posted
Yes, and even bigger abuses go unreported and unpunished for decades. It is possible to have accountability and oversight without compromising national security. At least in the same degree it is possible to have any National Security that relies on the integrity of human beings.
It would be nice if our country actually stood for something beside expediency.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
I thought I was in a George Orwell novel this morning when I read the press accounts in which George Bush stated that "we do not torture" right next to the account of how the Administration is fighting against legislation to ban the practice.
Thanks to Chris Bridges for posting a link to the Washington Post article.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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I think it's important to note that no one (besides the obvious) is for sure what is actually going on in the black sites; it may be wise not to jump to the worst conclusions...
Posts: 57 | Registered: Aug 2003
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Torture should be illegal. The CIA exemption would make the bill valueless from the perspective of an international observer. Either we're against inhuman treatment of prisoners, or we're not.
That said, if someone really, truly believed that if someone wasn't forced to give information that, say, a nuclear attack would be carried out, they ought to be willing to make the sacrifice of breaking the law.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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FIJC, that is the same argument I supported about our treatment of prisoners in Iraq. After all, no able bodied American soldier would abuse his prisoners.
If AbuGaib taught us one thing its this: To much power over any individual, without some oversight, leads to trouble.
Even if you are 100% sure that President Bush and VP Cheney will enforce the "No Torture" policy, if they legalize it for the CIA, then it is an option for less pure hearted furture administrations.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
This is horrifying. If it happened as described, there is no excuse for it. If the US/Britain/etc. want to claim this didn't happen as described, well, there is no security reason that an independent oversight body can't be established so that someone is in a position to verify the truth.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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quote:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Torture should be outlawed.
If there ever is a scenario where we need information *right now* to save lives, the investigators can decide to torture anyway, save the lives, and then lose their jobs/go to prison as punishment.
If the info isn't needed badly enough to go to prison to get it, then it isn't needed badly enough to torture people.
This is exactly right. Juries can always choose to acquit if the reasons in favor of the crime are overwhelming. What we need in this country, right now, is a rock-solid means of bringing to justice people who are torturing prisoners without overwhelming need (i.e. hundreds or thousands of lives immediately at stake).
It may or may not be happening now, but it is far more likely to happen than one of the ticking-time-bomb scenarios that our attorney general keeps mentioning.
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
I'm with the "torture is not only wrong, it's stupid" people here. A guy being tortured is just going to tell you whatever he thinks will stop the torture *for the moment*. The human brain tends to revert to "animal mode" in moments of extreme pain, and you're really not likely to get any useful information out of them.
Even if you *were* likely to get any useful information, I think that deliberate cruelty is wrong on a number of levels. I object to it on religious, moral, and psychological grounds. It is likely to do as much damage to the interrogator, psychologically speaking, as it is to the interrogatee. And, from a religious viewpoint, I think cruelty rots the soul.
Of course, you *do* need a decent definition of torture. Intimidation tactics are widely used by every police force in the world, and every decent athletic team for that matter. I teach a number of them as a Kung Fu instructor; better to intimidate than to harm. I don't think these qualify as torture. I *do* think one needs to be *very* careful to find the line, and then stay as far away from it as practically possible. And *never* cross it.
As for the anti-torture bill, I believe one of the main objections given was that it was poorly worded. One of the problems which such politically and emotionally charged issues is that you can draft a bill, call it "anti-torture" or "anti-child-abuse" or "anti-terrorism" or whatever and then let the magical charged words do their work. You can then raise Hell if anyone opposes it and paint them as being pro-whatever-the-bill-is-anti. There's no way to tell if this is true, though, without actually reading the bill. And that requires a fairly high central nervous system pain threshold, which is probably one of the reasons they write bills the way they do.
I've not read the bill (though I should) and so I'm withholding judgement on whether it is or is not a good law. McCain seems to me to have a tendency toward media attention grabs and political grandstanding, and I'm not a big fan of his "campaign-finance reform" on First-Amendment grounds, so color me a bit skeptical on this latest bill of his.
