It sure does.
> At DETENTION SITE COBALT, detainees were often held down, naked, on a tarp on the floor, with the tarp pulled up around them to form a makeshift tub, while cold or refrigerated water was poured on them. Others were hosed down repeatedly while they were shackled naked, in the standing sleep deprivation position. These same detainees were subsequently placed in rooms with temperatures ranging from 59 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
> two detainees that each had a broken foot were also subjected to walling, stress positions, and cramped confinement, despite the note in their interrogation plans that these specific enhanced interrogation techniques were not requested because of the medical condition of the detainees.
> CIA records indicate that Majid Khan cooperated with the feedings and was permitted to infuse the fluids and nutrients himself. After approximately three weeks, the CIA developed a more aggressive treatment regimen "without unnecessary conversation." Majid Khan was then subjected to involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration, which included two bottles of Ensure. Later that same day, Majid Khan's "lunch tray," consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was "pureed" and rectally infused. Additional sessions of rectal feeding and hydration followed.
edit: And I mean those are just the emotive gut-wrenching things. Skimming the rest of it, it's filled to the brim with the CIA lying about the extent, efficacy and importance of the program. To me, that is the more worrying part. Anyone who's studied basic psychology gets taught Zimbardo and knows what happens when you run an unregulated prison. While disgusting it's not surprising.
But what is really surprising is the extent to which the CIA was willing to lie and obscure the truth even to their superiors.
> Additional sessions of rectal feeding and hydration followed. In addition to his hunger strikes, Majid Klian engaged in acts of self-harm that included attempting to cut his wrist on two occasions, an attempt to chew into his arm at the inner elbow, an attempt to cut a vein in the top of his foot, and an attempt to cut into his skin at the elbow joint using a filed toothbrush.
Page 115
That is the cold truth of that statement. This is fucking disgusting, and someone needs to be held accountable.
The citizens of the United States need to be held accountable. Sorry, someone has to start looking at the root of the problem.
The new law authorizes the use of military force to
liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied
country being held by the court, which is located in
The Hague. This provision, dubbed the "Hague invasion
clause," has caused a strong reaction from U.S. allies
around the world [...]
The US has engaged more positively (but without any moves toward ratification or even retracting the purported retraction of its signature) with the ICC under the Obama Administration.
Start by phoning your representative's office. Today. Tomorrow. The day after that. Every day, ask for your representative's statement on CIA torture. Ask why they haven't condemned it more thoroughly; are they in favour of torture? What exactly are they going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again? Really? Just that? That's not enough. What else? Talk to your neighbours, friends, family, colleagues. Ask them to do the same. Send letters. Send eMails. Visit in person. Don't stop.
And not even just the US law. I'm sure what the Nazis did was totally legal by their own laws, and yet they were still punished. Some crimes supercede local laws.
I'm sure all the previous people who used politics to change things did indeed find it an easy ride. Martin King basically phoned in his efforts, didn't he? And I recall Pankhurst effected her changes with a single stern letter to the London Times.
In the end, these people need to be prosecuted in order to lock them up. That means the DoJ needs to do its job, but in the corrupt system of the US, it also means that Congress needs to understand the gravity of the situation.
Consider for a moment: you can vote for spam or canned tuna.
Hilarious.
How do you think you can stage a revolution with a minority of the population behind you, while the powers that be are as well-armed and as eager to use violence as they are in the US?
You've got a better chance of voting both parties out of office with a minority vote, and fixing the broken system that people are so disenchanted with.
Your mistake is that you believe that the options they're giving you are the only ones. You can make a third option. If you can get enough people behind you to stage a credible revolution, you can easily get enough people to vote for your third option.
It's totally true that the US electoral system is broken and corrupt and doesn't do justice to the vote of the people, but it's not yet to the point that the vote doesn't matter at all. People do still need to vote, and alternatives to the two ruling parties are still legal. You can take advantage of that to stage a much more peaceful revolution through the ballot box.
this that
you speak of rats.
---
geese. a world of peace
you stumble stammer
pound your fist
an’ i tell you there are no politics
you swear
tell me how much you care
---
you cheat the lunch counter man
out of a pack of cigarettes
an’ i tell you there are no politics
you tell me of goons’
graves. ginks an’ finks
an’ of what you’ve read
---
an’ how things should be
an’ what you’d do if . . .
an i say someone’s been
tamperin’ with your head
you jump
raise your voice
---
an’ gyrate yourself
t’ the tone of principles
your arm is raised
an’ i tell you there are no politics
in the afternoon you run
t’ keep appointments
---
with false lovers
an’ this leaves you
drained by nightfall
you ask me questions
an’ i say that every question
if it’s a truthful question
---
can be answered by askin’ it
you stomp
get mad
i say it’s got nothin’ t’ do with
gertrude stein
you turn your eyes
---
t’ the radio
an’ tell me what a
wasteland exists in television
you rant an’ rave
of poverty
your fingers crawl the walls
---
the screen door leaves black marks
across your nose
your breath remains on
window glass
bullfight posters hang crooked above your head
an’ the phone rings constantly
---
you tell me how much i’ve changed
as if that is all there is t’ say
out of the side of your mouth
while talkin’ on the wires
in a completely different
tone of voice
---
than you had a minute ago
when speakin’ t’ me about something else
i say what’s this about changes?
you say "let’s go get drunk"
light a cigarette
"an’ throw up on the world"
---
you go t’ your closet
mumblin’ about the phoniness of churches
an’ spastic national leaders
i say groovy but
also holy hollowness too
yes hollow holiness
---
an’ that some of my best friends
know people that go t’ church
you blow up
slam doors
say "can’t no one say nothin’ t’ you"
i say "what do You think?"
---
your face laughs
you say "oh yeeeeeaah?"
i’m gonna break up i say
an’ reach for your coat
‘neath piles of paper slogans
i say your house is dirty
---
you say you should talk
your hallway stinks as
we walk through it
your stairs tilt drastically
your railing’s rotted
an’ there’s blood at the
---
bottom of your steps
you say t’ meet bricks with bricks
i say t’ meet bricks with chalk
you tell me monster floor plans
an’ i tell you about a bookie shop
in boston givin’ odds on the presidential
---
race
i’m not gonna bet for a while i say
little children
shoot craps
in the alley garbage pot
you say "nothin’s perfect"
---
an’ i tell you again
there are no
politics
----
Bob Dylan - some other kinds of songs.
Working in groups is what makes it so damn easy to discredit, re-brand and dilute movements. Protesting? C'mon, we're way past the useful application of protesting.
Anyone not doing that, is guilty of condoning this crime, and ensuring that it can and will happen again in the future.
The best thing a "citizen" can do is recognize the state is foundationally unethical and has no legitimate political authority and never did. [1] Once we leave behind the mysticism of state authority, perhaps we can find better ways to organize society in ways that are ethically sound.
[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Auth...
You need people on your side. You need a majority of Americans on your side. And once you've got that, you can vote the politicians out of office, elect some better ones, and finally see justice done. And maybe before that, you can use the threat of this happening to get the current crop of politicians to finally care about justice.
The root of the problem didn't start at the voting booth, "Oh I'll check yes to torture those terrorist", or "I'm going to write my Congressmen telling them to torture some folks". In fact Congress voted to outlaaw waterboarding: http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/14/us-security-usa-wa... (although it was vetoed by President Bush). This report will help to further clamp down on brutal interrogation techniques. It will push Congress and President Obama to resolve the issue. The CIA, in fact mislead any type of oversight over the torture programs. So instead of jumping to "we're all blame" conclusions, why don't you blame the people in charge that secured the funding for these officers to do it?
When the institution that is performing these acts out-and-out lies about the impact and severity, how can random citizens be held accountable? That honestly makes no sense to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner...
