NASA's Impending death

Next year, the Space shuttle will be retired. For nearly 30 years, the space shuttle system has been the symbol of pressing the boundaries, and moving to the next step in space exploration.

Now, NASA is giving up it's heavy lift Constellation Systems.  We are going to lose our position as leader in space because bureaucrats can't make up their minds on what goals to reach for.

NASA is dying.  Without a vision, the Bible Says, the People perish, and without a goal NASA languishes.  They have wasted billions building a shuttle replacement, the changing their minds, and going a different direction. 

NASA is dying.  It's lost it's cutting edge.  It's lost it risk-tolerance, without which there is no real exploration.  In a few decades, our space program will be a distant memory.

I hope and pray I'm wrong.

Torture

Torture

"Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a male or female person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession..." United Nations Convention Against Torture

Torture is a horrible practice. It's been used since before recorded history. Some modern forms of torture are

• physical assaults (i.e. beating up the prisoner)
  
• Stabbing, cutting, suffocating
• electrocution
• starvation
• breaking of bones
• chemical burns

Obama is thinking about prosecuting those who approved 'aggressive' interrogation techniques. The following are some of the "torture" inflected on detainees

• keeping somebody from falling asleep
• Exploiting someones fear of insects to coerce information from them
  
• Making somebody stand for hours, in an uncomfortable position
• Pushing someone into a specially built wall that bounces. Steps are taken to prevent any injury. The wall just makes a big sound (like the mat in pro wrestling)
• Holding the detainees' face
• Slapping the detainees' face (with spread fingers) no more than twice
• Grabbing the detainees' shirt and pulling him close (think Clint Eastwood style)
  
• Pouring water into somebody's face.

Compare this to the torture inflected upon our POWs in Vietnam.

In all honesty here folks, that isn't torture! It is not warm and cuddly. It's not comfortable. These same techniques have been used for years on over 10,000 U.S. airmen in the Air Force's Survival, Evasion and Escape program.

Do we torture our military? No. The training is tough, it gets close, but still fails on the 'severe pain and suffering.' Causing fear is a common interrogation technique used by all police departments in the world. Fear itself cannot be called sever pain and suffering.

The crux of the issue is

1. What constitutes torture? We agree that beatings and cutting off body parts constitutes torture, but does slapping someone? How about sleep deprivation?
   
2. Is morality absolute, or is it dependent upon the situation. If we caught someone planting a dirty bomb in a major city, and we knew that there were five more bombs, how far would we be willing to go to extract the locations of the other bombs from the terrorist we captured? Would our self-righteousness balm the knowledge that thousands, in not millions, are now dead because we decided not to get rough?
3. Are we fighting a war or are we doing law enforcement? Soldiers kill the enemy. Police arrest criminals. Police require evidence, and assume innocence. Solders neither require nor assume either. These are mutually exclusive worldviews. We cannot be of two minds about this question.

If we become like those we are fighting, we loose the very thing for which we are fighting. We can also be sure that our enemy will not limit themselves in this fight to what we consider moral, no matter how much nice we are.

The basis of our nations policy should be reality before philosophy. There are groups of people in this world who want to do us harm. The way to prevent them from inflicting harm on us to to hunt them down, and stop them. Stopping them may mean killing them.

There are two different moral implications at work in this decision. First, the governments obligation to act in a manner consistent with the Constitution of the United States, and with the traditions of this great nation. The second is much more basic. One of the first responsibilities of governments is to protect its citizens against attack. How moral would it have been if Bush could have prevented 3,000 deaths on 9/11, but choose instead not to be rough with a conspirator?

In light of the threats on this nation, and after reading the memos, I honestly believe the Bush people attempted to apply reasonable techniques that attempted to balance the morality of action against the morality of inaction. While harsh and aggressive, these methods fall short of out-right torture. All of the techniques were required to do no actual harm. Pain was to be kept to a minimum. Do you think that our enemies would be as considerate or moral?

Disgusting

In doing research of a paper I was writing for history class, I came across something I never heard before.  

During the early part of WWII, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and in the course of events, executed at least 22,436 Polish POWs.  Of course, the Soviet Union denied it had done so, until the Nazis discovered the mass graves.  FDR rejected a report from one of his underlings detailing Soviet responsibility and banished him to American Samoa for the rest of the war. American POW  Col. John H. Van Vliet wrote a report that concluded that the Soviets were responsible.  U.S. Maj. Gen. Clayton Bissell, assistant chief of staff for intelligence to Gen. Marshall (of the Marshall Plan fame) destroyed it to keep from offending our allies, the Soviets.

Murder of POWs is an atrocity that the Soviet Union repeated.  At the end of the war, when Germany surrendered, 91,000 German were taken as prisoners of war by the Soviet Union in Stalingrad.  Of these, only 6,000 survived.

The U.S. leadership showed no moral authority what-so-ever.  Political commentators condemn Reagan for supporting the Contras but give a pass to their favorite president, FDR, who did much worse.