Gorgon

You can't qualify that statement or make any about how often either result occurs because both failure and success is kept a secret after the fact. Rather we are left with some airy notion that so and so many terrorist actions have been prevented through torture, that significant intelligence obtained through torture helped a military campaign to fruition, these are claims though that by their nature are never fully investigated.

Lets stay away from straw men shall we, obviously the observation that torture doesn't work is general, not specific.

Thats not the point he tried to make at all, rather torture induces the subject to tell the interrogator any wild tale he thinks will make it stop. Everyone breaks sooner or later.

At least McCain can't subscribe to this relative weighing out of torture, as if 'torture light' existed. He was tortured himself and doesn't mince words. I think we ought to consider torturing the president and the secretary of state, it would be a valuable life lesson with practical applications. The central question of whether torture works. Well, here's the rub, it does work if you are able to cooperate the information gathered, in essence it is one source with just as many motivations for telling the truth as for telling what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear. It all depends on how ruthless and impatient you are in search of intelligence. As for this 'being a war after all' - when does the war on terror end, are we pretty much indefinitely committed to the pursuit of stamping out a strategy employed since the birth of anarchism in the late 19th century, well you could go further back and include the Assassins, the Thugs in India, the Jewish Zealots, and claim that terrorism has been at work for as long as marginalized factions have been trying to seize and change the social and political agenda.

He ran the place into the ground, I can't think many examples of a socialist revolution gone this wrong.

I voted for 'wedgie'

No. Thats not as stupid a maxim as it sounds, all empathy derives from self, on being able to sense your own pain, or pleasure in others (I dunno why but that sounded a little kinky). By protecting the group you protect yourself.

Everybody owns a little bit of everybody else, that is the basic premise of financial institutions in a global marketplace. It's also why a collapse of a few key loan institutions as a result of the housing crisis could, if we are not careful, create a cascade effect not seen since the 1920s.

Security methods these days offer excellent protection against lone crazies. A lot has been learned from the attempt on Reagan. Ted Kennedy was in the middle of a crowd, poorly screened, and John Lennon had no protection. Nevertheless it could happen again, you can't foresee every eventuality or completely examine every person a politician shakes hands with.

I guess that depends on intent doesn't it. If you believe the coalition acted out of an altruistic desire to free the people of Iraq, it could be considered moral. I actually think that was a small part of it, emphasis on small. Morality can be divorced from legality and perhaps truthfulness as well, although starting a war on a purely moral basis, I don't think there is a real world precedent.

Morality has a tendency to be swallowed up by international politics, at best the UN can be convinced to intervene in some third world plague pit not directly in the crossroads of so many different strategic aims. A majority broke the rules in dealing with Milosovich, and the international outrage was decidedly muted. I think though, that an action in order to be moral has to be free of lies. The coalition wanted weapons to be there and in their rush to prove it asked the people they are ultimately responsible to, their own voters, to risk their lives based on exaggerated and unsubstantiated intelligence claims.

I'm no expert on international law, i'm just going on reports. You would assume that a commitment to be a member of the UN, and to abide by it's principles and charters either matters, or it doesn't. In purely practical terms the president's prerogative trumps international commitment, the report you linked to in its conclusion states definitely that 'regime change cannot be the objective of military action', and yet the coalition is convinced, well, make a show of being convinced, that they got their resolution and with its somewhat ambivalent and emminently interpretable wording could do away with the say of the security council. There are way too many questions raised and conditions not wholly fulfilled for blatantly declaring that the war was sanctioned. The invasion of Iraq unquestionably weakened the already imperfect security council and organisation, because what does it really mean now that it can be sidestepped by a minority when the decision doesn't go their way.

Michael Caine was in every movie made in the late 70s and early 80s. Roughly.

