Ooops, my bad. Obama has corrupt politcol friends in other states too. I gotta say, Obama sure know how to pick them.

Sometime after Marc Rich's wife donated 500k to the Clinton library, Eric Holder recomended a pardon for Marc Rich. Congress was so outraged, they held hearing on it even though they coul dnot reverse the pardon.

Alright, well at least you are attempting to work with facts instead of fiction now.

There were several conditions on the pardon as well that you may have missed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich

Clinton explained his decision by noting that similar situations were settled in civil, not criminal court, and cited clemency pleas from Israeli government officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

As a condition to the pardon, it was made clear that Rich would drop all procedural defenses against any civil actions brought against him by the United States upon his return there. That condition was consistent with the position that his alleged wrongdoing warranted only civil penalties, not criminal punishment.

In his letter to the New York Times, Bill Clinton explained why he pardoned Rich, noting that U.S. tax professors Bernard Wolfman of Harvard Law School and Martin Ginsburg of Georgetown University Law Center concluded that no crime was committed, and that the companies' tax reporting position was reasonable.

So there we have independent confirmation that the "crime" was not a criminal offense, and that it should have been resolved through civil litigation rather than criminal litigation.  Furthermore, the pardon was granted on the condition that Rich comply with the civil process and submit to adjudication. 

Even if there was a conflict of interests, can you explain to me how the choice was an unclear expression of the law or why Rich should have been prosecuted as a criminal when the laws don't suggest that he should be?  Was Clinton doing anything that circumnavigated the judicial system even if in hindsight the choice may have been unwise based on the circumstances?

There would have been no pardon if not for the massive money donantions his ex-wife made on his behalf.

How do you know that?

Were you working in the U.S. Attorney's Office at that time?  Did you evaluate Rich's pardon application and why he suggested that he deserved a pardon?  Did Clinton not give other pardons to people who donated nothing to him or to any causes he was associated with?  Did Holder even know about the donation, and if he did, did it change the fact that Rich had a legitimate case for why he deserved a pardon?

You are making a lot of assumptions without providing any facts whatsoever to support those assumptions.  All you are doing is falling behind the guilt by association defense, which your false claims that Holder is a "Chicago" politician confirm.  You don't even care.  You aren't even looking at the facts.

If you want to play the guilt by association game, I can show you that everyone who was in the U.S. Attorney's Office during the Bush Administration deserves to either be fired or prosecuted in criminal court.  Do I think that the U.S. Attorney's Office should go through that?  Maybe in a few isolated cases where someone oversaw and condoned clearly partisan activities in violation of the law, but certainly not on a massive scale.

How about strapping someone to the ground over a freshly planted bamboo plant and letting it grow through their torso?

I like Dennis Miller's take on waterboarding honestly.  He points out that waterboarding is a technique that without physically harming people, can take someone who is (ie still is) willing to die for their cause and gets them to give you every piece of information they have.  And again, without bodily harm.  That's not torture, it's a gift that we should be using to save lives. Miller went so far as to say a "gift from the almighty" or something similar, but being agnostic I don't go that far.  I just see it as the right tool, for a distasteful (yet necessary) job, at the right time.

Of course others seem to have the priorities in the order of "We won't do something that would help save lives because it might emotionally harm a terrorist".  

Call me crazy but I don't buy the argument of "We should show them that we are above that.".  If anything, and at the risk of offending some, I would look down on any person who could actually put the life, much less the emotional state, of a terrorist before the lives of, what could potentially be, hundreds or/of thousands of innocent people. Honestly I think many folks who claim otherwise would actually go through with it if they were faced with the responsibility of making the choice.

In short, I say yes to waterboarding, and no to real torture...like growing a plant through someone's chest =P  But, what I also say yes to is the idea that the person who gives the order should be accountable to get it right, both in making sure it's done properly and in selecting the subject.  Agents who don't want to use the technique shouldn't be forced to, but to use the analogy, just because someone finds making sausage to be distasteful doesn't mean I can't have sausage.

PS - The bamboo thing is a real technique that has been used in the past.

So, say, you're just a regular Joe Schmoe.
They think you've got information.

Are you going to just say anything just so they can stop drowning you?
I would.

Well which point would you like to argue? 

Are you having a problem with them using it on regular joe schmoe? or just generally questioning effectiveness?

For Joe Schmoe, that's simple enough a regular guy isn't a terrorist so no problem there, but if for some reason in this case (ie the worst case imagineable scenario), a mistake was made, then the person who gives the order is accountable.  It's their job to reveiw the information and be sure that they are dealing with someone who is a terrorist...that decision in most cases would require information from initial interrogation regarding his reactions and whether he is even denying his involvement.  Overall the argument that we shouldn't do it because it might be misused is a really weak argument to me, we can say the same thing about microwaves, ovens, cars, golf clubs, baseball bats, crow bars, etc...etc...Potential for misuse doesn't amount to a reason to disallow something, controlling it perhaps, but not complete removal.

