More proof that liberalism is a mental disease.  I can't even begin to understand her logic on this issue. 

www.theholyrosary.org

"There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we can not resolve by the prayer of the Holy Rosary." -Sister Lucia

FREELAND: Do you think it would be immoral to preemptively kill someone who hasn't committed a crime yet?

Yes. In a war. It is moral to kill the enemy, crime or no crime.

Another bad liberal fallacious argument. We are not talking about criminal matters here.

Sincerely,

a Veteran of a 1000 psychic wars.

Is chaos and anarchy moral? Is plotting to kill innocent people moral? Is slaming terrified passengers into a building moral so you can kill innocent people in that building. Is that moral?

If I fail to correct my child when he is mean to others, I show him there are no consequences for his actions if he is mean.

Waterboarding gives the terrorist proof that there are consequences for their actions. Letting a terrorist not die as a martyr and, instead, allowing him to become the source of information that destroys their own organization and prevents it from doing further harm is far more moral than the alternative.

I would like to donate all of my frequent flier miles to Ms. Chrystia Freeland. Please turn off the spigot.

She says there's definitely a line between interrogation and torture, but can't define that line.

Joe should have asked her what the term waterboarding means.  I get the impression that many of these libs don't have the first clue. 

"Beauty is only skin deep, but liberal's to the bone." - me

1.  Do terrorists have the right to remain silent?  If so, you must believe that are either protected by the Geneva Convention (which they clearly are not) or by the 5th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

2.  Wouldn't the need for enhanced interrogation be elimated if the terrorists simply told us what we wanted to know?

All information when gotten from an interogation, by any means, is concidered suspect until corroborated by other unrealated sources. The people who are fixated on waterboarding are complete morons. It is one method out of hundreds that can be employed. Technically it is one of the most ethical because it does no actual damage to the person and they can't drown, they just think they are. Maybe we should replace waterboarding with knee-capping and hamstringing and bamboo under the finger-nails? Would that be better?

Freeland and others are against "torture" until it can directly affect themselves and maybe save their lives. Then they are all for it. Much like Rosie O'Donnell is against guns and thinks they should be illegal, but it's OK for her security team to have them.

Hey, I got the wrong "CHANGE"!

Alan Keyes / Sarah Palin - 2012

I would actually have to agree with her, but to a very limited extent:  in philosophically abstract sense, it is never 'moral' to torture someone, no matter what the justification. 

But you bet your a$$ that you had better do it anyway. Join a monastery if you want to be able to avoid difficult moral choices.

Liberals have a great time time ignoring morality when it is convenient to them, so it is the height of hypocrisy to complain about a 'moral failure' that saves lives (as opposed to one that takes lives, like abortion).

What is this chick's address? And would anyone like to come with me to explain torture to her??

Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, "Dad burned the dinner, let's get the dog to cook." PJ O'Rourke

A couple of notes about this exchange.

1) Scarborough is the one at fault in the first exchange. That Freeland believes that there is a line past which sleep deprivation constitutes torture does answer his question, whether it fits into his binary view of "torture or no torture" or not. Eating in the same way could be called torture past a certain point if you force fed a person beyond their digestive capacity... yet no one would argue eating in itself either is or is not torture.

2) I think Scarborough has a point that many Americans thought we should whatever it took to protect ourselves after 9/11, but I don't think that justifies what we did. We are a nation of principles, principles people have sacrificed to uphold. If popular opinion thinks those things no longer matter, that doesn't make them any less worth looking to and trying to uphold. Especially by protectors of the Republic.

3) In the reliable information section, Scarborough makes the same mistake in saying the info is either "reliable, or not" when the truth falls on a scale between the two, in my opinion more towards the 'not' side. Either way, statistics beyond anectodes for either side are unreliable.

4) Buchanan caught on to a brilliant point, that death could be moral while torture could be immoral. I think that case is quite possible, because making torture a policy of the land has ramifications beyond the individual. It leads to a state that uses force to coerce individuals under the guise of asking questions rather than using its force to act in the name of justice. In my opinion, the lines between good and bad become blurry very fast when government takes the gloves off, and I for one don't want to see enhanced interogation spread to be used on more people.

5) For the record, I don't agree with Freeland that there is a very clear line when it
comes to torture, but I do think that some of the enhanced techniques
the US has used fall under the term.

Let’s try a moral mind experiment.

1. Say you’re a police detective in New York City, and the suspect in a murder is refusing to tell you where he stashed the gun. Would you waterboard him?
2. Now suppose you’re an FBI agent, and you’re holding a mob crew member. You suspect there’s going to be a hit against a rival mafia capo tomorrow morning, and you’re convinced your suspect knows where it’s going to happen. Do you waterboard this guy?
3. Now suppose that instead of a possible killing of some other gang member, the hit is going to be your dad. Do you waterboard the guy?
4. Now let’s say that you’re a World War II sergeant in the Battle of the Bulge. You’ve captured a German colonel. Would you waterboard him?
5. Finally, imagine you’ve captured an al-Qaeda captain. Do you waterboard him?

The first three examples are domestic criminal cases, and in each case, we’ve already agreed (through law) that citizens have rights, even if we hate their guts. Oh we can play with the scenario, and offer various mitigating circumstances, like whether the suspect is a jerk, or how we feel about the future victim. We can increase the urgency of emotion, throwing innocence and self-involvement into the moral equation. But no matter how we stir the emtional pot, we still can’t waterboard these guys. Domestic criminal suspects have rights, and we all agreed to it through law.

