Well, wingnuts and neocons have the same standards for defining “not torture” as they do for “not rape” and even “not racism”.

At least they are consistent.

Mancow is such a clueless asshole. And he’s been like that for years. And his listeners are the dumbest bunch of frat boys you will ever not want to meet.

And now even he is saying that waterboarding is torture. Will miracles never cease.

If only more people would try to prove it’s not torture by undergoing it.

Fix that HTML - everything’s become underlined!

This could set a good precedent - everybody who is doubtful about whether waterboarding constitutes torture can have the technique tried on them, first.

</u> I just watched the video. There’s no doubt that it’s torture. It’s something horrific. He was shaking afterwards. Even in a controlled situation it was that horrific.

Meh. I tried.

The 1st U of Until seems to have been made an underscore tag somehow, because the site is broken.

On topic, there’s really nothing more sickening than listening to comfortable right-wing assholes sitting in a plush chair talking about how easy the detainees have it.  Mancow and Hitch don’t really deserve much praise for submitting to some waterboarding, IMO.  The difference between them and Hannity is that they were stupid enough to actually believe themselves when they blabbed that it’s not really torture.

The rest know perfectly well that it’s torture.  They’re just lying, as usual.

I’m so glad we live in an enlightened age, where we no longer consider trying to drown and suffocate someone to be torture.

Back in the Middle Ages, torturers were under the mistaken impression that Water Torture was actually torture.  In fact, centuries later, America mistakenly prosecuted people for doing it to Americans.  Those ignorant fools!

At least the controversy is over now…

The difference between them and Hannity is that they were stupid enough to actually believe themselves when they blabbed that it’s not really torture.

That, or they thought they were big manly men who could easily withstand it.  Hannity knows he’s a wimpy fratboy who couldn’t take it for a minute.

Since right-wingers absolutely LOVE to talk about how waterboarding can’t be torture because Navy SEALS do it as part of SERE training, let’s point out why SEAL candidates are waterboarded:  because many of them have a macho ideal of how they would react to being tortured and they have to be broken of that idea.  They are deliberately subjected to torture so they won’t have any illusions about how they might react under torture and understand what their own limits are.  Plus it makes them pay a lot better attention to the Evade and Escape parts since now they know what they’re going to have to deal with.

This whole thing is cockeyed. This idea that it’s not torture if you can stand it is utterly transparent bullshit and I hope that the increased attention that this will get will prompt people to ask the kinds of questions that point out how nonsensical it all is.

Torture is inflicting pain on someone so they will tell you what you want to know (whether it’s true or not). He said he thought he could last 30 to 60 seconds. So if you can withstand something for a minute without screaming for it to stop, it’s not torture? If it’s “not so bad,” why did he (or anyone) think we ever did it in the first place? John McCain not only survived but is sane enough (but for maybe a bit of an anger problem) to have a successful political career. Does that mean he was not tortured?

I am glad that Muller likened it to his childhood near-drowning. Maybe that will get people to realize that it’s not “simulated drowning,” like the conservatives like to say; it’s interrupted drowning. If they don’t stop, you will die.

Do conservatices really not understand that something is bad until they’ve experienced it themselves? I mean, sure, anything has an extra dimension when it’s happened to you, but is it really impossible for them to read about, or see video of, people like Hitchens who have undergone it and draw some conclusions?

If only more people would try to prove it’s not torture by undergoing it.

Geez, that’s actually gonna happen, isn’t it? Some meth party is gonna end with a bunch of dudes waterboarding each other, and someone’s gonna die.

Honestly, every pundit who claims that torture isn’t torture should be subjected to it, just to get them to shut the fuck up.

Hannity mouths off about waterboarding? Someone drags out a waterboard and tells the blowdried motherfucker to get on board.

They should do it to every single Congresscritter, Republican or Democrat—again, just to make sure they know what they’re blathering about.

Those folks over at NeptunusLex (the “until the pliers and blowtorches come out, “torture” seems to be very much in the eye of the beholder” folks) are some exceptionally stupid individuals.

How’d you find those guys, Jesse?  Turn over a rock?  Those folks are creepy.  (and always with the damn fighter and bomber plane pictures.  Somebody needs a big ol’ phallic symbol to feel good about themselves).

Do conservatives really not understand that something is bad until they’ve experienced it themselves?

Yes.

Another edition of SASQ.

This was a great idea.  Every media personality, in fact everyone period who says that waterboarding isn’t torture should be made to endure it.

And now Mancow can legitimately claim that he is a better man than Sean Hannity.  We should all send a message to him thanking him for his selfless act.

Do conservatices really not understand that something is bad until they’ve experienced it themselves?

No, which is why the uproar over a Supreme Court nominee who has empathy.  Since they don’t have the capacity to understand the world from another’s point of view, they assume that there is no other point of view or experience other than their own.

So, as Scott suggests, bring out the waterboards. If they can’t empathize without experience, let’s give ‘em the experience.  Perhaps the Manly Men can use this as a rite of passage…. you’re not a Real Man(tm) until you’ve been waterboarded…..

They should do it to every single Congresscritter, Republican or Democrat—again, just to make sure they know what they’re blathering about.

Scott on 05/22 at 05:47 PM

Cheney first, please, please, please, please.  with video.

“Perhaps the Manly Men can use this as a rite of passage…. you’re not a Real Man(tm) until you’ve been waterboarded….. “

Quite a change from going hunting and drinking the warm blood of your first kill… or in Cheney’s case drinking the warm blood from his first Iraqi child…

Torture is inflicting pain on someone so they will tell you what you want to know (whether it’s true or not). He said he thought he could last 30 to 60 seconds. So if you can withstand something for a minute without screaming for it to stop, it’s not torture?

Torturers are government officials.  They don’t get paid by the minute, or even the hour.  They get paid by the fortnight.

Awful lot of minutes in two weeks…

Mancow has more balls than Mannitee though, at least.

(still not saying much)

I hope Keith points this out on Countdown!

What does the it’s-not-torture crowd say is the effective truth-coercing characteristic of “inhanced interrogation”? I mean, what do they actually call part of “inhanced interrogation” that will drive someone to do or say absolutely anything to make it stop?

I’ve seen numerous videos and read numerous written accounts now by various macho dudes who had to try being waterboarded and every. single. one. has freaked out and begged for mercy within seconds.  Not a one lasted even 10 seconds.  And they’ve all reported being traumatized for weeks after the event:  Nightmares.  Flashbacks.  Anxiety even taking a shower.  And that’s what happens when it’s a controlled environment with people you know and trust doing it, knowing that there are medical personnel standing by. 

It doesn’t matter who you are or how macho you are or how much or what kind of training you have.  Once that primal, instinctive panic and fight for survival kicks in and the reptilian brain takes over, conscious, rational thought is impossible.  It’s pure instinct and few people get through that kind of experience without lasting trauma.

Bah. Even by the standards of DJs in general, Mancow is a lower life form. Too bad he didn’t really drown.

How can it really be torture if they can put it on national TV and then he can immediately sit at his microphone and talk about it?

It’s not torture simply because it is unpleasant.

There is absolutely no chance anyone is going to actually drown or be injured, either.

This is, of course, very much aside from the fact that such “intensive intorturegation” techniques produce little or no actual intelligence of any value.

The torture doesn’t stop when the truth is uttered, it stops when the tortured person says what the torturer wants to hear.  That’s why torture is an ineffective means of gaining any useful information beyond rubber stamping that which is not reality based to begin with.

How can it really be torture if they can put it on national TV and then he can immediately sit at his microphone and talk about it?

They can put it on TV because doing it to a willing participant isn’t illegal.  Even if it wasn’t consensual, there’s no law against airing a crime.

In fact, since Mancow had it so easy, I suppose you’re in favor of releasing all of those torture pictures, right?  The US is obviously not doing anything bad to those tar’rists, since that pansy Mancow managed to take a whole six seconds of it.  He only sputtered with a look of utter terror on his face for about ten seconds after he quit, too.  It was barely anything, he was still conscious even!  How could it possibly be torture to do that to someone for weeks or months straight?  And it’s just spiffy that a chunk of our military has spent years doing this shit to people, because that wouldn’t have any negative effects on the mind either, now would it?

Seek help, psycho.  I’m serious.  You’re a spree-killing waiting to happen.

There is an element to this that is just like exclusionary religious groups, people who think that their religion is the “true” one and that they are God’s chosen people. My religion is the right one and all other believers are confused or deceived.

Mancow and his listeners believe that their version of “reality” is the right one, all evidence to the contrary: opinions of people who know stuff don’t matter, history doesn’t matter, the law doesn’t matter, egg headed number crunching doesn’t matter.

His reality is correct and it’s just your stubborn pride and DFH ideology that stops you from seeing the truth. If you were honest with yourself like he is, then you would agree with him.

I think there is also a belief that people like him have that they are special, unique superior specimens of humaninty. This self evaluation isn’t based on any evidence, of course, but they’re kind of like smokers. Epidemiology says that smoking does bad thing to the human body, but each individual smoker thinks that the bad health effect of smoking won’t happen to them. They’ll quit before the negative health effects occur, or they believe that the smoking won’t hurt them like it does other people.

Or the Christopher Hitchens like belief that excessive drinking won’t hurt him because alcohol doesn’t affect him like other people. That same attitude led Hitchens to have to be waterboarded he could admit what should be obvious, it’s torture.

The radio host think he’s tougher than most people, tougher even than Navy Seals at the end of their training. OK… maybe he can’t do as many pullups, but mental toughness. He didn’t have a trust fund. He had to work hard to overcome his disadvantaged upbringing, therefore he’ll shrug off waterboarding unlike those silly imprisoned enemy combatants.

How else can you not understand what’s going on? It’s like he’s insisting fire isn’t really hot, and he’s going to stick his hand in there to prove it.

Ppigg - People do get injured and even killed during waterboarding.  Because of this, the CIA ordered medical personnel to stand by during waterboarding so they could perform a tracheotomy or administer CPR.  They drown, have strokes, cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest, etc. 

Why don’t you stop by tonite and I’ll show you how it works?  Don’t worry.  I’m certified in CPR.  I don’t have a defibrillator but you can just jam a fork into a electrical socket before you lose consciousness.

Adding… Mancow thinks that he has worked hard to succeed in a way that other people don’t, and that’s what makes him especially tough and unique. Mentally strong… 95th percentile special.

I’ve never listened to the guy and really don’t know anything about him. But “waterboarding isn’t torture, I’ll go do it” leads one to speculate.

My guess: brought up by single mother, suspended from a couple of high schools, didn’t graduate from college. Getting past those obstacles make him John Gault.

How else do you get to the point where a simple reading of the description of waterboarding makes you say, “Eh… it’s nothing,” rather than, “That would suck. I don’t want to do that.”

Q: What do Mancow Muller and Southern Baptists have in common?

A: None of them was held underwater long enough.

How can it really be torture if they can put it on national TV and then he can immediately sit at his microphone and talk about it?

It’s not torture simply because it is unpleasant.

There is absolutely no chance anyone is going to actually drown or be injured, either.

Oh good, PrivatePigg, Maybe you can answer my question then, since you seem to be very clear about the difference. If it’s not really torture, then why bother doing it? If it’s not torture, then what exactly is it about this unpleasant experience that makes it so effective and necessary?

