<<It's bad enough dealing with Tee's misguided hyperbolic rants of how out of control our military is, or Lanya's op-ed parade of how Bush is a war criminal, so why not actually try applying terms appropriately.>>
1. Your military is in fact out of control. It is committing criminal acts never seen in all of WWII on the part of Americans. It is not obeying the laws of warfare, it is torturing and murdering prisoners and it is covering up the torture and murder of prisoners. It is massacring civilians and covering up the massacre of civilians. And not just the military but its civilian "overseers" who have basically given it a blank cheque. Now whether these truths are stated in business-school numbered-point prose or in "hyperbolic rants" should not carry one one-hundredths the significance of the fact that these things are being done. It's bad enough that Lanya, and I, and other sane and normal people in this group have to deal with the continual lies and distortions of the rabid right on these topics (to say nothing of the nit-picking that goes along with them as if matters of great significance depended on it) but now we have to be faced with the asinine distraction of defining "torture" as if . . . as long as someone here can point to a worse form of torture not yet committed . . . or not yet KNOWN to have been committed . . . by Americans, then everything short of the most extreme form of torture must be OK.
I have challenged you - - sirs - - REPEATEDLY - - to simply state whether or not the forms of treatment reserved by the "President" as his prerogative to inflict on persons in American captivity - - WHETHER OR NOT YOU CALL IT TORTURE, it makes no difference - - is acceptable if inflicted on Americans captured by the other side. In your typical gutless fashion, you have so far refused to answer that simple question. You have dodged, you have evaded, you have come up with snarky little pretexts - - but you have not answered. And will not answer either because you lack the balls or the intellectual honesty or both.
Instead of answering one simple question, you now have the balls to come up with a new distraction, to define torture. Dictionaries are full of definitions of torture. Pick one and go with it. I see from further back in the thread that definitions of torture were in fact offered to you. Definitions you didn't accept as presented, you had to tweak and hammer at them until they were refashioned into new, hand-crafted (by you) definitions that, curiously enough, applied to things the (so far, according to you) the Americans have not been proven to commit. You are of course stacking the deck once again for anyone stupid enough to fall for your childish and pea-brained game. Don't waste my time or anyone else's with this kind of bullshit, you are merely insulting the intelligence of anyone who pays you the courtesy of reading that drivel.
We know now you won't answer the simple question that I have repeatedly put to you, and most of us understand why. Basically it's because even you know at some level of your hate-filled little brain that what Bush wants to do to his prisoners is just plain WRONG.
