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Gitmo inmate: My treatment shames American flag [W:508,759]

matchlight said:
I don't know what that means. The law on this subject has been established for a long time--see, e.g., Ex Parte Quirin. The U.S.--despite Mr. Obama's efforts to make nice to various Islamist thugs--remains at war with Muslim jihadists around the world. This country doesn't need to justify drawing up rules for military tribunals and trying unlawful enemy combatants in them. Nor does it need to justify executing any convicted of war crimes.

Thirteen years after an attempt to decapitate the government of the United States, which involved the murders of almost three thousand people and cost countless billions in economic damage, the man who openly admits--boasts about--being the mastermind of the plot, far from being executed for it, as he should have been a dozen years ago, has never even been tried. It would be hard to imagine a more effective way to encourage our enemies by showing them our lack of resolve.
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The thing that procedure disregards is that leaders must lead. That requires taking the others with you.
 
joG said:
In what way is waterboarding toture? Don't be silly. It depends on the aplication. As prescribed, it is an insult to people that have been tortured to say that that is torture.
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The simulation of drowning is torture. Sorry to burst your bubble, chief.
 
joG said:
In what way is waterboarding toture?
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This way:

Torture, according to the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture, is:

...any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in, or incidental to, lawful sanctions. --UN Convention Against Torture[5]
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JasperL said:
This statement conflicts with the one below. The grunts who supposedly crossed the line were acting on approved orders from their superiors all the way to the WH. So if you want to prosecute, that's the ultimate target, and we won't do that, so why would I support only prosecuting a few low level grunts who are made to be fall guys?



I just disagree 100%. Once you agree that waterboarding is an acceptable technique, you've obliterated any meaningful moral or ethical line, and all that matters is results. What you're saying, ultimately, is that after we eliminate all bounds of behavior, we're shocked that a person who is ordered to be cruel to a prisoner for purposes of extracting information is TOO cruel. That is of course the documented history of torture as a tool and why we cannot accept "a little bit of torture but not too much" as official policy.

It's not unlike soldiers asked to kill the enemy without remorse. When we order them to do that, we KNOW they'll make horrible mistakes and will sometimes kill innocents. The video of the helicopter gunship firing on the van with journalists is an example. Those men in that helicopter aren't criminals. We make them into killers and they do as ordered. When they cross a line, that's (with VERY few and extreme exceptions) on the people ordering them into battle.

So when extreme cold is an acceptable technique for breaking a prisoner, we should expect some will die of hypothermia. When they do, if we want to prosecute someone, it's the person who decided that torture is a tool we will use, not the person or persons who take torture a bit too far.
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You are exaggerating, as your position is otherwise intenable.
 
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Amadeus said:
This way:
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As i pointed out earlier, the word severe is in the aftermath and context of Auschwitz and not Seseme Street. It is a blatant affront to the survivors of Dr Mengele to equate the enhanced interrogation methods as described in the legal paper with torture. To do so is reprehensible.
 
CMPancake said:
The simulation of drowning is torture. Sorry to burst your bubble, chief.
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Don't be silly. I've been there, tried it, got the t-shirt. Unpleasant it is and not something we would want to allow the police to use. Maybe we don't want to use it on terrorist combatants. But torture? Somebody has been pulling your leg.
 
joG said:
Don't be silly. I've been there, tried it, got the t-shirt. Unpleasant it is and not something we would want to allow the police to use. Maybe we don't want to use it on terrorist combatants. But torture? Somebody has been pulling your leg.
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Did you volunteer to get waterboarded?
 
CMPancake said:
Did you volunteer to get waterboarded?
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I just wanted to know, what I was talking about and had it done to me a little harsher than proposed in the legal brief. We do not want the police treating citizens suspected of crimes that way. But to call it torture in that relatively light form is absurd, makes mock of the meaning of the word and especially of the victims of the real thing.
 
joG said:
I just wanted to know, what I was talking about and had it done to me a little harsher than proposed in the legal brief. We do not want the police treating citizens suspected of crimes that way. But to call it torture in that relatively light form is absurd, makes mock of the meaning of the word and especially of the victims of the real thing.
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I like how a torture advocate tries to get the moral outrage high ground.
 
Grant said:
You may be right but there must be a word that comes somewhere between just asking questions and actual torture. Enhanced interrogation techniques will have to cover the situation until a less clumsy explanation comes along.
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We've defined "torture" to mean stuff we don't do. Waterboarding is the easiest - we prosecuted those who did it TO us, but when we do it it's not "torture." There's no reason for that other than we did it. Or maybe someone can tell us not-torture U.S. waterboarding differs from the torture kind?

Do you have a credible source for this information?
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Take a look at the list of approved interrogation techniques and imagine that happened to your son. If you can honestly tell me if he was waterboarded 183 times in 5 session, and subjected to the rest of those techniques (hypothermia, standing in stress position for 40 hours, etc.) that he wasn't tortured, he was just subjected to legitimate interrogation techniques, then you are a different man that I am.

They could be killed, as is being done now, but that way they give up less information. While EIT may be harsh, the victim will still be alive after he tells what the interrogators want to know.
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Change that "EIT" to torture and I agree. No need to pretend it's something different.

Actually about 65% of Americans support EIT and I remain suspicious of those who don't.
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I am suspicious those who don't want our country to abandon everything I thought it stood for.
 
CMPancake said:
The simulation of drowning is torture. Sorry to burst your bubble, chief.
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John Yoo, who is now a law professor at UC Berkeley, and Jay Bybee, who last I heard was a California appeals court judge, studied that very question in great detail at the request of the Defense Dept. when they worked in the Justice Dept.'s Office of Legal Counsel. Ten or so enhanced interrogation techniques had been proposed for possible use on any detained members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban who had been trained to resist conventional interrogation, and the people who would be using them wanted to be sure they were legitimate. Memos on this issue by Yoo, Bybee, and other legal experts have been published online, and I have read them carefully. They analyzed every applicable law against torture and concluded that none of the enhanced interrogation techniques that had been proposed--included the waterboarding procedure--violated any of them.