“There is absolutely no chance anyone is going to actually drown or be injured, either.”

Ok so it’s scary. You think you’re gonna drown, at least for a few seconds. Still, I experienced basically the same thing when my scuba regulator failed at 30 feet, and I really DID think I was gonna drown before I got to the surface (moral of the story - don’t rent cheap Mexican scuba gear, bring your own stuff instead, but I digress).

Anyway, it scared the crap out of me, but within a couple hours I was laughing it off over a couple of Coronas. No long term trauma, just a lesson in what not to do.

KSM had the option of stopping the waterboarding any time he liked. All he had to do was start answering the CIA’s questions honestly.

Wow, that really is a very, very stupid thing to say.

Errrr, so, how is the CIA supposed to know he’s answering them honestly and stop the waterboarding?  If they already have the information to verify or debunk his claims, then why bother interrogating him?  It’s a lose-lose situation, and it’s an excellent means for coercing false confessions.  Actionalbe intelligence?  Not so much.

And even if torture WERE to be effective, it’s still morally repugnant.  We know better, it’s time we own up and act like it.

“They can put it on TV because doing it to a willing participant isn’t illegal.  Even if it wasn’t consensual, there’s no law against airing a crime”

That wasn’t the point. Thank you for the legal advice, though… My point was that if it was so gruesome, they wouldn’t be able to show it. If they can show this hideous act being purposefully done to someone on TV, it ain’t that bad. And that is self-evident.

“If it’s not really torture, then why bother doing it? If it’s not torture, then what exactly is it about this unpleasant experience that makes it so effective and necessary?”

That doesn’t even make sense. The prosecutor often threatens a defendant with jail time unless he names names. The defendant gets scared and talks. Is this torture? Apparently, it is. Because it is effective. I mean, seriously? If it’s not torture, why bother doing it? You can’t get results unless it is torture? Is that what you said? OR are you saying that anything unpleasant is automatically torture? You make no sense.

EricJG - Someone making sense. Finally.

“Errrr, so, how is the CIA supposed to know he’s answering them honestly and stop the waterboarding?  If they already have the information to verify or debunk his claims, then why bother interrogating him?”

Well, they stopped waterboarding him, didn’t they? They aren’t still doing it to him, are they? So obviously he told them something of value and they stopped. That’s all he has to do.

So obviously he told them something of value and they stopped.

What?

Ah. It’s always hilarious to find the pro-torture crowd come out here simultaneously hailing the use of torture while also claiming it’s not torture. Look, everyone knows this is torture. That’s why it’s used, and it has had a long history of use because it torments the victim, giving him the sensation that he’s imminently going to die. It’s all pretty simple.

PP and EricJG aren’t even making any sense—they’re claiming that this is an effective torture technique, while also claiming that this isn’t really torture. You’re playing both sides of the issue.

I also like the assertion that having your SCUBA gear fail accidentally one time in your life wasn’t so very scary, so therefore being repeatedly waterboarded by someone who is holding you captive and shows no sign of letting you go must not be so bad either.

...or they figured out that they were just wasting their time torturing some dude just so Dick Cheney can achieve an erection.

Torture is something sick loosers do to a captured enemy. They’re angry they can’t destroy the enemy, so they focus all the brutality on a captive. As far as intelligence is concerned, people who are not Dick Cheney seem to agree that its value is negligible at best.

Erick thinks all he had to do to stop the torture is answer the questions correctly. Erick is an idiot who doesn’t know how this shit works out in the real world. Listen to the actual intelligence agents they interviewed(NPR ftw)- they were getting all these memos from D.C. about how they had to produce “actionable, hard hitting, high quality intel”, now that they had the tools to do it . And they wern’t getting any, either because the people they were working over didn’t know much, or what they did know was months past its sell by date. So, D.C. kept hounding them for more information, which did not exist. That fact does not sate freaks like Erick or P.Pigg, who just shrug and go back to torturing until they get their jollies.

I used to listen to Mancow driving to high school my junior year. He single handedly got me to switch from commercial radio to NPR. He’s beyond dumb. The “Free Speech Radio” thing is massively undermined by the fact that he hasn’t got anything to say.

That doesn’t even make sense. The prosecutor often threatens a defendant with jail time unless he names names. The defendant gets scared and talks. Is this torture? Apparently, it is. Because it is effective. I mean, seriously? If it’s not torture, why bother doing it? You can’t get results unless it is torture? Is that what you said? OR are you saying that anything unpleasant is automatically torture? You make no sense.

What I’m asking is what exactly about waterboarding makes it effective? I mean, if it’s not a big deal—maybe unpleasant, but really nothing to get upset about—then why do it? What makes it work? Why doesn’t the prosecutor waterboard the defendant if it’s just something merely unpleasant, but worth doing because it is so effective?

Sorry you don’t understand my question, PP. I’m trying to be very clear.

He understands perfectly, ilsita.  PP’s problem is not that he doesn’t understand you.  Word of advice: don’t waste your time trying to talk to him like he’s arguing in good faith.  He’s not, and he won’t.

so - was it torture when the imperial Japanese did it to US citizens?

“so - was it torture when the imperial Japanese did it to US citizens?”

...we won’t hear an honest answer from The Brave Defenders of It’s Not Even Torture.  Unfortunately…

This isn’t something I say very often, because I’m superstitious-like. But PP and EricJG really need for something actually bad to happen to them.

Because seriously, guys…if a scuba malfunction is the best you can do for trauma? You’re nothing more than marshmallows. You’d have shat yourselves within a minute of capture, and you’d have died of heart attacks before they even strapped you to the board.

Also, we all know about your teeny peenies. No sense tryin’ to hide it

The conservative circular firing squad and Keystone Koppery just keep getting nuttier. I’ll never stop giggling if this turns into a big pissing match with puffed-chest troglodytes lining up to be tortured.

Thanks, Seraph. Yeah… I always hope, but it never really turns out to be a fair fight.

Jrod, I resent being associated with Private Porker.

The macho guys really love the illusion of control, don’t they? I think part of it might be the underlying dog-eat-dog mentality of stereotypical male bonding, so that the idea of being subjected to uncontrollable pain by people who really, truly want to hurt you and could kill you at any time strikes too close to home.

Sorry about that, Doc.  We’ll call him an unstable sociopath instead.

You’d have to be a sociopath to watch the Mancow video, in which a man is left sobbing and in shock from six seconds of waterboarding, and say that it was just unpleasant.

Then we have JG here, who thinks the rush of escaping death and making it to safety has anything to do with the feeling of being strapped down and having water poured over your face repeatedly for weeks on end.  What the hell is wrong with you people?

I guess in Pigg’s world, it’s not torture if there’s no bloody mess left behind.  I wonder what’s on those pictures that Obama won’t release.  Nothing bloody or worse than unpleasant, I’m sure.

ilsita - The reason the prosecutor doesnt do it, of course, is that a criminal defendant has 5th Amendment rights. You can’t do anything to force him to talk. You can make deals with him and he can freely speak, but you obviously cannot compel them to give up information.

What makes waterboarding effective? The fact that it is extremely unpleasant, of course.

I had a previous comment that was much longer, and addressed more individuals, but it didn’t get through for some reason.

You know, you don’t really need to go much further into the “debate” of whether waterboarding is torture than pointing out that the Khmer Rouge used it in their infamous detention centers. They obviously had no hesitation when it came to torturing or killing whomever they wished. What did they choose when they wanted to make people suffer? Waterboarding.

Apparently we need to amend the US Constitution to include mandatory “waterboarding” for all criminal defendants (maybe we should even waterboard both sides of civils suits too) because it quickly produces the truth, leaves no scars, physical or psychological, and is guaranteed to work*.

Maybe that would even be too limiting.  We should perhaps spread the wonders of waterboarding all across society.  Want to know how many guys she really slept with before you?  Waterboard.  Want to know what your child is hiding?  Waterboard them.  Want to know if the stuff that job applicant said on their resume was true?  Waterboard them.

WWJWB: Who Would Jesus Waterboard?...

(*May require up to 183 applications to guarantee results…)

You know, I read this thread right after work yesterday, and the comments had reached 21 (“BadKitty on 05/22 at 02:39 PM”—note, that’s Pacific Time, plus it’s slow by one hour—apparently it doesn’t correct for Daylight Savings or something) and considered remarking that for once, we weren’t getting insane right-wing trolls “justifying” the obvious outrage.

Had I done so, I suppose it would have been timestamped “3:30” or so.

Two comments down, we got PP at “4:36”.

I’m glad I didn’t tempt the fates (maybe they were wiretapping my thoughts though?) and put the jinx in writing.

But now I can say:

The trollery reaches—well, hardly <u>new</u> lows, but it’s down there in the deeper depths.

And by gum, it sure did take a long time.

Do any of you troll guys ever lean back from the keyboard and think a little bit about what you are typing? Hello, you are trying to come up with arguments for drowning someone, 187 times! Why do you want anyone to do that, regardless of whether or not it falls inside or outside some legalistic definition or other? Would you accept anyone doing it to you?

I guess one reason they held off so long is that this is exactly what the root post is all about—some idiot like themselves foolishly agreed to let someone do it to them, and see what happens next.

It was douche-deterrent in the megaton range. But the roaches did come scurrying back eventually…

You know what I find extremely unpleasant, PP, is when I wake up on a freezing winter morning, pad down the hallway and slip in cold cat puke with my bare feet.

Anything that’s not pleasant is unpleasant. No mater how many qualifiers you use, unpleasant still just means “not pleasant”—less than pleasant. Mere unpleasantness can’t possibly be the standard experience they’re going for. So, what exactly are they going for? Discomfort? Irritation? Achiness? A little anxiety?

Do conservatices really not understand that something is bad until they’ve experienced it themselves?

All bad things that happen to conservatives are “someone else’s fault.”
All Good thing that happen to conservatives are through their “hard work and determination.”

Thus all this “torture” talk is academic.  The fact they have never been tortured is because they are manly men.  Or if they ever were, as Jesse links above, it’s because of Evil Brown People.

I think my favorite pro-torture argument in this thread is that it’s not torture because he was able to talk about it afterwards.

The ENTIRE POINT of torture is that at some point, you will break and start telling your torturers something.  So yes, you should be able to talk shortly after torture.

We all know these things can’t be torture.  Torture is something a prince or a king commands to be performed on some peasant, carried out by some leather-clad hunchback with an eyepatch and a lisp, down in some deep, damp, dark dungeon far beneath a large and ominous castle.  It involves the use of The Rack, or The Iron Maiden, or red-hot pokers.  Flesh must be burned, or pierced, or grotesquely stretched, bones must be broken, and people left bind, or unable to walk, or dead.

Psychological torture?  There is no such thing.  Psychology only exists because of ultra-liberal academics who seek to justify their bleeding-heart panty-waisted view of humanity.  Those are the people who have “feelings” and “empathy”, and other such liberal rot.  They say stupid things like, “Oh no!  You forced him to stand for a few days!”, or “Oh my, you cruel people made him too cold or too hot!”, or “You rubbed feces and menstrual blood on him!”, or “You locked him into a coffin-sized box with a stinging insect!”.  You liberals are all gay.

It’s so ludicrous to suggest anything done in Gitmo is torture.  Why, there isn’t even a dungeon, or a prince, or a hunchback in Gitmo…

Do conservatices really not understand that something is bad until they’ve experienced it themselves?

