Sean sent me an article promoting it. Since I went to the trouble of refuting it, I might as well preach to my buddies the choir.
As our lawmakers struggle to come up with improvements to our failing health care system, we as concerned citizens have a responsibility to become more knowledgeable about this issue and to lend our voices and opinions to the debate. Since the United States is the ONLY industrialized nation without universal coverage, it may be helpful to compare the systems of other nations in determining what models might work here.
In 1787 America became the ONLY one of the aforementioned nations that didn’t have a king or emperor? Europe traded theirs for socialism.
The most “socialized” system is exemplified by Britain’s National Health Service. All citizens and legal residents are covered by the NHS. Ninety-five percent of NHS expenditures are financed through taxes, with the remaining 5% through user charges such as co-pays on prescription drugs, dental and vision services. Because there are no bills to collect or claims to review, administrative costs are very low. The government owns the hospitals and employs the doctors, but citizens can choose their doctors and where they receive care. Doctors are paid based on the number of patients they see and get additional financial rewards for keeping their patients healthy. As a result, Great Britain is the world leader in the area of preventive care.
Yes, and they keep them healthy by regulating their life choices.
To control costs, the NHS does not cover certain high cost treatments that are often ineffective. The most common complaints about the NHS involve waiting times—particularly for elective surgeries such as hip replacements.
These are not small questions.Once you cover everyone in a single system the only point of savings is the individual.Some bureaucrat gets to decide whether you get your transplant.Numerous stories of how people with treatable cancer die in Britain on waiting lists is no small matter either.
Britain spends only 8.3% of its GDP on health care, or an average of $2723 per person per year. The World Health Organization (WHO), which ranked the US 37th in the world in overall health care, ranked Britain’s system 18th. Other countries with systems similar to Britain’s include Spain (7th), Norway (11th), and Sweden (23rd).
By what criteria does WHO rank each country?I want to know how many people travel from the United States to each of these countries to be treated for rare diseases and vice versa.If their health care is the best then there would be no reason for them to come to America.
The health care systems of Germany, France and Japan are “insurance based” systems, similar to the US, but with several major differences. The first is that insurance is provided on a non-profit basis.
Why doesn’t the Left put their energy into a non-profit insurance company in this country?If what they say is true they could put private insurance out of business.
The second is that insurance is paid for by payroll deduction, similar to the way we pay for Social Security coverage. Another difference is that coverage is universal—no one can be excluded based on age, health status, etc. Unlike Britain, the government does not own or operate hospitals and doctors are in private practice or are employees of hospitals.
Well, if the model is Social Security then I know exactly how solvent the system is.
In Germany, workers and employers split the costs, with each contributing approximately 8% of payroll to 240 different “sickness funds”. Coverage includes dental, prescription drugs and long-term care. Germany spends 10.7% of GDP on health care, or an average of $3673 per citizen.
In Japan, employers and employees each contribute 4% of payroll to mandatory national health insurance plans. While taxes are lower, the Japanese pay more in deductibles and co-pays for inpatient and outpatient care (30% for outpatient care and 20% for inpatient hospitalizations.) The Japanese spend 8% of GDP, or an average of $2358 per citizen per year on health care. The WHO ranked Japan 10th and Germany 25th in overall health care.
Here we all pay the same amount for the same care as anyone else in our country.But In Japan you are punished for making more money.
The country ranked Number One in health care is France. The French system has the most comprehensive coverage in the world, with quality care, excellent choices of doctors and specialists, and with no waiting time. The French system taxes employers 13.1% of payroll and employees 0.75% of payroll.
Wrong!French Employers pay nothing.The 13.1% paid by employers is actually wages that the employee never sees.In what way are the choices excellent?And if waiting times in other countries are insignificant then why is it significant to mention that France doesn’t have them?
Most people (87%) have additional private for-profit supplemental insurance. Income taxes provide coverage for the elderly and unemployed. The French pay higher taxes, which they accept as a necessity. They spend 11.1% of GDP on health care and costs average $3374 per person per year.
Why is private insurance a necessity when they are already paying 13% in payroll taxes?
Canada’s single-payer system is often mischaracterized as “socialized” medicine. In actuality, a single-payer system is publicly funded with private delivery. Unlike Britain, the government does not own the hospitals or employ the doctors. Our Medicare system is an appropriate analogy to the Canadian system.
Our Medicare system is going broke like Canada.
