When it's a one-sided partisan rehashing of old news, what purpose does it serve? What proposals were forwarded in the Senate report?
I say it proves to the world we're a laughing stock chocked full of idiots bent on self-destruction.
You mean, when we witness 3,000 of our fellow citizens murdered and have the temerity to want to prevent a subsequent attack and, instead of just engaging in full-blown torture -- such as in what our enemies engaged and continue to engage -- we develop a precise and defined regimen of enhanced interrogation techniques, get them approved by the administration, and present them to a joint committee for their consideration, and then use them to gain actionable intelligence that does exactly what they were employed to do? That makes us a worse place? Worse than who? Worse than where?
It's not like we're sawing off anyone's head or throwing them from buildings or feeding them feet first through a plastics shredder.
I do. I believe in the basic human right to life. I believe in the basic human right of people to expect their governments to live up to their cons utional obligations to protect its citizens against atrocities such as took place on September 11, 2001.
10Ks of American suffer and/or die from air pollution EVERY YEAR, but your Repug buddies and their BigCorp owners do everything they can to maintain/increase air pollution.
Repugs and BigCorps are a MUCH GREATER (MORTAL) THREAT to USA than all your paranoid fears about external threats. and of course you give Repug govt a pass for allowing 9/11 to happen.
The Torture Report’s Hidden Fiasco: How Mark Udall Revealed a Little-noticed Smoking Gun
However, despite the risk, Udall did reveal some very important classified information anyway. And for inexplicable reasons, nobody seems to have noticed. I’m talking about information contained in the classified ”Panetta Review,” which was the do ent the CIA was allegedly looking for when it infiltrated the computers of the Senate staffers doing the investigation.
Udall called it a smoking gun. Here’s what he said:
The Panetta Review found that the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Congress, the president, and the public on the efficacy of its coercive techniques.
The Brennan Response, in contrast, continues to insist that the CIA’s interrogations produced unique intelligence that saved lives. Yet the Panetta Review identifies dozens of do ents that include inaccurate information used to justify the use of torture – and indicates that the inaccuracies it identifies do not represent an exhaustive list.
The Panetta Review further describes how detainees provided intelligence prior to the use of torture against them. It describes how the CIA – contrary to its own representations – often tortured detainees before trying any other approach.
It describes how the CIA tortured detainees even when less coercive methods were yielding intelligence.
The Panetta Review further identifies cases in which the CIA used coercive techniques when it had no basis for determining whether a detainee had critical intelligence at all.
In other words, CIA personnel tortured detainees to confirm they didn’t have intelligence – not because they thought they did.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...age=1#bookmark
CIA Director Brennan: Whether harsh interrogation worked is 'unknowable'
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign...knowable-video
that's a superb defense of CIA torture!
Meh, he's trying to keep his job in an administration hostile to his agency.CIA Director Brennan: Whether harsh interrogation worked is 'unknowable'
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign...knowable-video
that's a superb defense of CIA torture!
Here's an interesting read on the topic:
JOHN BRENNAN’S KNOWABLE “UNKNOWABLES”
Brennan is being philosophically modest. Sure, it’s possible that hardcore al Qaeda members who hadn’t talked before they were waterboarded (for example) talked afterwards for reasons other than the waterboarding. Maybe, for no particular reason, they suddenly saw the error of their terrorist ways and decided to dedicate themselves to helping keep America safe.
But any reasonable person would infer a causal relationship between the waterboarding and the disclosure of useful information by hardened terrorists who previously had refused to cooperate. If this isn’t “knowable,” it’s a damn good bet.
A separate issue is whether these terrorists would eventually have spilled their guts had other methods of interrogation been used. This “counter-factual” question is inherently more speculative. However, we can be confident that the less harsh techniques used by the CIA interrogators at the outset weren’t producing useful information. I doubt that the interrogators went straight to waterboarding.
Moreover, “Jason Beale,” a longtime CIA man has said:
Feinstein’s committee didn’t talk to “Beale” or to anyone with the CIA.I know that we couldn’t have collected the same information using standard techniques because I was an expert in using standard techniques — I used them thousands of times over two decades — and the notion that I could have convinced the detainees. . .to provide closely-held information (or any information at all) without the use of enhanced interrogation techniques is laughable. There is zero chance. Zero.
The fact that so much information has and continues to be collected through non-torture means makes a mockery of the anonymous CYA torturers.
If it's so great, why did the Bush administration stop it themselves?
I think they've already said why, the urgency of the days right after 9/11 had passed and they had developed more effective way to gather intelligence -- not many of which involved interrogation of detainees.
They ceded their moral authority long ago. Making excuses for torture is about as low as it gets, IMO, and simply gives me another bullet point to make the case about the overall immorality of modern conservatism as understood by so many of its professed adherents.
Ethics can be defined as using reason and empathy to determine harm.
Triggering an intense amount of pain, or fear in another human being is, by any measure harmful, as I can easily empathize that such feelings are unpleasant to the point of traumatic.
So the administration just lied all those times they warned of imminent attacks?
Way to throw them under the bus.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...action/303973/Six months before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison broke into public view, a small and fairly obscure private association of United States Marine Corps members posted on its Web site a do ent on how to get enemy POWs to talk.