Remember that earlier post about men who have daughters tend to be me liberal than ones who don’t? For a lot of people, women’s issues only become important when they have a personal stake in or personal experience with the outcome. Similarly for health care (Sandra Day O’Connor becoming a sudden advocate for universal health care now that her husband has Alzheimers, Dan Burton becoming an advocate for autism after his grandson was diagnosed) and torture (John McCain and Mancow).

Empathy is the ability to understand what someone else is feeling when you aren’t going through the same thing someone else is. Enough people lack this ability that they’re only going to understand and advocate for an issue when their hide is at stake.

Here are a couple of gentlemen who properly convey the Right Attitude (even if one of them says something nasty about America)...

Tyro:

Is it lack of empathy, or is it empathy suppressed until it becomes a mark of manliness to not give a shit about other people’s pain? For some reason as I read this thread I was reminded of Alice Miller’s quotations from concentration-camp guard training materials, telling them that they would feel shocked and horrified at first by the things they witnessed and the things they had to do, but that overcoming those feelings to do their duty was an even higher form of morality. Not exactly the same phenomenon here, but I think it’s in the same family.

“Is it lack of empathy, or is it empathy suppressed until it becomes a mark of manliness to not give a shit about other people’s pain?”

Good question.  I suspect the manliness thing is very helpful in transforming people into objects.  And ultimately that’s what this is all about.  They’re not human beings, they’re Terraists, a completely separate form of life.  It’s like the line from The Terminator: “Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

I wonder if that’s why it’s so easy to sell the idea that They Can Never Be Released! because They Can and Will Do Anything to harm Americans!  They’re being described as if they were X-Men with powers beyond the understanding of mere humans.  And somehow a military toilet that we hang onto just to spite the Castro brothers gets transformed into The Highest Security Detention Center in Human History, despite the fact they built it on the fly out of toothpicks and bailing wire.  The power of those 72 Virgins in Paradise that is able to transform ordinary Muslim people into Super Beings is so awesome we are utterly incapable of controlling it anywhere on earth but one end of an island 90-miles off the coast of Florida.

And America is a stronger, more manly place because some assholes in Washington got a hard-on to beat the hell out of some people because they were not Americans and shared a religion with some other people who hurt us.

I used to wonder how it was that people on the West Coast in WWII could sit silently by as their Japanese neighbors were hauled off to internment camps, and their possessions confiscated and sold off.  But seeing how easily one group of human beings is transformed by propaganda into a non-Human Enemy that we may torture and kill at will with no moral qualms…

It’s sickening…

I used to wonder how it was that people on the West Coast in WWII could sit silently by as their Japanese neighbors were hauled off to internment camps, and their possessions confiscated and sold off.  But seeing how easily one group of human beings is transformed by propaganda into a non-Human Enemy that we may torture and kill at will with no moral qualms…

It’s sickening…

The veneer of civilization is thin, or at least doesn’t extend very far outside our immediate circle. One of the reasons we must be adamantly and firmly against things like torture, indefinite detention without trial, and domestic “war powers” is because we will quickly and easily head down that slippery slope where we decide that all of these things are acceptable to any target we simply decide “deserves it.” In short, even if you think that things like “waterboarding” are acceptable in some kind of limited, supervised, manner against the “truly deserving,” the truth is that you, or plenty of other people, can probably be convinced that just about anyone deserves it, based merely on the whim of someone in power.

I don’t trust EricJG, PvtPigg, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or even Barack Obama to make those decisions. And even if I did trust someone with that kind of power, sooner or later some other idiot like George W. Bush is going to become president and abuse it. As I said, people don’t have much empathy for anyone they consider “not them.” Given that, the government and the public need to be restrained from their ability to make choices about whom to commit warcrimes upon, since they can so easily rationalize that “it’s not really a crime.”

I think the empathy question can be answered in part by Amanda’s post a (week or so ago?) about authoritarianism, in which she distinguishes between people whose sense of morality is generated within, by one’s own conscience, and people whose morality is dictated from without. The pro-torture crowd is probably scared brainless & heartless by the terrorists, because they know very well what the people they’re afraid of are capable of: It takes one to know one. (This is not to say, of course, that all the people they’re afraid of are actually capable of the atrocities they imagine, only that it’s not hard for them to imagine how someone fighting a holy war might behave, because they’d do the same thing. And they are.)

And also, more simply, when people are operating from fear and an inability to trust themselves to make moral decisions (thus their bizarre rhetorical question, “If you don’t believe in God, what’s to stop you from [heinous crime]?”), empathy is something like a luxury they can’t afford and can’t find a use for. I mean, if you’re in survival mode, because you’re afraid of what you’re capable of, and terrified because you imagine that everyone else is capable of the same thing, then empathy is as bizarre and incomprehensible as another dimension.

Here’s the post I referenced: http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/sunday_sermon_does_morality_come_from_in_or_outside/

Mancow is such a clueless asshole. And he’s been like that for years. And his listeners are the dumbest bunch of frat boys you will ever not want to meet.

And now even he is saying that waterboarding is torture. Will miracles never cease.

It’s no miracle.  There has yet to be one voice from the conservative movement who has claimed that waterboarding isn’t torture, and then personally underwent waterboarding, and continued to claim that it isn’t torture.  First Christopher Hitchens claimed it wasn’t torture, then got waterboarded, and changed his mind.  Now Mancow.

Take Hannity, Limbaugh, O’Reilly or any one of those chickenhawk turds and I guarantee they would all change their tune if they actually had the cajones to put themselves through waterboarding.

The problem isn’t empathy. The problem is ooozing with compassion for a total scumbag like KSM. The man is a human cockroach. nuf said

“The problem is ooozing with compassion for a total scumbag like KSM.”

We didn’t waterboard Nazis either…

You don’t have to ooze with compassion for somebody to not torture them.  You just have to have morals and decency.  We know that you don’t have those, JG, but thanks for confirming it.

human cockroach

What, do you torture cockroaches?  I’ve killed a few, but I don’t recall going out of my way to make it as painful as I could, nor did I get any pleasure out of doing so.  I guess you’re different, JG.

In any case, today KSM is bad and evil enough to torture with impunity.  Tomorrow it’ll be anyone who dares to cross the police.

No, wait, that’s today.

When my ex was issued pepper spray as part of his job in corrections, they all had to get nailed in the eyes with it so they would know what it felt like. When they were issued tazers, they all had to get hit with the tazer darts so they would know what it felt like. (And they even made video of that, I can pop it in the dvd player if I’m in a particularly pissy mood, heh.) The idea being that if they experienced just how strong of a sensation either on of these things actually is, they would be less likely to use it until it was absolutely necessary. (Obviously not a perfect system with all the tazer abuse out there, but I don’t know if all departments make the officers experience them, either.) Makes complete and total sense that any form of “enhanced interrogation” (puke) should be demonstrated on anyone who condones its use to make sure it really isn’t torture.

Hitchens’ complaint is they used water instead of vodka ...

Hitchens’ complaint is they used water instead of vodka ...

EricJG, not to steal your thunder, but over at MattY’s place, another commenter made a much funnier variation of that joke already.

EricJG, Let’s take as given KSM deserves every horror to be inflicted on him every minute of the day until he dies of it. God says so, and we can’t argue with that.

Whose humanity are you willing to sacrifice to see God’s will carried out? Your own? Your kids’? Or do you think we should find someone just as void of God’s grace as KSM to do the dirty work? And if you find a someone who fits the bill, are you willing to make that person your proxy, rather than just take him off the streets? (Remember the old saw: Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.) Have you read any of the reports about what torturers go through for the rest of their lives, no matter how righteous they believe their cause to be?

Anyway, I since you’re making the distinction, I wonder what you see as the difference between empathy and compassion?

It occurs to me that you might be just parodying—so forgive me for popping off so humorlessly if that’s the case. But whatever the case, this sentiment you expressed is worth addressing. And it also underscores the point I made above about people who are so freaked out by the idea that there might be other people like them, but working against them, that the unique qualities that we treasure as humans are completely irrelevant. Not just irrelevant, but bizarre.

I had a previous comment that was much longer, and addressed more individuals, but it didn’t get through for some reason.

Oh look it’s Fermat’s Last Blog Comment.

***

Our Eric probably has figured out that we don’t like torture because of what it does to us, not out of any misplaced compassion for Really Bad Bad Guys.  He just doesn’t think that what we lose was worth keeping in the first place.

ilsita:

Here’s a scary thing: some of the torturers are coming forward to say they’re troubled, but we’ve apparently also got a bunch of people so broken they are willing to do this kind of stuff without batting an eye.

When my ex was issued pepper spray as part of his job in corrections, they all had to get nailed in the eyes with it so they would know what it felt like. When they were issued tazers, they all had to get hit with the tazer darts so they would know what it felt like. (And they even made video of that, I can pop it in the dvd player if I’m in a particularly pissy mood, heh.) The idea being that if they experienced just how strong of a sensation either on of these things actually is, they would be less likely to use it until it was absolutely necessary.

then you should adopt a rule that not only do you try it out at the start, each and every time you taser someone, you yourself have to be tasered later for the same length of time.

because many of them have a macho ideal of how they would react to being tortured and they have to be broken of that idea

A friend of mine was in Intelligence in the Marine Corps. What he was allowed to tell us about their version of SERE training was very limited, and boiled down to: Everybody talks.

Paul, that is totally the scary thing. And people like EricJG are willing to either create more broken human torturers or to employ people who come broken. I guess he hopes that they will protect him from weeing his pants all over public message boards, as he just did.

We have, from the CIA (this year, not during the Bush Administration), a statement that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Muhammad produced actionable information which thwarted a planned terrorist attack.  We have, from 2007, the statement of the CIA agent in charge of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, John Kiriakou, that the interrogation produced actionable information which saved lives:

A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary.

In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.

“The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate,” said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News With Charles Gibson” and “Nightline.”

“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

My question to the Pandagonistae is a simple one: if you have a situation in which you reasonably believe that a captured terrorist has information which, if extracted, will save innocent lives, and the captive is uncooperative without harsh methods, is it better to let innocent people die than it is to use waterboarding on the captive to get the information?

It is very easy for us to sit in front of our computers and say, “Oh, no, this is wrong, this is horrible, we should never do it,” when we don’t have the actual responsibility of trying to prevent attacks, the real responsibility of trying to save lives.

I understand that the vast majority of my friends at Pandagon didn’t think very highly of President Bush, but President Bush didn’t interrogate anyone.  That was done by highly trained, very well educated CIA officers, professionals dedicated to protecting our country, and who are very well informed about what the law allows and does not allow, and what the consequences of their actions might be.  This wasn’t something they did on a whim, nor was it something that their professional (as opposed to political) supervisors would have pushed if they did not think that these interrogations were important, necessary and, most importantly, effective in producing needed information.

How many innocent lives are worth sacrificing to not use waterboarding?

It bears reminding:

Every person in enemy hands must have some status under international law: he is either a prisoner of war and, as such, covered by the Third Convention, a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention, or again, a member of the medical personnel of the armed forces who is covered by the First Convention. There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can be outside the law.

