Your momma is so stupid she thinks Roe v. Wade is 2 ways to cross a river!
- Daily Show
just had to put that out there.
[quote=“dantesolieri”]expedient but morally wrong works for me.
Again, there are gradations and levels of torture… I feel as if I have a Geneva Convention claim every time I take a bus here or walk down the sidewalk dodging umbrella swinging xiaojies… I am only half joking… If my company posts me to Shanghai and I have to live in all that air pollution… am I being tortured? It will cause long-lasting health problems. Will my company not be liable because this was not the direct intention of my assuming responsibilities there? Sorry, but three individuals being waterboarded when hundreds and thousands of US military and intelligence operatives go through the same thing… leads me to believe that not all torture is equivalent and to Sandman that does not make some desk jockey in DC “equally morally repugnant” in my view. Sorry, but I just do not see this.[/quote]
For a so-called lawyer, you seem to be missing a key point.
Your employment is at-will and you can voluntarily quit (and even sue) if your boss tortures you. Unless of course you’re telling us you’re some sort of indentured servant.
So… voluntary v. involuntary. Need I say more?
my fraternity did some things to us for initiation that were in the list like roman chairs and being kept awake for hours by loud music, etc., but again, I could have quit. They weren’t holding me in captivity. ergo, no torture
… when intelligence operatives go through waterboarding, it is a form of training, and that is also voluntary. ergo, no torture
Wouldn’t those who tortured our soldiers, or who may torture them in the future, use this same argument?
Wouldn’t those who tortured our soldiers, or who may torture them in the future, use this same argument?[/quote]
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he’s using the end justifies the means… which as Craig says opens the door wide for US’ enemies. So, what about consideration or safety of American soldiers? Perhaps Dante is saying he doesn’t care since he’s not a soldier himself.
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he presupposes that torture will get intel that non-torture interrogation cannot.
[quote=“dantesolieri”]expedient but morally wrong works for me.
Again, there are gradations and levels of torture… I feel as if I have a Geneva Convention claim every time I take a bus here or walk down the sidewalk dodging umbrella swinging xiaojies… I am only half joking… If my company posts me to Shanghai and I have to live in all that air pollution… am I being tortured? It will cause long-lasting health problems. Will my company not be liable because this was not the direct intention of my assuming responsibilities there?[/quote]
Apples and oranges. You have the choice to say “no”.
People who are tortured do not have a choice.
Those undergoing training have control over when the waterboarding stops by dropping the weights they’re holding in their hands.
Those the US tortured have no control.
Torture is wrong. It is immoral. It goes against everything America is supposed to stand for.
One reason why torture may be so easy this time around is because this is the first real war we’ve had with colored folks.
[quote=“dantesolieri”]expedient but morally wrong works for me.
Again, there are gradations and levels of torture… I feel as if I have a Geneva Convention claim every time I take a bus here or walk down the sidewalk dodging umbrella swinging xiaojies… I am only half joking… If my company posts me to Shanghai and I have to live in all that air pollution… am I being tortured? It will cause long-lasting health problems. Will my company not be liable because this was not the direct intention of my assuming responsibilities there? Sorry, but three individuals being waterboarded when hundreds and thousands of US military and intelligence operatives go through the same thing… leads me to believe that not all torture is equivalent and to Sandman that does not make some desk jockey in DC “equally morally repugnant” in my view. Sorry, but I just do not see this.[/quote]
In the first place torture is defined generally as the infliction of severe mental or physical pain intended to illicit information from someone in captivity. You can’t be tortured if you are free to leave, and the incidental pain and suffering caused by incarceraton (such as limited freedom, being in a small space, getting banged around a bit in the process of being arrested) is not torture.
Second, the Bush torture program was predicated on a view of executive power that is nothing short of dictatorial. In this view the president was above the law if (in his view) military necessity required him to be. Note the lack of accountability and checks and balance. But not too that the scope of powers he was assuming goes beyond anything any elected official should have.
How far could Bush go? John Yoo, one of the architects of the torture memos, said publically that no law could stop the president from crushing the testicles of a child if he felt military necessity required it.
I ask you sincerely, is this acceptable to you? If you say yes then you have to agree that if it was your child you would accept having no right to sue or charge (or even feel outrage at) the person torturing your child.
I would also ask that for once you stop talking in hypotheticals, and deal with what has been done. Crimes (or what sure look like crimes) have been done. They were pre-meditated. Those involved sought to avoid punishment in three ways: writing bad faith legal memos to give bogus legal protections; two providing retroactive immunity to anyone involved in torture (the military commissions act); destroying evidence of torture (as the CIA did by destroying tapes of their interrogations).