>When the institution that is performing these acts out-and-out lies about the impact and severity, how can random citizens be held accountable? That honestly makes no sense to me.
because the institutions and individuals doing it know that they will go unpunished once the truth gets discovered. Whenever stuff like this surfaces nobody gets punished and thus the citizens/society give clear approval to the actions that have already been perpetrated and to perpetrate it in the future as long as visibility of convenient "ignorance" is maintained.
[0]: https://twitter.com/Ethan_Heilman/status/542386688329125888/...
[1]: https://twitter.com/Ethan_Heilman/status/542385586313502720/...
[2]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1376...
If you are not interested in someone torturing on your behalf, you need to speak out, and loudly.
It's people. It's people among us.
It's sickening.
The common man is even more detached from the powers that be than previously assumed (which was already low).
We knew - we knew - that detainees were being tortured. We didn't know how many; nor for how long; nor the exact methods; but we did know that it was happening.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/todays-cia-critics-on...
2. There is abundant proof that the US engaged in a deliberate, not occasional, policy of torture, whitewashed as "enhanced interrogation techniques".
3. There is so far no proof that other western nations have recently had a policy of deliberate torture, except for the sad cases where the US creatively outsourced some of its torture needs to Poland and perhaps a few other eastern european countries.
Other Western nations facilitated capture and detention, they are helped get people to the CIA. So you are seriously telling me that they didn't suspect? Really???
Look, the EU is willing to drag planes from the sky to support the US in getting Snowden, so you think they don't know what the CIA was doing? Really???
in reality, everything is excused when it is against the enemy. but even then, the problem here is that 1) most things were done just out of sadism. for no real benefit. US tax payers pretty much paid for a BSDM dungeon for some sick CIA operatives. 2) several cases caught lawful citizens and great pains were taken to make it look like nothing happened.
This is meaningless if you get to define any innocent/held-without-charge person as 'enemy'.
> These violations included physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder.
> In 2004, Antonio Taguba, a major general in the U.S. Army, wrote in the Taguba Report that a detainee had been sodomized with "a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick."[30] In 2009, Taguba stated that there was photographic evidence of rape having occurred at Abu Ghraib.[31] An Abu Ghraib detainee told investigators that he heard an Iraqi teenage boy screaming, and saw an Army translator having sex with him, while a female soldier took pictures.[32] A witness identified the alleged rapist as an American-Egyptian who worked as a translator. In 2009, he was the subject of a civil court case in the United States.[31] Another photo shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner.[31] Other photos show interrogators sexually assaulting prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube, and a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.
> In other instances of sexual abuse, soldiers were found to have raped female inmates, and senior U.S. officials admitted that rape had taken place at Abu Ghraib.[33][34] Some of the women who had been raped became pregnant, and in some cases, were later killed by their family members in what were thought to be instances of honor killing.[35]
Fuck the police.
Just take two hours of your day. Strip naked, have someone throw a bucket of cold water over you, and then stand on a letter-size piece of paper for two hours in a room that is 15C
>Oh my god they were quite chilly
And abducted, held without trial, tortured, waterboard, anal raped, threatened, beaten againast a wall, and other things besides. A lot of them while also being totally inoccent (and in any way, without trial).
What exactly have you suffered besides a comfy middle class existance that gives you the moral superiority to laugh at that?
Would you also laugh at jews in Dr. Mengele's cold exposure experiments being "a little chilly"?
Absolutely. Abduction, held without trial, dehumanizing conditions, torture, etc.
Does your outrage about the jewish civilians only begin at the point were they burned them too?
Second, there are three levels of evil here, even if you disagree about "how many were totally innocent".
1) Some of them being totally innocent without dispute (for example those that were even released as such - in one case I read about after 7 years (!), and others for which they admitted they knew it for the start but used them as leverage, etc).
2) Even for the guilty, there should be no inprisoment without due process and fair trial.
3) Even for proven guilty, there should be no torture.
I don't consider anyone who does not agree on (2) and (3), basic tennets of human rights in the civilized world, anything more progressed than a KKK member lynching blacks back in the day...
Well, yeah, its called (naturally enough) the straw man fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
(FWIW: You are not the first one I ask about this.)
Why? Because people are so quick to judge without even trying once to see why the others are doing what they do.
I just think it is a bad idea to poke fun at it. There are times for funny remarks on serious stuff. I think you'll find that this is not it.
How about the humor in sentences about raping?
Second, the idea that terrorists (especially as arbitrarily defined, without trial and due process, for years on end) should be tortured is still problematic.
Third, yes they are out of whack. The decent human priorities would be to have the same sympathies for all victims, and the same demand for human rights to be applied in both cases.
Not on Hacker News it isn't. We want people to apply the Principle of Charity and respond to the strongest reasonable interpretation of what each other is saying [1]. Alternatively,
A comment in reply to another comment should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side. [2]
It increasingly seems to me that we should add these principles to the site guidelines, though they're arguably derivable from them.
It's true that when people seem (and/or are) hopelessly wrong and misguided, and no one else seems (and/or is) respecting these principles, there's a great temptation to say "fuck it" and let loose with snark. But that needs to be resisted. The community depends on you and other established users to set good examples. Otherwise how can we tell new users that they can't do the same—or rather, do worse, since these things always get worse?
There's a kind of caricaturing wit that could be called uncharitable, but only if it's meant to distort, in which case the humor is a means to something else and it's the something else that's the problem.
One was in a hyperbolic rhetorical context, to exaggerate the distinction with killing someone, which we consider acceptable in war:
> So you're saying we shouldn't engage in torture because it's "bad"? It's okay to blow these same people up in the battlefield, but god forbid we throw water on them and put them in a slightly cold room?
One was self-referential:
> I'd be pretty happy if HN could muster the same uniform moral outrage about rape jokes involving non-terrorists (e.g. gamergate) as it has shown in response to my comment about terrorists being cold.
One was in response to 'reitanqild saying: "Most of us would much rather prefer to be shot dead or blown up in a split second than being even slightly tortured and locked up indefinitely."
> Throwing water on someone and leaving them in a 59-degree room is worse than shooting them dead? Keeping someone awake until they hallucinate is worse than shooting them dead? Really?
The cold room and the sleep deprivation were in response to the "slightly tortured" part of that comment.
At no point did I ever try to make the argument that "what the CIA did wasn't so bad because they just put people in cold rooms." I actually have no interest in trying to convince anyone that what the CIA did wasn't bad. This is not an issue that people are going to approach rationally. It's about gut-feelings--either you have a visceral reaction to these interrogation techniques or you don't.
You said elsewhere: "I don't think torture is ever justified, under any circumstances. No exceptions."
Well I strongly disagree. If it would actually save innocent lives,[1] I'd have absolutely no qualms about any number of Al Qaeda terrorists being tortured. It's an unspeakably evil organization, promulgating ideologies that are at their best barbaric and backward. I think even the people that are receptive to their message and associate themselves with the organization, even if they do nothing more, are morally culpable.
And I imagine polls will show about half the country or more agreeing with me: http://mic.com/articles/106084/two-charts-show-why-the-cia-s.... Now of course the majority of people can be on the wrong side of history, but I don't think this is one of those situations.
[1] I've noted elsewhere that I don't think the techniques are effective and that we shouldn't be engaging in them for that reason.
Anyway, if you you have no interest in trying to convince people, why are you here discussing this? You're certainly giving every appearance of trying to convince people. You're putting forth arguments that look like they're intended to be convincing.
In another comment, you mentioned environmental disaster as something that should rank higher. Do you also endorse the use of torture on unrepentant polluters, climate change skeptics, and the like? Or is terrorism somehow special in your eyes?
And I couldn't care less how many people agree with you. I can't understand why you would even bring that up.
Anyway, at no point did I ever say we should torture anyone. In fact I said exactly the opposite in response to 'angibrowl. But at the end of the day I have better places to use my limited moral outrage than on how Khalid Sheik Mohammad was treated.