(as cited in the judgement of the Čelebici trial by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia)

Either Khalid Sheik Mohammed was a civilian, in which case he was a criminal and couldn’t be tortured, as PrivatePigg reminds us, or he was a prisoner of war, in which case he couldn’t be tortured, as the Third Convention, Part III, Section 1 reminds us, amongst all sorts of fruity terrorist-coddling that really shouldn’t apply anymore:

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

We could prosecute the monsters of the Yugoslavian conflict only because the USA was a moral beacon. International law can no longer be applied, because there is nobody to enforce it now that the enforcer is compromised

ilsita wrote:

Let’s take as given KSM deserves every horror to be inflicted on him every minute of the day until he dies of it. God says so, and we can’t argue with that.

Whose humanity are you willing to sacrifice to see God’s will carried out? Your own? Your kids’? Or do you think we should find someone just as void of God’s grace as KSM to do the dirty work?

But nobody was advocating using waterboarding on Khalid Sheikh Muhammad as a method of punishment, regardless of whether he deserved it or not.  Rather, the CIA was trying to get information from him that would be useful and actionable, and might save the lives of innocent people.  It could be argued that waterboarding was used past the point at which further useful information was there to be gleaned, but none of us were there to know what the interrogators were thinking; they may well have believed that there was still more there. 

“Someone just as void of God’s grace as KSM?”  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you are the person whose responsibility it is to get information from KSM, and you reasonably believe that lives will be lost if you are unsuccessful.  Does it mean that you are (de)void of God’s grace” if you believe your actions, which you really don’t like undertaking, will save lives?  Or do you say, “Sorry, no, I’d rather that others died than to stain my conscience with such acts.”

Phoenician, I think we should work together. Your proposal about tasers (and the like) reminds me of my own idea for a new law which would require all car manufaturers to install car horns that blast on the inside of the car as well as the outside, right out of the center of the steeringwheel. “You want to scare the bejeebus out of a biker, you’re going to get it in the face, too.”

(If that gets some popular support, then we should try for requiring that drivers can only honk their horns with their foreheads.)

This could be just one of many laws we could propose in our Golden Rule bill.

Whadaya say?

KJK::Hyperion wrote:

We could prosecute the monsters of the Yugoslavian conflict only because the USA was a moral beacon. International law can no longer be applied, because there is nobody to enforce it now that the enforcer is compromised

Actually, no: we could prosecute Slobodan Milosevic because his side lost, and our side won.  That really is all that matters.

General Curtis LeMay, the Army Air Force officer in charge of the b-29 bombing campaign against Japan famously said that, with the death and destruction those raids caused, had the Japanese won, it would be him in the dock, being prosecuted as a war criminal, and the Japanese officers who were unpunished.  It’s all a matter of who wins, and who loses.

Dana: it is appreciated, and it should definitely count as an attenuating circumstance in the criminal case against the officer responsible. Criminal intention of torture cannot be denied: he admits himself it was torture, and torture is a crime, therefore he is a criminal despite the good end to his criminal means

There is no other way to enforce international law than through the global hegemony and the moral purity of the USA. After two W. Bush terms, the premise is no longer true. The USA did wrong, nobody will prosecute the USA, and this devalues international law fundamentally

Dana: it is also appreciated you are not denying CIA interrogators are criminals, but merely ignoring the fact. God forbid we taint the reputation of war criminals

KJK:  Your statement brings into play the obvious question, is doing what is necessary to defend your country criminal?  The B-29 aircrews killed a million Japanese, because the war made it necessary.  Our Navy blasted the Japanese on Tarawa until Hell wouldn’t have it, because we had to take that island.  Our bomber crews killed civilians, including children, who lived around German armament factories and rail yards and power plants, because we had to weaken the Wehrmacht to reduce casualties among Allied troops.  Are these men criminals?  After all, they killed a great many innocent people.

Dana,

Everyone… seriously, at least those in whom you put your faith, even the CIA, knows very well that torture does not produce good, useful information. Torture will get you what you want to hear, but it will definitely not get you the truth. Torture does not, as a rule, save innocent lives.

Are you unaware of this?

So, If I were on TV, and were told that unless I pretended to torture someone, the plot wouldn’t turn out right, and I wouldn’t get paid, believe me, I’d do it.

But if it were real life, you can bet it all that I wouldn’t abdicate my responsibility as a child of god on this earth to torture a lie out of someone. Torture is strictly for getting what you want to hear, not for getting what’s correct.

Not exactly, KJK.  Rather, I am saying that their actions, if undertaken for purposes of revenge or sadism or something irrelevant to obtaining needed information, would be wrong, but when the war against the Islamists makes such tactics necessary, they may be ugly, but they are not criminal.

ilsita wrote:

Everyone… seriously, at least those in whom you put your faith, even the CIA, knows very well that torture does not produce good, useful information. Torture will get you what you want to hear, but it will definitely not get you the truth. Torture does not, as a rule, save innocent lives.

Are you unaware of this?

Except that in the cases of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and Abu Zubaydah waterboarding did produce good, useful information.  That’s the one fact you can’t get past, and the one fact it is intellectually unsound to ignore.

Forget the politicians; they don’t do the actual work.  Why would hard-working, honest professionals, agents who know that what they are doing is highly questionable, use waterboarding if it never worked?  That’s a straight ticket to being fired, at the very least, and possibly imprisoned.  The professionals would quickly abandon any use of such if it didn’t actually work, because they have their own professional hides about which to worry.

Dana: it’s criminal if it’s a crime. Really, does it make the world less secure to lock up a couple corrupt intelligence officials?

It’s criminal if it’s a crime, and the law says what is a crime, not morals. Crime does not imply a moral judgement, and the end of a crime can never cancel the crime completely. In any case, only a court can decide on the matter

Dana,

Look: Torture, as a rule, produces bogus results. As a rule. That means that when it produces good results, you can consider that an exception to the rule, and you still can’t completely trust the information you get.

If an unlawful, unconscionable, and largely ineffective approach (performed by either psychopaths would should already be locked up, or people whose psyches are being sacrificed for the greater good) gets good results, does your conscience sit right with that, knowing that another, humane method of culling information might have been used?

If you knew that something else might have worked more efficiently, and the torturer’s life could have been spared (because no one can survive that—people can survive being tortured, but *no one* can survive being a torturer), would you still feel righteous in your position?

ilsita wrote:

Look: Torture, as a rule, produces bogus results. As a rule. That means that when it produces good results, you can consider that an exception to the rule, and you still can’t completely trust the information you get.

OK, then why did the professionals at the CIA use it?  Clearly, using waterboarding is professionally risky, and might even lead to prison.  If, as a rule, it doesn’t produce anything of worth, why did anyone try it? 

Your argument assumes that the results from KSM and Abu Z were the exceptions to the rule, but the fact is that you don’t know that.  The story is that we used waterboarding on three, and only three, al Qaeda terrorists, and we got useful information out of at least two of them.  That, right there, is a 66.7% success rate, not the exception to the rule.

If an unlawful, unconscionable, and largely ineffective approach (performed by either psychopaths would should already be locked up, or people whose psyches are being sacrificed for the greater good) gets good results, does your conscience sit right with that, knowing that another, humane method of culling information might have been used?

I assume that other methods were used, and were ineffective.  But even if they weren’t, the methods which were used got results, and those results saved lives.  Yes, my conscience sits just fine with that; I know that there are people alive today who would almost certainly have been burned or blasted to death otherwise.  I regard that as a greater good than not subjecting KSM and Abu Z to discomfort and terror.

If you knew that something else might have worked more efficiently, and the torturer’s life could have been spared (because no one can survive that—people can survive being tortured, but *no one* can survive being a torturer), would you still feel righteous in your position?

Really?  It seems that many people have survived being a torturer, throughout the centuries. 

However, you have no way of knowing that there was any kindly method which “might have worked more efficiently” in the cases of Abu Z and KSM.  People are alive to day who would otherwise have been killed because the CIA got the information to thwart some terrorist plots.

KJK wrote:

Dana: it’s criminal if it’s a crime.

Sorry, but too simplistic.  It is a crime to simply shoot someone, but if that someone has invaded your home and appears to be threatening your life or the lives of your family, then it is not a crime to shoot him.

Really, does it make the world less secure to lock up a couple corrupt intelligence officials?

Getting the information required to save innocent lives does not strike me as defining “corrupt.”

And I have noted that my question has gone unanswered: How many innocent lives are worth sacrificing to not use waterboarding?

Except that in the cases of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and Abu Zubaydah waterboarding did produce good, useful information.  That’s the one fact you can’t get past, and the one fact it is intellectually unsound to ignore.

Acorrding to Dick Chaney and the CIA?  How does the saying go - fool me once, shame on you…

In a speech in 2006, President Bush claimed that Abu Zubaydah initially revealed useful intelligence, including information that allegedly helped foil a terrorist attack on American soil, but that Abu Zubaydah became uncooperative.[79] It was only then, he reported, that an “alternative set of procedures” was used on Abu Zubaydah in order to gain valuable intelligence and were “safe and lawful.”[79] He also stated that Abu Zubaydah had received training in how to resist interrogation, and thus more aggressive techniques were mandated.[79] These claims directly conflict with the reports of the original F.B.I. agents tasked with interrogating Abu Zubaydah who had been receiving crucial pieces of information from him without the use of harsher techniques[18][85][86], as well as other government officials.[2][87] The President further asserted in his speech that after the harsher interrogation techniques were applied, Abu Zubaydah renewed his cooperation and provided information that helped capture an alleged planner of the September 11th attacks, Ramzi bin al Shibh,[79] and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the September 11th attacks.[79] It has been revealed that the information Abu Zubaydah gave on these two terrorists had already been gleaned by U.S. intelligence months before Abu Zubaydah’s capture.[85][86][88]
[...]
The U.S. Government used questionable intel from Abu Zubaydah in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.
[...]
The final memo mentioned Abu Zubaydah several times and claimed that due to the increased interrogation techniques Zubaydah also “provided significant information on two operatives, [including] Jose Padilla[,] who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area.”[139] This claim is heavily disputed, however, by Ali Soufan the FBI interrogator who first interrogated Abu Zubaydah following his capture, and other intelligence officials.[18][85][86][105] In fact, the memo noted that not all of the waterboarding sessions were necessary for Abu Zubaydah, since the on-scene interrogation team determined he had stopped producing actionable intelligence.[139]

In short, these claims come from proven liars trying to cover their own asses.  However, I will admit to being wrong if they can demonstrate that these tortures, which are illegal under US and international law, were necessary and justified in a court of law as a defense in their trials.

Torture is illegal, Dana.  If teh claim is that it was necessary, let that claim be presented as a defense at their trials.

That, right there, is a 66.7% success rate, not the exception to the rule.

Are you really so benightedly stupid as to think a sample of three qualifies as statistically significant? Not to mention this is coming from the Bush propaganda machine—what the fuck would you know about what was actually done?

Back in WWII they figured out that you could catch more flies with honey than vinegar—daily chats, chess games, general socialization worked wonders where torture did nothing; somehow I doubt the Japanese got much actionable intelligence from the allied POWs they did torture, given how massive attrition attacks were all they had left by the battle of Okinawa. Torture is for spite and coercion, not intelligence-gathering.

And I have noted that my question has gone unanswered: How many innocent lives are worth sacrificing to not use waterboarding?

Mu. Your premises are wrong. Please check and resubmit.

Dana, read this.

Sorry - link here.

