Republican U.S. Senate candidate Robert Blaha tells us how he really feels about the controversial interrogation practice known as “waterboarding” at last night’s candidate forum hosted by the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives in Colorado Springs:
BLAHA: Well actually, I’ll rephrase the question because I do not consider waterboarding to be torture. [Pols emphasis] The way I look–I’m all tangled up here brother–the way I look at waterboarding is controlled waterboarding is not torture. What it does is it extracts information that is absolutely crucial to, to the men and women who are depending on getting that information.
As we saw last week when Blaha stated he would “go beyond” Donald Trump’s proposal to block Muslims from entering the United States, he appears to have locked on to a campaign strategy of shocking Republican primary voters with as strident a position as is possible on any given issue. The fact is that waterboarding is widely discredited as an effective interrogation technique, along with other forms of torture considered by experts more likely to render a prisoner willing to say anything the interrogator wants to hear to end the torture than the truth.
But once again, that’s how rational people think about waterboarding. And those are not the voters Blaha needs to win this primary.
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So, I'm going to link to a Newsmax article on why John McCain (who may know something about torture that Blaha doesn't) thinks Blaha's full of it. Conservative enough? Bla-ha!
McCain: Anyone Who Says Waterboarding Works is a Liar
What the hell is the matter with Republicans like Blaha and Trump? Thank you, John McCain, for showing that not all Republicans are idiots.
The Republican Party needs to be destroyed at the ballot box by the American voters. What we are witnessing today began when Ronald Reagan brought the "religious right" into the Republican Party. Thirty-six years later, those extremists and their progeny, fueled by fear and paranoia, control the party and set its agenda. Mr. Trump is simply the latest iteration of what began then, and blossomed with the arrival of Sarah Palin in 2008. These people do not care about facts or rational thought. Facts scare them because it undermines their fear and paranoia. They are scared of the world and through a perverted version of religion they think they can and should remake America to fit their world view.
They gladly take the name "conservative" as a self description, yet they are the most unconservative group we've seen in many decades in the United States. True conservatives nurture the institutions a society and culture has raised up over the decades and centuries. Today's conservatives attack all our existing institutions, including our K-12 schools, our colleges and universities (both public and private), and every government institution from local to federal in a never ending attempt to undermine public confidence in them when in fact there isn't any reason to do so. It is one thing to criticize a given policy or institution and call for changes, but it is quite a different matter when a political party seemingly wants to undermine all confidence in them; and it is especially iniquitous when they promote legislation (i.e. budget or tax cuts) whose primary purpose is to make public institutions dysfunctional but then blame those same institutions for failing to operate correctly. If they succeed, we are left with nothing. A society without institutions supported by the public won't remain viable for long. Instead of promoting all the "trumped-up" (no pun intended) charges against our institutions, perhaps the Republican Party should look to Edmund Burke, one of the greatest conservative politicians of all time, for advice:
If the Republican Party chooses to continue down the path they are on rather than take the advice of Burke, the American electorate should show them the door and toss them on trash heap of history.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hell, those guys think Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) is a liberal, just to the right of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif). I do like your comment Half Glass Full, but doubt the Republicans/Idiots will reveal why they're buying into the con artists Trump and Blaha.
First, water boarding, which used to be called water torture, has been recognized right here in the US as torture and has been illegal for over a hundred years. Both Americans and foreign nationals have been successfully prosecuted and sentenced to prison for that crime in both US criminal and military courts going back to the Spanish American War and as recently the 1970s when a Sheriff was convicted of the crime in our criminal justice system.
Second, these people keep claiming it produces valuable information but no one has presented a shred of evidence that this or any torture produces reliable intel. What you get might be true or might not. People will say anything to get it to stop so you have no way of knowing. Mostly it's just a matter of saying whatever the torturer insists that the tortured say to get some relief. Most of the intel obtained by torture is bad.
Historically torture has been most effective in getting people to say what your agenda requires them to say… Yes, I'm a witch. Yes, my neighbor's a witch. Yes, I murdered a Christian child and used the blood to make matzoh. That sort of thing. That's what it's for.
It is way down on the list of useful methods to attain accurate intel and is banned by the constitution all these clowns claim to love so much .It's against our law and violates international conventions to which we are a signatory.
Once torture has been used to obtain testimony, that testimony, whether it incriminates oneself or others, cannot be used in any legitimate court, civil, criminal or military.
Even if it were possible to prosecute someone after torture has been introduced and tainted all testimony it's extremely common for the tortured to recant whatever evidence they gave under torture. Usually they recant because they were made to say things that aren't true. Like when our captured soldiers have been tortured into denouncing their country when that's not how they feel at all.
The embrace of torture also makes it impossible for the US to have any legitimate standing to complain abut human rights abuses in other countries. If we are just another regime that tortures then when we complain about the cruelty of other regimes what the rest of the world world hears is blah blah blah and their reaction is … seriously? You're complaining about human rights violations? You're kidding, right?
Other than all that, it's a brilliant policy.
Blaha Moment #93 . . .
. . . when you realize the only candidate In the race that's lamer than you (Keyser) isn't in the room, so you feel the need to say really stupid shit, just to grab a little attention.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/03/politics/trump-adviser-hillary-clinton-waterboard/index.html