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Author Topic: UNTHINKABLE (2010)  (Read 5273 times)
indianasmith
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« on: July 06, 2010, 10:33:58 AM »

How far can you go to defend the lives of millions without stepping across the line into the void of moral bankruptcy?

Samuel L. Jackson does an incredible job as a covert CIA interrogator known only as "H" in this gruesome, thought-provoking look at a doomsday scenario that could happen, in the real world, any day now.  A U.S. Army veteran with heavy experience in nuclear weapons has become a radical Muslim and gotten his hands on 18 pounds of fissible nuclear material.  He has constructed three atomic bombs and planted them in three American cities.  The authorities have captured him, but he ain't talking.  Enter "H", a covert CIA interrogator who has broken some of the toughest hardcases captured in the War on Terror.  As a horrified FBI Special Agent Helen Brody watches, he begins the physical assault designed to break this man, to force him to tell where the weapons are hidden . . . while the timers tick down and over 10 million lives hang in the balance.  How far is too far?  Will Special Agent Brody stand by while H does the unthinkable in order to save three American cities?  A very powerful film.  Regardless of how you feel about the war on terror, or about the use of "enhanced interrogation", this movie is bound to get you thinking and talking about the stand you choose.  For once, Hollywood doesn't use a movie to score political points on the right (or on the left), but simply presents the dreadful moral choices that war can lead men into.  This was simply an OUTSTANDING movie.  Try to see it if you can!
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« Reply #1 on: July 06, 2010, 10:49:22 AM »

I agree. I really liked this movie. Jackson is simply amazing. I believe that whatever your opinion is on government sanctioned torture or, if you prefer, enhanced interrogation    TeddyR   this movie will reinforce that opinion. In my  house we have different opinions on "enhanced interrogation" and after watching we all thought it showed what we believed was right.   Smile   It made for some interesting discussion.
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indianasmith
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« Reply #2 on: July 06, 2010, 11:48:50 AM »

I personally believe that sometimes we are just better off not knowing what is done in order to keep us safe.  Those who make such decisions must live with them.  I believe in the Constitution, but I do not believe that the Bill of Rights is a suicide pact.

In World War II, the British had captured the Enigma encoding machine and could read every single encrypted transmission the Nazis sent.  Early in the war, they intercepted a German order for a mass bombing raid on the English city of Coventry.  The sole source of the intelligence was Enigma.  If they evacuated the city, or did a mass effort to intercept the bombers, the Germans would know that their code had been broken and change it.  Churchill made the decision to let Coventry burn in order to save the military advantage of Enigma for a decisive moment in the war.

Would any of us want to make such a decision?
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« Reply #3 on: July 06, 2010, 01:51:26 PM »

I personally believe that sometimes we are just better off not knowing what is done in order to keep us safe.  Those who make such decisions must live with them.  I believe in the Constitution, but I do not believe that the Bill of Rights is a suicide pact.

In World War II, the British had captured the Enigma encoding machine and could read every single encrypted transmission the Nazis sent.  Early in the war, they intercepted a German order for a mass bombing raid on the English city of Coventry.  The sole source of the intelligence was Enigma.  If they evacuated the city, or did a mass effort to intercept the bombers, the Germans would know that their code had been broken and change it.  Churchill made the decision to let Coventry burn in order to save the military advantage of Enigma for a decisive moment in the war.

Would any of us want to make such a decision?


All I can say about that is Wow! I'm glad I didn't have to make that decision.
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« Reply #4 on: July 06, 2010, 02:01:44 PM »

Quote
I believe in the Constitution, but I do not believe that the Bill of Rights is a suicide pact.

 If you come up against the constitution it generally means you ahve taken a wrong turn in your policy.  If you are forced to break it to, for exmaple, more effectively occupy the middle east, you stop occupying the middle east, you don't adjust the constitution.  if not, the constitution should be discarded because it has no point.

as for the hackneyed scenerio of a man with the knowledge of a bomb or whatever, the constitution would clearly give you the right to do whatever is needed to get that information but Torture at abu graib for example was not used to get such information it was used for the bawdy entertainment of the officers and to create a general sense of dread among the conquered peoples of iraq.

Quote

In World War II, the British had captured the Enigma encoding machine and could read every single encrypted transmission the Nazis sent.  Early in the war, they intercepted a German order for a mass bombing raid on the English city of Coventry.  The sole source of the intelligence was Enigma.  If they evacuated the city, or did a mass effort to intercept the bombers, the Germans would know that their code had been broken and change it.  Churchill made the decision to let Coventry burn in order to save the military advantage of Enigma for a decisive moment in the war.

