Carter: America tortures

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

You've got it wrong. "Things that nobody disagrees is torture" is essentially the set of things that Al Qaeda does that we don't.

How is that not what's what I said. What AQ does, everybody agrees is torture. What we do, not everybody agrees is torture. The definers, such as Carter, call it torture in order to make the moral equivalency case.

Yay us that we aren't as bad as Al Qaeda, but it doesn't excuse the things that we do.

But your line of thinking "we are not as bad as Al Qaeda" contains the notion that "we are bad", and now that is your starting point and you're working to prove it. You could just as easily start with "Al Qaeda does much MUCH worse things than we do, 999 times out of 1000, ordered and instructed from the top, motivated by inhumanity as a part of their very nature... and that is what makes Al Qaeda bad and us good. That said, we are overdue for discussions and instruction about where the limits are and why."

But you didn't, and that suggests to me that you are shooting at that moral equivalency notion and I don't understand why.