Dana: the officials ordering torture of the prisoners did so knowing it was a crime. They did it despite of it being a crime because they knew they could count on the right people being grateful enough to them. Criminal government employees are being protected by powerful government employees, and this is the very definition of corrupt

And whether the end of a crime completely cancels it, or in part, or not at all, is a matter for the courts to decide. If you killed a swarthy dragon who violated the threshold of your castle, you should expect to face a criminal court, no matter how righteous you, or evil the dragon, were. Again: moral doesn’t imply legal, and illegal doesn’t imply immoral. Nobody is saying the torturers are bad people, we’re saying that there are people who can openly admit being criminals without being prosecuted, and that this makes a mockery of democracy

“This isn’t something I say very often, because I’m superstitious-like. But PP and EricJG really need for something actually bad to happen to them.”

Well, I’ve dislocated my shoulder several times. Absolute excruciating pain. Far worse than waterboarding.

when the war against the Islamists makes such tactics necessary, they may be ugly, but they are not criminal.

You’ve watched “A Few Good Men” too many times and taken the completely wrong message from it. I’ve actually found the macho posturing by right-wingers on the torture question to be rather tiresome. The funny thing about the Nazis and Japanese was that not only did we capture and interrogate a bunch of fanatics without resorting to torture, but we also prosecuted them for engaging in the torture tactics that you advocate now.

“Do any of you troll guys ever lean back from the keyboard and think a little bit about what you are typing? Hello, you are trying to come up with arguments for drowning someone, 187 times! “

I get the sense that you Moral Equivalists would weep over the fate of Judas, while remaining indifferent to the fate of Jesus. You have compassion for evil, yet indifference for virtue.

I get the sense that you Moral Equivalists would weep over the fate of Judas, while remaining indifferent to the fate of Jesus. You have compassion for evil, yet indifference for virtue.

People with your thought processes come to the strangest of conclusions. First off, Jesus was screwed by one of his closest friends, despite warning Judas he knew it was coming. Second, it’s clear Judas wasn’t entirely stable anyway, being a hardline anti-Roman when Jesus himself was presented as being explicitly apolitical (“Render unto Caesar”, etc).

But then, the actual facts of first-century Judea, not to mention nuance in general, tend to be irrelevant to your kind, Eric. The only response you deserve for an absurdist assertion like that is “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

This reminds me well of an essay by Lee Harris entitled Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology:

[Let’s] call the phenomenon in question a fantasy ideology — by which I mean, political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy. ... What is common in such interactions is that the fantasist inevitably treats other people merely as props — there is no interest in, or even awareness of, others as having wills or minds of their own.

We hear a lot about how the Islamists are fanatics hell-bent on destroying us all, and thus the normal rules to not apply. And in this case, heroic figures need to step up and torture the captives to get what they need from them.

Obviously we are treating the terrorist (in some cases merely suspects, many of whom died in custody due to abusive treatment) captives as props, but we’re also treating the interrogators as props in our fantasy: he’s the Jack Bauer figure who embodies the goodness of America and the need to “Git ‘er done.” Things like the need for information, the fact that torture is a line that civilized nations don’t cross (certainly they would have been against it before and been impressed with the ability to “turn” Nazis with convention interrogation methods. After all, in that war, we were the “good guys”), or the opportunity cost of torture, given that conventional interrogation methods by skilled interrogators (as opposed to the CIA contractors) have a long and well-known history dating back at least to WW2 with the interrogation of the Nazis don’t matter here.

Discussing the practical consequences, opportunity costs, and facts surrounding whether any information from these interrogations was actually useful becomes besides the point: the pro-torture faction has adopted, in many ways, the sort of fantasy ideology that Al-Qaeda runs under. While Al-Qaeda fantasizes reviving the Caliphate from Tehran to Spain, the pro-torture faction has, for lack of a better description, “A Few Good Men” fantasies, where they see themselves showing the puny civilians and liberal pantywaists “what men need to do when the chips are down.” In this case, by trying to confront Dana with the facts of the matter of the use of water torture on KSM, PiaToR (your overlong nickname has really always chapped my ass, by the way) is missing the point: torturing such captives is part of a grand psychodrama where hard times and hard enemies create a scenario where the fantasy ideology that a lot of right-wingers hold can be satisfied.

““The problem is ooozing with compassion for a total scumbag like KSM.”
We didn’t waterboard Nazis either…”

Because their war was over when they gave up. There was no need to then.

But seriously, why the ooozing of compassion for mass murdering monsters? Is this like the same phenomenon that has hordes of young women writing to guys like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, some even sending marriage proposals?

In any case, today KSM is bad and evil enough to torture with impunity.  Tomorrow it’ll be anyone who dares to cross the police.
No, wait, that’s today.

tinfoil hat, anyone?

they’re coming to take me away, ha ha, hee hee
away, away, to the happy home, the funny farm,
where life is beautiful every day!

You have compassion for evil, yet indifference for virtue.

Who’s the virtuous character between KSM and the CIA-contractor waterboarding someone 183 times? The compassion here is for the American people and American values, which are the innocent victims in this scenario.

Because their war was over when they gave up. There was no need to then.

The stupid burns here. You are aware that we captured plenty of Nazis while the war was still going on, correct?

EricJG: did Saddam Hussein lose the war because he was a bad person (or Iraq because it was a bad country), or because his army was outmatched? Did W. Bush win the war because he was a good person (or the USA because it was a good country), or because he had the superior army? Was the war’s final goal, of turning Iraq into a deregulation heaven for foreign investors, a virtuous goal? Even then, does virtue elevate yourself above the law?

Conservatives believe that wealth means success, and success means moral good, and moral good means success, and success means wealth, and that all three mean unquestionable impunity, but democracy grants impunity to none of them. Impunity for rich, successful or even “good” people is incompatible with democracy: impunity for the torturers will create a special category of people who are legal to torture - a category that, being outside of the law, can expand or shrink arbitrarily according to who’s in power

impunity for the torturers will create a special category of people who are legal to torture

Impunity for the torturers will create a special category of people who can be legitimately, not necessarily legally, tortured. The legitimacy would be lent by unchecked executive power, instead of by the power of the law

For the thick-skulled: yes, by arguing about the erosion of democracy, I’m saying that the USA is slipping into fascism, and that there are enough fascists still in power to prevent a full recovery

Dana says, “OK, then why did the professionals at the CIA use it?  Clearly, using waterboarding is professionally risky, and might even lead to prison.  If, as a rule, it doesn’t produce anything of worth, why did anyone try it?”

That cracks me up: “the professionals at the CIA.” Professionalis like Plame? Why the unquestioning respect all of a sudden? Torture is not effective for getting the truth, but it’s super for eliciting the confession you want, to justify your behavior. You can’t “unpleasant” someone into turning coat, but you can terrorize them into telling you anything you want them to. Holyhell, I can think of several reasons the “professionals” would torture—all of them leading back to justifying the lives they’ve squandered.

As far as your completely ass-mined 66.7% waterboarding success rate goes: Statistics that rely on factors like “the story is” and “you don’t know” don’t sway me at all. And to further muddle up your position with factors like “I assume” and “But even if” to definitively conclude that disaster was averted, thanks be to the professionals that wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t correct, means that, essentailly, you’re asking us to argue your belief system with you. If that’s what you’re bringing to the table here, you’re not going to let go of it anymore than you’re going to let go of the ground under your feet.

Have you read about what torturing does to a person? Just because these people are still walking around on two legs or die of old age, doesn’t mean they’ve survived the experience intact.

“OK, then why did the professionals at the CIA use it?  Clearly, using waterboarding is professionally risky, and might even lead to prison.  If, as a rule, it doesn’t produce anything of worth, why did anyone try it?”

They weren’t professionals. They were contractors:

The CIA’s secret interrogation program has made extensive use of outside contractors, whose role likely included the waterboarding of terrorist suspects, according to testimony yesterday from the CIA director and two other people familiar with the program.

These weren’t CIA agents. IIRC, what happened was that it was the contractors who appealed to the White House to allow them to use physical torture to interrogate the detainees. Professionals like the FBI wanted nothing to do with these contractors-run-amok and went on to say the following:

Soufan said the contractors did not have any experience in interrogations. They reportedly came from a school where the Army trained American personnel to resist torture.

So these weren’t “professionals”. Your assumption that they were sort of adds fuel to my previous argument that a lot of this support for torture is basically something done simply to feed the fantasy needs of the adherents.

But seriously, why the ooozing of compassion for mass murdering monsters?

Eric, you are a fool. 

“It is wrong to torture” is not a statement based on compassion, it is based on morality.  What seperates the civilised from the barbarian is that the former have lines over which they will not cross, a code of conduct that says “it is not enough to call ourselves The Good Guys, we must ACT as The Good Guys”.

The very worst mass murderer (which, need I remind you YET AGAIN the majority of those imprisoned is not) is a human being.  Either we respect humanity, or we do not.  And if we do not, the difference between us and them becomes one merely of degree, not of kind.

You’re supposed to be some form of Christian - did you somehow overlook Matthew 7:12?

tinfoil hat, anyone?

Nothing says “tinfoil hat” like a first person account put on video hours after the event.  It’s crazy to think that we’re creating a culture of brutality and torture just based on the many accounts of brutality and torture, of course.  I’m sure this will all work out just fine, as brutality and torture always will.  These sorts of things are very easy to keep under control, once started.

“Nothing says “tinfoil hat” like a first person account put on video hours after the event.  It’s crazy to think that we’re creating a culture of brutality and torture just based on the many accounts of brutality and torture, of course.  I’m sure this will all work out just fine, as brutality and torture always will.  These sorts of things are very easy to keep under control, once started.”

Agreed. The CIA program works because it scares new Jihadis. It says “we can capture your leaders anywhere, and get them to confess whatever we like”. Nothing like Fear and Wonder to confuse one’s enemies!

“And even if torture WERE to be effective, it’s still morally repugnant.  “

No, it is JUSTICE. Remember when Jeff Dahmer got shivved in prison ‘cause the guards were looking the wrong way? Same thing.

KSM sent thousands to their deaths. Many ended jumping from the World Trade Center. They had about 10 seconds to see everything in their life before they hit the ground.

Wonder what ksm saw as he was being waterboarded? 72 virgins, or a vision of him roasting in Hell forever? Whatever it was, it was enough to get him to start talking!

Eric’s Zen philosophy of surfing.

1. It’s not the wave itself, but rather how you ride it.

2. No matter how many times you wipe out, there’s always another wave.

PS Cross posted on Dana’s Site

No, it is JUSTICE.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Except that in the cases of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and Abu Zubaydah waterboarding did produce good, useful information.  That’s the one fact you can’t get past, and the one fact it is intellectually unsound to ignore.

It’s also not a fact.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida—chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates—was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
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Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations,” and other top officials called him a “trusted associate” of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11—and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

The only response you deserve for an absurdist assertion like that is “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
BrianX on 05/23 at 08:52 PM

Thanks, Brian! This is, of course, exactly what I was asking EricJG, and PrivatePig—and now Dana, who has graciously joined them here…

I guess I jinxed the thread after all, because when the trolls came along, they came to stay.

Dana—of late I’ve wondered from time to time if some of us aren’t being a bit harsher with you than you always deserve. Your arguments here, on this thread, shut down all sympathy I might have been developing for you.

