Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture

[firstdown]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

Funny thing about war. In times preceding the 18th century, armies met on open battlefields and went toe to toe with one another. While just movies, the scenes from Braveheart tell the tale. Along comes the invention of the firearm and armies still battled in this manner, standing in an open field trading volley after volley.

It wasn't long before a group of militia figured out that hiding in the trees, bushes, and shrubbery could give their men a leg up on the opposition. One army stands out in the open and marching down roads in formation, while the undermanned rag-tag militia hid in the trees and continually ambushed the more powerful army, an army that was ultimately either too proud to adapt or too slow to do so.

Thus the Revolutionary War was won and the United States was born.

You can't criticize terrorists for fighting the way they are. They can't meet us head on, so sneaking around setting bombs and hijacking commercial planes is their next best option. And surely they aspire to sneaking a nuclear weapon into our country. Some might call this style cowardly, but if you want to win that fight you better figure out a way to combat it. If you don't adapt to their style you risk losing the war, no matter how proud you are of your values and way of life.

Sneaking around to set bombs and hijack planes requires coordinated covert planning. If you want to uncover the plan, you have to uncover the intel. Torture is the answer to the terrorists' version of ambushing the Red Coats from the woods.

The problem with your conclusion is that they were to armies out to fight each other while terrorist hit innocent people. Now if you used the example of them using IED's (might have those letters wrong) while fighting us in Iraq then your statement would make more sense.

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by firstdown

The problem with your conclusion is that they were to armies out to fight each other while terrorist hit innocent people. Now if you used the example of them using IED's (might have those letters wrong) while fighting us in Iraq then your statement would make more sense.

You're missing the point. The point is not to compare the Colonial American tactics to those used by terrorists, I'm not arguing whether one is more cowardly than another (the answer to that is clear and not debatable). The point is that if the United States doesn't adapt to the tactics used by the terrorists, we could end up losing just like the British did.

The adaptation we need to make is to get comfortable using whatever means necessary to extract intel.