The UN charter does not allow for the notion of 'preemptive strike', and the US and UK are signatories. The adopted resolution do not change that fact, neither do you start interpreting resolutions and going to war on your own. The war was technically illegal, thats not really in question, Kofi Annan said as much. Now as to whether being in compliance with the UN charter means that much in practical and legal terms to a head of state, that is something else, apparently it does not. This is a contradiction in national law that is expectable when you think about it, but in terms of the organisation's own rules, there is no doubt.

Well, how much is freedom worth in lives, to use Bush speak. I guess it depends on where you live. The Kurds are flourishing and clear of insurgency and terrorists. Of course now they have to deal with Turkey, who would like nothing better than eradicating them.

What ? The image loads slowly and whacks out the format on my screen. Thats it.

We don't have any clear idea of how many people have died in fighting or otherwise unnatural causes because both the US military and the Iraqi authority realise that the number would probably be very unflattering. No body counts, no images of soldiers in caskets. Where is the upside in meticulously documenting failure. A conjectured number is much easier to attack as politically motivated.

Yes, they stole the name from Norse Mythology, now is that any reason to spam the entire image again.

In any case, being a survivor in a post apocalyptic mutant infected earth might well lend itself better to the sketchy and temporary feel of 90% of the quests in a Bethesda game, as will the exploration, which they were always good at, now if they could only throw in something more rewarding for the trouble of exploring than a scamp, a pile of bonemeal and a ruby, we might be getting somewhere.

I played Oblivion almost to the end twice, the second time with the Shivering isles expansion pack, I thoroughly enjoyed many of the scripted encounters in shivering isles and the Dark brotherhood as well as the main quest, other than that I didn't get too involved in many of the guild quests except the thieves guild. I never bothered completing very many of the more mundane tasks people seemed to be handing out to me with alarming frequency. In the end my list of open quest was so long as to make me lose sight of where I was going. Then my inventory started randomly disappearing, none of the patches in between the first release and shivering isles seemed to have fixed it, so I gave up for the second time. I had some fun up to that point though.

UT 2003 and 2004 were some of the most enjoyable LAN shooters I have ever played. I like Unreal Tournament too of course, the buff heroes running around in spandex suits were awesomeness. I don't care about the single player games really, and even less about the billion different game modes - run around and shoot a ball into a hoop, build a series of interconnected blue beams across the sky and win - WTF ?- Just give me regular deathmatches or CTF games with lives, yes lives, if you die so many times you're out. So far I have disliked the implementation of vehicles in all the games.

I liked Oblivion a lot better, it had some semblance of a story, Sean Bean (Boromir) and NPCs who answered with more than the standard name, profession, location, rumors, etc. NPC interaction was still pretty stale though. Morrowind was good mainly for exploration, at the time it came out the graphics were unmatched, once the initial charm wore off though there was nothing left to do but mindless fetch this, kill that tasks. Well, thats what you had been doing all along, but back then you were fueled by the intense desire to enchant a silver claymore just so. I don't subscribe to any sentimentality about the greatness of Daggerfall, the dungeons were torturously horrible and the graphics ugly to an extreme reserved exclusively for DOS games. The system and character creation was the only saving grace.

When you chose to go to war I think it's important ,for obvious reasons, not to lie, and that includes lying by overstating the facts, to the people you are asking to make a sacrifice. I place absolutely no credulity to the assertion that the coalition acted out of fear of Sadam's weapons programmes. The Bush administration wanted to use the momentum of 9/11 and Afghanistan to change the political makeup of the middle east, change it fundamentally, and in doing so ensure long term strategic goals, yes that encludes oil, and no, stating that doesen't make me a conspiracy therorist. They embarked on their endeavor with the wide eyed optimism of a child, and predictably it turned out a great deal more difficult than envisioned, but really, 4000 dead would not be considered that much in the colonial era, merely the cost of doing business, and of course you can't discount that the Iraqis have gotten something really rare out of the whole ordeal, their liberty, well, while it lasts anyway.

*rimshot*

If all my opponents look like this i'm in trouble before the fight stars