Would any of us want to make such a decision?

he was a fool for allowing things to get to that point in the first place, namely by issuing a war guarentee to Poland. Without Churchill getting them into ww1 and 2 the british empire would still likely be ruling the world from on high.  He probably did make the best decision in that scenerio but when it counted he blew it.


Quote
I personally believe that sometimes we are just better off not knowing what is done in order to keep us safe

lol well if it makes you feel better alot of what they do we don't know about till much later. unfortunately much of it isn't done for the purpose of making us safe.
« Last Edit: July 06, 2010, 02:17:45 PM by lester1/2jr » Logged
indianasmith
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« Reply #5 on: July 06, 2010, 05:00:47 PM »

Where do you read your history?  The guarantee to Poland was made by Neville Chamberlain, not Churchill.  Churchill didn't start WW2, either . . . that would be the Kaiser of Germany.

You seem to have an incredible knack, Lester, for making the good guys into the bad guys and vice versa.  I realize that life isn't always black and white - but sometimes it is!

As for Abu Ghraib - the clowns who pulled that crap are doing serious brig time.  It was prisoner abuse, nothing more or less.   I didn't even think about that in watching this movie or making my post.  I was thinking more along the lines of the interrogation of some of the worst baddies, like Khalid Sheik Muhammad.  Ten active plots were disrupted and prevented with the intelligence that was gained from his interrogations, horrific though they may have been.

You seem to think that if America threw Israel under the bus and pulled our troops out of every nation on earth where they are posted, that the world would love us and everything would be perfect forever.  That is exactly what our enemies would love for us to believe.
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« Reply #6 on: July 06, 2010, 05:45:28 PM »

So the end justifies the means.  Pure Machiavelli.  Pragmatic, but disturbing.

As for the history:

Yes: Chamberlain, not Churchill.

Only one source suggested that Coventry was actually named in the messages: all other sources deny that there was any target identified by name in the messages and the bombing raid was assumed to be intended for London.

It is generally held that the duration of the war was shortened by at least two years by the decryption of German cyphers.
« Last Edit: July 06, 2010, 05:47:03 PM by Newt » Logged

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« Reply #7 on: July 06, 2010, 05:56:31 PM »

 I stand corrected, chamberlin not churchill

Quote
You seem to think that if America threw Israel under the bus and pulled our troops out of every nation on earth where they are posted, that the world would love us and everything would be perfect forever.  That is exactly what our enemies would love for us to believe.

yes, because it's true. and if we believed it they could go back to their day jobs and stop being terorrists. I'm glad you rightfully equate Israel with our massive expensive military industrial complax though. It is rather the lynchpin of the whole thing.

I could care less about khalid sheik mohammad being waterboarded, people who bellyache about that are wrong.  I don't know about any ten plots being disrupted though. waterboarding IS some scary s**t and countries who have no use for it are in a better place than we are
« Last Edit: July 06, 2010, 06:00:58 PM by lester1/2jr » Logged
indianasmith
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« Reply #8 on: July 06, 2010, 07:14:03 PM »

yes, because it's true. and if we believed it they could go back to their day jobs and stop being terorrists. I'm glad you rightfully equate Israel with our massive expensive military industrial complax though. It is rather the lynchpin of the whole thing.


I can agree with you on many points, but you are dead wrong here. The militant jihadists have a goal: The complete destruction of the West by any and all means necessary, the conversion of the whole world to Islam (by force if necessary) and the establishment of global Sharia Law.  Israel or no Israel, their intent is to kill any and all who stand in their way.

Read the charter of the Muslim Brotherhood, or Hamas, or Hizbollah.  These are evil, evil people, and they will go on trying to destroy us whether we have troops in Iraq or not, whether we support Israel or not.  They may do it demographically, as they are succeeding in doing in Europe, rather than militarily, but their goal has not changed.


Back to the movie - yes, it raises some very disturbing questions, and underscores Nietschze's grim warning: "Whoever fights monsters must take care that he does not become a monster."
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« Reply #9 on: July 07, 2010, 09:05:06 AM »

[qute]The militant jihadists have a goal: The complete destruction of the West by any and all means necessary, the conversion of the whole world to Islam (by force if necessary) and the establishment of global Sharia Law.  Israel or no Israel, their intent is to kill any and all who stand in their way.
[/quote]

lol.  you really need to talk to some muslims sometime.  You have a huge whole in your understanding about the issues.  on this or ANY issue talk to the people not the "experts".  99% of the people inb the middle east, moderate radical, atheist, short tall, HATE our foreign policy.

as for this movie, this is the the type of thing 24 dealt with and it was interesting post 9-11 but by now I think the conversation has largely moved on to other things. Theconcept seems dated.

you notice tea parties never talk about foreign policy. our wars are so peripheral if they ended tomorow most people wouldn't even notice
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indianasmith
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« Reply #10 on: July 07, 2010, 03:58:32 PM »

I'm not talking about all Muslims.  A vast majority of the world's Muslims may disagree with U.S. foreign policy, but all they really want is to be left alone to live their lives and raise their kids in peace.

