Congratulations... You most definitely have arrived.

Well, for what it's worth, I think you're at most half as deranged as Michelle Malkin.

I think your reaction is pretty funny especially as you have posted before about how nobody reads Sullivan anymore. And I think you arrive if he calls you out by name. Having said that, you've done a wonderful job guest blogging.

I think you're deranged too, but just for making me click on 3 links to get to the actual A.S. post.

uh, yes. you could try to not be deranged.

What, no props for Dawn, who has recognized your innate evil all these years?

Only thing that woulda been better is if he had actually deigned to call you deranged by name. There's something to shoot for next time.

And I thought that Andrew Sullivan didn't have anything interesting to say anymore. I will have to check out his blog more often.

Well if anyone would recognize the symptoms...

Bellicose?? really?? Someone has been practicing for the SATS.

Andrew Sullivan is coming very late to the party.

Karol:
Congrats!

Von Bek:
I think Sullivan's condescending ommission of Karol's name only makes it sweeter for her, and funnier for the rest of us.

Dan:
I'm sure Andy has missed you! I always knew you belonged together.

Youre not deranged, you're just illiterate and the whole point of Sullivan's post is lost on you. You somehow managed to confuse skepticism with "hysterically arguing that there was no terror plot out of London". What's even worse is that you think the torture question is simply a moral debate between those who would to save lives and those who wouldn't. Point is, torture is damn near useless in extracting reliable info that would save a single life. If there's any truth in Sullivan's musings and the hypothetical he throws out there, then we've got just one more example of the bumbling ineptness of the sadists and the hacks like you that support them. How much longer must we endure the flatulent stench of the corpses rotting beneath your pale, bloated pudge?

Congraduation. You're having all the fun. I have not been updating my blog the last couple of day because I would definitely saying something that may be consider "deranged".

Again Congrad.

Try actually reading a little more into Andrew's blogs. He has never denied a terror plot coming out of London. In Fact he even argues that if 9/11 didn't happen we'd be in a much worse situation now. Remember, Andrew is a true Republican Conservative. Not the hijacked conservatives that is currenlty the Republican party.

Yeesh. That is some heavy imagery right there, Mikhail.

Mikhail Medved:
Try sounding more hateful, and throwing more insults. Maybe then your humanitarian speech will sound more convincing.

Mikhail,

I don't know why you think torture is "damn near useless", especially since it seemed to be extremely useful in this very case. I'm sorry if the world isn't as simple as you would like. Torture certainly works, but you want to pretend it doesn't because then you don't have to think very hard.

Here in the real world we realize having an absolute no-torture policy is going to mean more innocent people will die. Maybe that's a price we're willing to pay as a society, maybe it's not. But don't pretend a policy like that is free.

I would never advocate routine torture of anyone suspected of being part of a terrorist organization. But if I have a reason to believe somebody in custody has information that could save the lives of thousands of people, well, grease up the thumbscrew.

By the way, Sullivan always throws out those "musings" as a rhetorical dodge so he doesn't have to take ownership of his positions when the are attacked. He does it so often I think he has a template for it in his word processor.

Daimeon: Andrew Sullivan is a true a Republican Conservative as you are. Bwahhh!!!!

Sullivan has some conservative views on say the size and powers of the federal government and the need for financial sanity. But I do not think he is a true American conservative. Then again neither are the big government, open border, internationalists who call the shots in the Republican Party these days and the amen corners at National Review, the American Spectator, the dittoheads, and of course the Trotskyites at the Weekly Standard.

For something that doesn't work there's been a long history of people engaging in fundamentally futile activity. Sure, a percentage (maybe even the preponderance) of that has been of a purely sadistic nature, but that doesn't explain away all the stories of secrets revealed under physical durress.

Of course torture works. Saying that it doesn't is equivalent to denying the principals of operant conditioning. And to the "it doesn't produce reliable information" point; well, that's where the old "multiple iteration" scenario comes in. Subject provides info that proves bogus, subject gets the juice again. Subject provides info that proves good, subject gets a cookie. Repeat as necessary.

