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I asked you what reason we have for keeping the cons utional protections around.
What is that reason?
From whom/what?
I think it was some point when you tried to argue that waterboarding ISN'T as bad as other forms of torture, so you approve of it. Except, you'd approve of worse forms if they were needed.
Or maybe it was the part where you said you would never torture innocents, but you would torture people that you were pretty sure were terrorists.
Or it could be the strawmen you're trying to build that we said "Torture never works" when everyone arguing against you has clearly stated that a) it's not worth it/unnecessary/hurts us more than it helps and/or b) it's wrong morally.
I don't know, it's tough to keep track of all your spin.
I asked you what reason we have for keeping the cons utional protections around.
What is that reason?
From whom/what?
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...he-senate.htmlLast night, along with the bill reopening the government, the Senate confirmed Stephen W. Preston, the top lawyer at the C.I.A., to move to the Pentagon to serve in the same role there. The vote slipped by unnoticed by most, but on close inspection, it revealed previously unreleased do ents that lift the lid on an unusual standoff between Congress and the Obama Administration’s C.I.A. At its core is a bitter disagreement over an apparently devastating, and still secret, report by the Senate Intelligence Committee do enting in detail how the C.I.A.’s brutalization of terror suspects during the Bush years was unnecessary, ineffective, and deceptively sold to Congress, the White House, the Justice Department, and the public. The report threatens to definitively refute former C.I.A. personnel who have defended the program’s integrity. But so far, to the consternation of several members of the Intelligence Committee, the Obama Administration, like Bush’s before it, is keeping the damning details from public view.
Preston’s confirmation became a proxy skirmish in the fight. Obama reportedly hoped to get Preston confirmed before the congressional recess this past summer. Instead, Senator Mark Udall, a Democrat from Colorado, who is a member of both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Armed Services Committee, put a “hold” on Preston’s confirmation until he answered a set of additional, and previously undisclosed, questions. A copy of these seven questions, and Preston’s answers, obtained by The New Yorker (below), sheds new light on the conflict.
Preston admits outright that, contrary to the C.I.A.’s insistence that it did not actively impede congressional oversight of its detention and interrogation program, “briefings to the Committees included inaccurate information related to aspects of the program of express interest to Members.”Preston also distances himself from the C.I.A.’s argument that it is impossible to know whether alternatives to brutal interrogations would have produced information that was as good, if not better. According to the Udall do ent, the C.I.A. has argued in its rebuttal to the Senate report that it is “unknowable whether, without enhanced techniques, C.I.A. or non-C.I.A. interrogators could have acquired the same information from those detainees.”
However, Preston, in his answers to Udall, agrees with the Senate report’s finding that it is sometimes possible to determine that there were other ways that the C.I.A. could have obtained the same information, without tormenting detainees. Evidently, the report recounts numerous instances in which ordinary legal methods would have produced the same intelligence that was gained through brutalization. Preston, in his answers to Udall, acknowledges that:
I agree that it may be possible to make a determination as to whether information… was “otherwise unavailable.”
Doctors and psychologists working for the US military violated the ethical codes of their profession under instruction from the defence department and the CIA to become involved in the torture and degrading treatment of suspected terrorists, an investigation has concluded.
The report of the Taskforce on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centres concludes that after 9/11, health professionals working with the military and intelligence services "designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees".
Medical professionals were in effect told that their ethical mantra "first do no harm" did not apply, because they were not treating people who were ill.
The report lays blame primarily on the defence department (DoD) and the CIA, which required their healthcare staff to put aside any scruples in the interests of intelligence gathering and security practices that caused severe harm to detainees, from waterboarding to sleep deprivation and force-feeding.
The two-year review by the 19-member taskforce, Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror, supported by the Ins ute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and the Open Society Foundations, says that the DoD termed those involved in interrogation "safety officers" rather than doctors. Doctors and nurses were required to participate in the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike, against the rules of the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association. Doctors and psychologists working for the DoD were required to breach patient confidentiality and share what they knew of the prisoner's physical and psychological condition with interrogators and were used as interrogators themselves. They also failed to comply with recommendations from the army surgeon general on reporting abuse of detainees.
"The taskforce says that unethical practices by medical personnel, required by the military, continue today. The DoD "continues to follow policies that undermine standards of professional conduct" for interrogation, hunger strikes, and reporting abuse. Protocols have been issued requiring doctors and nurses to participate in the force-feeding of detainees, including forced extensive bodily restraints for up to two hours twice a day"The taskforce says that unethical practices by medical personnel, required by the military, continue today. The DoD "continues to follow policies that undermine standards of professional conduct" for interrogation, hunger strikes, and reporting abuse. Protocols have been issued requiring doctors and nurses to participate in the force-feeding of detainees, including forced extensive bodily restraints for up to two hours twice a dayhttp://www.theguardian.com/world/201...errorists-9-11rules to ensure doctors and psychiatrists working for the military are allowed to abide by the ethical obligations of their profession; they should be prohibited from taking part in interrogation, sharing information from detainees' medical records with interrogators, or participating in force-feeding, and they should be required to report abuse of detainees.
