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malanthrop: Some of those sentiments are pretty disgusting to me. I'll try to just respond to the ideas themselves as I don't personally think you are a terrible person.
quote:I have a hard time understanding how anyone could possibly compare our intelligence agencies to the Nazi's. Please, there were no gas chambers, we weren't pulling their teeth out or making lamps out of their skin.
Tom's next post responding to this is exactly what I've said every time somebody makes this claim.
quote: None of them died and likely didn't even bleed. Sure they may have been humiliated and made uncomfortable, a far cry from what these animals do to the infidel. I hear much more outrage over waterboarding than one of them beheading an American contractore on tv.
When it comes to torture, it is often worse than death, the goal in fact is to make the person desire death, but be unable to find it, thus making their only recourse to do what is necessary to stop the torture.
quote:Bin Laden was right, most Americans are pathetic and week.
You'll forgive me if I do not let a terrorist with evil intentions define what makes somebody admirable and strong. You shouldn't do it either.
quote:The taliban is in Pakistan beating women in the streets for Sharia offenses and barbers are being beaten and having their stores torched for the sin of shaving a man's face.
I don't quite understand. Are you saying that because Taliban forces do terrible things for causes we think are wrong that for the sake of those they victimize we should turn them into victims of torture?
quote:If we really want them tortured, we send them to one of our allies and let them do it for us.
Extraordinary Rendition may be the darkest blot on our nation's good name that I have seen since I was born. If those people are really our allies I hope they tell us to 'shove it' and remind us that we made the commitment not to torture and to hold us to it.
quote: If I'm ever sent back, I'll definitely be less inclined to take a prisoner. Our troops should do the humane thing and just put them down like the dogs they are.
I sincerely hope then that you are never redeployed until you reconsider that position. Atrocities in war are unavoidable as war by its' very nature is an atrocity, but while our soldiers are prosecuting the war they represent me and everyone in America. We've already agreed that executing the enemy is categorically wrong, it says so in the uniform code of military justice. I hope that any soldier that decides to kill another human being without justification is tried for murder.
We the people have already spoken on the subject, you and your fellow soldiers are not permitted to act as judge, jury, and executioner. Cultivate some love for your enemies, your lack of empathy has already lead you to conclusions I think are dastardly cruel.
edit: Calling them dogs is only an attempt to dehumanize them so that treating them inhumanely is less difficult. The worst crimes in human history were committed by first doing that very thing.
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quote:None of them died and likely didn't even bleed.
I have a question for you. Let's say that we invent a device capable of firing every single nerve at once, creating awesome, indescribable, total pain in a way that no amount of real-world damage could ever cause. And we can do this at will, and subject our prisoners to sustained periods of this experience.
Is that better or worse than making a lamp out of their skin?
If your as of yet uninvented torture device were available, I would suggest it is better than having a lamp made out of your skin.
They are suggesting prosecuting the attourneys that gave the legal opinion that it was not torture. If the case went to the supreme court it is unlikely they would come to a unanimous decision. Should the dissenting justices be punished for their opinions? The current administration is setting a scary trend. Ex post facto political retribution. First they threaten 90% taxes on past pay now they are willing to charge prior legal opinions??? If congress wanted to, they could outlaw waterboarding, they have not. Wether it is "torture" is legally debatable and Pelosi and Obama could make it illegal by passing a law but politicizing it is much better for them. Congress was briefed on its use years ago. This will set a very bad precident that will only further the grid lock in our government. Every decision will have to go through tedious legal arguments for fear of future political retribution under the guise of law. We are going back to the pre 911 mentality that got us into trouble. The war on terror, excuse me, "overseas contingency operations" and "man made disasters" are once again becoming a police action subject to the courts. They are at war with us, they have no constitutional rights and they are not subject to the Geneva convention.
When conservatives regain power they could do the same and charge the current administration with treason for violating the constitution. If abortion is made illegal they could go back and throw the lawyers in jail who once argued for its legality.
Make it explicitly illegal and move on. They don't want to though. They would rather you keep your narrow minds on the Bush administration while they convert the preferred stock in the banks into common stock and become the controlling vote in our banking system, thus nationalizing the banks.
In better times, the personal lives of Paris Hilton in conjunction with our pathetic education system sufficed to keep the masses from paying attention. Times are tough, we need a bad guy. Wall Street and Bush. Eventually the Bush administrations flaws will lose their effect and people will begin to scrutinize this administration.