In Canada, all insured people are required to be covered for all medically necessary hospital and physician care without co-pays or user fees. About 70% of total health care spending is financed by the public sector through income taxes, payroll taxes and sales taxes. Many Canadians obtain private insurance to cover prescription drugs, rehabilitation services, vision and dental care, which accounts for the remaining 30%. Canada spends 9.9% of GDP on health care, or $3678 per person.
Who decides what is necessary and are they rewarded for turning people down?How is it financed by the public sector?Do they own a football team or Exxon?No, they take the money from productive people.And on top of all those taxes they need private insurance anyway.
While Canadians complain of long waits for elective procedures and to see specialists, surveys show that a majority of Canadians are happy with their health care delivery system.
House slaves were pretty happy with their lives too in comparison.
Only about 40 developed countries in the world have established health care systems. In Africa, much of India, China and South America the rich who can afford to pay out-of-pocket get care and those who can’t afford to stay sick or die.
China is a communist country.Why doesn’t their socialism cover the best health care possible?
According to T.R. Reid, a Washington Post correspondent who has written extensively on health care issues, our fragmented national health care apparatus has elements of all these models. Our veteran’s health care system is like Britain’s, Medicare is like Canada’s, our employer-based insurance is like Germany’s or Japan’s (with the exception that most of the insurance industry in the US operates on a for-profit basis), while our 47+ million uninsured Americans might as well live in India.
Really, better in India?Health Insurance came about in the United States during World War II.Before that were people better off in India?
No country has the perfect health care system and perhaps none of these systems would be perfect for the United States. You should note however that, contrary to what the scary “Harry and Louise” type ads might imply, in ALL these systems, patients have a choice of doctors!
Wrong!You only have a choice of doctors in countries where it pays for the smartest most dedicated people to become doctors.That doesn’t happen in countries that control health care.Medicare is a year behind paying Sir Saunders his money from patients because they can be as late as they want.
The US spends a larger percentage of GDP (15.3%) and more per person ($6714) than any other country in the world—and unlike the US, the other 39 countries with established systems cover all of their citizens.
Anywhere else in government progressives will point to the amount of money spent and use it as justification for a superior system.Have you ever heard them brag that America’s education is better because we spend less money than Germany?
Whether we end up with a hybrid system like we have now or a system like the ones detailed above, we cannot solve our health care problems without finding a way to cover all Americans, without controlling administrative costs and without reducing wasteful, unnecessary and ineffective treatments and procedures.
Those efficiencies are impossible without Tort Reform which is not a part of this proposal.And we all know the government is a master at reducing administrative costs.Look at how little the Department of Education, Labor, Commerce etc cost.
Not what you think. On Flag Day (June 14) my wife and I took a little getaway to a quaint small town in PA. We were strolling about the town when the sounds of live music drew us to the town square, to what turned out to be a Flag Day ceremony presented annually by the Elks lodge. A succession of Boy Scouts, in pairs, marched old flag after old flag to its ceremonial position on the platform. Old men presented a brief history of each flag in what amounted to a pretty comprehensive US history lesson. "The price of liberty is constant vigilance" was a theme. Many versions of the stars and stripes were honored, as well as the POW-MIA flag.
The local community band ("All Instruments - No Auditions") performed traditional favorites: The Star-Spangled Banner, God Bless America, a medley of Sousa marches, America the Beautiful, and others. We had followed the band's trailer into town but thought nothing of it at the time.
Everyone stood and pledged allegiance to the flag.
Finally the flag burning. A beat-up old flag was given an honorable retirement from service -- "presented for inspection and dignified disposal" ... "honorably retired from further service" ... it had "reached its present state through honorable service to our country" ... "worn out in worthy service" ... "retired and replaced" ... "fittingly destroyed." All the vets stood at attention while this was taking place. Man with bugle played Taps as an old vet set the folded flag ablaze in an urn.
The event was carried out with assistance from the local Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, VFW, and American Legion. It was the kind of afternoon that Manhattan ridicules and that makes me proud to be an American. I really enjoyed it.
Why is conservative thought even needed in our universities? The Wall Street Journal, gives an excellent editorial in defense of conservative thought. Here is an exerpt:
That constellation (Conservative thought) begins to come into focus at the end of the 18th century with Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France." It draws on the conservative side of the liberal tradition, particularly Adam Smith and David Hume and includes Tocqueville's great writings on democracy and aristocracy and John Stuart Mill's classical liberalism. It gets new life in the years following World War II from Friedrich Hayek's seminal writings on liberty and limited government and Russell Kirk's reconstruction of traditionalist conservatism. And it is elevated by Michael Oakeshott's eloquent reflections on the pervasive tendency in modern politics to substitute abstract reason for experience and historical knowledge, and by Leo Strauss's deft explorations of the dependence of liberty on moral and intellectual virtue.