C'mon. Sullivan's torture obsession developed at pretty much exactly the same time Bush came out against gay marriage. He's been on a jilted-admirer's-revenge snarking-spree ever since. (It will be fun to watch Andrew's climb-down when charges - and plot details - start flowing out of Scotland Yard, or MI5, or whatever. Chances are, all those "allegeds" will disappear down the memory hole.)

I can respect an argument that "even if it works, we shouldn't do it" -- that argument is rational, and it's one with which I mostly agree. But that argument exists in a space that is largely ignored because it is inconveniently littered with exceptional cases, and unless you're really interested in addressing those cases (as opposed to using the whole issue as a proxy for something else) going there is likely to be exhausting and not conducive to a warm-and-fuzzy feeling of self-righteousness.

The shorter form being, I've pretty much lost all respect for Sullivan's intellectual honesty. A shame, really.

"In Fact he even argues that if 9/11 didn't happen we'd be in a much worse situation now"

What kind of dolt is this Andy Sullivan. Does he still do the comedy routine where he samshes watermelons ???

I hate seeing my friends fight...

I know you're not a fan of Andrew, but that New York magazine piece he wrote was nothing short of amazing.

If you're holding my mom for ransom and I find you, damn straight I'm gonna beat you as hard as possible until you tell me where she is. Why? Cuz chances are you only want money and if I beat you bad enough you'll probably tell me where.

That torture can extract true information is ovbious and trite. What we're talking about is torture as US POLICY IN THIS WAR, RIGHT NOW, and I defy you to give me one example of how equivocating to allow for torture has in any way reduced the threat to Western Civilization from desperate Islamic fanatics. In fact, I dare say it's increased the threat by playing right into the caricature of the infidel they've created.

Torture is the masturbatory glee of the sadistic, the institutionalization of which empowers these wretched cowards like pedophile priests at Bible camp. This is what happens in the 'real world', not GI Joe holding his nose, clenching his teeth, and throwing the switch to protect innocent life.

What we're talking about is torture as US POLICY IN THIS WAR, RIGHT NOW, and I defy you to give me one example of how equivocating to allow for torture has in any way reduced the threat to Western Civilization from desperate Islamic fanatics

Maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, pal, but your example is in Karol's post.

Well Eric, we didn't find out about the group from the guy in Pakistan. So unless it leads to a successful conviction, torturing him really didn't do us much good, did it?

If flushig the Koran down the toilet and rubbing used maxi pads with pigs blood on the informant's face saved the world a disaster to rival 9/11....torture away may Anglican friends.

The forms of torture the U.K. and the U.S. use like sleep depravation are nothing compared to how the "other side" uses violence and torture to further the terrorist cause.

To this guy:

"I don't know why you think torture is "damn near useless", especially since it seemed to be extremely useful in this very case."

and

"Maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, pal, but your example is in Karol's post."

Not only do you accept prima facie that torture was used in this case to extract any useful info, but you make the far more egregious assumption that this torture has been "extremely useful" when not a single charge has yet been brought or piece of evidence revealed as to the real nature of the plot or if the word "imminent" has any relevance. I'm not claiming to know what's gonna happen next, but your example is utterly useless at this point, unless of course you have some secret info you're not sharing. But I doubt it...

Maybe you should try thinking more about all the current events reporting you read instead of just opening up and swallowing whole like a duck.

Homosexuality used to be described as a mental illness. If Andrew were the only gay person I knew, I'd certainly be arguing that the old taxonomy of illness is the correct one.

Mark Poling: "Of course torture works."

"In an article last month entitled "Why torture doesn't work," retired US brigadier general David Irvine, a former military interrogation professor, argued along the same lines.

"No one has yet offered any validated evidence that torture produces reliable intelligence," he wrote.

