This needs editing, but... Fear is running high. People are rallying around their worldviews, and they're ready to do harm to "others" to defend those views. (Terror management theory is an excellent theoretical approach to this, imho.) And that rallying, it's also polarization. But not merely two poles, look at this board: we have the leftists, the rightists, the libertarians, and the conspiracists! When I consider the history I've read, it seems to me that this is what's "normal" for the world. Not everywhere always, but definitely somewhere always. Recall Socrates's complaint about the youth of his day. I think the world is always going to hell in a handbasket, or rather, it always seems to be.
Panetta is smart. He just triangulated obama and the republicans. He admitted what was obvious, that we got very valuable info from putting the screws to these animals. That is very different from using torture to extract confessions, which are inherently unreliable under those circumstances. It is a difficult moral issue. As a society we don't like the idea of using even minor levels of torture. However, is it moral for our leaders to allow hundreds or thousands of innocents to be killed by a terrorist attack when they have the means to thwart it? Obama and Holder were among the worst of the preening moralists, but they didn't mind using the fruits of the interrogations they harshly criticized Bush and Cheney for.
"Leon Panetta : Waterboarding aided Bin Laden raid" Now some REALITY.......... http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=219986
WOW!!! please tell me more!! I didnt even know this was happening.....please give me a dose of reality...
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