To be honest, what really kept me participating in this thread is the comparison to Japanese and Jewish persecution. I just can't understand the point of view of people who focus on the action alone, to the exclusion of who is the target of the action. I think it matters that these guys are scumbags.
Who decides what constitutes "scumbaggery"? You? Me? A random person off the street? A CIA lawyer? The President?
This sounds like a recipe for disaster, frankly. It sounds like a recipe for treating some minorities as non-humans, on a not very formal basis.
There's a thin line between "this guy is a scumbag because he's part of al Qaeda" and "this guy is a scumbag because he's a Republican." This is why we have due process. Or rather, why we're supposed to have it, even though we've given up on it for al Qaeda, or for people we think are related.
A quote of a quote: "The Baltimore Sun reported that, former Battalion 3-16 member Jose Barrera said he was taught interrogation methods by U.S. instructors in 1983, used this technique: "The first thing we would say is that we know your mother, your younger brother. And better you cooperate, because if you don't, we're going to bring them in and rape them and torture them and kill them."
In summary, not only does the CIA torture, it exports the vast knowledge of torture that it has so that other people (usually horrid regimes) can torture just as effectively.
The USA has a long, disgusting, and utterly unforgiveable history of practicing and teaching torture. The latest "war on terror" was yet another excuse for the endless parade of terrorism which the CIA inflicts on people.
You say that this stuff would make the Gestapo, KGB, and Stasi proud. Of course it would; the CIA is one of their classmates, and always has been.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/03/torture-victims-in-el-salvado...
This list does not include examples in which CIA inten-ogators were authorized to use the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, but then implemented the techniques in a manner that diverged from the authorization. Examples include Abu Zubair^®^ and, as detailed, KSM, whose intenogators developed methods of applying the waterboard in a manner that differed from how the technique had previously been used and how it had been described to the Department of Justice. This count also excludes additional allegations of the unauthorized use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.
What I did find, on page 101 is this:
"Over the course ofthe CIA program, at least 39 detainees were subjected to one or more of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.CIA records indicate that there were at least 17 CIA detainees who were subjected to one or more CIA enhanced interrogation techniques without CIA Headquarters approval. This count includes detainees who were approved for the use of some techniques, but were subjected to unapproved techniques, as well as detainees for whom interrogators had no approvals to use any of the techniques"
This passage indicates that those 17 tortured outside the approval process are accounted for. I don't see anything showing there were others outside the 39.
I don't see anything showing there were others outside the 39
Rather than give my honest opinion here, which would no doubt end up in a kindly word by dang, may I just ask you to run a basic boolean check over your posts before hitting 'reply'.
edit - the part you have such difficulty locating is from the exact same section you quoted, just a little further on, page 104.
Also, the bit you quoted from page 104 is in reference to a list of the 17 tortured without authorization. So it also doesn't indicate there were more than 39 total
How can it be referring to the 17 where no authorization was sought, when it specifically states it is talking about authorized interrogations?
And in common meaning, if you say 'at least 39', you are giving a low-end estimate, not a known total.
"The 17 detainees who were subjected to techniques without the approval of CIA Headquarters were: (...)", and then it lists them by name.
Then there's the part you're quoting, which is quite clearly stating that the list of 17 isn't counting cases where EIT was authorized, but the techniques were not implemented as authorized. This isn't surprising since the list of 17 is of people who weren't authorized for EIT at all.
If they were authorized, they're not listed as being unauthorized, even if the techniques used went beyond the authorization.
It's really very simple if you read the document. There's no question that section you quoted is referring to the list of 17.
It was, and I think his point is borne out in the fact that numerous films and TV shows have depicted torture that would formerly have been the preserve of pure villains to tools available to heroic protagonists in sufficiently urgent circumstances. Never do you see the efficacy of it questioned, or the deleterious effects on the administrator explored, or the scenario where it is erroneously applied to an innocent or where an intelligence asset is lost as a result. Deliberately or not, the fictional depiction of torture over the last decade or so has been almust uniformly ideological.
Fox and the like will also be debating its "benefits and how it saved Americans' lives"
the top headline on Fox news this morning was quoting some blowhard politician calling the release of the report 'unconscionable.' strange moral calculus in which the publication of a document is considered a more egregious offense than torturing people.
I think that it is quite possible that there is some purposeful desensitization going on.
I was thinking more about how there were a whole stack of movies exploring different aspects of torture in great detail, typically with unpleasant dilemmas, eg the Saw franchise, Hostel etc. etc.. Now I don't think these are exclusively a response to American policy either - the opst-2000 cultural context also included things like Al-Qaeda terrorists decapitating Daniel Pearl and uploading the videos to Youtube and so forth.
[1] You see it a lot in crime dramas from the 1980's, where things like the 4th amendment are portrayed as just letting criminals off on "technicalities."
The long history suggests that the shows and movies are a symptom of cultural attitudes, rather than a cause. For example, consider all the media in the 1980's portraying criminal procedural protections as "technicalities." I think it was in response to the fact that, after 1960, crime per capita tripled before incarceration per capita started going up. As I said about 24--in the aftermath of 9/11, the torture-fest was just capitalizing on the anger people felt. On my college campus in 2002 there was a lot of talk about nuking the middle east and things like that, which is quite contrary to what the government was saying.
Do you remember post 9-11 America? People were angry and afraid.
Jack Bauer tortured because America wanted him too.
There's something to be said for the post-9/11 zeitgeist that it gonna take us a really, really long time to get over. We see it in super hero movies (if I have to watch Manhattan get pulverized one more time...) and in a more evolved and complex form with Homeland. I think it'll be years before we come to terms with how we've responded as a society and with what we've done.
[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9876686
1) The ridiculous urgency of it, where they're running against the clock to "stop the bomb" or something like that. These kinds of scenarios are highly unlikely in real life, IMHO.
2) That Jack Bauer always got away with all the things he did. AFAIK, he did not spend even a single second inside a US prison (although he did come pretty close a few times).
I always looked at the show as fiction (like a superhero show), not something to be emulated in real life. I really hope most of its viewers looked at it the same way.
Imagine you are the director of such a show that is about some hero that prevents terrorism. What would you make that hero do to prevent a second 9/11 to capture the audience.
Edit: What I can imagine is that 24 inspired some US officials.
That's just the last straw for me. I would never have someone in my life, family or not, who would think raping people is acceptable. This is even worse. Even our enemies shouldn't be raped/tortured.
On the other hand, torture isn't something that people do because they feel they have to, but rather because they can. Since all the accumulated evidence to points to it being a poor way to to gather intelligence information, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it's just way of being vindictive or sadistic instead, something that we find deplorable in other contexts. I think it's considered deplorable because such feelings are quite common but the majority of us make the effort not to act upon them.
the human race so far narrowed it down to 2 possibilities - judicial proceedings or war following the rules of Geneva Conventions. Every other form of violence is a crime, with torture and killings being the crimes against humanity, prosecutable by any government and without statute of limitations.
Google cache as 3AM magazine seems to have some troubles at the moment[2]
[1] http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/saying-no-to-jack-bauer-mains...
[2] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.3a...
US promoted a reward program in middle east asking locals to turn in anyone with ties to terrorists. All they had to do was tell a name to US military, and collect reward for every name.
Many locals turned in thousands of innocent people just to collect a reward. These people were immediately arrested and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay without any investigation. US did not even require any probably cause, evidence or investigation to detain and torture these people.
If CIA tortured George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in this way, I am sure they would confess to being an accomplice along with Osama Bin Laden in 9/11 attack.
Unfortunately, this US "war on terror" has created tens of thousands of more terrorists all over the world. It haven't made the US or World any safer, it has created a even bigger monster.
In this sense, US Gov is the primary cause of and is directly responsible for nearly ALL terrorist acts in the past decades, globally.
