2008 Giuliani on Waterboarding: “It depends on who does it.”
posted by October 26 at 9:33 AM
onAsked at a town hall in Iowa this week if he thinks waterboarding is torture, Rudy Giuliani had this to say:
“Well, I’m not sure it is either. I’m not sure it is either. It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. I think the way it’s been defined in the media, it shouldn’t be done. The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that’s the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn’t be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is. Because I’ve learned something being in public life as long as I have. And I hate to shock anybody with this, but the newspapers don’t always describe it accurately.”(Applause)
Comments
I'm sure that if it's done with the right atmosphere - candles, smooth jazz, maybe a little incense - it can be just fine.
Giuliani is the worst candidate in history. He makes GWB look like FDR. If he's elected I'm moving to Canada or Australia, and this time I mean it.
Hey, as long as you can throw in a reference the "liberal media" in the answer to any question, you're on track to clinch the nomination.
Doesn't the convention center have a Waterboarding show each year.
People should do waterboarding scenes for next year's HUMP! so we can all see how it looks when it's done right.
Greg@1:
Best post of the week!
Stay Fresh!
http://zmax.org/supergreg/sgdotcom/
In his quest to diss the "liberal media" in front of the home crowd, he really just can't keep it all straight.
"The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that's the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn't be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is."
Ok, fair enough. He doesn't know what waterboarding is. Then he says this:
"Sometimes they describe it accurately. Sometimes they exaggerate it. So I'd have to see what they really are doing, not the way some of these liberal newspapers have exaggerated it."
So which is it Rudy? Do you know what it is or not? If you do, then you should have an opinion on whether it's torture. If you don't, how do you know what descriptions are accurate and which are exaggerated? What a f'ing clown.
I've always wanted go to an event like the Republican National Convention and set up a "waterboarding station" so the torture apologists can sign a waiver and get pwned. Of course, if any of them stopped masturbating to Jack Bauer for 5 minutes and actually submitted themselves to a waterboarding I'd be really f'ing surprised.
Yeah, this description must have been written by the liberals. I mean, c'mon... it's supposed to be one of the worst things a person can experience, Guliani.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding
I know, why don't we go ahead and do it to him and he can judge for himself.
Gary, I love how the article opens with "Waterboarding is a form of torture" and it has 9 citations.
Well, it got Kalid Sheik Mohammed to talk and that did avert some attacks. And the recipient suffers only psychic terror and fright - but no physical scars. But still, I'm not saying that it can be justified.
Nazi!
It did NOT get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to talk usefully at all. Their ham-handed approach destroyed a potentially useful source of information. Torture DOESN'T WORK.
flawed & fascist as he is, guiliani is going to win because of people like raindrop @ 11 & my parents, who hate hillary beyond reason.
this country is fucked up.
So torture doesn't work, but coercive interrogation can? Some people classify waterboarding as the latter. Some torture victims relent and confess factual truths, others with dead ends and red herrings but risk more torture when their captors find out they’ve been lying. But those that say torture just doesn’t work period and draw a semantical line with coercive interrogation as justifiable are not complete in their thinking. The argument can never be solved either way, it's like calculating Pi.
And those must be the only two alternatives, right, raindrop?
Thanks for the right-wing talking points. Gosh, there's no way anybody could know where to draw the line, is there? It's a total mystery. Certainly there are no experts, or written definitions, anywhere.
Why not ask the REAL interrogators, the ones who know how to get actual usable results? This is not a dark science developed out of nothing five minutes ago; interrogation has been the subject of much study for sixty years. The US intelligence community has learned the hard way how NOT to do it, until the ham-handed Bush fucks came in and ruined everything. We get less out of people now than we ever have.
I say all Presidential candidates should submit to all forms of interrogation themselves before deciding if they're okay to use or not.
All I know is that, apparently, since "enhanced interrogation techniques" are good and legal enough for use in Guantanamo then they are good and legal enough for the SPD to use here.
I'm not spewing right wing talking points Knarf. You think Bush is the first president to engage in this sort of thing? How much do you really know about past presidents and wars? You only think it's just Bush because its only in our present time when the media and Internet have shed light on such tactics.
Of course... the inverse is also true.
If people in Seattle are not concerned with how the SPD and King County Jail treats prisoners who have not yet had their day in court... then they really have no business bitching about how prisoners are treated in Guantanamo.
raindrop, i think you meant liberal media and liberal Internet in you last sentence.
but fnarf, how do we know we get less now than ever before?
@19
Our flaccid media and masturbatory Internet didn't probe out the truth of torture.
It was the Bushies themselves who -- ironically -- were more open about it than previous administrations. In a real sense, Bush is no different than Nixon or Carter or Clinton in practice. He just isn't ashamed of it.
Which means that once Bush is gone, our policy of torture will be swept back under the rug for another generation.
Here's why torture, and coerced confessions are stupid:
http://www.psychsound.com/2007/10/a_tale_of_two_decisions_or_how.html
Egyptian guy gets caught in his New York hotel room on 9/11 with a special radio that can communicate with pilots. The jackoffs who interrogate him make it clear that if he doesn't confess his family will be tortured back in Egypt. He confesses, knowing that he's committing suicide to protect his family. Much later an airline pilot shows up and wants his radio that he left behind in his hotel room.
Lives are destroyed by this kind of shit, and security is hindered.
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