"While torture apologists frequently make the claim that torture saves lives, that assertion is directly contradicted by many Army, FBI, and CIA professionals who have actually interrogated Al-Qaeda captives," he said.

With hindsight, a number of confessions obtained by force from operatives of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network have turned out to be false."

Mark Poling: "And to the "it doesn't produce reliable information" point; well, that's where the old "multiple iteration" scenario comes in. Subject provides info that proves bogus, subject gets the juice again. Subject provides info that proves good, subject gets a cookie. Repeat as necessary."

"According to Eric Denece, of the French Center for Intelligence, "all services use as torturers people who are a bit sick. Normal people cannot do it, in cold blood." ... "He will carry on 'working' his victim and the guy will make a dozen different statements, contradicting one another. He will talk so long as he is being tortured. And then it becomes a real mess to process it all," he said."

http://news.inq7.net/breaking/index.php?index=3&story_id=59251

There are an endless supply of authorities stating that torture does not work. I suggest you seek them out.

Karol, I was happy to see your name in the daily update. Congratulations.

Considering the ethical problems inherent in collecting data on whether torture works or not, I have to say I'm skeptical that any rigorous conclusion on the "reliability" of information obtained via torture exists at all.

So appeal to authority all you want; I'm simply not going to buy that this "truth" you assert isn't agenda-driven.

Therefore, I'll rely on first principals in concluding that, applied correctly and over time in a controled environment, basic operant conditioning will produce a very compliant subject.

And no, I'm not saying that it wouldn't be evil, and that it wouldn't be evil to ask one human to "break" another. What I am saying is the assertion that it doesn't work is an attempt (honest in some cases, not in others) to short-circuit the debate.

A_B,

I find this somwhat confusing:

"While torture apologists frequently make the claim that torture saves lives, that assertion is directly contradicted by many Army, FBI, and CIA professionals who have actually interrogated Al-Qaeda captives," he said.

These are American officials making pronouncements about the efficacy of torture. But I thought it's illegal for American agents to torture suspects. So how do they know? Are they willing to go on the record saying "I have personally undertaken or observed torture enough times for my opinion to be statistically relevent." Somehow I doubt it.

Cold rooms and stress positions are not torture, at least not any kind of torture you'd consider effective. I submit that these always-anonymous "former officials" have less expertise in that department than your average Saudi security agent.

The argument about a person under torture giving phoney stories is a red herring. Nobody who does interrogations relies on the statements of one person. Any cop can tell you what you do is separate your suspects and interrogate them individually until the stories start to match up. This is true whether you torture them or not.

In any event, as I've said twice before in this thread, the idea that torture doesn't work flies in the face of the facts. The whole reason we're having this conversation is the revelation that, in this case, torture did work. I think we can dispense with the "torture doesn't work" meme unless that turns out to be bogus information.

"Homosexuality used to be described as a mental illness."

That description only changed when a determined cabal of activists rammed it through (no pun intended) at an American Psychological Association convention. When one considers the absolutely stomach-turning things homosexuals do to one another -- talk to a doctor about the horrendous GI tract infections gay men routinely suffer from, for instance -- it becomes quite clear that they must be very disturbed people to pursue their lifestyle. The fact that gay couples invariably adopt roles as "the guy" and "the girl" should be another big clue.

"Remember, Andrew is a true Republican Conservative. Not the hijacked conservatives that is currenlty the Republican party."

To liberals, "true conservatives" are always "conservatives" who happen to agree with liberals 90% of the time. Funny how that works.

"I do not think [Sullivan] is a true American conservative. Then again neither are the big government, open border, internationalists who call the shots in the Republican Party these days and the amen corners at National Review, the American Spectator, the dittoheads, and of course the Trotskyites at the Weekly Standard."

You must read a different National Review and Weekly Standard than I do.

"How much longer must we endure the flatulent stench of the corpses rotting beneath your pale, bloated pudge?"

Corpses fart? Must've been the chili...