The only real way to get around this problem is balance of power - more people need to be richer, so that on average, nobody can push their agenda better than anyone else.
[1] http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/gtmo-by-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner...
The most famous innocent victim of paid-information is the taxi driver Dilawar, beaten to death in the Parwan Detention Facility.
Here are few links about it:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8472804/...
http://www.reprieve.org.uk/publiceducation/2012_08_30_Public...
at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard
...
included an "intellectually challenged" man whose CIA detention was
used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide informationBut A LOT of them were.
"The country" doesn't admit that "the country" did this. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence "admits" that the Central Intelligence Agency did this, while at the same time insulating everyone else -- even in the Executive Branch -- from involvement, based on "the CIA was lying to everyone, including the White House, who totally didn't mean for this to happen."
> For me, that's hope that we're still in a position to learn from our wrongs, and that the checks-and-balances are still somewhat in-tact.
Checks and balances aren't admitting after the fact that actions which meet the definition of torture and war crimes in both US domestic law and international law which the US has treaty-based obligations to uphold occurred (while, except for the "personal opinion" of the chair in the introduction, not actually admitting the legal conclusions demanded by those facts), checks-and-balances is actually imposing some accountability on the perpetrators of those crimes.
AFAICT, there are no "checks-and-balances" in evidence yet.
And there's the problem.
Imagine, if you will, that your son is taken against his will by say, Iran, because your son has ties to someone who threw a grenade that killed an Iranian. Your son is tortured in much the same way the report states.
Do you care which committee didn't do a thing, or who voted for a thing, or lobbied another? You blame the country. The voting public, the non-voting public, their philosophies, culture, politicians, their military. They collectively represent the individuals who did that despicable stuff to your son.
And it's what perpetuates the hate, the wars, the fear.
It's much worse than that, we'll just flat out kill you with a drone strike, even if you're an American citizen[1][2].
[1]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/23/obama-anwar-al-awla...
[2]UPDATE - found the better article: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/how-team...
Kiriakou was charged with using numerous forms of classified information about foreign intelligence operations in order to promote a book, and, in doing so, outing a still-undercover foreign operative involved in the Zubaydah case. That operative had allegedly been under cover for over 20 years.
If you read the filings, you'll also see that Kiriakou claims to have outed the program accidentally --- in other words, that the leak didn't occur because he was deliberately blowing the whistle on the program, but instead by accident (or, as the USG would have it, negligence).
However terribly Zubaydah was treated by the CIA, we should probably remain clear on the fact that he was believed by everyone involved, including Kiriakou, to have been an integral part of the Al Qaeda network.
The case files are not themselves dispositive; I merely comment to suggest that it's harder to judge the Kiriakou case than it immediately seems.
I share the prevailing sentiment that our failure to prosecute CIA employees at all levels for torture is frustrating, and a miscarriage of justice. Though I'm not particularly interested in discussing that on HN.
Is that supposed to be a rationalization for his treatment?
You could sum that case up by saying that Kiriakou is accused of two major harms to the USG: first, outing a 20-year undercover operative, and second, potentially compromising the Zubaydah case. It would be an easy message board rebuttal to say, "well, it turns out Zubaydah was a pawn with virtually no value to the USG or Al Qaeda, so compromising him was not a big deal". But, at the time when Kiriakou was alleged to have leaked secrets to promote his book, nobody believed that about Zubaydah. He was instead believed to have a key operational role in Al Qaeda, and compromising him to promote a book would have been a grave matter.
It is hard to explain the nuance of this case without sounding like I'm taking a side in it. CIA is also accused throughout the Senate report of leaking secrets to polish its own reputation. The only issue I'd have a problem with is the idea that Kiriakou's actions were heroic. By his own stipulations that appears not to be the case.
I'll say this again: I'm may be more ambivalent than most of HN when it comes to surveillance and law enforcement and regulation, but I am not ambivalent about torture or, for that matter, the CIA, or criminal liability for the CIA.
I should have to make that disclaimer, but obviously I do.
"However terribly Zubaydah was treated by the CIA, we should probably remain clear on the fact that he was believed by everyone involved, including Kiriakou, to have been an integral part of the Al Qaeda network."
which seems totally unrelated to anything you have posted above, which was what make it stand out in the first place.
I cannot see any other way of interpreting it than the way I mentioned in my previous post, could you clarify what you meant by this since I am obviously not getting your meaning?
If the report leads to no action, where is the good in releasing it?
Real risk for real people has been created. It's not theoretical. Actual innocent people have been placed in danger.
If there's no good coming from the report, was it worth placing those people in danger?
Risk of what?
> Actual innocent people have been placed in danger.
Who?
I'm not attempting to argue the point. I haven't read the report. It just seems a strong statement to make that innocent bystanders (with no connection to torture) have been put at risk (of what?).
I'm curious how legitimate this claim is since to be honest it reads a bit like FUD (that's just how it comes off; but I'm just looking for a rationale).
People working for the US government overseas. Or just Americans. Or even just westerners in general.
Security is heightened, units are on alert worldwide. The risk is real and serious.
Remember, radical elements killed people over a silly video on youtube. This is much more inflammatory.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/12/09/lv-mcc...
You can't make moral judgements from a viewpoint that assumes knowledge of the future.
> You can't make moral judgements from a viewpoint that assumes knowledge of the future.
Actually, you can. It's one of the main categories of normative ethics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics#Normative_eth...
"Consequentialism (Teleology) argues that the morality of an action is contingent on the action's outcome or result", this particular category includes one of the most famous theories of ethics, utilitarianism.
Your problem with it is valid, however. As far as I've understood from my study of the subject matter, no ethical theory is perfect, not even utilitarianism.
Check out the wiki page for the other categories. Personally I like virtue ethics, keeps me on my toes and critical. I wouldn't recommend it though, I'd prefer if the rest of the world was utilitarian :-P cough
Incentives for information: 1.) Extract information. 2.) The information should be useful.
Incentives for intimidation: 1.) Information extraction is of no concern. 2.) The torture should be so shocking, and awesome, that George Carlin style many extra syllables need to be added to the word "tor-ture" like when Diane Feinstein says the supersized Orwellian phrase that "tor-ture" has become. 3.) The details of the torture should be made public.
Doesn't seem shocking these days. Can't prosecute the good ol boys club.
[0] - http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/cia-torture-report/doj-stan...
https://www.aclu.org/national-security/fact-sheet-extraordin...
Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism
The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically,
Let me be perfectly clear when I say this. It shouldn't matter which party started this, ITS WRONG.
This is not about extraordinary rendition -- which certainly is an extremely disturbing practice, and by all accounts seems to have included instances where prisoners were tortured by other countries with the knowledge and at least tacit consent of the US in violation of US obligations under international law.
This is about systematic torture directly executed by an agency of the United States government, under false pretenses, and while making damaging deceptions about the program to other entities within the US government.
There is certainly an extent to which it fits in with a common pattern with extraordinary rendition, but its not the same thing.
You must have missed this part of my post:
Let me be perfectly clear when I say this. It shouldn't matter which party started this, ITS WRONG.
Sure glad all the downvoters actually read my ENTIRE post before they started getting trigger happy with their downvotes.
That's what we're talking about here: the actual meaning of "gloves off". And no, this was categorically NOT something that started on Clinton's watch. It's started on Bush's watch, specifically at the direction of Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington, using legal justifications drafted by John Yoo.
Bush, not Clinton, got it?
And just so you're clear, this is not a defense of Democrats. After all, nobody has done more to forestall this report than the Democrat Barack Obama. In many ways, he's the worst offender here as it was his administration that elected to protect the people involved instead of punishing them, which serves to normalize something that absolutely should not be normalized. After all, the deepest institutional damage is done not by those who abuse their authority, but by those who allow the abusers to get away with it (see the systematic sexual abuse of children and the problems the Catholic Church caused itself by concealing it for another case in point).
