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"random people complain about exhibit in UN premises"
farce!
You need a better article to make that point, IMO.
"random people complain about exhibit in UN premises"
farce!
That was my earlier point, before I posted the article. It's just another example.
you're a caricature, Yoni
just for the sake of living up the the Philo moniker, wouldn't that make it a political issue for you too?
In what sense? I think in that realm it's a diplomatic issue.
you dont think foreign relations are of a political nature?
To a degree, sure. But in that realm, it's not internal politics (which is what I was referring to, perhaps, not clearly), it's nation to nation.
As I stated above, my main concern is on treaties, breaking them, the future impact of those unilateral actions, and the diplomatic damage that was well do ented.
Perhaps I should've used "partisan politics"? Would that be more clear?
To recur to Yonivore's point upstream, in no way does it exonerate us that we experimented on our own troops using torture and mind control techniques we borrowed from Communist enemies, before we used them on others.
http://www.thenation.com/article/193...d-human-beingsNo one has been held accountable for torture, beyond a handful of prosecutions of low-level troops and contractors. Indeed, impunity has been virtually guaranteed as a result of various Faustian bargains, which include “golden shield” legal memos written by government lawyers for the CIA; ex post facto immunity for war crimes that Congress inserted in the 2006 Military Commissions Act; classification and secrecy that still shrouds the torture program, as is apparent in the Senate report’s redactions; and the “look forward, not backward” position that President Obama has maintained through every wave of public revelations since 2009. An American majority, it seems, has come to accept the legacy of torture.
Human experimentation, in contrast, has not been politically refashioned into a legitimate or justifiable enterprise. Therefore, it would behoove us to appreciate the fact that the architects and implementers of black-site torments were authorized at the highest levels of the White House and CIA to experiment on human beings. Reading the report through this lens casts a different light on questions of accountability and impunity.
The “war on terror” is not the CIA’s first venture into human experimentation. At the dawn of the Cold War, German scientists and doctors with Nazi records of human experimentation were given new iden ies and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking rapidity of American POWs’ breakdowns and indoctrination by their communist captors, the CIA began investing in mind-control research. In 1953, the CIA established the MK-ULTRA program, whose earliest phase involved hypnosis, electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program evolved into experiments in psychological torture that adapted elements of Soviet and Chinese models, including longtime standing, protracted isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation. Those lessons soon became an applied “science” in the Cold War.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation and extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA produced a manual led “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation” to guide agents in the art of extracting information from “resistant” sources by combining techniques to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.” Like the communists, the CIA largely eschewed tactics that violently target the body in favor of those that target the mind by systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the desired state of compliance. The Phoenix program model was incorporated into the curriculum of the School of the Americas, and an updated version of the Kubark guide, produced in 1983 and led “Human Resource Exploitation Manual,” was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin America and Southeast Asia during the global “war on communism.”
In the mid-1980s, CIA practices became the subject of congressional investigations into US-supported atrocities in Central America. Both manuals became public in 1997 as a result of Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Baltimore Sun. That would have seemed like a “never again” moment.
But here we are again. This brings us back to Mitc and Jessen. Because of their experience as trainers in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, after 9/11 they were contacted by high-ranking Pentagon officials and, later, by lawyers who wanted to know whether some of those SERE techniques could be reverse-engineered to get terrorism suspects to talk.
The road from abstract hypotheticals (can SERE be reverse-engineered?) to the authorized use of waterboarding and confinement boxes runs straight into the terrain of human experimentation. On April 15, 2002, Mitc and Jessen arrived at a black site in Thailand to supervise the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the first “high-value detainee” captured by the CIA. By July, Mitc proposed more coercive techniques to CIA headquarters, and many of these were approved in late July. From then until the program was dry-docked in 2008, at least thirty-eight people were subjected to psychological and physical torments, and the results were methodically do ented and analyzed. That is the textbook definition of human experimentation.
My point is not to minimize the illegality of torture or the legal imperatives to pursue accountability for perpetrators. Rather, because the concept of torture has been so muddled and disputed, I suggest that accountability would be more publicly palatable if we reframed the CIA’s program as one of human experimentation. If we did so, it would be more difficult to laud or excuse perpetrators as “patriots” who “acted in good faith.” Although torture has become a Rorschach test among political elites playing to public opinion on the Sunday morning talk shows, human experimentation has no such community of advocates and apologists.