"Torture is the masturbatory glee of the sadistic, the institutionalization of which empowers these wretched cowards like pedophile priests at Bible camp. This is what happens in the 'real world', not GI Joe holding his nose, clenching his teeth, and throwing the switch to protect innocent life."

Nope, no stereotyping there. But whatever you do, don't question his patriotism because, by God, he supports the troops.

As a final note, let me point out that no matter what we do, two things will always be true: 1) Terrorists will be emboldened, and 2) Liberals will blame America for whatever goes wrong (and even for quite a few completely made-up things, like the "post-9/11 anti-Muslim backlash"). Yes, bombing terrorists probably helps recruit new ones. But appeasing them and/or insisting on following the Queensbury Rules also recruits new ones and emboldens the ones we didn't kill. Ask an Islamist what he thinks of Europeans and he will laugh and tell you they are weak, cowardly pussies. As Osama himself noted, when people have a choice between a strong horse and a weak horse, they will naturally favor the strong horse. Fascistic Islamism is a cultural disease, and anyone who thinks we can defeat it by playing nice is, at best, naive.

Jack, if you think gays have exclusivity on dangerous/messed-up practices, you don't get out enough.

Let's not hijack the discussion, m-kay? This is not about Sullivan's practices, this is about his biases. It is possible to separate the two.

(BTW, I have gay friends who I think are pretty damned stable, compared to some of the straight freaks I know, god bless 'em.)

AblahB

"There are an endless supply of authorities stating that torture does not work. I suggest you seek them out."

Bollocks.

You're just making that up.

Guy Fawkes was tortured and gave up all the "Gunpowder" plotters within a day.

"You must read a different National Review and Weekly Standard than I do."

I make no excuses for puttintg my principles ahead of any partisan affiliation I have and hope that more of my fellow conservatives would do the same. It would send a message to the spineless GOP leadership and their cheerleaders.

Mark,

Not talking about relationship stability here (although that's not an inconsequential subject), but about sexual practices. Yes, there are straight freaks out there, but activities that make straight people first-order perverts are just a normal part of gay sex. e.g., How many straight women are into fisting?

Congrats! You'll be collecting foaming-at-the-mouth logic-challenged trolls next... oh wait, that's starting already

Von Bek:
Who IS a true American conservative?
Other than you, of course :)

If we're talking us vs. them, are we allowed to use anything that works?

Let's say terrorism works. Can we kill little children if it makes us safer? What about genocide? It would probably be effective.

Remember our metric: "An attack was imminent, and the information had to be obtained, no matter the method."

Anyone who has "Frame by Frame" on his Ipod, Ivan. :)

The decision to put the lives of children "at risk" happens all the time in war (especially of the asymetric kind, where non-combatants may be used as human shields precisely because "our side" finds the thought of killing innocent children repugnant.)

Or, to put it another way, if Iran stockpiles nukes under kindergartens, does that make the nukes untouchable?

at, the easier we make the answers, the easier it will be to manipulate us. Do we want lines beyond which we will not cross? Absolutely. Do we want those boundaries to be so restrictive that we cannot act to protect ourselves? In my opinion, no.

You ask "what about genocide"? Well, guess what; there's a significant population on the "other side" who want just that, with "us" as the target. The apocalyptic rapture segment of that population thinks the Eschaton will be immanentized when Islam is near destruction, at which point Allah will act to protect His own, ushering in some kind of Islamic paradise on earth.

So in other words, the whole point of their policies is to ratchet it up to mutually-assured genocide, because then God will put His thumb on the scale.

I'm afraid of absolutists on both sides; I'm afraid of Mad Mullahs, and I'm afraid of Puritans who won't take the Mullahs seriously.

So dude, get serious.

I think Andrew Sullivan has been suffering from dementia for the past two years. How sad - he used to be one of the most articualte voices on dangers of Islamofascism.

I'm not talking about putting the lives of children "at risk."