However, the hard core jihadist movement - which is somewhere between 10% and 20% of the world's Muslims  (that puts their total number at somewhere between 100 and 200 MILLION people) firmly believe that the Quran commands them to convert the whole world at the point of the sword, and kill all those who refuse to be converted.  They will not change their beliefs just because we abandon Israel and pull our troops out of the Middle East.  They would overrun and slaughter the Israelis, celebrate for a day, then begin planning our destruction.  And this is not based on my fertile imagination, or the writings of some right wing fear monger - IT IS BASED ON THEIR OWN, STATED GOALS. I HAVE read what they have to say for themselves.

  Yes, our support for Israel does give them a recruiting tool.  But their hatred of us is not based on the fact that we support the only working democracy in the Middle East.  It is based on WHO we are, and what our values are.  They hate democracy, they hate Christianity, they hate freedom of religion, they hate women's rights, they hate freedom of speech, they hate the free press except when they can use it to repeat their own twisted propaganda.  In short, they hate everything that Europe and America have built over the last 2500 years of human history, and they want to erase it all, and recreate a barbaric theocracy of a kind that never really even existed, even in Muhammad's heyday.  You may write them off as a joke, or insist on regarding them as rational beings when they or not, but that doesn't change the fact that if you or I were in their power, they would kill us both in an instant if we didn't start shouting "Allah Akhbar!"
Again, I am NOT talking about all Muslims, or even a majority.  But there are still a lot of jihadists out there, and us changing our foreign policy is not going to reduce their hatred of us one iota.
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« Reply #11 on: July 08, 2010, 07:25:29 AM »


However, the hard core jihadist movement - which is somewhere between 10% and 20% of the world's Muslims  (that puts their total number at somewhere between 100 and 200 MILLION people) firmly believe that the Quran commands them to convert the whole world at the point of the sword, and kill all those who refuse to be converted. 

I don't mean to get right in the middle of this particular discussion since this was more supposed to be about an ethically/morally charged movie, but do you have a source for that?  That seems a strange figure to me and I wouldn't mind finding out where that fact came from.
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indianasmith
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« Reply #12 on: July 08, 2010, 08:12:27 AM »

I've read it in various sources, including Mark Steyn's AMERICA ALONE: THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT and another book called INSIDE THE REVOLUTION.  The statistic based on a wide survey done by Al-Jazeera throughout the Muslim world shortly after 9/11.  They based the definition of "radical Islamist" on respondent's answers to a series of questions regarding which methods were acceptable means for spreading Islam to the non-Islamic world.  What is kind of scary is that many "non-radical" Muslims - those who don't approve of military Jihad against the West - still reject most of the values that Western civilization is based on.  Given that Europe is becoming more demographically Islamic with every passing year, it makes one fearful about the future of the West.

This thread has really gotten away from the movie (Lester has that effect on me!), but I do highly recommend the film . . . it is powerful and thought provoking.
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« Reply #13 on: July 08, 2010, 09:39:30 AM »

indiana- no doubt there are people who are so full of themselves they think their way of life is better than ours ( we are of course nothing like that!) but it's our foreign policy that gets random muslims here and across the world to join them.
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indianasmith
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« Reply #14 on: July 08, 2010, 10:16:49 AM »

One thing that does bother me a bit - of course, all cultures are inherently arrogant.  Many cultures feature a word for "foreigner" that is the equivalent of "barbarian."  However, at the same time, honestly and objectively, I think it is ridiculous to say that all cultures are morally equivalent.

A culture that enslaves women and stones them to death for immodesty, demands the death penalty for anyone who changes religions, and encourages fathers to murder their daughters in so-called "honor killings" if those poor girls  have the misfortune to be raped, and does not allow any religious or intellectual freedom to question the doctrines or teachings of its religious leaders, is a barbaric and evil culture. Period.  It absolutely stupefies me that so many on the left who are all too eager to trash our own culture, which, for all its flaws and blemishes, has created most of the technical and scientific advances of the last 300 years, and has given its people the best standard of living in the history of the world, and yet will absolutely refuse to condemn the evil of a culture that has very few, if any, redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Again, let me be perfectly clear.  This isn't about all Muslims; it is about the extremists that tend to dominate that faith in a few corners of the world.
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