I should add that the Obama Administration's conduct would be slightly less galling if it weren't part of a pattern, but the fact that James Clapper suffered no consequence for lying to Congress about the NSA's constitutional violations means that this is bigger than the CIA. If you get to the root of it, it's really about the goddamn nightmare of a lawless and amoral security state given big budgets and free reign stemming from the insane over-reaction to 9/11 that has since been enshrined in the Patriot Act.
That's the real heart of darkness here. Well, that and the cowering bedwetting chickenshits who don't support the whole "land of the free home of the brave" thing, and would rather hand the country to people like Cheney, Addington, Yoo, etc. and not think twice about the damage they're doing.
And those people? The fear driven chickenshits? Overwhelmingly Republican. It's the FOX News demographic, essentially. (FOX News, not coincidentally, has been a big supporter of torture. Like Cheney, they consider it evidence of "toughness", not idiocy.)
Well, in the past they've said that. Mostly now, they seem to be more avoiding commenting on the substance at all, and just saying that its wrong to publish the report.
Saying sorry afterwards doesn't do anything for those wronged. Admission doesn't take away pain, humiliation and fear.
Admitting wrong doing and offering solutions to prevent this from ever happening again are the first steps towards rebuilding what is undoubtedly going to be a much damaged world wide reputation.
Even releasing this report was a step forward.
[0] - http://www.tealeafnation.com/2012/12/has-japan-ever-apologiz...
The question on my mind, were their CIA operatives that refused to comply with orders? Take the various police brutality cases, what's lost in the echochamber about it all is that these guys volunteer to be police, nobody is forced to, some of them want to carry guns, that really changes the situation a bit when an unarmed person ends up dead. The CIA has the same problem here, I know there are people in the CIA that "want to kick some terrorist ass." I'd feel better if there were some outspoken CIA operatives who were coming out saying that they refused to take part. If not, it's not just an ugly stain but the whole organization is broken, they have no respect for law..
in case of US concentration camps there also was one man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou he is still in prison, because ratting on your fellow men is against the law
There usually are no 'good cops' either, because doing something in the face of evil marks you as a traitor
Japanese internment is still rarely talked about and in some states rarely taught in schools(!).
I really wish there was a way for to accurately evaluate these statements. I learned about this by age 10 from my mother, it was mentioned multiple times in high school, it is occasionally referenced in conversation online and in person, and comes up on my Fort Minor pandora station about once every 4 hours of playtime. But I live in a liberal social circle that places a high value on learning history.
Compare to this memo, where you have roughly half of the politically involved population of the country criticizing its release as if the memo itself is somehow reprehensible, and not saying one word about the activities it describes.
It's important to teach about what happened in those camps and to understand why they were wrong. Drawing inappropriate comparisons between those camps and the absolute atrocities in this report isn't helpful.
Nobody did. I said that Americans looked the other way. Nothing more, nothing less.
You're clearly reading more into what I said than what I actually said verbatim.
I'm surprised that you think torture is not an atrocity. The US claims to be "giving the gift of democracy" and "spreading freedom". Ignoring international conventions on the rights of prisoners of war (and do not start the weaselly bullshit about whether these people are POWs or not) doesn't seem to be a good way of liberating a nation.
Because if the CIA was just ignoring the rules, they wouldn't be trying to lawyer their way around what's "enhanced interrogation" versus "torture." They'd just be pulling out fingernails.
> Ignoring international conventions on the rights of prisoners of war
You fundamentally misunderstand the rationale behind these conventions. The reason we don't torture the soldiers of civilized nations is because we assume that they will reciprocate when it comes to our soldiers. Stateless militants can't be expected to do that, so the rationale for following those international conventions disappears.
Anyhow, there is also the Convention Against Torture isn't even related to conflict or POWs, but applies universally, and obliges parties to it (including the US) to prosecute (not merely avoid engaging in) torture, whoever does it, wherever they do it, and in whatever context they do it. Torturers are hostis humani generis, the common enemy of all mankind.
Also the fact that these conventions were valid for any war the signing country was involved in, not only those against other who signed (correct me if I'm wrong) seems to point in the same direction, no?
Also, downvote brigade: Fine, I totally agree that rayiner was downvoted and flagkilled twice. rayiner deserved that IMO.
However stop downvoting when he or others are providing insights, even if that insight is uncomfortable, OK?
It's true that is the scale of awful behavior, the CIA's program would rate something like 3 or 4 out of 10 - other regimes have engaged in things like pulling out people's fingernails, administering electric shocks, actually killing or raping family members rather than simply threatening to do so so, and worse - much worse. It's also true that atrocious actions by the US during the 'war on terror' are less bad than prior atrocities in previous conflicts like Vietnam or the Phillippine-American war of 1899-1902, a largely-forgotten conflict which would be considered genocidal by modern standards (and which is very much worth studying because it has so many similarities to the war on terror - gruesome murders by the rebels, widespread use of waterboarding by the US (then called the 'water cure'), subsequent political fallout and so on).
But even when we look at these things from a purely utilitarian standpoint rather than an idealistic one, the fact is that it our ability to project soft power - that is, to promulgate our values internationally so as to further our interests - is severely impaired by our all-too-apparent willingness to abandon the standards we propound in the areas of human rights and so forth. I'm not too impressed by the authoritarian regime in Cuba, for example, but the fact that we have a mini-Gulag in Guantanamo Bay makes it impossible for the US to criticize that regime in any meaningful fashion - even when it does the same or worse, it can fall back on a Tu quoque argument, and while that's a logical fallacy it's nevertheless a very effective one. On a more serious level, it has severely blunted our ability (along with that of the UK and other coalition countries, albeit to a lesser extent) to put pressure on North Korea over that country's appalling human rights record.
The basic problem for the US is this: we don't necessarily aspire to hegemony, but a de facto hegemony is the best guarantor of our long-term interests. We can't impose that by force, or want to, but we can get close by exercising soft economic and ideological power backed up with the availability of force against those who directly threaten our interests. At times the world is too messy and we'd like to take our ball and go home - let everyone else think what they like, the US land mass and economy is large enough for us to function as an autarky in an unconnected world. But the reality of a global technological world is that oceans no longer serve as impassable moats; disengagement and indifference to the emergence of other hegemonic powers would sooner or later result in disadvantage.
In war, we justify things a lot more morally ambiguous than a police officer shooting an armed criminal that's an imminent threat. Workers at a munitions factory who are just carting things around? Those folks get killed in war in airstrikes that are totally consistent with international conventions. Is waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed worse than blowing up some sap who just showed up to work on the wrong day? I just find it ridiculous to play that line drawing exercise.
I agree 100% with the rest of your analysis, though. Whatever the moral case may be, we shouldn't engage in enhanced interrogation because it yields low-value or even misleading information at the cost of tremendous political capital.
I agree that trying to establish bright-line rules often seems a futile exercise because it's so easy to come up with ethical inconsistencies. I do have a theory about the moral calculus of conflict but it's inchoate and this comment isn't really the place for it. To sketch the outline, though, the severity of a given outcome in a conflict can be mitigated by the degree of risk involved in bringing it about; so while the imposition involved in sleep deprivation or keeping someone cold is mild compared to someone being horribly maimed by a piece of shrapnel, it's the massive prior asymmetry between captor and prisoner that's problematic in the case of torture. Of course, you could argue that this asymmetry is also strong where only one side in a conflict has an air force or where one side is using remote-controlled military assets like drones, whose 'pilots' experience no physical risks whatsoever. This is going to become a huge problem within a few short years with robotic infantry assets - as soon as they're 'good enough' to deploy effectively there will be huge pressure to do so, even if they are just slightly extending forward positions over a short distance.
Yes. Waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is viewed by the vast majority to be morally far much worse than bombing a munitions factory. That is why doing it costs the tremendous political capital.