So my question is, you’ve got a crime and evidence of a coverup. What do you think should be done about this?
Nice one! 
Torture is useless, morally repugnant, and undermines any moral high ground ‘we’ may wish to claim.
Shoot 'em all in the first place. Much cheaper, much less drama (and save so much money on rendition flights), and a much better deterrent. Isn’t that what they want anyway?
Besides, you can’t realistically lock up prisoners of war in an endless war of ideologies. When would you be able to safely let them go again?
One thing that has bothered me about this issue as of late is the often repeated claim that torture is not only wrong (that part I agree with), but is also ineffective as a means of getting information. Total bullshit, and completely misses the point. Sure, it is a waste of time to try to torture a captured foot soldier or maybe even a mid-level officer. The fact is that the torturer will not have enough context on the captive to know what sort of information he might know, and on what sort of topics or problems he might be knowledgeable. He will likewise not know what sort of topics about which the captive is ignorant, and will just say whatever it takes to end the torture. In the time it takes for an interrogator to learn enough about a captive to be able to have a clue about exactly what he might be able to wring out of him, that information has become stale, if not useless.
Leaders are a different thing altogether. Whereas the foot soldier only has a small slice of tactical-level informaton in his head, the high-level offficer or leader of a terrorist organization is full of a broad range of strategic information, much of which would be useful long after he is captured; interrogators will already know what kind of information the captive might have, and will already have some level of context in which to test it. I doubt all those instances of waterboarding were justifiable, but I also think it pretty likely that the interrogators got some very valuable information through using those techniques.
However, in my opinion, none of this justifies what Bush and his fuckwads did. The reason is that now that we have dirtied our hands with this sort of thing, we will become more frequent victims of it in the future. Future adversaries will likely assume that no reciprocity exists for how both sides treat captives. They won’t stop and think “Oh, the Americans only torture high level guys, so we should adhere to that standard, too.” No, the torture genie is out of the bottle, and our adversaries may use it any time they think there is a chance of getting any useful information.
In WWII, there was a very big difference between the way Germany treated POWs from Britain, Canada and the US, and the way it treated captives from the USSR. The Geneva and Hague Conventions were completely ignored when it came to the way they handled Soviet captives. There were two reasons for this. First, Nazi ideology painted Soviets as unhuman. More important, and this is what was emphasized in postwar histories written on the basis of interviews with both officers and enlisted men in the German army, was that the Germans thought “Why the fuck shouldn’t we rape, torture, enslave or execute these people? They do the same to us, and even their own.” In contrast, prisoners in the western theatre were treated relatively well because both sides understood that the other side was generally observing the Hague Conventions, and that lapses were not systematic or a result of policy.
By crossing the line on torture, Bush, Cheney, et al have very likely put future American POWs/captives at greater risk of torture or worse. Obama’s attitude about all of this is pathetic, and he is doing no favors to people in the military. The way I see it, at this point the only way to minimize the likelihood of US personnel being exceptionally ill-treated in the future is to draw a line under what has happened: bring charges against Bush and Cheney for war crimes. Demonstrate to the world that the US does not tolerate torture.
Given that the people that we are fighting have no qualms about maximizing civilian deaths, where exactly do you think that this will cause “encouragement” to treat our soldiers likewise? Any soldiers or civilians captured by these people are usually given quite a bit of real “torture” and then they get their head hacked off all while on some jihadi video which is sent for distribution around the Muslim world for the amusement and titillation of the “Arab street.” So… what was your point again?
As to all the other “refined” arguments. Guess what? I just don’t care what the Geneva Convention says on this and I don’t really care if our government broke the rules. To me, the kind of “torture” that was meted out to these individuals is chump change in the grand scheme of things. And… given the reckless abandon with which most other nations in the world break similar laws… who is really going to be pointing the finger?
Oh, calm down, I can just hear the squeals: “we all need to live by a higher code,” etc. but most of these individuals probably hail from nations such as Canada, Ireland or New Zealand. Safe behind the protection of a more aggressive (and easily therefore castigated) power, they can afford the moral frissons of outrage. For the rest who live in the real world, tough choices need to be made and there are costs either way. I am all for protecting US civilians over the “technical” breaking of a few of these laws.
Because again, to me, what is being listed as “torture” here is not really such a big deal. Doubly so because the people we are dealing with are the most barbaric, uncivilized, least respecting of international law and any other such claptrap of any group in the world… even over the North Koreans! So to accord them all those privileges and to worry about how these people should be treated “outrages” me. They are not fighting in uniform. They respect no code of conduct. Hell, if it is this much of an issue, my suggestion would be for the generals on the battlefield to make sure that a few errant bullets finish them off rather than sending them to the tropics where their biggest complaint is the rapid weight gain.