You claim moral high ground as a Catholic—how would Pope John Paul II have reacted to your “hey, torture saved our bacon in 2005 so it’s all good!” line?

Of course I doubt very much any such obviously self-serving statements coming from the CIA. Let them make the objective case now that there really was some such plot against Los Angeles actually in the works in 2005, and that they really had enough evidence to ask this guy questions about it, but not enough to frustrate the plot based on evidence they got legitimately.

And then let’s rake over that “case” very critically, because the CIA’s profession, with respect to the general public if not supposedly the President, is to lie. They are supposed to be a source of dispassionate evaluation of information for the President, true—but we’ve seen, throughout its history but more and more outrageously as time has gone on, how Presidents ignore and worse than that, punish its agents when they tell them what they don’t want to hear, and reward and promote the agency’s members who say what Presidents obviously want said—even when this stuff is questionable up front and eventually debunked completely, sometimes by tragic historical developments…And that’s the CIA’s “nice” mission. It also is responsible for covert action and disinformation—and no matter how many pieties there are in law about this weapon never being turned on Americans, it has been anyway. Certainly the “blowback” we eventually suffer for our actions overseas—rigging elections in post-WWII Italy and France, for instance, or to pick a more obviously terrible example, the whole Pinochet regime in Chile—involves us in the consequences of their arrogant, unchecked actions.

So at best, the “professionalism” of the CIA means they are devoted 100 percent—not to democracy, fair play, Western values, or any such abstractions—but covering the ass of the President of the United States. That’s at best. At worst, perhaps they are a bit selective in judging which Presidents deserve to be protected, and which ought to be allowed to fail—As Kissinger said about Salvador Allende, why should the “irresponsibility” of a nation (he was talking about Chile, but why not Americans?) be allowed to prevail?

If in fact the various agencies who have been involved in torture can ever make a real, defensible case based on independently verifiable evidence that they actually needed torture in order to save lives—that would surprise me very much first of all.  At this time, I laugh off all these obviously self-serving tall tales the “responsible” agencies put out. But if they could do it—the ethical issues still remain.

And along with such foul folk as EricJG and PrivatePigg, you, Dana, have tossed all ethics in the trash, reducing it to the level of “but we’re the good guys!” The CIA is Jesus, whomever we torture is Judas?

Dunno if those other two idjits claim to be Christians, but you, Dana, certainly do a lot. So in the Gospels—Who is the Person who gets tortured? You sure you are standing with the sheep—or the goats?

Look Dana, this is where you can’t have it both ways. If you want to come across as some kind of To-The-Right-of-Atilla-the-Hun thug who simply delights in victory, that’s one way to go. If you want to be the condescending disciple of Jesus who comes to bear witness to our degenerate, baby-killing, transgressive immorality, that’s another. You just cannot do both!

From my point of view you’ve always been on the thug side, but it hasn’t been clear to me you realize this. All those pieties serve their purpose, I guess, in clouding minds—yours certainly, and to some extent ours.

If you ever wonder how we can be so darn rude to you, remember this thread, where you tried to convince us torture was A-OK because it allegedly works.

“From my point of view you’ve always been on the thug side, but it hasn’t been clear to me you realize this. All those pieties serve their purpose, I guess, in clouding minds—yours certainly, and to some extent ours.”

Lighten up and smoke a fattie. Life’s cool, Dude, OK?

Torturing scum for vital intel = groovy. Killing 3,000 on 9/11? Not so much. Moral relativism sucks.

“We could prosecute the monsters of the Yugoslavian conflict only because the USA was a moral beacon. “

Moral beacon? We blew up little kids from 15,000 feet because Slick Willie didn’t want to risk getting any on our side killed because he dodged the draft.

“And along with such foul folk as EricJG and PrivatePigg, you, Dana, have tossed all ethics in the trash, reducing it to the level of “but we’re the good guys!” The CIA is Jesus, whomever we torture is Judas?”

The problem is, in today’s debate, the libs would all be defending Judas as being the “victim” of hate speech who was driven to kill himself, all the while playing Pontius Pilate over the Fate of Jesus.

The problem is, in today’s debate, the libs would all be defending Judas as being the “victim” of hate speech who was driven to kill himself, all the while playing Pontius Pilate over the Fate of Jesus.

Also, Batman can beat up Superman. SO THERE!

Actually, one reason I admire Superman more than Batman is that surely Superman could beat up Batman. But he wouldn’t!

EricJG, I wasn’t even addressing you because you established your credentials as a total barbarian right up front. “Torture good, ‘cause our side did it and We are Good.” Clear enough.

I pretty much forgot that even before Dana barged in, trailing incense, you were the one who suggested torturing people like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad would be the Christian thing to do.

So congratulations, you can be in the barbaric hypocrites for Jesus club too. Sorry about leaving you out.

Though, like Dana, you might want to brush up on your Gospels. Then either reconsider this torture shit, or ditch the Christian act.

Except oh wait, I guess the reason I don’t even bother to go to Mass anymore is that I figure this kind of, um, tortured “logic” is embedded in the very twisted DNA of orthodox Christianity.

So OK, y’all can be Christians right there with Torquemada and the Conquistadors.

I won’t waste reformulating the perfectly good logic that has already been adduced against your pro-torture positions on pragmatic, legalistic, and ethical grounds. The arguments stand.

Even if there were decent evidence from reasonably reliable sources that the CIA’s claims re KM and the alleged LA Plot of ‘05 are all true—which is pretty implausible on many fronts—I mean, consider the improbability of any “24”-style ticking bomb scenario (I’m cribbing from a poster at Slacktivist here a few weeks back; many readers here probably remember it):

1) we have caught a bad guy and know to question him regarding a clear and present specific danger with a deadline attached, but we don’t know enough from the same sources that tell us this much…

2) said bad guy is really really bad and so doesn’t deserve any of the consideration our legal system has evolved, over thousands of years, for good reasons, and we all know this in advance

3) there are no more profitable and less ethically challenging channels to pursue to get the information we need now

Or 3b) there are other channels and we are pursuing them but meanwhile, here’s this bigwig bad guy, so what the heck, let’s put the heat on him and see if he cracks first before those fancypants Forensics people bring in the bacon

4) Torture, and not some other method of persuasion, is the obvious thing to try, given the time constraints (which we know about how?)

5) Said big bad does crack under torture, in a timely manner, giving us the information we need to foil his evil plan.

Ok, put like that—how likely does this combination of circumstances actually seem? If we know enough to label someone or other “Al-Qaeda’s #4 guy” and “there’s an attack somewhere on something scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, but we need him to tell us where and what and how”—well, that takes some setting up in fiction. If the CIA’s claims were true, then I guess we might see how it could actually happen in real life. But the CIA, especially in a case like this, is a very questionable source, one long versed in making up implausible but scary scenarios.

Anyway—suppose this time it was true. This would complicate discussion of the ethics, legalities, especially the practicalities—but it would still be necessary to give more consideration than you guys do to the reasons why our society, and our nation in particular, long ago concluded that torture is wrong and should not be condoned. Even if you can get a good result in one case, what about the hundreds of counterexamples—where sincere and well-intentioned torturers are tormenting the wrong guy, or said suspect is smart and tough enough to mislead them until too late, or meanwhile other channels of investigation get the results? And the thousands of potential other cases, well-documented in history, where getting information fast is not the goal at all really, but coercing false confessions, “verifying” false conspiracies with an eye to “justifying” even more sweeping atrocities, or just plain terrorizing the populace as a whole with the threat of torture is pretty clearly the real agenda? That’s why we banned it; the fact that it’s also a poor way (if not infallibly wrong) to get information helped make the decision easy to make.

It’s hypocritical but true, and often pointed out among us alleged Christ-killer, Judas/Pilate loving liberals, that if in reality—say in this KM case—the “24” ticking bomb scenario somehow does arise, than decent authorities (if we further stipulate they are such) can after all break the rules, expecting to have to be held accountable for doing so, get the dramatic info in the nick of time, save the day—and then defend themselves in court, where they have to explain their actions and reasons. We don’t have to change the rules that are there to protect us all against predictable, nigh-inevitable abuses, in order to allow for these comic-book scenarios. We can judge reasonably after the fact.

And if it seems that I am being unduly skeptical of those noble folks at the CIA, it’s because naturally any defense of this particular act they may like to make will be judged in the light of their general track record for underhanded deception. If that leads to unfairly harsh judgments in this case—it’s still justice long deferred in a lot of other cases.

Since y’all torture-Christians think morality is a matter of counting victims, this should make sense to you.

KJK wrote:

For the thick-skulled: yes, by arguing about the erosion of democracy, I’m saying that the USA is slipping into fascism, and that there are enough fascists still in power to prevent a full recovery

Really?  In 2006 we had an election, in which it was predicted that the Republicans might just lose control of the Congress, yet those elections were allowed to proceed, and when the Republicans did lose control of the Congress, the Democratic majorities were allowed to take their seats.  In 2008 we had an election, in which it was predicted that the party in control of the presidency would lose, yet that election was allowed to take place, and the opposition candidate won; at the Constitutionally-appointed time, the winning candidate assumed the presidency, while the outgoing president and his administration left office peacefully.  The new president even thanked the old one, for having such a cooperative transition between administrations.

Where, in all of that, is the “erosion of democracy?”

A question for our esteemed pro-torture brigade: is abortion morally justified if it “kills” the next Stalin?  The next Hitler? 

If torture is justified because it hypothetically could result in something beneficial happening, despite no evidence to that effect, then are you going to become pro-abortion (not pro-choice, mind you, but objectively pro-abortion) in order to prevent the next dictator - or jihadist - from killing thousands or millions of innocent people?

Eric’s Zen philosophy of surfing.

1. It’s not the wave itself, but rather how you ride it.

2. No matter how many times you wipe out, there’s always another wave.

PS Cross posted on Dana’s Site
EricJG on 05/24 at 05:22 AM

EricJG is doing some late-night drunk-commenting again, as he did last night.

BrianX shows the difference in thinking here:

And I have noted that my question has gone unanswered: How many innocent lives are worth sacrificing to not use waterboarding? (me)

Mu. Your premises are wrong. Please check and resubmit.

This says something.  It says to me that, at least for Brian, and perhaps for the rest of the Pandagonistae, the notion that an unpleasant action may be necessary toi prevent something worse is simply not something to be considered.  Despite the statement of the Maori in a time of Kiwis, the very man in charge of the interrogation of Aub Z stated that the waterboarding was unpleasant but proved effective to obtain the information we needed.  The waterboarding saved innocent lives!

Yet you (plural?) simply refuse to consider such an outcome to be possible, or to be a thing to be considered.  That is not, to use a favorite phrase on the left, reality-based.

Nor have I seen any response to the point that, regardless of the political leadership, the waterboarding had to be actually done by well-trained and highly-educated professionals, men who knew that what they were doing would lead to trouble if not effective, men who had seen the results of the idiocy at Abu Ghraib, in which some of the participants went to prison.  If the people actually responsible for doing the interrogations did not believe that such would work, and were not seeing positive results from the waterboarding, why would they do it in the first place, or why would they have continued with it if it was failing initially?  That’s a career-ending move, at the very least, and quite possibly a ticket to the penitentiary.