I'm saying that if we are looking only at effectiveness, then we can't rule anything out, can we? If it would get us information to save X Americans, we could strap a bomb to a bus and blow it up in the middle of an Iranian day-care, right? Not innocents killed by collateral damage, but pure terrorism. If it works, then we could use it, right? I mean, we wouldn't want those lines to restrict our ability to "protect" ourselves, right?

Basically the question boils down to this:

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

There was a time once, not long ago, when conservatives expressed outrage over moral relativism. There were absolute measures of right and wrong and anyone who said otherwise was the worst sort of moral degenerate.

Is there no method that is so wrong that using it would be wrong even if we couldn't protect ourselves without it?

Trust me, I'm deadly serious.

Greg,

Your arguments are little more than sophistic straw men stuffed with red herrings.

It is utterly inconceivable that we would ever need to "strap a bomb to a bus and blow it up in the middle of an Iranian daycare." It is not entirely inconceivable that we might need to blow up an Iranian school in order to stop the launch of a missile concealed underneath it, but then such a scenario would likely mean that the kids were about to die anyway once the missile launched. At any rate, such a strike on our part would, by definition, not be terrorism, since the goal would be to take out a legitimate military target, not to cause civilian deaths and rampant fear.

Your addle-brained post got even murkier when you accused conservatives of moral relativism. Conservatives have long argued that nuking Japan was a necessary act of war, remember? Above all, conservatives are realists. War is hell, and when bad guys try to kill you and you fire back, bad stuff is going to happen. Always does.

You couldn't even get your Biblical reference down. America is not trying to "gain the world" -- only trying to defend its corner of it. I guess when someone breaks into your house, you wet your pants and beg for mercy. Stop your nancy-boy neurotic sniveling and actually use your head.

"Is there no method that is so wrong that using it would be wrong even if we couldn't protect ourselves without it?"

Possibly. But if the math of the method says torture one man to save 10,000 lives, I'm sorry, put me in the "pro-torture" camp.

And of course BTG is right; Conservatives pretty much by definition consider themselves realists. Progressives and Socialists want to build the perfect society.

Actually, I'm afraid you are serious; that you'd trade those 10,000 for a strong sense of your own righteousness (and then blame America -- or at least the Republicans -- for not doing more to eliminate the "root causes" of terrorism).

Bleak thought for the day: if our civilization falls to violence, the "root cause" will be the inculcated narcissism of our supposed elites.

You rock

Real world, real time scenario:

A woman boarding a regional plane in Huntington WV is found to be carrying a waterbottle that tests positive for explosive materials onto a flight. She is a native of Pakistan. Her ticket is one-way, with an apparent final destination of Detroit.

Bells going off for anyone just yet?

A screener noticed a bottle in a woman's carry-on bag as she prepared to board a flight to Charlotte, N.C., Booton said.

I'm not sure how to read that. Did the bottle show up in an X-ray? Did the screener just happen to just glance in her purse and see it? If the bottle got through the X-Ray without raising an alarm, that's a real problem.

But really that's a digression. This could of course be a false alarm, even though the contents failed both a chemical swab test and a bomb-sniffing-dog test. But if this is the real thing, we would be stupid to assume this bomber is the only one running. If this is an Al Queada (or derivative) operation, their main signature is multiple synchronized attacks.

Which means other bombers could be on planes right now.

Does anyone know anyone flying domestically today? And if you do, have your opinions on coercive interrogation changed?

God willing, this will turn out to be a false alarm. If its not, let's hope this woman is the only agent in action. And if she isn't the only actor, let's really pray that we can get information we right this minute need desperately without violating any of our oh-so-valuable ideals of decency.

(Double posted - here and in the next thread - because what's happening now could be damned important. Avoid flying today if you can.)

In your original post on Michelle Malkin's blog, I think you meant to say "I have no such QUALMS" (not "QUANDARY"). To my mind, one is "in a quandary", or one "has qualms".