The secret evidence against the Bosnian detainees Judge Leon ordered the government to release (in 2008) wasn't probative. That's one reason the discretion to torture can't be left to the government, assuming this is a valid policy to begin with. They load the dice against the detained and overrely on untested information. This is a recipe for torturing innocents.
Letting the government decide the facts prior to interrogation is a mockery of justice. When subjected to scrutiny in an adversarial process, most of the charges and information have turned out to be bunk.
btw, 26 of the 110 detainees who were subjected to torture while in CIA custody were -- according to the CIA's own records -- cases of mistaken iden y or otherwise detained in error. The CIA admits more than one fifth of the people it tortured were innocent.
9/11 didn't make it right to torture people, Yoni.
It wasn't torture, Winehole23.
it is when others do it to us. you can't have it both ways.
It was torture.
Rectal feeding? Death by exposure? Breaking limbs then making people support their weight on them? Confinement in a coffin for days on end? Waterboarding?
How are these things not torture?
I'm going out on a limb here and suggest anyone who would deem to torture an American isn't going to spend the time deliberating whether or not their techniques can be harsh without crossing the line into torture; they're not then going to ask their lawyers if they've successfully devised techniques that do so.
I would suggest they'll just break out the drills, clamps, generators, whips, and plastics shredders and proceed to torture -- before they videotape the beheading of our citizen.
Tell me where our EITs even approach that kind of barbarity?
We disagree.
Medically necessary for non-compliant detainees. Starving is worse than a forced enema.
The person responsible was twice presented for prosecution and prosecutors declined because the was poorly trained. Also, his actions fell outside the legal framework of the EITs.
Not an approved EIT. In fact, stress positions were not used on Abu Zubaydah because of his injuries.
Hadn't heard that one but, so what?
Designed in a manner where it did not cons ute torture.
There, that's how.
"if these things happened as they are described in the report, as you describe them, those were not authorized by the Justice Department. They were not supposed to be done and those people who did those are at risk legally because they were acting outside their orders."
-John Yoo
So if they just did the same things the CIA did.
Are you fine with American servicemen and women being so treated by enemies or not?
I won't disagree with John Yoo. Funny you should use him as an authority, though.
I think torture should be prosecuted. I believe if the administration went to the lengths to make sure they designed an interrogation regimen, that would not cross the line into torture, and people acting outside those parameters caused harm -- they should be held accountable.
I don't know if John Yoo had the benefit of context when he answered that question but, he did qualify it by say, "If these things happened as they are described in the report, as you describe them,..." then it seems he's in favor of prosecution, as well.
The problem is, the report is suspect. The one incident of rectal rehydration, the report claims was not medically necessary, they base on a single e-mail send by what appears to be some Gruberesque officer that got some thrill out of exerting control over the detainee. If that's born out, I suggest he be held accountable.
All the other incidents of rectal rehydration are claimed to have been medically necessary (as this one may well have been, too) and the report makes no determination otherwise.
I think its a ridiculous hypothesis to fantasize that any of our current enemies would do the same but, sure, I'd rather be waterboarded as it is designed by the CIA than whatever else would befall me in the hands of al Qaeda. Absolutely.
No, I'm not but, if it's between this treatment and what they're actually doing to our American servicemen and women, I'd take it.
I'm not suggesting that I agree with John Yoo on anything in particular; I'm just saying that while some continue playing semantic games, even John Yoo acknowledges that his willingness to gerrymander the law to find support "enhanced interrogation techniques" relents at some point and recognizes that the ends of this effort do not always justify the means.
So you're fine with American service men and women being waterboarded and subjected to cold until they die of hypothermia.
Cool with sevicemen and women being sodomized with hummus.
Nice.
You're sick, dude.
I don't think that's what he's said at all. I think he recognizes people engage in excesses and that they would do so absent any guiding legal framework and, that they need to be held accountable when they do.
Nope.
Nope.
But, I would rather our servicemen and women, if captured, be subjected to the EITs, as designed by the CIA and vetted by the DOJ, than what we both know would happen to them, instead.
So, by acknowledging that if the facts in the report are true, that such acts would open the door to consequences -- ostensibly for having violated the law -- Yoo didn't say that the ends don't always justify the means? I think he's saying that no matter how much he tried to manipulate precedent and governing do ents, there's simply no legal justification for certain conduct in the interrogation of detainees and that such conduct is impermissible, no matter how much information a defender of its use might suggest that it had provided.
Recognizing that there are excesses is an acknowledgment that there are limits to what is acceptable.
I don't think either one of us should pretend to put words in his mouth but, it doesn't make sense to me that Yoo would be acknowledging his effort led to abuses as much as Yoo would be acknowledging the report may contain examples outside what was authorized and that could be characterized as abuses.
We can disagree but, I think only Yoo can settle the question.
You're right, and I believe he's contending those limits were strictly defined in the designed EIT's and the DOJ's vetting of them.
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