Torture

So you are saying the ends justify the means?

If it looks like a fascist...

Honestly, you're beyond belief at this stage. This was going way too far here

ES

 

Smuggler:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=4

The Army is opposed to torture. I guess they know less than you eh?

ES

 

Not that I disagree with your overall point, Ender, but that article (at least the part you link) doesn't say that the Army overall has an anti-torture policy.

Best part of the article:

 

I thought the best part was this:

In a more sober tone, he said, ?We?ve had all of these torture experts come by recently, and they say, ?You don?t realize how many people are affected by this. Be careful.? They say torture doesn?t work. But I don?t believe that. I don?t think it?s honest to say that if someone you love was being held, and you had five minutes to save them, you wouldn?t do it. Tell me, what would you do? If someone had one of my children, or my wife, I would hope I?d do it. There is nothing?nothing?I wouldn?t do.? He went on, ?Young interrogators don?t need our show. What the human mind can imagine is so much greater than what we show on TV. No one needs us to tell them what to do. It?s not like somebody goes, ?Oh, look what they?re doing, I?ll do that.? Is it??

lol.

These fancy experts, with their education and their practical experience, say torture's bad, but I don't believe it!

Idiot.

ES

 

Nope. Not even if the info is reliable. I'm kind of sick of this attitude that if you phrase something one way that the converse is true. It's not.

 

Don't get in a huff. If my daughter was held, to be executed, and I could find out where by torturing someone... I'm not sure I'd say 'no'.

 

If I'm getting in a huff it's because I'm kind of sick of people doing that. Not just by you, but the regular conservative schlock that I've encountered here. It's twisting someone's words around to make them look bad. Intentional or not. You shouldn't have to cover your ass with everything you say because someone, somewhere might get the idea that if you rally against a conservative principle that the opposite must be true. Or that if you say you're against something for some reason that it must mean that if that something were reliable that you would support it. I've dealt with that crap for five years now and it annoyed me then and it sure as **** annoys me now.


And no, I wouldn't support torture even with hostages. There are other methods that could be used that are more reliable.

 

I;m sorry, but your comments here betray a very clear bias.

Conservatives aren't the only people who do that. There is quite a bit of that from the liberal side of the fence as well around here.

Kimball Kinnison

 

Yes, however I've experienced it mostly from conservatives more than liberals. Sooo....again, not bias. Just going by experience.

 

In a more sober tone, he said, ?We?ve had all of these torture experts come by recently, and they say, ?You don?t realize how many people are affected by this. Be careful.? They say torture doesn?t work. But I don?t believe that. I don?t think it?s honest to say that if someone you love was being held, and you had five minutes to save them, you wouldn?t do it. Tell me, what would you do? If someone had one of my children, or my wife, I would hope I?d do it. There is nothing?nothing?I wouldn?t do.? He went on, ?Young interrogators don?t need our show. What the human mind can imagine is so much greater than what we show on TV. No one needs us to tell them what to do. It?s not like somebody goes, ?Oh, look what they?re doing, I?ll do that.? Is it??


These fancy experts, with their education and their practical experience, say torture's bad, but I don't believe it!

I like to sometimes some up the above (bolded) situations into logical fallacies. The speaker in question thinks, probably honestly, that they are giving an explanation of thier view by outlying a dire picture that is possible. And sure, anything is possible. What they don't realize is that thier discussion of the relevant point stopped at the sentence "But I don't believe that".

Everything that follows doesn't answer the question of WHY the speaker doesn't believe that. It goes on to sort of just make the assumption that it would work, and makes it a matter of an erronious "test of wills". That the world will be saved if only we have the will to save it and do the things that need to be done. And he goes on about the need for that. But what he forgets is that everything he's saying is irrelevant if it doesn't work. In fact someone in that position would be doing the worst thing possible: wasting time. Better to try something that WILL work than just assume that the hardest thing for you to do is the correct answer -- assuming that sacrifice of the subject (pain) and yourself (will) is naturally the correct answer. Forget morality... we're just talking in terms of practical results.

What this ends up being instead of a real measured response of cold, calculated but necessary will as the speaker would have it, is really just throwing something at the wall and seeing if it sticks. If you like pop culture references, it's closer to Sawyer's bungled attempt at euthenasia of the Marshall on LOST's Season 1 because 'it's what needed to be done' than anything seen in the heroics of 24.

Sure, there are times of high pressure on a strict timeline where you have to make these huge decisions that decide fates. In the heat of battle and war, I'm sure these decisions need to get made, and in other realms they have to as well. But that doesn't mean we have to go characterizing situations like that which don't apply. It's another of those things that seem to come about by someone thinking in terms of being "manly", even though they don't think of it as such.

 

Actually, that's still a bias.

You don't notice it as much from the liberals because you tend to agree with them more, and so you haven't been a target for them as much. That makes it a self-selecting bias.

Kimball Kinnison

 

No, if you go back over the several years this has happened it's always in some thread and a conservative comes in and does it. At least they do it to me. Dunno about anyone else. Bubba was a frequent user of this tactic. Now we can continue this in PM if you want.

 

FID:

Kimball in all honesty seems to be correct. We can't really use your experiences to judge who really makes these prejudgements any more than we can use Kimball's experiences concerning his religion to prove or disprove the existance of God.

 

Hey now, who you calling conservative! Ya mama's conservative!

