COMMON SENSE OR SOMETHING LIKE IT

People, I've had enough. This is getting ridiculous. The nonsense. The hypocrisy. The absolute foolishness of it all.

Imagine this; there you are; a parent. Your child has been abducted. The police, in conjunction with the FBI find a suspect based on surveillance tapes and eye witness accounts. They come to you exasperated. The kidnapper has told them that your child is tied to a chair in a dank basement somewhere, in the dark, alone, starving to death. But that's all this sicko will say. He laughs in the faces of his interrogators at the notion that your child will die there before anyone could find him.

Picture yourself in your own living room. The FBI officer who cracked the case open in under 48 hours on no sleep is standing there somberly explaining the situation to you: "I'm sorry. There's nothing else we can do. This guy is crazy and he just won't talk."

You see, that's the crux of this entire stupid discussion.

CRAZY PSYCHOPATHIC MURDERING LUNATICS WHO WANT TO KILL AND MAIM INNOCENT PEOPLE DON'T GIVE KEY PIECES OF INFORMATION VOLUNTARILY.


I know this is tough to grasp for those out there who are against so-called torture or enhanced interrogation but there is NO OTHER WAY TO GET THEM TO TALK, you idiots!! Stop being such a bunch of pansy-asses. This isn't an episode of CSI and it isn't tattle time at the principal's office in grade school.

Do you know what real violence is? Do you know what war is like? Have you ever seen a dead body that has been torn apart by shrapnel from a nail-filled suicide bomb? Have you ever lost a loved one, a limb or the use of a bodily function because some jackass who spent his formative years in a madrassa decided to drive a van full of ammonium nitrate into an outdoor vegetable market? Do you know what a dirty bomb could do to a densely populated area?

Maybe you missed the 9/11 attacks? I didn't. I was right here in New York City. If I could have stopped those attacks by torturing the everloving shit out of some woman-hating scumbag whose dream it was to blow himself up anyway _ well you're goddamn right _ I would have. Gladly and without hesitation. And if you're going to sit there and say you wouldn't have scorched the likes of Mohammad Atta to save 3,000 innocent lives, you are just an asshole plain and simple.

You see, the world, in case you haven't noticed, is a dark and ugly place. I don't like it anymore than any other decent, peaceful person. I don't want war. I don't want violence. But it's there. Pretending it's not there and saying we're going to take the moral high road by not "torturing" doesn't make it go away. I'm an idealist and I seek the beautiful and righteous and sacred in humanity on a daily basis. However, I'm not stupid enough to think our protectors (the CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, Armed Forces et al) can do their job shutting down a global terrorist network of determined and well-financed fanatics with their hands tied behind their backs.

We're dealing with individuals who have been indoctrinated to hate and murder. They don't want M&Ms or a cold Diet Coke. They want you dead even if it means they or their children go with you. That's how much they hate you. Can you even get your Disney-saturated head around that? Can you put down your Starbucks and close your MacBook for a second and think about that? We all know you went to college and that you have a "well-rounded", "liberal" education. We all know you drive a hybrid car and that you only buy products made with recycled goods. Yes, we know that you donate to Amnesty International and that you're a card-carrying member of the ACLU.

Doesn't matter. See, they still want you and your family and all of your friends dead. No matter what we do, short of converting to fundamentalist Islam, they will want us dead. They don't want peace. They don't want money. They don't want fair trade. And they don't want organic wheatgrass smoothies from Jamba Juice. They want to pillage and rape and murder. They want to subjugate the females and convert or destroy the non-believers. They want world dominance for a retrograde ideology.

And yet, we're not supposed to use a phone book to the side of the head to stop them?

Some high decibel heavy metal early in the morning...?

A little sleep deprivation maybe...?

Bright lights perhaps...?

Cramped confinement for a plotting mass murderer...?

Not fair, you say? Not humane? Not right...?...

Fine. So when it gets personal and someone close to you gets blown to smithereens, are you going to be satisfied knowing that the authorities had some jerkwad in custody who knew where the bomb was but couldn't get the information because they weren't allowed to turn him upside down and pour water over his face?

That's what I thought.