Maybe Napalitano should be charged with dereliction of duty for heading homeland security and stating that illegal immigration isn't a crime. Talk about inept. Everything they are doing is undermining our national security. Obama shaking hands and smiling at a tin pan dictator who locks up his political opposition hurts freedom around the world. The speaker of the house demanding that ICE stop deporting illegal immigrants and our head of homeland security claiming it isn't a crime weakens our borders. Forcing the DoD to release all the photos of "torture" to the public will cause a fire storm in the middle east. Are you not seeing the security in the world crumble due to his affable, nice guy nature?? Iran, Venezuala, North Korea just ramping it up since he's been in office. Russia pressing against the young democratic nations on it's borders. Sometimes having a cowboy is good. We're dealing with tyrants who understand the cowboy and laugh at this administration.
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Waterboarding was illegal. It was illegal for soldiers to use it during Vietnam. It was illegal for law enforcement to use it to get confessions.
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Waterboarding isn't the only technique they are scrutinizing. Only 3 prisoners were waterboarded, one of them planned the September 11th attacks.
You are using "law enforcement". These people do not have American legal rights. They do not have miranda rights, etc. But once they are in our courts, a nit wit lawyer will argue that the soldier didn't read him his rights to get him released. Again, this is a war not a criminal action. The 911 commission found that treating terrorism (manmade disasters) as a crime was what lead to 911. We are not only going back to pre 911 mentality, they are going beyond that and giving these animals the rights of US Citizens.
How's the American reporter in an Iranian prison doing about now. When Mr. nice guy Obama talks with Ahmadinejad, do you think it hurts her? Our enemies are emboldened and we are all in greater danger for it.
Manuel Rosales fled Venezuala soon after O's bromance with Chaves. Rosales was his strongest opponent, his greatest threat to locking up his president for life bid. But, being nice doesn't hurt, right??? Rosales can see the writing on the wall. He was about to become a political prisoner just like our reporter.
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Waterboarding was the worst we did. No comparison to what they do and what we are. They will behead an American civilian, any American civilian. They've killed thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of innocent people around the world. We waterboarde 3 people who had a lot of knowledge. There is no comparison. When we start beheading the Arab who owns the corner store with a butcher knife and sending the videos to the SWAT region, we've become them.
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malanthrop: Could you verify your "only 3 waterboarded" statement? How can we even know how many people were waterboarded when after the Justice Department requested tapes of interrogations, the CIA erased hours of footage? It was certainly more than three who were sent to other countries where worse things took place. Waterboarding is not the worst we did, as we are still responsible for those we used extraordinary rendition on, and we don't know what was on those tapes.
It does not matter what others are doing, we are not a tit for tat nation. If Al Qaeda kidnapped some children from the continental United States and publicly executed them would we show our resolve by one upping them? I don't think so.
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Point of order: Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and stress positions are already explicitly illegal. The US has - freely of its own will - entered into treaties whereby these precise techniques are considered crimes against humanity, and has convicted other nations' citizens for war crimes for such actions on American citizens. These treaties have the force of law in the US. There is no need for new law; the law exists, and the only question is whether to enforce it.
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quote:The so called "torture" our special forces submit themselves to in training.
Why do our special forces submit themselves to that sort of thing, do you think?
quote:None of them died and likely didn't even bleed. Sure they may have been humiliated and made uncomfortable, a far cry from what these animals do to the infidel. I hear much more outrage over waterboarding than one of them beheading an American contractore on tv.
Whether or not they bled and certainly whether or not they died has no bearing at all on whether or not they were tortured. So that was a pretty foolish statement to make.
The fact that our enemies treat their prisoners worse in many cases is also irrelevant. We're not supposed to have moral standards on the basis of the worst our enemies do to us.
There is not more 'outrage' over torture than American contractors being beheaded.
quote:If we really want them tortured, we send them to one of our allies and let them do it for us. If I'm ever sent back, I'll definitely be less inclined to take a prisoner. Our troops should do the humane thing and just put them down like the dogs they are.
In that case you would be a disgrace to the uniform you'd be wearing and the tradition you'd be serving if you did it. Regardless of how widespread the sentiment is.