The do ent described a situation very similar to the one the United States faces in the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan: a fanatical and implacable enemy, intense pressure to achieve quick results, a brutal war in which the old rules no longer seem to apply.
Marine Major Sherwood F. Moran, the report's author, noted that despite the complexities and difficulties of dealing with an enemy from such a hostile and alien culture, some American interrogators consistently managed to extract useful information from prisoners. The successful interrogators all had one thing in common in the way they approached their subjects. They were nice to them.
I guess, I will cede the word "work". Torture works, in the same sense that freezing your hand solid with liquid nitrogen works to drive nails into wood. It just isn't the best solution, and is actively harmful.Part of why Sherwood Moran became such a legendary figure among military interrogators was his cool disregard for what he termed the standard "hard-boiled" military at ude. The brutality of the fighting in the Pacific and the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese had created a general assumption that only the sternest measures would get Japanese prisoners to divulge anything. Moran countered that in his and others' experience, strong-arm tactics simply did not work. Stripping a prisoner of his dignity, treating him as a still-dangerous threat, forcing him to stand at attention and flanking him with guards throughout his interrogation—in other words, emphasizing that "we are his to-be-respected and august enemies and conquerors"—invariably backfired. It made the prisoner "so conscious of his present position and that he was a captured soldier vs. enemy intelligence" that it "played right into [the] hands" of those who were determined not to give away anything of military importance.
In his report (written in the form of a letter of advice to interpreters newly assigned to interrogation duty) Moran stressed that he would usually begin an interrogation by taking almost the opposite tack.
I often tell a prisoner right at the start what my at ude is! I consider a prisoner (i.e. a man who has been captured and disarmed and in a perfectly safe place) as out of the war, out of the picture, and thus, in a way, not an enemy … Notice that … I used the word "safe." That is the point: get the prisoner to a safe place, where even he knows … that it is all over. Then forget, as it were, the "enemy" stuff, and the "prisoner" stuff. I tell them to forget it, telling them I am talking as a human being to a human being.
How about torture is far less effective than not torturing.
"They" have yet to concede it was torture. No court has made the legal determination it was torture. "They" went through a very deliberate process to make sure their techniques were not torture. No court has found otherwise.
The Bush administration stopped the methods as a matter of policy -- not because any conditions had changed.
Why change a policy to forbid what you were doing if you think it's all fine and dandy?
Nothing has been brought up in court.
Well, you should read the various domestic and international laws you believe apply here because they all have very specific definitions for torture. Your glib use of terms such as "intense" and "pain" and "fear" are all addressed and, as Bybee demonstrated, there are levels of acceptable pain and fear that is not outlawed but merely discouraged.
So, words have meanings and you should be precise when you try to argue -- beyond the emotional -- what was done cons utes torture.
My point, thank you.
So your confidence in Yoo and Bybee is unfounded.
All you have is echo chamber support.
So how many times did Yoo and Bybee perform the techniques on detainees?
Actually, it's founded in the knowledge it hasn't been successfully challenged and in the fact that I understand and agree with their arguments.
That is a question, not a straw man. It's a fair question.
I just want to know how much hands on experience they have to be experts on the effects of these methods. I would be much more inclined to believe what they have to say if they had any experience whatsoever with these methods and the harsher methods they ruled out.
Echo chamber.
What's fair about it? It's like asking a defense attorney many crimes he's committed. It's not germane to the discussion.
It's obvious you haven't read the memos or you would at the very least understand they were interpreting the law and not discussing the effects of EITs.
Your question is still a...
A straw man is a common type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on the misrepresentation of an opponent's argument. To be successful, a straw man argument requires that the audience be ignorant or uninformed of the original argument. The so-called typical "attacking a straw man" argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition by covertly replacing it with a different proposition (i.e., "stand up a straw man") and then to refute or defeat that false argument ("knock down a straw man") instead of the original proposition.
You know, like claiming my confidence in Bybee and Yoo should be predicated on their personal experience with Enhanced Interrogation Techniques instead of on what I actually do base my confidence, their experience in the law and their well-reasoned exposition on the law vis-à-vis, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques versus torture.
this is actually pretty funny, because in this very same thread (page 3 and so on), 3 years ago, you made the same argument without actually knowing any of the laws. I had to actually list them to you, and when pressed on what's your definition of torture that doesn't violate any of these laws and conventions the US is a signatory of, you never responded...
The red-herring of "successful prosecution" was also tackled then. The difference is that it was actually challenged since then, but the challenges suppressed through state secrets. But the fact that it was not brought to justice, for whatever reason, has no bearing on it being legal or not. Some people get away with doing illegal stuff all the time. The fact that they don't get prosecuted doesn't make it any less illegal.
Nice of you to use crime in your comparison.
I have read them. The interpretation depends in no small part on the perceived effects of the methods.It's obvious you haven't read the memos or you would at the very least understand they were interpreting the law and not discussing the effects of EITs.
Nah, does get your goat though.Your question is still a...
I asked a simple question. You wrongly inferred my reasoning.You know, like claiming my confidence in Bybee and Yoo should be predicated on their personal experience with Enhanced Interrogation Techniques instead of on what I actually do base my confidence, their experience in the law and their well-reasoned exposition on the law vis-à-vis, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques versus torture.
It's OK, you get preemptively defensive a lot.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
