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Until Jack Goldmith revoked the memos, yadda yadda yadda.
As I recall, the GWB era gloss of *severe* was equivalent to the pain of losing a limb or experiencing organ failure.
Until Jack Goldmith revoked the memos, yadda yadda yadda.
For the record, I do not find Geneva vague, though I concede that it is not precise. Painful, degrading or inhumane treatment is proscribed. What's so unclear about that?
Geneva was international policy for nearly sixty years, and I don't recall many complaints during my own 40 years that it was too vague -- until the last eight years.
Geneva is still the law of the land, despite the legal black hole created for POTUS in the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
The MCA of 2006 gives Obama the right to interpret Geneva Common Article 3 for the interrogation scenario all by himself, and immunizes the participants retroactively to 9/11.
It's unclear because what qualifies as painful, degrading and inhumane gets left up to individual interpretation. Sure, it's easy enough to distinguish when we look at the extremes. Tell me, or I'll cut off your fingers = torture. Tell me, or I'll make sure that your breakfast is cold = not torture. Pretty easy to differentiate there. Start working towards the middle from those two extremes and the lack of a precise definition becomes more and more significant.
I'd think that has more to do with a lack of participants in global conflicts over the last 40 years who are trying to walk that fine line. When Russia invaded Afghanistan they didn't care about Geneva. They just went ahead and tortured people and didn't give a damn about where the torture/not torture line was. That made it easy for the rest of the world to point and say "look, there's torture". Vietnam, same thing. Bosnia, any of the African conflicts. Same thing. Over the last 40 years who's been an active participant in a conflict who cared about whether or not they followed Geneva? Bush Sr. in Gulf War I? Only example I can think of.Geneva was international policy for nearly sixty years, and I don't recall many complaints during my own 40 years that it was too vague -- until the last eight years.
Does Sodium Pentothal not work? It is one of the drugs used for lethal injection, so it has to be used with caution.
Just curious. I'm against torture as long as it's not a suicide pact.
That the whole world flauts law and humanitarian principles is no reason to disdain the law or humanitarianism. Go ahead and pooh pooh an agreement that has protected American warriors -- not perfectly, not infallibly -- from those who were probably inclined to do them even worse. For sixty years.
I realize that international laws and norms mainly inhabit the realm of the symbolic, but we made Geneva the law of the land, and you'll pardon me if I'm not one to cast it aside like a used tissue, just because others blow their nose with it.
This is why I choose to err on the side of NOT waterboarding. I'd rather we stuck with persistent questioning and giving more carrots than sticks. I'm certainly not for highly elevated/lowered temperatures, sleep deprivation or waterboarding.
How can you not see that a strength of Geneva?
By all means, refresh your memory.
I'm not pooh-poohing anything. You say there's a line we shouldn't cross. I'd like to know where that line is. You say Geneva is the law of the land. Good laws have rigid definitions. That's why we have a penal code that specifically spells out exactly what type of behavior is prohibited, instead of having some generic "you shouldn't do bad stuff" verbage where we rely on the interpretation of enforcement to say "I'll know law breaking when I see it".
Yeah, apparently that makes me a wimp or something. I was partly replying to Darrin when I said that. My reply to you is more particular.
If you do this, you've just written a torture manual. You're telling the bad guys what they have to get around.
I'll agree that it didn't work for porn, but it kind of makes sense for torture. Non US signatories will tend to err on the side of restraint, not knowing where the line is. Vagueness is part of the wisdom of Geneva IMO.
I defy you to come up with a 'definite' line for torture. The problem is that torture is measured in degrees as much as it is by actions.
If I keep you awake, it's not torture. But what if I keep you awake for 3 days straight? 7 days? What about if I combine that with lowering the temperature in the room to 50 or so?
I guess while we're at it, we might as well also put you in a stress position designed to make you tired, and blast loud foreign music.
My point is that it is a combination of factors that leads some to break, but for many when they break, they can't be "put together" again.
Honestly, I'd be fine with declaring what we will and won't do. But that's mostly because I'm of the mindset that developing a rapport and gaining trust is a better/more effective way to gain long-term intel. (Short-term probably leans in favor of torture, but the fact that such info can be unreliable, and my own personal morals, lead me to still go with the good cop/bad cop routine moreso than the torture route.)
It's okay to steal from your own citizens and intentionally decrease the standard of living for their future generations, but you dare not deprive some goodhearted men of sleep.
Another concern is that our friends and enemies may tend to construe it (esp. w/in the historical frame) as an official policy of legally parsed mistreatment.
"What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight ... is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings. "- General David Petraeus, May 10, 2007
From the New York Times.
According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.
Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-do ented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.
They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.
The process was "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm," a former C.I.A. official said.
You must still be asleep. SpursTalk posters are pissed off about the bailout all over the map.
Go start a new thread if you care so much.
Bush is out of office now. Move on!!
Is he?
Also, declaring *approved* stress techniques violates the spirit of Geneva.
It looks like a special exception to the rules, and in fact US legal parsing has already underwritten such exceptions under the cover of *compliance*.
Where slicing Binyan Mohammed's penis fits in I guess I'll just leave to wiser heads than mine.
This is why knowing the results of the interrogations are important.
I submit it's not important. It's a moral dodge.
I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what are effective and non-tortuous means of obtaining potentially life-saving information.
I mentioned sodium pentathol. Is its use considered torture?
Google it yourself, Darrin. Why should anybody do your homework for you?
What's your goddam take, Socrates?
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