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quote:There is not more 'outrage' over torture than American contractors being beheaded.
I don't know. I am more outraged that the US is torturing prisoners in my name than I am that terrorists beheaded someone. I expect my country to have a higher and stronger ethical code than terrorists. I am outraged when people like mal suggest that its OK for us to sink into moral depravity solely because the other guys are even worse. Terrorists and Nazi's should not be the standard by which we set our moral code. We should not judge ourselves in comparison to their moral depravity. Some things are simply wrong regardless of whether or not other people do even worse things. Torture is one of those things.
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The special forces submitting to torture training are clearly different from prisoners. For one thing, they volunteered. They have the option of leaving at any time. They know the end date if they stay the whole time. They have safety words if it gets too intense. And the people torturing them are fellow Americans- who ultimately are on the same side as the torture trainee. I thought one news outlet made a great comparison- the difference in these two cases is the same as the difference between S&M and rape. Consent matters.
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I've never understood that argument: "When our forces are being trained to withstand torture, they get tortured, so when we do it to other people, it's no big deal."
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According to one Navy captain, they stopped the technique of waterboarding our special forces trainees because it hurt morale.
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The fact that our enemies treat their prisoners worse in many cases is also irrelevant. We're not supposed to have moral standards on the basis of the worst our enemies do to us.
If our "moral standards" are giving our enemies an advantage over us, we should ask why we should keep the standards when dealing with these enemies.
I assume that the reasons for keeping the standards are (1) to keep people who are currently not with our enemies from having another reason to join our enemies; (2) to maintain our relationships with our allies, who probably won't have enough information to see our torture as necessary even if it is; and (3) to keep us off the slippery slope of using torture for more and more things.
I'd still like to here Cheney et al. say why they thought the interrogation techniques they approved were necessary.
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I would say that moral standards are worth having for their own sake.
As to whether we should prosecute those responsible for torture:
quote: The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.
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G.W. Bush is such a hypocrite. The statement kmboots posted above was posted after the he approved the torture of prisoners.
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: In better times, the personal lives of Paris Hilton in conjunction with our pathetic education system sufficed to keep the masses from paying attention. Times are tough, we need a bad guy. Wall Street and Bush. Eventually the Bush administrations flaws will lose their effect and people will begin to scrutinize this administration.
Maybe Napalitano should be charged with dereliction of duty for heading homeland security and stating that illegal immigration isn't a crime. Talk about inept. Everything they are doing is undermining our national security. Obama shaking hands and smiling at a tin pan dictator who locks up his political opposition hurts freedom around the world. The speaker of the house demanding that ICE stop deporting illegal immigrants and our head of homeland security claiming it isn't a crime weakens our borders. Forcing the DoD to release all the photos of "torture" to the public will cause a fire storm in the middle east. Are you not seeing the security in the world crumble due to his affable, nice guy nature?? Iran, Venezuala, North Korea just ramping it up since he's been in office. Russia pressing against the young democratic nations on it's borders. Sometimes having a cowboy is good. We're dealing with tyrants who understand the cowboy and laugh at this administration.
You know, I'd oddly not offended by your opinions -- I can see where you're coming from, and it's not the typical vapid Republican argument against gay marriage or federal oversight.
But calling Bush a cowboy? Really? Cowboys do things. Bush was a posing frat boy whose incompetence and corruption bankrupted our treasury, exhausted our military, and destabilized the world. He's at best an utter failure.
Pretending that Obama is destabilizing the world is just baffling.
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That said, I understand your impatience with Middle Eastern culture. To some extent, I share it. It's really easy to see them as subhuman, because a great many of them are animals.
But I've dated, and been very much in love with, a Muslim girl who introduced me to her parents and gave me an idea what life is like over there. I have a number of Iranian friends who have the best families in the world. In many ways, the Middle East is like the US -- tons of wonderful people politically dominated by religious fundamentalists. The Religious Right is just more powerful over there.
I understand the glass-parking-lot arguments, and I understand why you think torturing these people is okay. But if you wouldn't be okay with your local police torturing suspects, what makes you think the military should?
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quote:If our "moral standards" are giving our enemies an advantage over us, we should ask why we should keep the standards when dealing with these enemies.
How about 4--its the humane thing to do?