For the issue of effectiveness I think neither of us is qualified to make any real assessment of this.  But I would say that I find it hard to believe that torture, and more recently waterboarding, has been used for such a long time and yet doesn't work.  I think the problem is that many like to tell themselves of how they would react as you did, but really how do you know how you would react in that situation?  I certainly don't, because I've never been there, and since I don't plan on committing any terrorist acts my odds of ever being in that situation are probably less than winning the lottery 3 times in a row. 

But it's also worth noting that waterboarding is more than just pouring water, there is interrogation techniques and mind games they play to get truthful information.  You're probably correct that information isn't always 100% truthful, but thats why you ask questions you know the answer to and have the puzzle out to see if the piece he gives you would even fit.  The problem is that it's hard to do a case study =P

Now let me ask you a question:

You have a choice, you can either press the red button or the blue button.  The red button kills 1 person, the blue button kills 500 people.  If you don't choose in 60 minutes the blue button gets pressed automatically.

First, what would you do? 

Second, do you recognize that if you choose to do nothing you're still making a choice that results in people dying?

Third, what if the 1 person was a child rapist?

Fourth, what if it was 500,000 people and 1 person?

Fifth, what if it was 500,000 people and 1 child rapist?

Of course your counterpoint to this is that the waterboarding question isn't so concrete, and that's valid.  But I would point out that your question to me posed a favorable scenario to your argument, so I pose one favorable to mine.  The point is that, both scenarios are technically possible and if your scenario happens, one guy has a bad day and a completely legitimate gripe.  If my scenario happens?  500,000 people don't get to live because it might emotionally harm a single person.....Sorry that is a ridiculous to me.

Can I press all 4 buttons?

I hate philosophical hypothetical, especially when they are used to argue against principles by people who use principle to argue against taxes, abortion, government spending, gun restrictions...

I think the principle that I, as part of "the people", do not torture or condone torture is pretty important.

I'd rather live a life of reason and principle, than doing what ever I have to do to survive. I believe that biological life is not the same thing as spiritual life... of course the ideas behind much conservative thinking is that they are one in the same. That is why they can be against helping poor people or protecting minorities, because it doesn't matter if a person's spirit is broken. That is why they consider a fertilized "egg" to be the same as a living person. That is why they can torture and live with torturing. Of course, this leads to all different types of intentional and unintentional discrimination. That a person who is born poor doesn't deserve the same educational opportunities, that a minority is inferior, that a woman's physical or mental health is less important than a potentially living person, that their ideology is better so it is okay to kill civilians, or that one person's life is worthless (an suspected terrorist?).

I'd rather die than torture someone.

I'd rather have our country attacked than have our country torture. It's a choice of maybe being murdered or definitely committing suicide.

With out the IDEA of America, than the United States wouldn't be worth anything.

If a serious majority of Americans ever actually starts supporting torture, the United States is already dead.

Read my new sig.

Ok, well your opening starts out by setting a fallacy as the basis for the debate.  You're setting a framework for the discussion whereby a person who argues for torture or water-boarding  is arguing against principles, and the person arguing against same is arguing for principles.  This is patently ridiculous since it's pretty clear both sides are basing their argument in principles, it's the correct prioritization of those principles that is at the heart of the debate.  I prioritize by saying the lives of many people comes before the life, let alone mental health, of one person.  That's not even addressing the innocense or guilt of the individuals in question. 

Based on what you're saying, in a "You start in the middle, to the left you can save 1 person from being waterboarded or to the right you can save 500 from death, not enough time for both! zomg" scenario you would choose the 500 people...but as soon as you have the proposition phrased such that you're giving the order to waterboard or not to waterboard, then your against it.  But I say they are the same scenario, you're in a position to make the exact same choice "allow or don't allow" waterboarding to occur, if you do allow you can save lives, if you don't allow people will die.  It's a simple difference in phrasing. (My apologies, I know you hate the hypotheticals but they are a valid form of argument, and happen to be one of the few experiments we can do in this forum so I don't see why they should be ruled out.)

Your opening fallacy is again reused in your line about your rather having a a life of reason and principle.  The very debate is about which course of action is more reasoned and principled, you're begging the question to pre-suppose it as part of your argument.  And the bolded part...well that's nonsense, and the rest of the paragraph is pretty unrelated to the point to begin with.  I hope your argument doesn't rely on the supposition that all conservatives are against helping poor people and "protecting" minorities, and if it doesn't rely on it, as I suspect it probably doesn't, then we should probably keep this to the issue at hand so the scope of the discussion doesn't get out of hand.

As for choosing to die rather than torture, and letting the country get attacked rather than torture: Fair enough, I can understand that argument (even if I don't completely agree) and I too think torture is distasteful.  But the issue is whether waterboarding is torture, you can't just assume your position on the matter is correct and then use that as an argument.

Your close is an interesting bit of idealism, and I can sympathize to a degree with the ideal.  But I really don't see how torture is the magic bullet that kills the idealistic america.  I think it's an emotional argument from an emotional political position, but I also think it's a position that is seriously lacking in logical reasoning and principles the same as you think of my position.