The one point that does stick with me (and which convinced me not to support these measures and remember I actually do not agree with the torture meted out to them and still don’t… my issue is with all the media attention and “outraged shrieking”) is because it does not really yield in anything of any value. Now, the administration (previous) claimed that the waterboarding did yield actionable evidence in the case of the three people who were waterboarded. Don’t really know about that as I have not seen anything to back that up.
I find these ‘now we’re fighting such a barbaric, uncivilized enemy who doesn’t wear uniforms or respect civilian life such that all bets are off’ arguments breathtaking in their historical myopia.
Take any statistical approach you want over the last century to tally up which countries have slaughtered more civilians and you’ll find Germany, Japan, Russia, China, the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy leading the pack by a wide margin. Correct me if I’m wrong.
The only thing which has really changed which would explain why we all the sudden feel no qualms about tossing out the Geneva Conventions and torturing people is because the Geneva Conventions were written by white people for white people but we’re not fighting white people now. We’re fighting little brown people who look funny, talk funny and smell funny so that we’re not entirely sure if they’re fully human or not. After all, it’s only been a hundred-and-fifty years or so since our ancestors we’re treating such people as less than human so maybe we haven’t fully gotten it out of our systems yet.
Once we start fighting white people again who look and think like us the Geneva Conventions with its prohibitions against torture will undoubtedly be right back on the table where they belong with no sense of irony at the double standard.
Live in history if you want… Most of those groups are not the ones killing people TODAY. We know what happens when these groups get a hold of a civilian, soldier or someone they just do not like… drills to the knees, light bulbs shoved up the ass and then broken, real drownings not waterboarding followed by endless resuscitation, starvation, real shitty prison conditions whether for cold, heat, dark, damp, dirty, bug infested, rape, electrical shocks, beatings, legs into wood chippers, packs of hungry wild dogs released onto rape victims when the perpetrators “tire” of them, women buried in dirt up to their necks and then stoned… so you will pardon me if I do not get all frantic about someone being shoved up against a wall who has probably been subjected to loud music for a night or two to “soften” him up. Call that kind of sleep deprivation “torture” if you like. Even point to the fact that it is defined as “torture” in the Geneva Convention, but to me and to most sensible people, I would imagine the previously described finger nail pullings and bamboo shoots under the nails and the hammer smashed toes and fingers will probably still remain the “real” torture.
[quote=“dantesolieri”]As to all the other “refined” arguments. Guess what? I just don’t care what the Geneva Convention says on this and I don’t really care if our government broke the rules. To me, the kind of “torture” that was meted out to these individuals is chump change in the grand scheme of things. And… given the reckless abandon with which most other nations in the world break similar laws… who is really going to be pointing the finger?
Oh, calm down, I can just hear the squeals: “we all need to live by a higher code,” etc. but most of these individuals probably hail from nations such as Canada, Ireland or New Zealand. Safe behind the protection of a more aggressive (and easily therefore castigated) power, they can afford the moral frissons of outrage. For the rest who live in the real world, tough choices need to be made and there are costs either way. I am all for protecting US civilians over the “technical” breaking of a few of these laws.
Because again, to me, what is being listed as “torture” here is not really such a big deal. Doubly so because the people we are dealing with are the most barbaric, uncivilized, least respecting of international law and any other such claptrap of any group in the world… even over the North Koreans! So to accord them all those privileges and to worry about how these people should be treated “outrages” me. They are not fighting in uniform. They respect no code of conduct. Hell, if it is this much of an issue, my suggestion would be for the generals on the battlefield to make sure that a few errant bullets finish them off rather than sending them to the tropics where their biggest complaint is the rapid weight gain.
The one point that does stick with me (and which convinced me not to support these measures and remember I actually do not agree with the torture meted out to them and still don’t… my issue is with all the media attention and “outraged shrieking”) is because it does not really yield in anything of any value. Now, the administration (previous) claimed that the waterboarding did yield actionable evidence in the case of the three people who were waterboarded. Don’t really know about that as I have not seen anything to back that up.[/quote]
They didn’t break the rules, they broke the law, domestic and international. If you are fine with this I guess there isn’t much to say except I hope no one you love ever gets treated to the whims of an unchecked executive.
Of course you have no argument and you know it which is why you resort all the time to the nationality of people making counter claims. As for the tough guy act, well, it’s really ke’ai, like a Hello Kitty Samurai doll, or a pink muffin pretending to be an uzi.