Terrorists are willing to kill thousands of innocent civilians to try and scare us into bowing to their perverted ideas. Only a few daft lunatic fringe elements are willing to do the same to them. Sure we could nuke Pakistan and be done with a lot of them, and terrorize a bunch more into laying down their arms. But we don't, because its the wrong thing to do. Sure, we give up that advantage to the enemy, but if we don't we become the enemy.
Why did they think it was OK? Because they were scared and panic produces bad choices.
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God help us all if "well, it's not like we're doing what the Nazis did" becomes our watermark for moral behavior.
We know a tiny fraction of what has been done to prisoners under U.S. control because of various leaks and similar acts of poor information control. We know a tiny amount more because this administation is more concerned with transparency than the previous one.
We will probably never know the full extent of what has been done; we will almost certainly never know all of what has been done at "black sites" and to prisoners who have been given over to regimes with laxer standards than those we espouse.
According to the Red Cross, military intelligence officers estimated some 70-90% of prisoners taken in Iraq were "arrested "by mistake". That's the kind of prisoner we risk when we legitamize torture. Someone like, say, Maher Arer.
So, even if we presume that terrorists who are willing to kill innocent civilians warrant torture- which is not an assumption I support- how many innocent people are we willing to inflict pain upon in the name of making such techniques available to use on the "bad guys"?
And then do we return them to the civilian populace to allow their stories to become propoganda coups for radical anti-U.S. groups? Or do we just quietly dispose of their bodies, in the approved manner of dictatorship death squads?
And as far as the tired old straw about some people "caring more about [insert U.S. human rights abuse here] than [insert terrorist atrocity here]"; does anyone really think my petitioning or protesting terrorist/insurgent groups is a good use of my time? Yes, I hate that innocent people have been the victims of insurgent/terrorist violence. Take that as a given. No, I am not prepared to authorize more violence, with fewer safeguards to prevent other innocent people from being enveloped, to prove that I care to people who are already determined to see my views in the worst possible light anyway.
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Considering it's pretty easy to hold ones breath for over 3minutes, I'd think it'd be cheaper to just hire the NewFirm.
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quote:God help us all if "well, it's not like we're doing what the Nazis did" becomes our watermark for moral behavior.
While what you say is true, I feel it's necessary to point out that in fact, waterboarding, beatings, and stress positions are what the Nazis did. In favoured countries like Norway, that is, where the brother Aryans were to be treated with the silk gloves. What they did in Poland is admittedly worse.
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"I don't like the "It's ok we did it because it worked" attitude that Cheney has about it. That doesn't make it right or ok. It just makes it effective."
quote:I don't like the "It's ok we did it because it worked" attitude that Cheney has about it. That doesn't make it right or ok. It just makes it effective.
One former interogator claims torture is not only ineffective its counterproductive, even in the ticking time bomb situation.
This guys arguments make perfect sense to me. I don't know about the rest of you. I'm sure there are those whose response to bullying is to cooperate. But when I sense I'm being bullied into doing something, I dig in my heels. When bullied, I'm unlikely to do something I might have willingly done if I'd been simply asked politely. Even though I'm sure there are some types of people who would quickly confess to avoid torture, somehow I don't expect that the those people are likely to join an insurgency against the world's most powerful army.
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quote:Originally posted by Lalo: That said, I understand your impatience with Middle Eastern culture. To some extent, I share it. It's really easy to see them as subhuman, because a great many of them are animals.
But I've dated, and been very much in love with, a Muslim girl who introduced me to her parents and gave me an idea what life is like over there. I have a number of Iranian friends who have the best families in the world. In many ways, the Middle East is like the US -- tons of wonderful people politically dominated by religious fundamentalists. The Religious Right is just more powerful over there.
I understand the glass-parking-lot arguments, and I understand why you think torturing these people is okay. But if you wouldn't be okay with your local police torturing suspects, what makes you think the military should?
quote: Even though I'm sure there are some types of people who would quickly confess to avoid torture, somehow I don't expect that the those people are likely to join an insurgency against the world's most powerful army.
Be reasonable, Rabbit. The argument in favor of torture or 'harsh methods' isn't that the threat of it will be effective. It's that the application and then withdrawl of it will be.
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Rakeesh, I don't see how that changes my argument. Insert a "further" in front of torture. Read the article I linked. An experienced interrogator says that torture tends to harden prisoners resolve not to talk. I find that a very understandable response based on my personal reactions.
