Torture the President unless its well, you know - bad

No, I didn't say "kill the President", just torture him, just a little bit, see how he likes it. Maybe some waterboarding, maybe standing up naked for a few days, throw in some retro Japanese water torture, a fake execution or two. Afterwards maybe he'll have a bit more clarity over whether its good to torture prisioners, and who knows, he might confess a thing or two. But of course afterwards he'd probably tell us he didn't do anything he confessed to - that he would have confessed to anything under torture.

Precisely. Under torture people confess to anything. Its a well know fact, even the CIA knows it. And that's quite apart from torture being morally bankrupt and a license for all your enemies to torture your citizens. Plus you'll probably have quite a few more enemies after you're done detaining and torturing citizens from across the world. I mean America loves to pick on countries that pick on its citizens, so why shouldn't everyone else act the same way as Team USA? Just who is this country that wants to unilaterally give itself favoured nation status to do whatever the f**k it wants.

Yes I'm pissed about this. Torturing people is not ethical, not decent, not productive, not a good example, completely non-Christian, and definitely not something I want happening in any country I live in. Yes, its one of those things that makes me think, maybe I don't belong in the United States? Maybe I should take my stuff and run for the border? When I find myself thinking like that I also start thinking why should I run from the country, can't the country change? It's changed so many times before so it can do it again. Maybe this Iraq War is to America as the Civil War was to slavery (if you ignore the protestations that the Civil War wasn't about slavery at all, but corporate power).

Maybe when the US troops are out of Iraq, the various factions there are back to fighting each other in the usual fashion, various commissions are done counting the hundreds of billions wasted, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the historians are totalling the damage to America's credibility, safety and integrity caused by the war. Maybe then, and only then will we all be able to look back and say, South Park style - you know, we learned something in Iraq: preemptive war is bad, unilateral "peace actions" are bad, falsifying evidence is bad and yes, finally, torture is bad.