The CIA is full of professionals; political appointments make up only a few top positions.  Yet where were the complaints from the professionals to the political leadership, “Hey, this stuff just doesn’t work/isn’t working, and we need to stop this before we put more of our professionals in jeopardy?”

At some point, reality has to intrude into this discussion.  You need to consider the real-world facts that waterboarding has produced useful, actionable information.

Mr Taylor wrote:

A question for our esteemed pro-torture brigade: is abortion morally justified if it “kills” the next Stalin?  The next Hitler?

If torture is justified because it hypothetically could result in something beneficial happening, despite no evidence to that effect, then are you going to become pro-abortion (not pro-choice, mind you, but objectively pro-abortion) in order to prevent the next dictator - or jihadist - from killing thousands or millions of innocent people?

The author of Freakonomics suggested that crime had decreased because the abortion rate was higher among black women than white women, thereby resulting in a greater percentage of black males being consigned to the dumpster before they commit crimes.  You sure you want to take the debate in that direction?

Mark, ultimately trying to point out to Dana or Eric that their Jesus wouldn’t respect their defense of torture (which would be a very Roman thing to do, BTW) is a losing battle.

They are the kind of Christians who only love the Jesus who went medieval on the money changers in the temple, not the Jesus who said turn the other cheek.  Their Christianity is as all about worship of authority and punishment, about strict (and arbitrary) rules for behavior and strict consequences for violating those rules.  Their Christianity is all about treating the Other as inherently immoral and inhuman monsters, who are undeserving of humane treatment.

Of course, this ignores, and deeply disrespects, the majority of what their savior says in their holy book.

I find it highly enlightening to see how the atheists, followers of non-Christian religions, and non-fundamentalist Christians here exhibit a greater understanding of the true spirit of Christianity than the “Christians” who believe torture is justified in any case…

The author of Freakonomics suggested that crime had decreased because the abortion rate was higher among black women than white women, thereby resulting in a greater percentage of black males being consigned to the dumpster before they commit crimes.  You sure you want to take the debate in that direction?

I’m pretty sure I asked the question I asked because I wanted an answer to it.  It’s the point of asking questions.

The CIA is full of professionals; political appointments make up only a few top positions.  Yet where were the complaints from the professionals to the political leadership, “Hey, this stuff just doesn’t work/isn’t working, and we need to stop this before we put more of our professionals in jeopardy?”

Dana, your problem is that you are being wilfully ignorant again. As has been pointed out to you, use of torture and waterboarding was not an initiative asked for and conceived of by interrogation professionals. It was an initiative of torture-training CIA contractors and approved by a group of people in the White House who thought it would be cool. The FBI, who specializes in interrogating suspects, immediate realized that it would be best to stay away from this fiasco.

Furthermore, the claims that KSM started “talking” and gave valuable intelligence after being waterboarded only once or twice turned out to be completely false. He was waterboarded almost 200 times, and when people dug deeper into what he said, it turned out he talked about a terrorist attack that had been thwarted years before. His waterboarding was actually a typical use of waterboarding in that it was used to extract a confession.

Torture’s a crime, Dana. Even when fighting the Nazis we knew that. The interrogation regime being pursued by the Bush administration was being run by amateurs and people convinced that the legal system was “holding us back.”

I might add another thing Dana—the reason you can be rather loathed here is that you are wilfully ignorant or dishonest. You constantly revert to standard talking points in the face of counterarguments that you ignore. It’s as though you have a rather immoral policy belief you hold based only on republican demands of what they require you to believe, and then you mindlessly pursue that road, repeating and repeating and repeating long-discredited arguments as though no one has ever discredited your statements. (you do this with gay marriage as well) It’s reflective of two things: first, that you regard ability to repeat the talking points as a greater moral value than facts. Next that you regard your duty to repeat the talking points and believe that you must “lie for the cause” in the hopes that someone reads only what you’re saying, in the hopes that they, too, will mindlessly repeat those same talking points.

It says to me that, at least for Brian, and perhaps for the rest of the Pandagonistae, the notion that an unpleasant action may be necessary toi prevent something worse is simply not something to be considered.

No, it may be considered.

It’s kind of stupid to consider it when the proposal is, “We must torture people in order to maybe get information that there are not only other methods of getting, but which is only useful if we get the information by those other means to begin with.”

And the idea that they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work is completely and totally asinine - they did it to three people.  A better question would be: if it works, and if it’s not torture or even particularly troublesome, why isn’t it used more frequently?  We have hundreds of terrorists and alleged terrorists in captivity, and yet not only was a tortured (no pun intended) legal rationale required in order to get those three people waterboarded, but we haven’t used it for what you claim is its obvious and sure purpose for those hundreds of other people who want to kill us? 

Simply making up a reason why you’re a steely-eyed reality warrior doesn’t work when your rationale is a trumped-up expression of your hindbrain’s need for vengeance and punishment.

I find it highly enlightening to see how the atheists, followers of non-Christian religions, and non-fundamentalist Christians here exhibit a greater understanding of the true spirit of Christianity than the “Christians” who believe torture is justified in any case…

Dana represents a strange phenomenon of conservatives in modern American Catholicism. Specifically, Dana is a Catholic living in a country that is officially secular and unofficially adheres to a British-descended form of Protestantism as the “norm” of the ruling class (eg, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist or the evangelical offshoots of those). If anything, it should be Dana’s inclination if not his duty to be skeptical of the government initiatives and ideas… they may not be outright hostile to Catholicism, but they’re orthogonal to the ideas of Catholicism and could be used against him and Catholicism if need be.

Insofar as one could perhaps justify the government’s actions when it came to a state with explicit institutional support and association with the Catholic Church, that’s clearly not what’s going on here in the USA, and instead Dana has confused the necessity of zeal in support of Catholic teachings for zeal in support of Republican teachings—the latter of which having nothing to do with the teachings of the Catholic Church. I simply don’t see the skepticism of government abuses that I would expect out of a Catholic. Instead I see blind loyalty for the Republican party and its talking points, even in the face of contradictory information.

“You sure you want to take the debate in that direction?”

Apparently you’ve already gone there and found the accommodations too comfortable…

So the author of a book has an opinion.  Does that mean it’s correct? 

The authors of Bell Curve have opinions too, but that doesn’t make their “science” any more reasonable.  The “discoverer” of DNA is a closet eugenicist, but that doesn’t make eugenics any more scientific or moral.

The Nazis had a truckload of “scientific” books, as well as movies and bombastic speeches, describing how Jews were ruining humanity merely by their existence.  Do we believe they were correct?...

EricJG: Judas was not guilty, he was a victim of a god’s whims, just like Jesus (Jesus called himself a lamb as an explicit reference to animal sacrifices: he would be the ultimate sacrifice, that would settle the bill and please YHWH forever). Look anywhere in ancient mythology, and you’ll see that, back then, it was considered inevitable and proper for people to be crushed by unseen forces, and this implied no guilt, because nobody owned their own destiny, not even kings

Where, in all of that, is the “erosion of democracy?”

Maybe it’s just me, but I remember a lot more things happening since 2000. Like the publicly admitted (I’d say boasted) violation of all possible laws on the treatment of criminals/prisoners of war. I guess your silence on the matter means you agree with me, that this is something that doesn’t happen in a healthy democracy, and since it’s happening, the USA is not a healthy democracy

Oh, Christ, Dana, you’re a moron. The asshole in charge of interrogations says it works! Like, OMG, what better source! It’s not like it gives him a job and lets him keep his own personal BDSM dungeon going or anything.

More on this at Dana’s site .........

http://commonsensepoliticalthought.com/?p=5906#comments

Dana:

Torture’s main effect is to cause people to say anything—anything at all—in order to make it stop. It does not produce reliable information; it produces panic, thought salad, and PTSD.

Torture is not an interrogation tool. It’s state-sanctioned bullying.

“It does not produce reliable information; it produces panic, thought salad, and PTSD.”

...which, of course, are considered features and not bugs.  Cheney was desperate to have “proof” of a connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq, “justifying” an invasion.  He also needed “proof” of foiled plots to justify continued dismantling of the Constitution.  He did not care whether it was the truth or not, he just needed something that could be construed as he wished.

He wanted it, and lo and behold, people who depended on him for their continued employment “found” just what he was looking for.  Amazing!

And since the NutCons thought they would be in power forever, they didn’t have to worry about their evil schemes coming to light.  And even with Obama’s election, they are this close to getting away with it.

Fortunately for Cheney and the other Reichwing soldiers, there are throngs of sycophants, like Dana and EricJG and Piggly, who are more than willing to discard reason in the service of their favorite political fantasy…

Mr Taylor asked:

A question for our esteemed pro-torture brigade: is abortion morally justified if it “kills” the next Stalin?  The next Hitler?

If torture is justified because it hypothetically could result in something beneficial happening, despite no evidence to that effect, then are you going to become pro-abortion (not pro-choice, mind you, but objectively pro-abortion) in order to prevent the next dictator - or jihadist - from killing thousands or millions of innocent people?

Your question falls apart because it fails to consider that we have no idea which unborn child, whether he is eventually born or is aborted, would become the next Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler, any more than we know which one would become the next Mother Teresa or Amanda Marcotte.

But we have used harsh interrogation only on people we knew were heavily involved in al Qaeda.  The reports are that it was used on only three prisoners, all high-ranking terrorists; we didn’t use it on every captured Islamist.  There was no utility in doing so.

If the people actually responsible for doing the interrogations did not believe that such would work, and were not seeing positive results from the waterboarding, why would they do it in the first place, or why would they have continued with it if it was failing initially?

You’ve never worked in a bureaucracy before, have you?  Or in any ideologically-charged environment?

This isn’t about their beliefs, by the way.  If I earnestly believe it won’t hurt you, do I get to punch you in the face 183 times?

That’s a career-ending move, at the very least, and quite possibly a ticket to the penitentiary.

No, apparently it’s not.  That’s the freaking problem.

Please read up on the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments.  You have a very skewed and naive understanding of human nature.

BrianX wrote:

Torture’s main effect is to cause people to say anything—anything at all—in order to make it stop. It does not produce reliable information; it produces panic, thought salad, and PTSD.

Torture is not an interrogation tool. It’s state-sanctioned bullying.

Mr X, your statement ignores the fact that we have produced good, useful, actionable information.  Not only do we have the testimony of the people who had to do the work, but we have the internal rationale of the people doing the work: there is no reason at all for them to risk their careers, and possibly their freedom, to continue with something which wasn’t working.

The CIA gets a huge number of applications, and has the luxury of being very selective.  People selected are all very well educated, have done well in school, and have impeccable records.  I don’t know if it’s still the case, but the CIA used to have a real bias for graduates of Ivy League and a few other “elite” schools.  There is a strong bias in favor of applicants who have travelled abroad and seen other cultures.  While an occasional potential bad guy can get through, no one stupid does.

“But we have used harsh interrogation only on people we knew were heavily involved in al Qaeda.” ...says the government agency you fear and distrust under almost any other circumstance.  It that really the truth?  We won’t know, at least for years, if not decades…

“The reports are that it was used on only three prisoners, all high-ranking terrorists; we didn’t use it on every captured Islamist.”

Again, this depends directly on the veracity of the various agencies/people who have a stake in spinning things for their benefit.