I'm sorry if that make no sense to you but you should still read what the experienced interrogator says.
[ April 27, 2009, 05:08 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote: Even though I'm sure there are some types of people who would quickly confess to avoid torture, somehow I don't expect that the those people are likely to join an insurgency against the world's most powerful army.
Be reasonable, Rabbit. The argument in favor of torture or 'harsh methods' isn't that the threat of it will be effective. It's that the application and then withdrawl of it will be.
Wait, you would .. have to explain the relevance of that?
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quote:Rakeesh, I don't see how that changes my argument. Insert a "further" in front of torture. Read the article I linked. An experienced interrogator says that torture tends to harden prisoners resolve not to talk. I find that a very understandable response based on my personal reactions.
I've read the link. You're missing my point. First of all, Major 'Alexander' doesn't just say that torture causes suspects to simply clam up and not say anything. He says that's the initial reaction. For example: ""People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop," he says. "They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped.""
He doesn't say they'll simply clam up forever.
The post I responded to suggested that the sorts of people likely to join these insurgencies are the sort to be able to withstand torture. You don't specify a length of time, which was pretty much my point.
Advocates of torture aren't saying, "It'll work as soon as you pour the water down the guy's throat." They say it works the tenth or the twentieth time, or by the time you've gone through a few fingers, or several other unpleasant (to say the least) possibilities.
quote:Wait, you would .. have to explain the relevance of that?
It's relevant because saying, "Torture causes suspects to clam up," and simply leaving it at that is not a good argument, in my opinion. That's all.
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While I absolutely do not condone torture, I also think we've taken a very liberal definition of torture.
There was a time when torture was a brutal and sadistic thing, but in the modern time, if you don't offer a prisoner sugar with his tea and biscuits, it is considered inhuman treatment.
These are suspected enemy combatants, we have not obligation to be nice to them. We suspect them of conspiring to plot against us in dark and deadly ways, consequently, we need to treat them as they are, prisoners.
And in questioning them, I don't feel we need to say 'please' and 'thank you'; serious crimes warrant serious questioning and serious treatment.
But, while I think harsh interrogation is warranted, I stop short of true torture, but keep in mind when I say 'true torture' I mean 'true torture', not some overhyped liberal hippy 'politically correct' impression of torture, nor do I mean some overhyped scandal-mongering media version of torture.
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BlueWizard: Historically speaking humanity as virtually always erred on the side of excess cruelty when dealing with prisoners and enemies. People will almost always stepped just a bit further than the lines we draw with ink, and call it "personal discretion." It behooves us then to draw the lines a bit too amiably back so that when our agents step over that line they are still within reason.
I suppose this warrants the risk of not getting information of a possibly vital nature, and yet, I'd rather let the prisoner be a party of one as far as roguery is concerned.
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We considered waterboarding "true torture" when the Japanese did it to our soldiers in WWII. Certainly waterboarding a prisoner 183 times within a single month qualifies as real torture by any honest definition. There is only one accurate description of claims that waterboarding is merely a harsh interrogation method when we do it today even though we called it torture when the Japanese did it 60 years ago -- gross hypocrisy.
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quote:Col. Harold E. Fischer Jr., an American fighter pilot who was routinely tortured in a Chinese prison during and after the Korean War, becoming — along with three other American airmen held at the same prison — a symbol and victim of cold war tension, died in Las Vegas on April 30. He was 83 and lived in Las Vegas. The cause was complications of back surgery, his son Kurt said.
From April 1953 through May 1955, Colonel Fischer — then an Air Force captain — was held at a prison outside Mukden, Manchuria. For most of that time, he was kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air. ...
You will notice how the NYT defines torture when it comes to foreign governments - isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation. Much milder than anything the US did to one of its own citizens, Jose Padilla. But the parallel is almost perfect: these are, after all, the exact Chinese Communist techniques that were reverse engineered from the SERE program. So you have a perfect demonstration of the NYT's double-standard. If Chinese do it to Americans, it's torture; if Americans do it to an American, it's "harsh interrogation." Does Jill Abramson really expect us to take this lying down?
You will also notice the quality of the intelligence procured through methods milder than the Bush administration's ...