The deaths caused by the aggressor of a war are not consistent with international conventions, they are, in the words of a judge in at the Nuremberg tribunals, the consequence of the ultimate war crime.
The moral high ground is very valuable real estate indeed, and the US does hurt itself by doing things that reflect poorly in the eyes of the global public. But we're rightfully and pragmatically more concerned about artillery and soldiers occupying plain old fashioned military high ground. We interrogate to prevent people who openly wish us harm from gaining the power to turn their words into deeds. You can always earn cool points by pointing out historical atrocities, but in the end what matters is that we're still here, alive and prospering. Do you honestly believe that if the US government always behaved like perfect angels that N Korea or Cuba would suddenly listen to our moral lectures? That our behavior would somehow inspire them to change the fundamental cultural mores that come from decades of national poverty and the mindset that comes along with it? Because I don't think it will. Human rights violations will still exist even if we behave with moral perfection. Sometimes the best way to stop the bad guys isn't to set a good example, but instead to waterboard someone until he tells you where to send a SEAL team.
For better or worse, the US has the sanctioned role of providing security for the world. If that means we have to strip someone naked and throw them against a wall then so be it. It's unpleasant, but it sure as hell beats the alternatives.
Much as police violence in custody has often been defended with the argument that the police were attempting to obtain information that would lead to a conviction.
It isn't done for revenge or in situations where the stakes are anything less than the life and death of innocent people. Someone who has information on a literal ticking time bomb is the very definition of a threat to the public.
Ostensibly, but for one thing there is usually no actual ticking time bomb because we don't live in the universe of 24, and for another if there was a ticking time bomb there'd be no way to protect against misinformation about its location until it was too late.
The TTB argument implicitly assumes that intelligence gained through torture will be correct and actionable, but this isn't backed up by evidence. If the bomb is on West 63rd street and the torture subject directs you to East 47th street, you won't know you've been lied to until you get there and find out there is no bomb. Conversely, what if the person does not actually know what you want to know, like the 26 detainees mentioned in the report who were picked up despite not being suitable targets for interrogation? When they keep saying they don't know where the ticking time bomb is, how do you tell that they're not just holding out on you?
For better or worse, the US has the sanctioned role of providing security for the world.
Hmmm, no. As I outlined above, its in our interests to hold such a position at present. I think you need to think a bit longer about this, because your views on this subject seem rather shallow.
Actually, it doesn't, as the CIA admits. So much so that they had to lie about its effectiveness.
I can imagine torture that's worse than death. I don't think any of the things revealed in the article qualify. Which is precisely what I'm getting at. If you're not a pacifist and you think it's okay to kill people in war, I think you have to go to pretty tortured lengths to say that these enhanced interrogation techniques are unjustifiable in light of that. If you're a pacifist who doesn't think that killing is justifiable in the first place, that's a totally different thing.
Reading Solzhenitsyn in the context of today's news might be worthwhile for people. If people can read all that, note the similarities between the NKVD's tactics and attitude toward the law and the CIA's, and walk away contentedly thinking to themselves "but our guys have good intentions and are a lot more selective!" we are hosed as a country.
I understand the frustration, but please do not violate the site guidelines like this.
The comment would be appropriate and stronger with just the first question.
I imagine this thread is all sorts of "fun" for you right now....
Thanks for respecting the guidelines. It matters a lot for established users to set good examples.
Anyway, thanks for your work in keeping the place in line.
Also, just being locked up with nothing to do can be painful in itself.
Well consider me convinced! We definitely need to limit immigration to America otherwise we could end up with large numbers of people whose cultural norms allow them to condone torture and try to make jokes about it! Can you imagine what a cluster fuck this nation would be if the majority view was that repeated anal rape leading to multiple attempts at self-harm was something to be made light of!? No we definitely need to make sure that we only accept a small enough number of immigrants that we can ensure that things like the concept of the rule of law, the right to trial, and the right to not be, you know FUCKING TORTURED, are fully assimilated by them. Gods knows what things would be like if they somehow managed to not internalize these concepts.
You're also making assumptions that people die instantly on the battlefield and in drone attacks. That's not the case. They can (and do) die in slow, lingering, painful ways in such cases.
My point is being locked up indefinitely and tortured again and again. Waiting for pain is also painful unless you are very mentally strong.
Does this surprise you? It shouldn't.
That is: the actions outlined in this summary of a report, and in other tacit admissions by US elected leaders, go way beyond arguing that the actions are "legal" or "illegal". The actions outlined in the summary speak to a government that does not care about most human beings at all.
All of morality is not contained within the law. Segregation was legal for a while. Apartheid was legal for a while.
To the contrary. I think you have to have a very legalistic dedication to procedural due process to assert that people abroad advocating the violent overthrow of the United States should have the same rights as ordinary accused in the United States.
Beyond that, if it's good policy for US citizens to have freedom of speech, or right to a fair trial, or to not be tortured, then it's good policy for all humans to have those rights.
By asserting the "random person in the street" argument, you're asserting a tyranny of the majority. You should know better. Shame on you.
I never was fond of you, but this confirms that you're truly a vile human. I cannot believe that there is an actual torture apologist on HN.
In your follow-up comment, you rationalize it by saying that they are not worthy of the same treatment as those from civilized nations.
I don't know if you're a sociopath or you harbor a lot of hate and anger, but in either case, I hope you get the help you need before you hurt someone.
And even now there will be people who say that this was too much, but a little bit of torture is necessary.
Just look at what people were saying a out water boarding - "it's not really torture".
How many detainees are still held without trial?
Let's put it this way: unless you're not horrified to have such a procedure happen to you, your wife, child, etc, it IS torture.
Jubal Early: You oughta be shot. Or stabbed, lose a leg. To be a surgeon, you know? Know what kind of pain you're dealing with. They make psychiatrists get psychoanalyzed before they can get certified, but they don't make a surgeon get cut on. That seem right to you?
Pft. You're not getting off that easy.
The "saving grace" for Germany was going to international trial for the crimes committed, something the US actively refuses to do, AND hanging their heads in collective national shame for the atrocities they allowed happen in their name, scared shitless what a country is capable of when not kept in check by its people, fearing and strongly dismissing anything remotely reeking like nazism, even up to the point of partially giving up their own freedom of speech, ever since. I don't see the US doing anything similar any time soon. "It's our FREEDOMS! We must have our FREEDOMS!"
Sorry I'm just really angry and sad.
I hope the US is truly sorry about this, but they will have to show how sorry they are. Words are not enough.
Germany, has gone out of its way to punish the guilty, and to change their national culture, and imprint their new culture with the taboos necessary to ensure those atrocities can never happen again. No country in the history of the world has ever been so sorry as Germany, and their reaction to the shameful things they did deserves admiration and respect.
If the US wants to deserve similar admiration and respect, they have to show it. They have to prove it, by putting all these people behind bars at the very least.
It's mostly able to admit it because nothing will change, that is: such exposes are inconsequential.
If those kind of reports could change things, they wouldn't happen at all.
This would end with a few questions, some pats in the back, and business as usual.
While the importance of safety is reflected in bulk of our public discretionary expenditures, Americans have other values. Americans value liberty. Americans value humanity. Many value these above safety (e.g. N.H. state motto). Sadly most people I know choose safety first and close their eyes to the corollaries, which leads us to where we are now.
Meanwhile, jokes about prison rape are socially acceptable & the US government refuses to do much of anything to stop it.
I haven't seen many people use Brown's robbing the convenience store (and assaulting the shopkeeper) to justify his shooting. It's his attacking the officer and trying to take the officer's gun that is typically used as justification.
The convenience store was relevant before the forensic evidence was available, because at the time we had to choose between two stories, neither of which made much sense:
1. Cop with no prior evidence of problems flips out for no apparent reason and blows away a young man who he had stopped for jaywalking, or
2. Young man who was kind, gentle, non-violent and never harmed anyone flips out for no apparent reason and attacks a cop who is just trying to tell him to walk on the sidewalk.