Without an introduction to the conservative tradition in America and the conservative dimensions of modern political philosophy, political science students are condemned to a substantially incomplete and seriously unbalanced knowledge of their subject. Courses on this tradition should be mandatory for students of politics; today they are not even an option at most American universities.
Of course, I'm having a hard time just getting my University to let me expose my students to William F. Buckley, much less Leo Strauss.
A few weeks ago I ran across Wayne Allen Root’s challenge from last summer. Root was the Libertarian VP candidate and he was theoretically a schoolmate of Obama’s at Columbia.
Welch: Were you the exact same class?
Root: Class of '83 political science, pre-law Columbia University. You don't get more exact than that. Never met him in my life, don't know anyone who ever met him. At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, 20th reunion, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack! Who was he, and five years ago, nobody even knew who he was.
Other guy: Did he even show up to the reunion?
Root: I don't know! I didn't know him. I don't think anybody knew him. But I know that the guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange? It's very strange.
I’ve read over this several times since because it’s more poignant than all off the plot points that we heard last summer because it kind of explains everything with Wright, Ayers, Allinsky and what not.
He most likely skirted at Columbia and that’s why no one knows him there and it’s why he won’t release his grades. After four years in the real world and the added maturity he went to Harvard Law and applied himself and he’s more than willing to share those grades and stories. But like a talented athlete he treated Columbia like he was a bonus baby and he treated Harvard like he was playing in his option year.
I'm kind of getting the feeling that he treated the campaign last year as the option year and he's now skirting. It’s common to make campaign promises that you don’t intend to keep, but it’s surprising the number of times he’s made an actual policy decision as president and then backtracked. That’s clearly the tendency of a guy who isn’t doing his homework. It’s also one explanation as to why the teleprompter is going everywhere. He’s a talented guy use to getting by on glib philosophical statements and that just doesn’t work in the White House. The CEO of a successful corporation isn’t the smartest guy in the company but the hardest working.
Look at Obama's post Harvard Law years. Instead of using such a degree to find his own success he went into public service where even if he were a failure no one would ever know. We do know that he couldn't make enough money to buy his own house and needed the shady Tony Rezko to accomplish it for him.
When all the talk was going around last summer that he had no personal accomplishments it was derided because he was such an exciting person. But electing a man with no accomplishments gives such a man the idea that the world is about keeping cool rather than making tough decisions. Obama has been accomplished in getting elected to things, but he has yet to make his mark in any particular job.
Bush didn’t speak well, but he knew the issues and where he stood as President. Obama has been unable to understand how his radical upbringing fits into the real world decisions of the presidency. It’s going to take a lot of hard work for him to be as comfortable with decision-making as Bush and nothing in his past suggests that he is up to the task. Once the newness wears off so will the facade. At some point you have to actually judge a president based on his own accomplishments instead of his contrast to the previous leader. I hope that we can get there before the 2010 election.
May 26, 1959 -- The Pirates' Harvey Haddix pitches a perfect game thru 12 innings and loses 1-0 in 13.
The Pirates were retired in the top of the 13th by Lew Burdette — who, like Haddix, had started the game and was still pitching.
Felix Mantilla, who was to record a lifetime batting average of .261, led off the bottom of the Braves' 13th. He hit a grounder to Don Hoak at third. Hoak appeared to take his time gripping the ball, got it right, but his throw to first baseman Rocky Nelson — who regularly fielded better than .990 — was on a bounce. Nelson could not dig it out. Hoak was given an error. The perfect game was over, but not the no-hitter.
With Mantilla at first, the Braves’ great home run hitter Eddie Mathews was up. He did something he was to do only two more times that season — hit a sacrifice bunt. It was successful, and Mantilla moved to second. Now Haddix was facing Hank Aaron, who was leading the major leagues in batting. Of course, Aaron was intentionally walked.
Then big Joe Adcock was up. He was a home run hitter who once had smacked four in a game against my Dodgers at Ebbets Field. This time, he stroked a low liner that went over the head of right fielder Roman Mejias, toward the fence about 330 feet from home.
