Senators Clash With Nominee About Torture

[queequeger]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Your coworkers are whom I should give a fuck about?

My coworkers (and I) are military intelligence collectors and analysts, and fluent arabic linguists (among other things).

The fact is, while I do make a point of reading about this subject A LOT, so much of the things I've read distort the information they receive or receive previously distorted information. A lot of the time we're told by some local schmo 'those al-qa'ida guys over there are killing everyone,' and it turns out to be some other group. A lot of the time, we never get a chance to verify the information before we, well, kill everyone that's shooting.

The number of attacks on US forces that can be verified to come from Al-Qa'ida are slim to none. We're talking single percentage points. The number against civilians is somewhat higher, which is why I say if we're actually trying to stabilize the country we do need to count them amongst our enemies. But, that being said, they have a pretty tedious hold on what little ground they actually DO control, and the whole of Iraq is against them.