What would stop you from waterboarding the German soldier? Answer: his uniform and the Geneva Convention. Wearing a uniform in time of war means that you’ve agreed to stand out from the civilians, preventing you from hiding behind innocents. The trade-off of a uniform, though, is that if you’re captured, you have a right to be treated in a certain way. When we signed the Geneva Convention, we agreed to those terms.

But an al-Qaeda terrorist isn’t a domestic criminal suspect. He doesn’t wear a uniform, and kills our people while hiding among innocent civilians. The terrorist doesn’t obey the restrictions of any Geneva Convention. 

We have never agreed to recognize any rights to a terrorist. Not in law. Not in treaty. In fact, the Geneva Conventions say nothing about we now call an “illegal combatant.” (There are proposals, and stretched theories that categorize terrorists as bystanders, but there is no signed agreements on how to treat illegal combatants.) You can’t deny a technique, in time of war, against an illegal combatant … because it seems “icky” to you. We already have clear moral delineations about how to treat suspects and prisoners, defined by treaties and laws. These terrorists have deliberately contradicted those standards to make it easier for them to kill our people. They evaded the law. Therefore, what law, treaty, or social agreement shields the terrorist from anything? Because terrorists don't obey the rules of war, they don't (and shouldn't) enjoy the protection of those rules. Payback is a b*tch, isn't it? 

The greater morality here is to stop terrorism before it starts. The first step in preventing terrorism is not to reward it.

Freeland is not entirely stupid, and she clearly understands the unsustainability of her position.

That would be the point where she admits that yes, it would be worth "torturing" a suspect if it meant that 9 planes would be saved from being blown up in mid-air.

But she cannot say that because she knows it destroys her whole dogma, that under no cirumstances can it be moral to harshly treat a suspect to elicit information that will save many many lives.

"The nature of an ideology is not determined by majority vote—but by logic... The logic of environmentalism leads to a society without technology... even if various environmentalists would deny this." Ayn Rand, 1971

It blows my mind that the Demon-crats can use the word "immoral" with a straight face, after what they "stand for" and "believe in" (notice the quotes).

I say, hell yes..use waterboarding...use distressing positions, use electricity (RED is positive and BLACK is negative) to save the lives of innocent people. The more information we get..the better.  That is what intelligence is supposed to do...glean information then check out the validity.  Make it clear that any false information that a subject gives will result in MORE HARSH techniques.  Everybody has their limit...the trick is to find it without killing the subject.

is another Harvard-educated buffoon.

Democrat circles are infested with these types like Barack Obama and Caroline Kennedy Slushfund.

You know . . . morons.

Ms Freeland (is this a made up name, or what?) is free to say this type of stuff because brave men made sure she was in a safe country to do so.

However, the mooslims don't care about her, her head chops off as well as anyone elses.  The mooslims cry about water boarding because they know there are useful idiots in this country that will protect them no matter what (ACLU I'm writing about you).

I don't really care why mooslims hate us, the feeling is mutual.  The fact is, why is there a single mooslim in America?  They don't belong here, they will not become part of America, they just need to get right back to Arabie where they belong and are more comfortable.  

If this appears to be harsh, tough.  You are describing a people that want to over throw my way of life and my country.  Do we really want to become another England? Or Germany overrun by Turks?

It's bad enough we are nearly overrun by illegal aliens, we damn sure don't need anyone here that wants to see people of the majority religion in America dead.

Funny, how liberals adore government authority and power until it's used against foreign bad guys who threaten us harm. 

The "Mainstream" Media: By liberals. For liberals.

most lefty American are as mis-informed as this twit.  Why on earth give ANY validity to the opinion of a financial publication editor by giving her an open mic to speak of something she knows so little about?

Here's the morality question.  If those nine aircraft were filled with flaming liberals, is it immoral to waterboard?

It's my daughter--should I ask that Kos guy to talk to the kidnappers or say, Jack Bauer? While I don't want nutty Blackwater freelancers smearing people with excrement and snapping their eyes out in dark office suites or tile-floored cells, I do think people who know such things--people we have hired--will do what they do in extreme situations. I doubt it Obama would personally take part. But he doesn't have to.

I finally turned it early this morning to Morning Joe to see what was going on since the election....guess what segment it was...

THIS ONE!

Talk about absolutely infuriating, mind-bending...Freeland is part of the reason I quit watching this show, she is a regular dim-witted leftist guest anymore, along with others, I can't take these people, I wanted to more than water-board her before she was done.

I just shake my head...ungrateful, unrealistic brain-dead leftist lemmings who don't have a clue, or care....just the regular talking point lines....over and over and over.

Scarborough did a good job, I just don't know how he can do it daily at times.

"America isn't the problem...America is the solution." ~ Rush Limbaugh

of Orwellian flavor, Freeland sure has a great handle on newspeak.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” -- Chief Justice John Roberts

I actually had a similar conversation with a Lib a few months ago.

I asked her if someone probably had information about a nuclear bomb placed somewhere in a city and a million lives were at stake, would she torture the guy to find out where it is?

No, she wouldn't.

These people really do exist, and not just on the MSM.

One of the 24% who thinks George W. Bush was a great President. One of the 89% who wants to bring back the stock and pillory.