The Tortured Path: Daily Kos

As my vision for this blog matures, I see a great potential way to add value to those that stumble upon the non-sense jotted here, thus the creation of the "Blog-of-blogs". Of course a play on the generally over priced, and ineffective investment vehicle, a "fund-of-funds". The premise being to spend spare time trolling the blogs of the left and right who have already cherry picked news stories to whine about and spin. Rather than do my own news worthy searches, I will simply let the crazies on the left and right filter the news for you and I, then I will filter their rants into an opinion that the average Middle American can process and form opinions on!

Crazy Rant: First item that caught my attention is from the left leaning blog of Daily Kos. A great looking website with a huge following, and lot's of good info. One blog entry from "Hunter" (probably his first name and not a reference to wild game hunting given his obvious political affiliation). The entry offers an opinion of the current debate whether to prosecute government officials responsible for drafting the now illegal torture policy's of the Bush Administration. The gist of the story is that the types of interrogation techniques used violate US and international law, and those responsible should be tried in a court to be consistent with our laws.

Middle America's Take:The basic premise that the Bush Administration took the War on Terror as an opportunity to quietly if not illegally modify U.S. policy on interrogation techniques is 100% accurate, and eventually I support falling to sleep watching these idiots get prosecuted on C-Span. However, not for the reasons the left craziness subscribe to. I want these idiots to face something similar to "the reckoning" played out in the movie Tombstone ( wasn't Val Kilmer awesome in that?), because they either lied about or concealed the policy changes from the American people. They broke the law, simple as that. Now to really get the skin crawling of our lefticon friends, I would probably had zero problem with the administration coming to the American people and saying "we caught some crazies, we think they know something, and our current techniques aren't working. This is waterboarding, this is the risk to the prisoner, this is the benefit, we do not feel it violates current law, and would like approval to adopt these tactics".
You see I do not advocate the Abu Ghraib wild west nonsense (an absolute embarrassment to our professional armed forces). However, if professional interrogators can prove a case for more aggressive techniques, and American lives are at stake, I have no issue with that. What if we broke out our trusty crystal ball, and knew two days before 911 what was going to happen. If we had a known acquaintance of the terrorists in custody, knowing what was about to happen, how many Americans would not support waterboarding to stop the attack? How many mothers, wives, sons, and daughters would not vote to save their loved ones? You see, the debate of "torture" is academic and in hindsight. What if I am a Marine Force Recon sniper, air lifted to the defensive position where your son, and my fellow Marine, are being over run by insurgents? What if through the scope of my .50 caliber sniper rifle ( generally against international law to use .50 caliber rounds on human targets) I can see your son, and I have a clear shot to take down the insurgent who is about to kill your son? Do we support taking the shot, or allowing your son to die for the sake of international law? The bottom line, I support taking the shot. Wars are hell, and should be avoided at all cost (especially ones with oil rights as the goal), however once your in one the only times rules make sense is when your enemy respects the same rules. We have not been in a war like that in a long time. When our cowardly enemy is willing to torture, burn, mutilate, and rape, I am willing to expand my threshold to save American lives, assuming my government goes through legal channels to make it's case.