From Aaron’s vantage point, it did not seem to clear the fence. Aaron took off for second, saw Mantilla racing home, and Aaron thought that was the ballgame. So he touched second, then cut across the infield for the dugout. He believed the ball had landed inside the stadium and that the game was over. But the ball had cleared the fence.
Adcock continued running, though, and rounded the bases. He touched home and the plate umpire Vinnie Smith declared the game over.
But not so fast. There was some confusion. The Braves thought it was a 3-0 game, but Adcock had passed Aaron on the bases. That made Adcock out. That night, the National League president, Warren Giles, ruled that the game was actually a 1-0 affair, that Adcock’s hit was a double. And for Haddix, officially it was never ruled a no-hitter, nor a perfect game, even though it went beyond nine innings.
Haddix went on to win Game 7 of the 1960 World Series over the Yankees but nobody remembers that.
ONE MAN (YES EVEN A JUNTOBOY) CAN FIGHT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA
Tonight I was surfing the web as usual when I came across this story written and released by the Associated Press:
I found it on the San Francisco Chronicle. I then posted this comment on Facebook and on the San Francisco Chronicle comment section associated with the article (not one other person out of 96 posts had found it):
The SF Chronicle is so out of touch that the SF Chronicle can't even bash the Bible correctly! SF Chronicle incorrectly sites that "Pentagon reports no longer include quotes from the...Gospel of Peter." There is no Gospel of Peter in the Catholic or King James or any other standard English Canon of the Bible. I guess their action line was "Christians Bad", "Bible Bad", Government stopped quoting Bible "Good." Interesting to see if they retract. Just to let you know SF Chronicle, there are only four recognized Gospels in the Canonized Version of the Bible as we know it today (old and new testament), since around 375 A.D., Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There are the Gnostic gospels recently rediscovered but still considered heresy by the mainline churches.
AP then changed the article, after I posted a comment on SF Chronicle Website. Was it that comment that made them correct "Gospel of Peter" to correctly "Epistle of Peter?" Don't know, but there certainly was a correlation if not causation. Don't tell me one guy on his computer blogging about these things can't make even a little difference!
Lest there be any doubt that civilian courts are precisely the wrong place for these folks, consider the prosecution of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, who was arrested in Illinois in December 2001 and held as an enemy combatant in a Navy brig.
Al-Marri joined Al Qaeda in 1998. In 2001, he was approached by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, architect of 9/11, about becoming a sleeper agent for a second wave of attacks.
With $10,000, Al-Marri entered the country Sept. 10, 2001, researched how to make cyanide gas bombs and focused on dams, waterways and tunnels.
The facts are beyond dispute; Al-Marri confessed in a plea bargain. In return, the Justice Department agreed Al-Marri would face no more than 15 years in prison, with the possibility of having his sentence reduced by the time he has already served.
Al-Marri's term of incarceration for active confederation with the forces that attacked America, killing 3,000, is, in a word, pathetic.
Credit card fraud can carry a stiffer punishment.
It would be more of the same if he closed Gitmo and brought them here.
I heard Mike and Mike's interview with Roger Clemens this morning on ESPN Radio. After quite a buildup that Roger was taking to the airwaves to break his long silence, the actual interview provided a lot of nothing. Clemens missed his opportunity to speak straight up with the folks, and Mike and Mike missed their opportunity to make news by asking hard, direct questions. Maybe they had a softball agreement in place, sure seemed like it. What I learned is that Clemens talks to kids, lots of kids, and high school players too, and he has a foundation, and the foundation serves kids, and he likes to get out and talk to kids. Did he mention how warmly he is received by the kids he goes out to talk to?
Hall of Fame credentials are worth a great deal of money, not just ego strokes, during a ballplayer's remaining lifetime and to his heirs. That is really what Clemens is all about at this point methinks.
Thomas Sowell produced 4 great columns about this topic last week. A response of sorts from slate magazine.
Webster's defines empathy as "the experiencing as one's own the feelings of another." Obama, in The Audacity of Hope, described empathy as "a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes." To Obama, empathy chiefly means applying a principle his mother taught him: asking, "How would that make you feel?" before acting. Empathy in a judge does not mean stopping midtrial to tenderly clutch the defendant to your heart and weep. It doesn't mean reflexively giving one class of people an advantage over another because their lives are sad or difficult. When the president talks about empathy, he talks not of legal outcomes but of an intellectual and ethical process: the ability to think about the law from more than one perspective.
