Arguement #14 "It's Wrong To Torture"

I have no arguement with this, and I am not going to try to weasel out with any
"Yes, buts." Having seen the dark side of law enforcemnet and judicial proceedings, I am loath to see torture accepted for terrorists becauase I know that "terrorists" will soon degenerate into a catch-phrase for anyone the people currently in power don't like. Just this morning, talk-show host, Neal Boortz, read snippets from "My Barack Obama.com" which included "people who are against health-care reform are right-wing domestic terrorists and are the heirs of bin Ladin." Torture is wrong and besides that, cannot be accepted out of purely self-interests - You could easily be called a terrorist if you don't go along with the party in power especially as the party begins to lose power due to its increasingly exposed corruption and its desire to force Americans into economic and psychological misery. We must not become like our enemies in order to defeat them. Bill Gertz in his book "Betrayed" concludes that the CIA is a statist agency primarily concerned about itself and unable to protect America and suggests structures to replace it. What we need is an agency perhaps like Blackwater that can establish an intelligence system of spies and informants in foreign countries. Pablo Escobar has shown us how well such a system works in the drug trade. I do not say that ironically: Escobar's deadly mistake was to go public in his dream to become the president of Columbia and become a politician. This helped expose his drug organization and more importantly, alarmed the power structure in Columbia and probably America. If we don't establish something much more effective than the CIA so that we can have human beings gathering intelligence, we are going to be moved more and more in the direction of snatching humans which is a particular forte of the Navy Seals and then torturing them to find out what they know. This is barbarism that America has to remain above. Let's not forget that in spite of Obama's lofty, flowery speeches against torture, he, like a true egomaniac, has retained the power of rendering for himself and himself alone. Rendering is nothing but cowardly torture by proxy. We, meaning America, must not become the enemy to beat the enemy. Why did we bother then? Peter Nickerson, MS, MSW at 352-359-0950. PS. Possibly my columns are eliciting some attention: I am getting calls from a certain number, but when I call the number, there is no ring. Jingle, jingle.