Soldier Admits to Waterboarding 4-year-old Daughter
This was bound to happen, eventually. When you start torturing a certain group, it's inevitable that it will move to other types of people. Who will it be next?
Susan
Susan
posted by Susan Stark at
9:25 AM
16 Comments:
Slight technicality. He just held her head underwater in the sink and beat her.
http://www.thenewstribune.com/partners/theolympian/story/1054799.html
It may not be waterboarding, but it's still horrible and scandalous.
Aw, c'mon! Everyone knows it's just a harmless prank! Fox News says so!
But wait minute, let's stay on point. Water-boarding isn't torture, even if Christopher Hitchens has changed his mind.
And let's remember the lexicon of 2003: if this solider fires a bazooka into his child's school, he's not destroying it, he's "liberating it."
it has nothing to do with water boarding, it's just child abuse...that's it. Horrific? yes, but stop cramming a case of child abuse into your pre-contrived political agenda just because the offender happens to be a soldier. It's an insult to the victim, and it trivializes a major social problem by conflating it with another major social problem.
And try to cite actual news sources as Orville did, instead of the never ending circle of stupid that passes as internet political discourse in the US.
Susan, precision just doesn't matter to you, and you're being as bad as the trolls on here, stop it!
This particular soldier will face the consequences of his actions, unlike the torturers in the intelligence agencies and their advocates whom Obama is now protecting. Even if the soldiers is merely put into a psych ward, he'll still face more justice than the others.
Obviously you have to figure in PTSD, but usually PTSD doesn't include dunking little girls' heads under water. This is the normalization of brutality at work here.
"Obviously you have to figure in PTSD, but usually PTSD doesn't include dunking little girls' heads under water. This is the normalization of brutality at work here."
THIS ISN'T ABOUT THE CIA....OR TORTURE.....it's about child abuse, stop using any material to propagate the same grievances, your grievances have merit on their own.
Furthermore, PTSD DOES very much involve domestic violence, spousal abuse and child abuse. Now you have conflated THREE major social problems. You remember when the Bush Administration kept conflating Iraq, Al Qaeda and 9/11??? Did that irritate you Susan? You're doing the same thing. I get your point, I just think you're coming across as irrational and silly, which trivializes the importance of those three social problems.
if this solider fires a bazooka into his child's school, he's not destroying it, he's "liberating it."
Wow, that's amazing! When did that happen?
Aggie Dude,
I'm sure the WWII veterans had nightmares and other problems when they came home, but how many dunked their kids under water and bashed their bodies up against the wall? Or murdered their whole family? Or killed themselves with carbon monoxide poisoning or a bullet to the head six months after they got home? When you fighting against two empires who want to take you over, it lends a purpose to your sacrifice.
Last year I listened to a Spanish Republican fighter in his 90s who fought against against fascism in Spain during the 1930s. He said that when he came home to the US after fighting, he slept like a baby. He explained that the difference is in what you fight for. He fought for the freedom of Spain. The soldier above didn't fight for anybody's freedom, not even his own. He was a corporate soldier-for-hire.
Aggie, I know it's hard for you to come to grips with the fact that evilness tends spread like a fungus, but that's what it does. And that fungus, in a hierarchical society like ours, spreads downward.
No, Susan, they "fell down the stairs" or had other various types of "accidents." How many WWII vets came home with problems? MILLIONS.
See? Now you just dug your hole deeper by conflating combat trauma with the overall political justification of the war. Now you've conflated the issue of child abuse -which was not widely recognized or addressed in the late 1940s- with torture, and PTSD. You've packaged them all neatly into a moralistic rant about the unity of evil as a singularity which flows through events and human practices.
It moved from faulty logic to flat out absurd. Just...go read a book about soldiers returning from WWII...many had severe problems and suffered greatly. Because of the social norms of that generation, they tended to suffer in silence, and if they took it out on their families, their families suffered in silence.
Wow, that's amazing! When did that happen?
Did you miss the word "if," or did my point about how the right frames these issues go completely over your head?
Sorry Grouchy, I should have taken you literally. Who on the right ever said that if a soldier fires a bazooka into his child's school he is liberating it?
That doesn't even make sense. What American soldier would fire a bazooka into his child's school?
Who on the right ever said that if a soldier fires a bazooka into his child's school he is liberating it?
Oh.
My point about how the right frames these issues does go completely over your head.
Okay this is the winner. I've been hopping about all over this site waiting for the one post so crazy I can feel sure that there's nothing better I might miss if I call it a day.
For meaning, moral content, and just the plain old way it rolls off the tongue, this...
When you start torturing a certain group, it's inevitable that it will move to other types of people.
... just has to be the sentence of the year.
Sorry, I know I said I was going, and I will, honestly, but I hadn't yet read all the comments.
And the stuff about the soldier firing a bazooka into his child's school is priceless.
Somebody replies saying, basically: crap point badly made, and the dude acts like he was challenging an empirical proposition and says "I said 'if'"!
So then he gets called on it again, and this time the guy spells out his point that the comment was silly and didn't mean anything, and the sap tries to take the intellectual high ground!
It's just wonderful.
So we have a father criminally disciplining his child, and you are trying to cynically link it to totally unrelated circumstances on the grounds that the guy's a soldier... and then this doofarooney finds this extraordinary analogy that he thinks will help the message along, and reserves for his final paragraph topper because he's so pleased with it, about a soldier firing a bazooka into his own child's school.
The sheer weirdness of this idea fascinates me.
Matthew, my original comment was an admittedly snarky, and perhaps unsuccessful, attempt at satire.
There are plenty of astonishingly brazen people who say water-boarding isn't torture, just as there were people who said we were liberating Iraq by bombarding its cities with missiles, launching a ground invasion and building permanent military bases on its soil.
I'm sure some readers immediately saw the satire in what I was saying, even if you or others didn't...
The sheer weirdness of this idea fascinates me.
Thank you. I'm flattered. Actually, on 2nd thought, maybe my satire was more successful than I imagined...
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