It's funny that this writer seems to know exactly what the President means while everyone suspects that empathy in the law is supposed to right those wrongs the legislature didn't get around to righting. We suspect this because every other liberal nominated to the court since the 1950s crusaded instead of applying the law.
The court has already become a super legislature that answers to no one and Obama is asking that a potential justice be willing to peek through the blindfold.
What she said doesn't surprise me, but I am surprised by how many people seem to be surprised. It's not worth blogging about except that James Taranto has a larger point about why it's funny to the Left.
The answer, it seems clear, is that this is an example of shock humor: a genre that relies on the frisson of violating taboos. By our count, Sykes runs afoul of five taboos in her Limbaugh joke: She equates dissent with treason. She likens a domestic political opponent to a foreign enemy. She makes fun of the disabled (Limbaugh's past addiction to painkillers would entitle him to protection under the Americans With Disabilities Act). She makes light of a form of interrogation that some people consider torture. And she wishes somebody dead.
Except for the last one, these are all taboos that liberals promote and enforce with especial vigor. If a conservative violated any one of them, he would be on the inside track to be named "Worst Person in the World" by that NBC blowhard (as indeed Feherty was).
What makes Sykes's joke funny to a liberal, then, is the sense of danger that accompanies her risky themes, combined with the secure knowledge that since the joke is at the expense of a liberal hate figure, the usual rules do not apply. It's the same reason people on the left evince particular glee when they attack Clarence Thomas or Michael Steele in expressly racist terms, or when they use antigay innuendo against their political opponents (regardless of the latter's sexual orientation).
One of the great PC tricks of the Left is making certain words and thoughts by the Right taboo. They reserve the ability to go down those roads to attack members of the Right before locking the thoughts and words up again for the sake of decency.
Buck Martinez made an interesting point today on XM's Baseball This Morning regarding whether DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak will ever be broken. He thinks not, because Joe faced 73 pitchers in those 56 games, whereas today a hitter would face any number of pitchers that he had not seen before, or had seen little. Deep in games, Joe would have seen the pitcher 3 or 4 times already. Buck cited games during the streak in which Joe saw the same pitcher 5 times and finally collected a hit. Now a hitter faces situational matchups designed specifically to get him out. Scott Graham's argument was weak but maybe right: that statistically anything is possible, and other records we never thought would fall have fallen.
Speaking of fallen, the Bucs started off 11-7 and have since lost 12 of 13, so they're out of it by mid-May and I can turn my attention to the Phils.
We saw a minor league game Saturday night and my younger son watched the whole game (and consumed many treats) without complaining, so I have entered the Golden Age of parenting. My older son scored the game, prompting the couple behind us to whisper how clever we were to find a way to keep him occupied, but he has been scoring games for years at his own initiative. He even tracks balls and strikes and the fielded location and relative arc of batted balls.
In other baseball news, apparently there is an ambidextrous pitcher having success in the Yankees system. There have been others who could throw both ways (Tulane pitcher and future Major League Gene Harris could do it while I was there in the 80s, but never actually switched arms on the mound as far as I know), but this guy is both an anomaly and a success. The catch is you have to start training the kid to do everything with either hand when he is 3.
You can see something right now that hasn't been around in baseball since the late 1800s: a switch-pitcher. His name is Pat Venditte, he's 23, and he's pro baseball's only ambidextrous pitcher. This living piece of history is more than a YouTube star; he's throwing almost daily for the Charleston RiverDogs, the Yankees' Single-A club. And he's not just throwing: He's blowing through hitters like a Cub Scout through Skittles. At one point in April, the closer's ERA was 0.00 in 6 1/3 innings, and he hadn't blown a save in five games.
Last season, he had 23 saves for the Staten Island Yankees, with a 0.83 ERA. And best of all, the kid can relieve himself!
He wears a specially made six-fingered Mizuno glove with two thumbs. (His Dominican teammates call him Pulpo, Spanish for "octopus.") When he warms up, he throws four pitches righty and four lefty.
I feel bad for Dodgers management who were daily reaping from all things Manny and then this. And for all the dads who get to explain to their kids, as I did, that Manny will make $15m this year for cheating and will be joyfully welcomed back after his 50 games off. But eventually he becomes a rich retired ballplayer who everbody knows is a cheater, and he will pay that price forever. (I didn't ask what they would have done in Manny's situation; $15m buys a lot of Skittles.)