Kinda puts both the effectiveness of torture and the types of techniques we used in perspective. (And I'm not as familiar with US publications, but isn't the NYT supposed to be liberal, not even right-wing?)
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: We considered waterboarding "true torture" when the Japanese did it to our soldiers in WWII. Certainly waterboarding a prisoner 183 times within a single month qualifies as real torture by any honest definition. There is only one accurate description of claims that waterboarding is merely a harsh interrogation method when we do it today even though we called it torture when the Japanese did it 60 years ago -- gross hypocrisy.
QFT.
And I want to point out that the hypocrisy in this is not really open for debate. We called it one thing 60 years ago, when it was used against us, and we called it something very different when we used it ourselves. The thing being one and the same, the hypocrisy is already committed. Even if we decided today that in fact what the Japanese did to us 60 years ago was just fine, we would still be hypocrites.
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Kinda puts both the effectiveness of torture and the types of techniques we used in perspective. (And I'm not as familiar with US publications, but isn't the NYT supposed to be liberal, not even right-wing?)
Assume some degree of actual reality seeps in whether the paper is left or right wing, or whatever. It's not at all crazy or revolutionary to consider these tactics to be torture. Have you ever been sleep deprived? It's not the same thing as being exhausted and relaxed after a hard day's work.
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quote:Even if we decided today that in fact what the Japanese did to us 60 years ago was just fine, we would still be hypocrites.
I'll take issue with this. First off, neither you nor I was around 60 years ago and its entirely possible that people born after 1940 might never have considered it torture when the Japanese water boarded American prisoners.
I'll also note that changing your mind doesn't necessarily make you a hypocrite. If the situation were reversed and we had thought it was fine to water board prisoners in WW II but then decided it was torture in the 21st century -- would that have been hypocrisy or moral progress?
But with that said, I do think most Americans who are justifying this are being very hypocritical here. Few people are saying, terrorism has caused us to reevaluate our stand and we now believe that there are morally justifiable reasons to torture prisoners. That isn't hypocrisy, it's moral regression. But is that what they are arguing? No, what they are saying is "we used to consider these actions torture but now we think they might be useful so we're going to rename them "harsh interrogation". At the heart of hypocrisy, is exceptionalism, the belief that for what every reason you can break rules that would be wrong for other people to break.
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quote:But with that said, I do think most Americans who are justifying this are being very hypocritical here.
I wouldn't go that far. I think the breakdown occurs in what many Americans think is acceptable treatment of soldiers - which is basically, if captured, treated with respect and housed in a clean though not necessarily comfortable PoW camp - and terrorists.
Where the hypocrisy occurs, I think, is not in us labeling one interrogation torture when used on our soldiers but not on terrorists. Two entirely different categories of people in the eyes of many (myself included). Where the hypocrisy occurs, I think, is when we conveniently forget that, according to our laws and our culture and our ideals, some things are supposed to be off-limits to everyone. Period.
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quote:Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.
At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.
"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."
If this is true...
...I may throw up.
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Well, no wonder they based their torture program off of a chinese program designed to elicit false confessions.
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But we don't, because its the wrong thing to do. Sure, we give up that advantage to the enemy, but if we don't we become the enemy.
Do the people who say things like this think that there is no situation in which torture should be carried out, or just no situation that is likely to occur? I can think of plenty of theoretical situations in which I'd be fine with torture.
quote:For several years our government has been fighting terrorism without using these extreme methods. We face some serious obstacles in defeating al Qaeda and its allies. We could be hit again, hit hard. But our decision to respect basic international standards does not appear to be a big hindrance us in the fight. In fact, if the U.S. regains some higher ground in the wider struggle of ideas, our prospects in a long conflict will be better.
as well as the many interrogators quoted in that Media Matters article.
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quote:Do the people who say things like this think that there is no situation in which torture should be carried out, or just no situation that is likely to occur? I can think of plenty of theoretical situations in which I'd be fine with torture.
Good question.
What I said was in response to your question if our Moral Standards were giving our enemies an advantage, why shouldn't we do away with them.
My response was not that Torture is such a slime that it should never be used, but that our Moral Standards need to be about what we believe, not what our enemy is willing to sink to.
More specifically, you asked if "people who write this" think that Torture should ever be used.
You say that you can imagine situations where torture should be used.
I have a great imagination. I can create some scenarios where it could be used.
The question is, what is the goal of the torture.
