this comment

D*mn, but Yoohoo's are out today.

Posted by: Barry at February 21, 2006 08:17 PM | Permalink to this comment

What clueless commenters.

Yoo has repeatedly argued in favor of the President's legal right to have prisoners treated cruelly or tortured. He evades this by privately defining "torture" in a manner inconsistent with law.

Alberto Mora, former general counsel to the U.S. Navy, found Yoo's arguments pitifully mistaken. So did every other attorney in his office. So has every attorney with a scrap of integrity.

Posted by: Anderson at February 21, 2006 09:00 PM | Permalink to this comment

Robert Spiers: "Don't bother to give any reasons for your contempt. Or are there any? It's so much more convincing to assume everyone sees the world the way you do."

If you've been paying any attention at all to Mr. Yoo's legal work on the behalf of the American people I think the reasons for BD's contempt would be clear. When asked an apt question regarding the efficacy of torture all Mr. Yoo can think to do is remove himself from the field of play ("What, me? I know nothing about legal hairsplitting designed to justify torture") and issue a reflexive, yet vague sounding apologia for the Bush administration, i.e. himself. His answer speaks volumes about the man's character.

Posted by: fnook at February 21, 2006 09:34 PM | Permalink to this comment

Why ask Yoo about it - John McCain should be a better authority on the matter

Maybe after reading this you'll want to shift the focus away from the "torture doesn't work" meme - because all it leads to is "so the minimal levels we use don't work - but apparently it does work according to McCain himself. We need to up the limits"

Here is what he had to say about the effectiveness of actual torture

Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2005 9:55 a.m. EST
John McCain: Torture Worked on Me

Sen. John McCain is leading the charge against so-called "torture" techniques allegedly used by U.S. interrogators, insisting that practices like sleep deprivation and withholding medical attention are not only brutal - they simply don't work to persuade terrorist suspects to give accurate information.

Nearly forty years ago, however - when McCain was held captive in a North Vietnamese prison camp - some of the same techniques were used on him. And - as McCain has publicly admitted at least twice - the torture worked!

In his 1999 autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers," McCain describes how he was severely injured when his plane was shot down over Hanoi - and how his North Vietnamese interrogators used his injuries to extract information.

"Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I did not cooperate," he wrote.

"I thought they were bluffing and refused to provide any information beyond my name, rank and serial number, and date of birth. They knocked me around a little to force my cooperation."
The punishment finally worked, McCain said. "Eventually, I gave them my ship's name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant."

Recalling how he gave up military information to his interrogators, McCain said: "I regret very much having done so. The information was of no real use to the Vietnamese, but the Code of Conduct for American Prisoners of War orders us to refrain from providing any information beyond our names, rank and serial number."

The episode wasn't the only instance when McCain broke under physical pressure.

Just after his release in May 1973, he detailed his experience as a P.O.W. in a lengthy account in U.S. News & World Report.

He described the day Hanoi Hilton guards beat him "from pillar to post, kicking and laughing and scratching. After a few hours of that, ropes were put on me and I sat that night bound with ropes."
"For the next four days, I was beaten every two to three hours by different guards . . . Finally, I reached the lowest point of my 5 1/2 years in North Vietnam. I was at the point of suicide, because I saw that I was reaching the end of my rope."

McCain was taken to an interrogation room and ordered to sign a document confessing to war crimes. "I signed it," he recalled. "It was in their language, and spoke about black crimes, and other generalities."

"I had learned what we all learned over there," McCain said. "Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine."

That McCain broke under torture doesn't make him any less of an American hero. But it does prove he's wrong to claim that harsh interrogation techniques simply don't work.

Posted by: pogue mahone at February 22, 2006 02:51 AM | Permalink to this comment

I'm with you BD.

I'd ignore the posters appealing to Stalin's better judgement.

And torture worked on McCain? He gave up useless information and signed a meaningless document.

Then again, that's about par for the course, considering the pathetic intel we're receiving from our own torture rooms.

Posted by: rdg at February 22, 2006 05:37 AM | Permalink to this comment

Pogue, that John McCain story ends with him signing a confession to a list of war crimes he couldn't even read and is very unlikely to have ever committed. They sure extracted those truths out of him.

Intelligence services that have to resort to these methods aren't.

Torture works great at making its victims into living mirrors of whatever false theories their torturers had about what was actually happening.

It would be funny if it didn't make me sick.

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