Megan Mcardle has the lowdown on why the bailouts are all about the unions:
Chrysler is a good company caught in a bad situation. Chrysler has been a bad headache for years. Daimler bought it for $36 billion in 1998, and actually paid $650 million to have Cerebrus take the company off their hands in 2007. The hedge funds benefited from the government money, so they're getting more than they would have otherwise. As far as I know, Chrysler has burned basically all the cash they got from the government, which is why they're in bankruptcy. They haven't bought exciting new assets the secureds can liquidate; they've just produced more cars that can't be sold at a profit, put more wear and tear on machinery, etc. The deal they made with Fiat doesn't put any cash into the company.
The administration isn't kowtowing to the unions; it's trying to prevent massive job loss. Chrysler employs about 60,000 people. This is a rounding error in the number of jobs that have been lost since this recession began.
To put it another way, we could have taken the $8 billion or so we gave to Chrysler and given every one of the company's employees $133,000 to start their own War on Poverty, while still providing much of their pensions through the PBGC. Of cours, the new Chrysler is going to cut many of those jobs, so the cost of actual jobs saved will probably top $200K per. For as long as the company lasts. Which most analysts do not expect to be long, given that their super secret surprise scheme for turning everything around is to have Chrysler sell retooled Fiats to a country with one-seventh the population density and almost twice the birthrate of Italy.
A couple of days ago I posted the Hiroshima history inspired by the Daily Show. May was on the show to talk about the memos and whether the United States tortured anyone. Dude said that Obama had a point and I rejoined that Obama was being disingenuous.
Obama's top intelligence official, Admiral Dennis Blair, says these techniques produced "high-value information" that gave the U.S. government "a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country."
Former CIA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently wrote: "As late as 2006, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of Al Qaeda came from those [coercive] interrogations."
Former CIA Director George Tenet has said, "I know that this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than [what] the FBI, the [CIA], and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."
Former National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has said, "We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened."
Many other top intelligence officials say the same: coercive interrogations are the only way we have to get life-saving information out of trained, hardened al-Qaeda terrorists.
I think the evidence is clear. But if others do not, let's release the "effectiveness memos" as former Vice President Cheney has requested and let's release other data on this question. Perhaps at this point we need a national debate on security and morality.
By not releasing the memos, Obama and company can make people think the worst instead of analyzing the actual events. His supporters have been yelling torture since before the 2004 election and they won't be happy with a conclusion that says otherwise so therefore the memos and an honest discussion on the issue cannot take place.
Look, we know this: Khalid Sheikh Mohamed was captured. He said: "I want a lawyer." He didn't get one - I know some people think he deserved one but he's not a criminal defendant or an honorable prisoner of war. The Geneva Convention does not cover him - even Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder has said that.
Later, they asked KSM over and over: "Will there be another attack?" He would just smile and say: "Soon you will see."
Now maybe you think asking him again and adding pretty please with a cherry on top would have produced results in time. The intelligence officials didn't think that. They went to the Justice Department and said: "What can we do? How far can we go to save lives?" And they got the information they needed -- and we haven't had another attack on American soil since.
And after being waterboarded and suffering other coercive methods in 2002, Abu Zubaydah explained that he and his "brothers" were permitted to give up information - only once interrogators pushed them to the limit of their endurance. At that point, he provided information that helped the CIA capture terrorist Ramzi Binalshibh.
The current administration appears to have ruled out any coercive techniques: No sleep deprivation - not even for a night. No loud music - it drives the terrorists crazy! So it's torture! Better to let the attack proceed. The victims and their families surely will understand.
We basically have three weapons against terrorists: capture them, interrogate them, kill them. But there's no point in capturing if you can't effectively interrogate, so that leaves just killing. How do you justify that? How do you say, yes you can hit that terrorist with a Predator missile but you can't make him listen to Shady Slim?
I would hope that President Obama would change his mind. I would hope he would say to his advisors: "Give me a list of all the techniques that are effective. I'll take a red pen and cross out the ones we will never use no matter what. But I'll circle the ones that may be used if I'm asked -- and if I give specific authorization. As for other techniques that are clearly not torture but may inflict discomfort, there will be detailed guidelines and I want the director of the CIA to sign off every time they are used.
This sounds reasonable to me. Since we rarely have a debate on here I welcome Dude to identify the chicanery in May's depiction or conclusions.
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