Given that the people that we are fighting have no qualms about maximizing civilian deaths, where exactly do you think that this will cause “encouragement” to treat our soldiers likewise? Any soldiers or civilians captured by these people are usually given quite a bit of real “torture” and then they get their head hacked off all while on some jihadi video which is sent for distribution around the Muslim world for the amusement and titillation of the “Arab street.” So… what was your point again?[/quote]
My point was that the people doing the torturing are also of the view that they are doing it in the name of protecting themselves and their country. We are perceived as a danger to their way of life by injecting ourselves into their affairs.
I’m not agreeing, just pointing out that the argument is weak. Nor am I suggesting that by not torturing, we “encourage” anyone to do anything. By torturing, however, we certainly give cause for others to do the same to us.
[quote=“CraigTPE”][
My point was that the people doing the torturing are also of the view that they are doing it in the name of protecting themselves and their country.[/quote]
The SS thought that too.
Dantesolieri. your support for torture mystifies me… “Oh, it’s not so bad, it’s just a little drowning”.
Hitchens had a similar view…until he underwent the experience himself.
[quote=“urodacus”][quote=“CraigTPE”][
My point was that the people doing the torturing are also of the view that they are doing it in the name of protecting themselves and their country.[/quote]
The SS thought that too.
Dantesolieri. your support for torture mystifies me… “Oh, it’s not so bad, it’s just a little drowning”.[/quote]
Dante’s trolling like Fred Smith. nothing to be mystified about.
As long as he’s not in the military himself, he doesn’t care. I’ll quote it again:
Base Details
[quote]If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour.
‘Poor young chap,’ I’d say-’
I used to know his father well;
Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.’
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I’d toddle safely home and die - - in bed.[/quote]
Siegfried Sassoon
How many nations routinely break such “laws” each and every day? Seems that I read about “torture” in Germany, France and other nations when it comes to illegal immigrants. Let’s not even talk about real torture in nations like Myanmar, North Korea, Iran… but it is the US and its actions that always get our paragons of moral rectitude, the Canadian English teacher, in a tizzy…
Not really trying to have an argument. I read the statements of the other posters on this subject in the previous threads and I believe that they were mistaken in trying to argue this out. Admit to limited torture that is mostly “technical” rather than “actual” and say like every other nation in the world: so? who cares? what are you going to do about it?
No one was drowned (to other poster). It was simulated drowning.
Again, I am struggling to understand what the big deal is here. Some people were roughed up but when they were the US intelligence went to such great efforts to ensure that even the damned wall was soft and that it merely made a good slapping sound to affect the interogatees psychologically rather than physically. You have three people being waterboarded admittedly for quite a few times. You have a caterpillar being put in someone’s cell. You have snarling dogs barking in their face. You have them put in uncomfortable positions for hours at a time or subjected to loud music or culturally insensitive situations. What you do not have is any bones being broken, any limbs being cut off, any eyes being gouged out, any electrical shocks being given to the genitals, any starvation (they have gained 20 lbs on average), and if anything overly sensitive treatment regarding their culture and religion. Guards who do not put plastic gloves on when handling the Koran are “breaking the law” but inmates who rip up the Koran to block the toilet are… what? acting out? which is understandable because of the rough treatment that they have been accorded?
And does anyone really believe that treating these terrorists in a civilized manner is going to get anyone else the same treatment? they have signed no treaties, they are not bound by any laws and they should not be given any of the privileges or protections. It is a two-way street and I am completely unsympathetic when I hear that some of them had such awful treatment as to be forced to kneel for three hours in the hot sun.
But, hey, I understand that we need to raise the bar, to set an example… likewise, so should all civilized Western nations… perhaps, that is why Canada has refused to accept any of the Guantanamo prisoners… strange that a nation so clearly obsessed with America’s evils in this regard cannot stomach to take even one of the Guantanamo inmates to end this mindless suffering that has so affected their delicate sensitivities? and concern for human rights? and the law?
Again, though, I do not support the torture simply because it appears not to work or deliver anything of value. Now, the Bush administration has officials who claim that it has or did in the case of the three waterboarded. We have not seen that yet so I am still not decided on this. Given, therefore, that this rough treatment does not deliver anything, I am on record as being against it. What I will not tolerate, however, is the bleating of sheep who claim to be outraged by such actions all the while living under the protection accorded by the forces that are attempting desperately to find a balance in confronting a new enemy with new tactics. Surely, those individuals who carry all the responsibility should be given some sympathy? and not just this endless opprobrium?