But here’s a good question for you: If we were only “harsh” on 3-people, how did all those other prisoners (maybe even hundreds) die?  Was it simply because their living conditions were so heavenly they died of joy, or because physical methods were used that went just a little too far?

“There was no utility in doing so.”

Actually, it seems there was a lot of “utility” in getting people to say the things we wanted to hear.  Very politically useful…

Mr X, your statement ignores the fact that we have produced good, useful, actionable information.  Not only do we have the testimony of the people who had to do the work, but we have the internal rationale of the people doing the work: there is no reason at all for them to risk their careers, and possibly their freedom, to continue with something which wasn’t working.

Aaaaaaand you’re assuming these people also have an absolute incentive to tell the truth, and that other methods such as the social engineering I mentioned above don’t work better. (We’re talking here about the same sort of people—and in some cases the same people—as Edward Teller’s enablers and the architects of Pinochet’s Chile. These are not the sort of people who are likely to let facts get in the way of ideology.) You’re either naive or envied the playground bullies growing up.

liminalist wrote:

That’s a career-ending move, at the very least, and quite possibly a ticket to the penitentiary. (,e)

No, apparently it’s not.  That’s the freaking problem.

Sure it is; I’m sure that you’ve heard of Abu Ghraib.  Seventeen officers and enlisted men were charged with abusing prisoners, and seven were convicted in courts martial and sentenced to federal prison.  One, Specialist Charles Graner, was sentenced to ten years, and another, Specialist Lynndie England, received a three year sentence.  The unit commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was demoted and her career wrecked.

The prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib served no purpose; they weren’t attempting to develop information from high-level detainees there.  It was stupidity compounded.  The agents who conduct the enhanced interrogations of high-level al Qaeda prisoners know all of this; that’s why, unless they were utter boneheads, they wouldn’t put their careers on the line to use waterboarding on someone like Abu Z unless they thought he had some pretty important and useful information.

Your question falls apart because it fails to consider that we have no idea which unborn child, whether he is eventually born or is aborted, would become the next Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler, any more than we know which one would become the next Mother Teresa or Amanda Marcotte.

But we have used harsh interrogation only on people we knew were heavily involved in al Qaeda.  The reports are that it was used on only three prisoners, all high-ranking terrorists; we didn’t use it on every captured Islamist.  There was no utility in doing so.

No, actually, you’re asking us to justify a policy based on the fact that it could possibly work based on things that could possibly happen despite the fact that no such event has actually happened and those who have any experience in the field whatsoever have repeatedly said that it’s a TV-inspired fantasy.  (This isn’t even to mention Abu Ghraib, where we imprisoned and tortured people who weren’t terrorists to begin with.)

So, yes, the question is directly relevant.  Can we justify a policy that some may find morally abhorrent because it could result in great benefit to the rest of us?  Suppose we had a genetic test that could determine the “evil” gene - do we justify aborting a fetus that’s off the charts for it?

Try as you might, you’re justifying a hypothetical.  So deal with this one.

The agents who conduct the enhanced interrogations of high-level al Qaeda prisoners know all of this; that’s why, unless they were utter boneheads, they wouldn’t put their careers on the line to use waterboarding on someone like Abu Z unless they thought he had some pretty important and useful information.

The waterboarding you so defend was conducted in 2003.  Abu Ghraib came to light in 2004.  So no, they didn’t know this.

Mr X wrote:

Aaaaaaand you’re assuming these people also have an absolute incentive to tell the truth, and that other methods such as the social engineering I mentioned above don’t work better. (We’re talking here about the same sort of people—and in some cases the same people—as Edward Teller’s enablers and the architects of Pinochet’s Chile. These are not the sort of people who are likely to let facts get in the way of ideology.)

I assume that they all have a form of enlightened self-interest, that when something like that doesn’t work, they quit doing it.

You just don’t get to be both stupid and in the CIA.

You forget, Dana, that the Bush administration spent years trying to remake the government in its own image, with secrecy and ideology trumping facts. The corruption was pervasive, from the USGS to NASA to HHS to almost every other part of the government that could be used to serve the neocon ideology. And this was only what was visible to the public—can you seriously sit there and tell me with a straight face that in the secret corners of the government, already long controlled by professional nest-featherers and ideological holdovers from the Cold War, weren’t thoroughly and completely coopted by the neocon agenda?

I assume that they all have a form of enlightened self-interest, that when something like that doesn’t work, they quit doing it.

You just don’t get to be both stupid and in the CIA.

*tweet* Flag on the play.

On the defense, argument from personal incredulity, five yards, repeat third down.

Damn, I think I broke Dana… it’s okay, Dana. I’m sure you can come up with more talking points.

Dana on 05/24 at 10:00 AM

Dana on 05/24 at 12:02 PM

I do have to hand it to the guy: he took a break for church on a Sunday morning.

“I do have to hand it to the guy: he took a break for church on a Sunday morning.”

Here are some thoughts on that:
In your pomp and all your glory you’re a poorer man than me,
as you lick the boots of death born out of fear.
I don’t believe you:
you had the whole damn thing all wrong—
He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.
- Jethro Tull

Yeah, I’m sure Jesus is very impressed that someone can support torture and still go to church and listen to tales of his infinite love…

I do have to hand it to the guy: he took a break for church on a Sunday morning.

For this he gets a cookie?

What am I saying?  He gets cookies for not loathing his daughters.  Gosh but that privilege is nifty stuff.

I assume that they all have a form of enlightened self-interest, that when something like that doesn’t work, they quit doing it.

You just don’t get to be both stupid and in the CIA.
Dana on 05/24 at 08:34 AM

Rational self-interest is relative to the incentives that actually operate in the system you are trying to navigate and survive in.

The CIA, according to its charter and press releases, exists to gather and objectively assess the state of the world as it is relevant to the President of the United States of America’s foreign-policy decision-making. That’s what they say.

Reality is, Presidents and their appointees generally know what they want to hear, to rationalize what they want to do; we can evaluate whether or not the CIA has lived up to this aspect of its mission by how often their findings have been bent from reasonable extrapolations of the evidence available at the time toward these pre-set justifications the Presidents and their people wanted to hear. Unfortunately this has happened very often, and increasingly often as time has progressed.

The careerists within the Agency know the real criteria on which their careers depend and respond accordingly.

Meanwhile there is the other dimension of the Agency’s operations—covert action, disinformation, propaganda. This too has a bearing on the Agency’s careerists’ rational evaluation of their own smart career moves.

I get a fair amount of information from books rather than online still, and unfortunately this means that often I know about things that are hard for me to cite online. I really ought to take notes as I’m reading I guess, then I could at least cite the book. As it happens I read one over Christmastime, about these very sorts of issues—the extent to which the CIA has been compromised by political interference and reactive political calculus by its own people.

It included a chapter about double agents, recruited by the KGB, and featured one dude whose name I forget. But he was a known drunk, who got very greedy for money in the 1980s. Despite all his known liabilities his superiors not only kept him on but left him a great deal of access to secret files; for money and out of bitterness he compromised a great many Soviet citizens whom the CIA had managed to recruit; they all vanished, presumably dead, within a few months in the mid-80s.

Stupidity has many dimensions, it is not something measured once and for all by an SAT test or IQ score. This guy himself, whose career spanned decades before he was caught, was obviously not the brightest bulb. What excuses can you make for his allegedly intelligent superiors, who left so many avenues for this kind of corruption wide open under a clannish culture of “trust our own?” No matter how many stupid and dangerous things they had already been caught doing?

Dana, I’m curious:  Why is torture the only way to save innocent lives?  Information isn’t actionable until it’s been confirmed.  That means that we can find other ways to get the information.  Besides, if torture is an effective, infallible method of interrogation, then I suppose untold numbers of spinsters and unpopular people with desirable property really WERE witches during the 16-17th centuries?  And everyone the Inquisition handed over to be burned was a devil-worshiping heretic?
  And now let’s turn it around:  People have been released from Gitmo after it was determined they’d done nothing wrong.  The Army, CIA, NSA, etc, are fallible.  How many innocents are you willing to torture in pursuit of actionable intel?  How many innocents are you willing to turn into torturers?  How much profit is there to gain the world at the expense of our national soul?
  Torture is immoral, regardless of intent or results.  It is an evil act, one that humans have no right to inflict on one another.  How much phony utilitarianism are you willing to bury your morals under?

dana, you fail: “You need to consider the real-world facts that waterboarding has produced useful, actionable information. “

because these facts do not exist. this is a lie. so shut up and go home since you refuse to participate honestly in a discussion. you lie, you’re out of the game. unless you can produce this evidence, you’re essentially making shit up.

also dana, stop lying about being a catholic. a real catholic respects the pope’s authority, as well as jesus’ actual teachings, and JPII denounced the iraq police state (because really, this is not a war. we’re not fighting for any goals at all) specifically.

oh and this? ““From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”” um, on what authority should we actually believe that? an unsubstantiated claim from someone in the business of lying is laughable.

““From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.””

Kiriakou is quite clearly lying or uninformed. He claimed that Zubaydah buckled almost immediately after being waterboarded. Later we learned that he was waterboarded 83 times over the course of a month. It’s unclear what Kiriakou’s role is in this whole kerfluffle: he was put up to the public to simultaneously discuss the value of waterboarding while also condemning the use of torture. And yet the claims he made turned out to be false.

And even Kiriakou claimed that we shouldn’t torture, given that (a) it’s a warcrime, and we’re supposed to be the “good guys” and (b) it’s unnecessary, since conventional interrogation techniques by actual interrogators (rather than amateur CIA contractors) work fine without resorting to use of torture.

But we have used harsh interrogation only on people we knew were heavily involved in al Qaeda.  The reports are that it was used on only three prisoners, all high-ranking terrorists; we didn’t use it on every captured Islamist.  There was no utility in doing so.

That’s funny, because I remember there being more than three people in the Abu Ghraib photos.

I suppose the thousands of unreleased torture photos will be of only three guys, though.  After all, that’s what someone in the CIA said, so it must be true.

I suppose if the CIA released a report stating that the world is in fact a flat disc, you’d believe that too, Dana.

That’s funny, because I remember there being more than three people in the Abu Ghraib photos.

That’s the way Dana works, JRod.  He takes one fact - that the CIA currently admits to only engaging on serial waterboarding on three named prisoners - and expands this out to fit his rhetorical world-view - that enhanced interrogation was only ever used on three high-level terrorists.  He’s been told about the deaths in custody - he ignores them.  He’s been told that waterboarding is torture - he ignores this. He’s been told about the other tortures - he ignores them. 

And then, having built his little fantasy castle in the air, he paints it a pretty sparkly colour - “we didn’t use it on every captured Islamist.  There was no utility in doing so.”.

I used to think it was cognitive dissonance at work.  Now I’m leaning towards the deliberate justification of something he knows full well is evil.  If Dante was right, that would put him in the Eighth Circle of the Inferno after he passes.

You just don’t get to be both stupid and in the CIA.

You just don’t get to be both stupid and a Stanford student, yet the Stanford prison experiment still happened.  Smart’s no defense against evil.

moo

Another great Aerosmith video .... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4AxQXmasg4&feature=related

You just don’t get to be both stupid and in the CIA

You don’t get to be both stupid and the “Leader of the Free World” and yet we have the eight year reign of GWB…

Well Eric’s run out of things to say…

The whole thread is dead. nuf said.