Both of these require someone to be acting way out of known character. Add in the convenience store, and we know that Brown was already acting way out of character that day, just moments before the shooting, which tips the probabilities way in favor of #2.
Now that the forensic evidence is available and backs #2, there are two questions that we should be asking.
1. Why was Brown acting so out of character that day?
Or were we seeing the "real" Brown that day, and the character he presented to family, teachers, clergy, etc., was a front? If so, then we should be finding out how he fooled them, so that in the future teachers and clergy can do a better job of recognizing such people and intervening.
2. Why did Officer Wilson allow himself to get into a position where Brown could attack him and go for his gun?
To me, the interesting questions are your second one plus the question of why the officer started shooting instead of leaving the scene, potentially returning with backup, since he was still in his car.
That's setting the bar low.
Strictly speaking, the US has veto power in the UN Security Council, which usually has primary responsibility for binding actions on matters of international peace and security, including, inter alia, taking binding action in response to threats to the same such as by grave breaches of international law by a nation-state.
However, its worth noting that -- at US urging in the context of the Korean War -- the UN established a mechanism (under the "Uniting for Peace" resolution [0]) by which the General Assembly can step in when the Security Council is unable to act because of deadlock among the veto powers.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly...
Secretary is essentially another word for Minister, and NATO's Secretary-General is its supreme commander in wartime. The UN's leader is called the Secretary General because he is in essence its Prime Minister, not because you get confused between a Secretary and his/her secretaries...
Unless you think General Secretary Joseph Stalin was a powerless functionary, of course.
>The UN's leader is called the Secretary General because he is in essence its Prime Minister
Both are wrong and wildly imaginative.
>General Secretary Joseph Stalin
Yes, but there's also a historic reason behind that title. The leader (like Chairman Mao) of the Soviet Union was supposed to be a sort of secretary for the workers. "Soviet" actually means "council"; the "chairman" and "secretary" names are communist propagandaspeak to give the impression that the workers are the ones in charge.
How do you know we haven't used rape as torture? We've already walked up to that line, with medically unnecssary anal rehydration acknowledged as a form of control.
So, we are debating the appropriateness of rape. And yes, that sickens me.
There are many techniques, but it seems like we have forgotten it is fundamentally manipulative and abusive. I mean, we are surprised to find that threats are used? What?
We are, if not surprised, rightfully offended that our government does not obey its own laws, which define and punish torture -- acts "intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control", where "severe physical or mental pain or suffering" is defined as:
---[quote]---
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
---[end quote]--- (18 USC Sec. 2340)
(And its worth noting that this interpretation enshrined into law has often been criticized itself as an attempt to minimize the scope of US limitations on torture and for the government to shirk obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment by limiting the understanding of torture to something much narrower than the international understanding underlying the convention, so that can enhanced the degree to which it is disturbing that having narrowed the definition of torture, the government still isn't serious about combatting it, or even just not actively engaging in it, under the narrowed definition.)
Causing the death of a detainee is not a threat. Perhaps negligence which should have consequences for those who were responsible for this person while in their custody.
You can get plenty of information out of someone without laying a finger on them.
In my opinion the question is the extent to which it's OK to play with people's psychology through isolation and misinformation, while still giving them 3 hots and a cot. The important thing to note here is that you can still damage people this way if you take it too far; solitary makes people go crazy especially when they're being fed false info about what's going on outside the walls.
Then again, these guys did not get rolled up for signing too loud in church. They have valuable intel in their heads. We're not going to beat it out of them, but how far are we willing to go? Should they get the same rights and protections as suspects in the US judicial system? This is the conversation we should be having in my opinion.
According to the report, "Of the 119 known detainees, at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard in the September 2001 Memorandum of Notification (MON). These included an "intellectually challenged" man whose CIA detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information, two individuals who were intelligence sources for foreign liaison services and were former CIA sources, and two individuals whom the CIA assessed to be connected to al-Qa'ida based solely on information fabricated by a CIA detainee subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.
Geneva Convention states clearly - either POW status or suspect in the judicial system. There is no 3rd option.
> This is the conversation we should be having in my opinion.
there is no conversation to have. Only charges (of crimes against humanity which torture is) to bring in.
None of the Geneva Conventions actually say this. OTOH, torture is subject to a universal prohibition under international law independently of the status of the tortured person, whether a protected person under the any of the Geneva Conventions, a regular criminal suspect in a domestic court system, or any other status that may or may not exist.
>None of the Geneva Conventions actually say this.
One way or the other it is mentioned in various places through the Conventions. In particular http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Geneva_Convention :
for internal conflict
" The passing of sentences must also be pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognised as indispensable by civilised peoples. "
for international:
"It also specifies that when there is any doubt whether a combatant belongs to the categories in article 4, they should be treated as such until their status has been determined by a competent tribunal."
Why does terrorism frighten people so much that they're willing to throw away basic principles like "innocent until proven guilty"? Honest question. I see comment after comment after comment in this thread that indicates the commenters are unbelievably frightened of terrorism, to the extent that they're willing to sanction anything, even acts that they admit are otherwise reprehensible, to prevent it. Why are apparently intelligent people so frightened of it?
Great question, and one we should always keep in mind. The death toll from terrorism on US soil since 9/11 is indeed very low. That said, the people plotting against us are intelligent and adaptive and wish to do us harm. If they succeed, they might destroy the free society which we've built for ourselves.
Put another way, I'm scared of the physical consequences of a nuclear weapon going off in midtown Manhattan and even more scared of what would happen to our society in the wake of it. You think we'd be having these conversations about which techniques may or may not be torture if there were half a million dead in NYC and the entire tri-state region were irradiated?
Look at what the US has done. Really, look at all the things it has done -- the surveillance, the drone strikes, the infiltration of civil protests, the use of military equipment by the police force, the lies to justify the war in Iraq, the lies to justify the torture, the violations of international human rights, the targeted killings of "enemy" US citizens, the re-definition of every single one of these words -- and then tell me how the US has upheld its values against terrorism.
Then look at countries like Iceland where the nation apologizes over a single justified death at the hands of a police officer, or Norway where after a killing spree and bomb attacks the first consideration by government officials is not about how to punish the murderer, but how to guarantee due process for someone evidently guilty of such heinous crimes.
The United States are not the good guys. I'm sorry, but you're not. No matter how much you want it to be true.
There isn't even any evidence that the threat of nuclear terrorism is credible. Nukes aren't something you pick up at the local Safeway on your way home from the daily jihad. Compare to 30 years ago, where the threat was absolutely, 100% credible. Literally hundreds of missiles ready to go at a moment's notice. One bad decision or bad hangover away from a billion deaths. And yet, we weren't having debates like this then.
That's not to say that the US was all innocent and pure. But at the very least, torture was secretive, hidden, not defended in public as being a worthwhile and justifiable act.
And then combine all that with the simple fact that torture doesn't even work. All it does is make their friends angry. Do you really think that torturing suspected terrorists reduces the chances of a future terrorist nuclear detonation in Manhattan? I don't see how.
Edit: Oh yeah, I forgot to point out that those hundreds of missiles and hundreds of nuclear warheads are still there and still ready to go at a moment's notice and we are still one person's bad decision or bad hangover away from total annihilation. We just manage to pretend it's not there.
And of course, it doesn't help that the folks who are captured are mostly objectively bad people. There are some people who can muster a lot of moral outrage for the rights of bad people, and there are ones who can't. This isn't a new phenomenon.
You've spent this entire thread making poor excuses for completely irrational behaviors and trying to justifying sickening, ineffective actions on the part of US personnel.
Just stop.
No, I don't know it. Care to explain it to me?