In fact, that's doubly damning. We tortured our own warriors.
Last edited by Winehole23; 12-18-2014 at 03:54 AM.
not mentioned in this thread that I've seen: according to the CIA's own records, 26 of the people we tortured were cases of mistaken iden y or otherwise detained in error.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/13/us...ror-.html?_r=0
in other words, more than one fifth of the 119 who were tortured while in CIA custody -- N.B., this does not include Gitmo -- were innocent.
light should be thrown on the schemers who got the contract to design the interrogations, Bruce Jesson and James Mitc
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/...ure-revisited/We now know that the CIA contracted out the torture to two individuals without “specialized knowledge of al Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism or any relevant cultural or linguistic experience.” They had never interrogated anyone – yet they got a $181 million contract to run the program. They were sadists:
John Rizzo, the acting CIA general counsel who met with the psychologists, wrote in his book, “Company Man,” that he found some of what Mitc and Jessen were recommending “sadistic and terrifying.” One technique, he wrote, was “so gruesome that the Justice Department later stopped short of approving it.”They had a pecuniary interest in the criminal enterprise. And they were making things up as they went along:
One email from a CIA staff psychologist said “no professional in the field would credit” their judgments. Another said their “arrogance and narcissism” led to unnecessary conflicts in the field. The director of interrogations for the CIA called their program a “train wreck” and complained that they were blending the roles of doctor and interrogator inappropriately.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...ngle_page=trueOnce 9/11 happened, Cheney ceased to believe that the CIA should be subject to the U.S. Cons ution, statutes passed by Congress, international treaties, or moral prohibitions against torture. Those standards would be cast aside. In their place, moral relativism would reign. Any action undertaken by the United States would be subject to this test: Is it morally equivalent to what al-Qaeda did on 9/11? Is it as bad as murdering roughly 3,000 innocent people? If not, then no one should criticize it, let alone investigate, charge and prosecute the CIA. Did a prisoner freeze to death? Were others anally raped? Well, what if they were?
If it cannot be compared with 9/11, if it is not morally equivalent, then it should not be verboten.
That is the moral standard Cheney is unabashedly invoking on national television. He doesn't want the United States to honor norms against torture. He doesn't want us to abide by the Ten Commandments, or to live up to the values in the Declaration of Independence, or to be restrained by the text of the Cons ution. Instead, Cheney would have us take al-Qaeda as our moral and legal measuring stick. Did America torture dozens of innocents? So what. 9/11 was worse.
under norms established at Nuremberg, doctors and psychologists may have committed war crimes:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/12/1...nuremberg.htmlCIA health professionals may have committed war crimes by collecting and analyzing data on brutally interrogated detainees in potential violation of U.S. and international bans on research on human subjects without their consent, a human rights organization said Tuesday.
Physicians for Human Rights called on President Barack Obama and Congress to establish a commission of inquiry to examine the participation of CIA and private medical personnel in the interrogation program, including possible breaches of domestic and international laws.
“The CIA relied upon health professionals at every step to commit and conceal the brutal and systematic torture of national security detainees,” the organization said in an analysis of a four-year study of the agency’s interrogation program released last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. “While most of the acts detailed . . . violate international human rights and domestic laws prohibiting torture, several of these alleged violations can also cons ute war crimes.”
In raising possible war crimes by medical personnel, the analysis cited bans on experimentation on prisoners that grew out of the trials of Nazi officials and doctors held in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II.
Riposte, Yonivore?
Winehole with the 8 consecutive post bads
Hilarious that you can't even try to refute what has been said.
Hard to have the "moral authority" when we did like this. ing terrifying.
i never said i disagreed with him. so why would that be hilarious, to not attempt to refute somebody i agree with?
So if a government lawyer writes a memo saying "it isn't torture" that is sufficient for you?
I guess if a foreign government detained you, and showed you a letter saying some procedure was not torture, you wouldn't complain?
I also noticed you very pointedly dodged the question about this being done to our service members.
soph·ist·ry
ˈsäfəstrē/Submit
noun
the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving.
a fallacious argument.
Pretty much. It is astonishing to me to see cowards who would have our country give up some very important principles at the first sign of danger.
I didn't think we had grown so soft and weak.
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