If it is to get reliable data, there is strong evidence that other interrogation techniques work better.
The ticking bomb scenario, where we need to do it quickly, kind of falls apart when we water-board a detainee 182 times in A MONTH.
If it is to terrorize the terrorists, to scare them into never crossing the US again, which is not an argument I've ever heard made, but may be believed by some, it doesn't work.
If it is to punish those that have or would inflict harm on our country, then I say we are being petty and vengeful, not two characteristics I want associated with my country. Yet when people excuse the torture by saying we are torturing, "The guy who planned the 9/11" what can they mean but that its justifiable vengeance.
Yes, I would say that I said the above because I could not see a reasonable likelihood that there would be a good cause to torture a terrorist.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
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Maybe I mischaracterized you, then. What exasperates me is statements like this one from Ted Rall:
quote:I don't care if torture works. I don't give a damn if torture could reveal a plot that would cost millions of lives. I would rather die in a terrorist attack than live in a society that relies upon torture to protect itself. But what do I know? Maybe I've just been brainwashed by my Christian upbringing.
I just don't understand an ethical system that tells you to let millions of people to die before you harm anyone else. If this means that I don't have Christian values, so be it. (Not that it matters, but I wonder whether Ted Rall really believes this for Christian reasons or whether he's simply trying to turn the Christianity of Bush et al. against them.)
The most charitable elucidation I can give to what Ted Rall says here is that the American government, with the tacit approval of the American people, has committed so many atrocities over the centuries that any assaults on it that could have been prevented by judicious torture would only help balance these out.
Posts: 781 | Registered: Apr 2005
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That is pretty exasperating. Would I rather die than let someone be tortured to keep me alive?
Academically, in the abstract, even, I can only answer a 'maybe'-it depends on who the person is and what they've done. Much of that uncertainty vanishes if the question becomes about, say, my sister and the person involved is a murderous terrorist who has dedicated his or her life to slaughtering the people I care about in as great and public a number as possible.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Omega M: Do you literally "don't understand" such an ethical system or is it that you simply don't agree with one?
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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Not sure where to put this, but there was a story on CNN today about how a proposed nuclear deal between the US and the UAE is apparently in jeopardy because US Congressmen are hesitant to sign off on a deal that sends nuclear power to nations that torture and have spotty human rights records.
Now, the Middle East isn't a cup of tea when it comes to human rights abuses, our own torture issues notwithstanding, but the UAE is hardly the worst of them by any reasonable measure, and the irony, given our recent torture outing in the light of day, is I'm sure lost on no one.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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My personal policy is this: torture remains on the books as a major crime, something that is illegal in all cases.
If there is ever a situation in which someone is confident that torturing this one guy will save thousands of lives, they should have no problem with also sacrificing their own freedom for those lives by choosing to commit a crime and suffer the punishment for it.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: ... and the irony, given our recent torture outing in the light of day, is I'm sure lost on no one.
Indeed.
quote:When American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee fell into the hands of North Korean border guards two weeks ago, vanishing into the maw of the most isolated nation on Earth, their fate drew concern. ... North Korea appears to be holding the women in a protocol house in Pyongyang.
"The rumor was that they are being housed at one of the guest villas," said Han S. Park, a University of Georgia expert who was visiting North Korea as part of a private U.S. delegation after the women were captured. Park told CNN International that the North Koreans scoffed at any suggestion that the Americans were receiving harsh treatment.
"They laughed. 'We are not Guantanamo.' That's what they said," Park said.
quote:A training manual for Canadian diplomats lists the United States among countries that potentially torture or abuse prisoners.
The manual is an internal document of the Department of Foreign Affairs. A spokesman for the foreign minister confirmed the contents of the manual after news reports about it circulated on Thursday.
The manual appears to contradict the public stance of Canada’s Conservative government, which accepts assurances from the United States that it does not mistreat prisoners, including those at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
One Canadian, Omar Khadr, is being held there; he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002.
In an e-mail message, Neil Hrab, a spokesman for the minister of foreign affairs, Maxime Bernier, said the manual was “not a policy document or any kind of a statement of policy” and did not “convey the government’s views or positions.”
A spokeswoman for the United States Embassy here was quoted by Reuters as saying, “The United States does not permit, tolerate or condone torture under any circumstances.”
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