I also agree that "Homeland Security" was easily one of the worst names they could possibly have given the department, right up there with Patriot Act as a name. I don't believe Bush is anywhere near stupid-far from it-but the man *did* inherit his father's facility, or lack thereof, for linguistic grace. This administration has serious communication problems and could really use either some more eloquent people, or just listen more to the eloquent people they already have, like Rice and her predecessor Powell. Seriously: Homeland Security? I could go on and on about the connotation problems *alone*.
I also believe the enormous self-flagellation over Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was a bit excessive, especially since the media seemed to just sort of gloss over other instances of torture in other places that make Abu Ghraib look like Disneyland sans It's a Small World, like CNN admitting to keeping Saddam's nastiest atrocities quiet in return for "access".
The French self-righteousness over this has also amused me, since their security apparatus is well known for-ahem-"aggressive interrogation techniques" and often outright assassination. Anyone who calls the French as a whole wusses has never met one of their "specialists". And I'm not even going to get into MI6 during the worst of the Troubles. None of this excuses anything we've done, but it is a reminder that hypocrisy is a favorite human pasttime and not just an American one.
Somewhat off topic- anyone remember Mal's interrogation technique in Firefly ("The Train Job")? Now *that* was effective. I'm not condoning vigilantism here, but it *was* funny. And I don't think there was much in the way of real law where they were anyway. 'Course, that's fiction.
"Avoid rather than block Block rather than strike Strike rather than hurt Hurt rather than maim Maim rather than kill; For all life is precious Neither can it ever be replaced." -Saying of the Shaolin Monks
posted
That's not strictly true. Do you really think torture during interrogation would still be practiced, 5000 years after it was first tried, if all this time it never worked? Human beings can be a bit clueless at times, but they aren't that stupid.
Torture DOES work. The question is one of morality.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Actually the efficiency and value of torture is highly debatable. However, torture combined with moder psychological techniques can get results, given time.
Torture has other uses as well.
1) It demotivates the enemy. In other words, terrorism for the state. Sure, you can blow our people up with random acts of extreme violence. Do so and we will make you scream in pain for weeks. There seems to be a lot of this going on, torture not as an info-gathering tool, but as a de-motivator for the enemy.
Now if we just put some heads up on poles and through some carcuses to the dogs, we'd be really working it.
2) It helps dehumanize the enemy in the eyes of our troops. See some people running around naked and whimpering in pain and you begin to believe they are not really human.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
I'm with Chris on this. Lots of time-tested techniques are used because they work; and lots of them are used because it *seems* like they would work. I'd say torture falls in the latter category.
Besides, torture was often used more indirectly, as a threat, for example, against the individual or his family. This *is* an effective technique for suppressing things you don't want people to do, and threats against family or friends will, used against the sort of idealist that tends to be involved in revolutions, be even more effective than threats against the idealist himself. I know many, many Cubans who said they kept quiet about their regime's abuses for years not because they were afraid of what may happen to them, but about what may happen to their families, and many *didn't* take action until their families were threatened and it seemed to be the only chance to save them. Or their families were "disappeared" and they no longer had anything left to lose.
This sort of torture threat against innocents, punishing the family for the sins of their relative, should never even be *considered* no matter what the circumstances.
Some methods, like Chinese Water Torture, were also useful for discrediting political opponents because they drove the victim insane but didn't leave any physical marks. But I don't believe torture as a direct interrogation technique has ever been terribly effective. It's inherently physchologically damaging and you can't retrieve much useful information from a damaged psyche.
What the ancients *really* found useful about torture was the very thing that makes it so useless for our purposes; the victim will say whatever he thinks the interrogators want to hear. When you want someone to admit to being a witch/heretic/revolutionary/just-plain-bad-person, it's quite effective. Think about the Inquisition, or the Salem Witch trials, or the English at the end of Braveheart. The purpose wasn't really to obtain information, but to shape it.
Posts: 1631 | Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
Shoot, Dan, you're faster than me. Quit stealing my points before I post them or I'll pull out the Infamous Noogie Torture!
Posts: 1631 | Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
Noogie ahead, I'll never talk. Why I've been tortured by the best of them, for hours, and days, and I never talked, well I did talk, which was why they were torturing me, since they were tired of my endless prattle and were torturing me to shut me up. Of course its hard to scream for mercy and be quiet at the same time, but threatened with yet another noogie....
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