I beg to differ.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2868419/Thrown-roof-...
The condemnation of torture seems to be far more widespread here.
Can you give examples? Do they work against hardened interogees? Do they involve threats of violence?
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/an_fbi_interrogator_on_the_...
It just seems like people are shocked to find fundamentally abusive/manipulative behavior going on at all. Virtually any form of extracting information from an unwilling informant is going to be. Feeding them lies to make them lose hope ("We've captured your co-conspirators") is abusive. Cozying up to them with donuts and backrubs is manipulative. Practically by definition, interrogation on unwilling informants cannot be some friendly, respectful thing.
"Scharff was opposed to physically abusing prisoners to obtain information. Learning on the job, Scharff instead relied upon the Luftwaffe's approved list of techniques, which mostly involved making the interrogator seem as if he is his prisoner's greatest advocate while in captivity."
And this guy was successful as well.
"Scharff's approach has been admiringly cited by top US interrogators, such as Ali Soufan"
Anyway, that's really counter-intuitive. I mean, I guess I could deal with pain, but losing body parts, skin or eyes? I would talk pretty fast.
Its also been shown to be a fairly poor technique, compared to other alternatives, to get accurate, actionable information.
As the Senate report itself notes, this was the conclusion of the CIA's own work on interrogation techniques prior to 9/11, which was disregarded in the aftermath of 9/11.
Which frankly makes me think they believe it does. The easy political win is to say it doesn't, and they aren't taking it.
https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/542382617711370240
"Obama official: White House won’t take sides between CIA, which says interrogations worked, and Senate, which says they didn’t."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff
http://www.k-state.edu/actr/2010/12/20/suspect-interrogation...
It gets even worse when the subject doesn't actually know anything useful. Waterboard most people and they will confess to anything they think will make it stop.
> This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud.
A big difference is that those groups tortured and killed many of their own subjects for their political dissidence. In this case, the CIA tortured (albeit counterproductively) to protect its citizens, and there was a free press to uncover and help stop these programs for the most part.
Like most of what Zizek says, this doesn't survive even the slightest scrutiny. Not that I want to be seen as "pro-torture", but to dismiss it categorically, as Zizek does, is to fail to grapple with the more general ethical conundrum of collateral damage.
Harris discusses this quite effectively[0]. Basically boiling it down to (paraphrasing) "If you're against torture then you should be against any action that results in collateral damage."
[0]http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/why-id-rather-not-speak-a...
Based on these descriptions of techniques, I suspect that the CIA officers responsible for this have also read the same book.
* The perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks to me represent a completely different sort of threat than has ever been encountered - which legitimized the use of torture (though to be honest, the sorts of techniques outlined in the report don't really sound like what I would classify as "torture"; i.e., the infliction of unbearable pain with no expectation of actionable information being extracted.)
* If the techniques were in fact of no value (which the CIA disputes) then I would of course not support their continued use. I don't support the infliction of 'needless' pain or suffering. If they were providing useful information then I have no ethical or moral problem with them.
I have a fairly flexible moral code as far as even torture is concerned... this goes beyond what I would consider appropriate in any sense of the word.
Do keep in mind that 9/11 doesn't even register on the atrocity scale when compared to what's been done by "soldiers of a legitimate state." If you would endorse torture to prevent another 9/11, why wouldn't you also endorse torture to prevent, say, another Hiroshima?
I think that in many ways this becomes the old Moral Absolutism versus Moral Relativism problem.
You can have a moral absolutist who says, "Harming another human is wrong, therefore we will not torture under any case." (A different absolutist might be more utilitarian in arguing for torture of one to save many, but you get the point- an absolutist has a position and a rigid interpretation of that position, and sticks with it)
You can have a moral relativist who says, "Harming another human is wrong. We cannot torture someone to collect information, but we cannot avoid collecting that information because if we avoid collecting that information it will lead to someone else harming more humans."
Two sides to the same moral problem. I tend to agree with the relativist view of the problem rather than the absolutist view; the relativist in this case is informed by the consequences of both action and inaction whereas the absolutist in this case only cares about the consequences of action. The solution? Absolutism will provide a solution because something is either right or wrong. So absolutism is easy, attractive. Relativism provides no clear solution, which is why many people prefer to reason in moral absolutist terms.
I object to torture on moral grounds. I also object to it on practical grounds. It doesn't work.
Since both of those objections point in the same direction, the solution is completely clear.
If something doesn't work, then don't do it. Hiroshima was an extreme example of that. By August the political establishment in Japan was split, with consensus moving rapidly to peace out of the war because by mid 1945 the industrial centers of Osaka and Tokyo were ruined by fire bombings. It just so happens that at the same time the government is moving to surrender, we use two bombs to vaporize more people.
"We need to use these bombs to end the war sooner." A fine argument to the intentionalist, regardless of outcome, but the consequentialist will have a problem with it because the atomic bombings did not lead to an early conclusion of the war, the fire bombings did.
They were so close to surrendering that the US had to drop two atomic bombs on Japan?
If torture could prevent the mass killing of innocent civilians, do you see any justification in it?
They had demonstrated the practice of mass killings of innocent civilians and expressed the desire to continue to do so.
> If you would endorse torture to prevent another 9/11, why wouldn't you also endorse torture to prevent, say, another Hiroshima?
Well, setting aside the moral equivalency of 9/11 to Hiroshima, I suppose if there was reason to believe there was a nuclear threat and there was access to someone for whom it was legitimately believed could provide details which would prevent it, employing torture would be morally and ethically justified.
That hardly makes them unique, or even different than previous enemies the US has faced, and dealt with detainees from, and studied the effects of interrogation, and concluded that torture is ineffective.
And, as the Senate report notes, every single one of the CIA claims that this torture was effective misrepresented the facts, either of whether information gained through torture had not independently been gained through other means, or whether the information gained was gained through the torture at all (often claiming information gained from a detainee before "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used was gained through those techniques, which is only plausible if the techniques are so effective that they send shockwaves back in time), or by simply misrepresenting the existence of threats that were supposedly disrupted when no real threat existed.
TORTURE IS NOT EFFECTIVE
This is hardly news, it has been known for a long time. CIA knew it before 9/11
OK, so nuclear attacks by soldiers justify it. How about conventional strategic bombing? Invasions? Exactly where and why do you draw the line, if you're not drawing it where you previously said?
I don't know where I would draw the line, but in the case of Qeada/ISIS, they are well across my personal fuzzy gray line.
Godwin's Law? As far as I know there were no mass machine-gunnings, people hanged with piano wire or actually any people tortured to death. A lot of the techniques listed are pretty much what the US (and UK) army use on their own troops as part of escape and evasion training.
On November --, 2002, adetainee who had been held partially nude and chained to a concrete floor died from suspected hypothermia at the facility. [camp COBALT]
> The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting. Abu Zubaydah, for example, became "completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth." Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving into a "series of near drownings.
> Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads. At least five detainees experienced disturbing hallucinations during prolonged sleep deprivation and, in at least two of those cases, the CIA nonetheless continued the sleep deprivation.
> Contrary to CIA representations to the Department of Justice, the CIA instructed personnel that the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah would take "precedence" over his medical care, resulting in the deterioration of a bullet wound Abu Zubaydah incurred during his capture.
> CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families— to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to "cut [a detainee's] mother's throat."
The list goes on.
I have no words. This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud. I can only hope more people read this report. Worse imaginable crimes are committed in the heat of passion or because of madness. Those are scary. What is more scary to me is cold institutionalized, calculated, torture, which is what this is.
Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost. Torture should be like rape. Anyone suggesting debating if rape is acceptable should be slapped on the head and considered an idiot. Torture should be the same in any civilized country. We are not only debating it, we have also done it, we have institutionalized it, and make no mistake, Fox and the like will also be debating its "benefits and how it saved Americans' lives".