I wasn't aware I was using any tactic... I was just interested.

 

There's nothing wrong with being a conservative, or a liberal.

As much as it's a cliche by now, these are just labels. Instead of people asking themselves where an idea comes from or what part of the political spectrum it identifies with, they're a lot better off asking "does this work or doesn't it?"... "Is this what's happening or isn't it?".

Hitler was a horrible person... it doesn't mean that he didn't do anything right to boot. Carter didn't have the personnel required to carry out the rescue of the Iranian hostages... that doesn't mean that Reagan was right about economics and he was wrong. Vietnam was a war fought on erronious assumptions on the capacity of the growth of Communism... it doesn't mean that the Soviets were being all that unfairly maligned. Michael Moore manipulated the truth on a number of occaisions in "Bowling For Colombine"... it doesn't mean that he reached the wrong conclusion in the film -- to the degree he reached one.

 

How would you feel if you torture gleaned you information that was false because you captive, in the unlikely instance that they actually broke, told you waht they thought you wanted to hear and not the truth?

That you'd traded what made you better than them? And for what, an emotionally satisfying act of bullying that did nothing remotely good?

Yeah, wrong answer Watto.

ES

 

Not to mention that you could have spent the time that turns out to have been wasted torturing doing something that was actually productive.

What I find unsettling in the article is that both sides take an all or nothing approach. One side says torture works, the other that it doesn't. There's no attempt to quantify it -- is it 20% effective? 40%? 60%? Even more, which is what Dick Cheney is now apparently arguing?

In the end, though, there is a more fundamental problem with torture, regardless of its effectiveness. While Cheney, Rummy et al, never quite got the concept of comity, it is actually a fundamental underpinning of international relations. How can we expect other countries not to torture our citizens, or our allies to support us in condemning such behavior, when we're doing it ourselves? Cheney and Rummy seem to think we can just say "Hey, we're the good guys" and everyone else will just jump in line behind us, except of course for the evil-doers. But how can we claim to be th good guys if we're doing what supposedly only the bad guys do? In a nutshell, by engaging in such wholesale acceptance of torture, we essentially trade some possible (lets's leave aside the probability question for a moment) near-term gains for mid- and long term loss of moral authority.

Just look at the effect of Gitmo and Abu Girab on current American foreign policy. Why won't one of our strongest allies, Angela Merkel, even consider sending more German troops to Afghanistan? Because for a large portion of the German public, Afghanistan stopped being about getting the people responsible for 9/11 when the first stories about torture and other HR violations at Gitmo and Abu Girab became public. It confirmed European's worst fear about the US, that it is primarily interested in preserving its own dominance, regardless of any morality, rather than in actually "spreading freedom and justice" throughout the world.

 

E_S, now you're doing what FIDo accused me of; you're putting words in my mouth.

I didn't say 'I'm all for torture'. I only said that if torture would work, I'm not sure I'd be against it. As it it, if I understand correctly, it's not a sure-fire tactic so this is all just an intellectual exercise.

What I want to establish is, what's more important? The fact that people shouldn't be tortured because it's cruel, or the fact that torturing won't gain you anything?

 

That probably depends on what you're gaining. Getting next month's lottery numbers is not the same as actionable information that could save the lives of thousands.

 

Former Bush aide claims Muslims LIKE torture

 

Even under Obama, the CIA is saying that waterboarding stopped at least one 9/11-style attack.

After he was subjected to the ?waterboard? technique, KSM became cooperative, providing intelligence that led to the capture of key al Qaeda allies and, eventually, the closing down of an East Asian terrorist cell that had been tasked with carrying out the 9/11-style attack on Los Angeles.

The May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that details what happened in this regard was written by then-Principal Deputy Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury to John A. Rizzo, the senior deputy general counsel for the CIA.

?You have informed us that the interrogation of KSM?once enhanced techniques were employed?led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ?Second Wave,? ?to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into? a building in Los Angeles,? says the memo.

Unknown number of innocent lives saved vs. three waterboarded terrorists.

You make the call.

 

Sorry, JediSmuggler but George Bush already tried this several years ago. Both the Washington Post and LA Times reported that within the intelligence community, it was never even clear that the attack had moved beyond the conceptual stage of "that might be a good target." The article that's still freely available online notes:

Looks like that unknown number is zero. Let's set aside how disgusting and morally outrageous torture is for a moment. Are you saying we should torture people to find out the details of brainstorming sessions? That doesn't save any lives. It's just idiotic.

 

Where are the pardons for Lynndie England and the rest of the people tried and convicted after Abu Ghraib? They were merely doing what the Bush administration had ordered. It's outrageous that they were made scapegoats for the real people in charge. It's unforgivable that W claimed to be "shocked," when in fact he ordered the very things England was convicted of doing.

England and others just had the misfortunate of going first. If they're to be convicted, many others should join them.

 

I would agree, KW, that England and others ought to be reevaluated. I think, much as Chairman Leahy does, that there behavior was very much in line with, and inspired by, general Bush administration policy. It is the higher-ups who are responsible, much more than they.

Also, just to put a nail in the coffin of this Library Tower idiocy:

Source

KSM was captured in 2003. So, by torturing him, they prevented the ticking time bomb of an attack they had already foiled a year earlier? Way to go.

 

Are the memos the same ones being mentioned here?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/21/obama.memos/index.html