Torture was not traditionally a separate crime like burglary, arson, etc. The main U.S. statute on it, section 2340 of the U.S. Code, implements those provisions of the 1994 Convention Against Torture that U.S. negotiators had agreed to and the Senate had ratified. Because this statute only dates from the mid-1990's, there was no case law interpreting it for Yoo, Bybee, and the others who studied the question to go by. But it is revealing that the Justice Dept. itself argued in a case before the Sixth Circuit that, in a different context, that conditions like those the jihadists in question were exposed to were not torture under U.S. law.

I will try to find the archived documents on this subject, which run into the thousands of pages, and post the link. They are not easy reading, but I think they are a valuable antidote to the propaganda the jihadists' defenders like to spread. Sorry to burst your bubble, but exhaustive, specific, well-reasoned legal research by highly skilled analysts carries a lot more weight with me than offhand cracks by people who don't understand the first thing about the issues.
 
joG said:
The thing that procedure disregards is that leaders must lead. That requires taking the others with you.
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I agree. Mr. B. Hussein Obama has never explained to the American people why he wanted to give the mastermind of 9/11 a trial in federal court just like a U.S. citizen would receive, despite the fact the man had no legal right whatever to any such trial.
 
Misterveritis said:
They are unlawful combatants. They are not protected by the Geneva Conventions. They are not prisoners of war in the classic sense as they did not wear uniforms, have badges of rank nor a country. They should be wrung dry of any useful information and then tried, convicted and executed.
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Your moral flexibility is impressive!
 
matchlight said:
John Yoo, who is now a law professor at UC Berkeley, and Jay Bybee, who last I heard was a California appeals court judge, studied that very question in great detail at the request of the Defense Dept. when they worked in the Justice Dept.'s Office of Legal Counsel. Ten or so enhanced interrogation techniques had been proposed for possible use on any detained members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban who had been trained to resist conventional interrogation, and the people who would be using them wanted to be sure they were legitimate. Memos on this issue by Yoo, Bybee, and other legal experts have been published online, and I have read them carefully. They analyzed every applicable law against torture and concluded that none of the enhanced interrogation techniques that had been proposed--included the waterboarding procedure--violated any of them.

Torture was not traditionally a separate crime like burglary, arson, etc. The main U.S. statute on it, section 2340 of the U.S. Code, implements those provisions of the 1994 Convention Against Torture that U.S. negotiators had agreed to and the Senate had ratified. Because this statute only dates from the mid-1990's, there was no case law interpreting it for Yoo, Bybee, and the others who studied the question to go by. But it is revealing that the Justice Dept. itself argued in a case before the Sixth Circuit that, in a different context, that conditions like those the jihadists in question were exposed to were not torture under U.S. law.

I will try to find the archived documents on this subject, which run into the thousands of pages, and post the link. They are not easy reading, but I think they are a valuable antidote to the propaganda the jihadists' defenders like to spread. Sorry to burst your bubble, but exhaustive, specific, well-reasoned legal research by highly skilled analysts carries a lot more weight with me than offhand cracks by people who don't understand the first thing about the issues.
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Well, gosh, if the people asked to find a legal rationale for torture somehow managed to place waterboarding in a legal not-torture box, then that's all that need be said. Why are we wasting time talking about moral and ethical issues at all, when the lawyers, hired by the people who wanted to torture detainees, found that, yes, you can do so, have spoken.

You've got to be joking citing those two as evidence for anything.

And I'll just note that you're all too willing to stridently disregard reasoned legal opinions of SC justices, but only when they don't come to conclusions you like, so I have no idea why you think this kind of argument is persuasive, especially in this context. Take any abuse of civil liberties or act of evil by ANY government. Almost by definition the abuse was placed into a box that made it "legal" at the time and place. We could quickly list 100 examples, here and abroad of "legal' but evil or morally repugnant acts.

Bottom line is anyone with a loved one subjected to what Yoo and Bybee concluded was legal not-torture is lying or very adept at self delusion if they say they'd conclude their loved one was subjected to legitimate interrogation techniques and that the interrogators would be justified in relying on a single admission by them during or after they were tortured/subjected to EIT. If you were waterboarded and believed it would stop the waterboarding, you and me and everyone here would admit to ANYTHING - that you were a space alien from another planet, a secret spy for Putin, a FDR's reincarnated dog, whatever. That's what torture does. You don't get those kinds of guaranteed results from any kind of legitimate "interrogation."
 
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Amadeus said:
I like how a torture advocate tries to get the moral outrage high ground.
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I always enjoy people that cannot deal with complicated concepts and therefore cling to simplistically used words instead of trying to say things as they are.
 
joG said:
I always enjoy people that cannot deal with complicated concepts and therefore cling to simplistically used words instead of trying to say things as they are.
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Torture is a pretty simple concept. You seem unable to cope with the definition, so you're trying desperately to pass it off as something else (like a true Cheney disciple), while admonishing others for calling it what it is -- torture.
 
matchlight said:
I agree. Mr. B. Hussein Obama has never explained to the American people why he wanted to give the mastermind of 9/11 a trial in federal court just like a U.S. citizen would receive, despite the fact the man had no legal right whatever to any such trial.
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If you bring him to court it will need robust evidence from other than enhanced interrogation.
 
matchlight said:
John Yoo, who is now a law professor at UC Berkeley, and Jay Bybee, who last I heard was a California appeals court judge, studied that very question in great detail at the request of the Defense Dept. when they worked in the Justice Dept.'s Office of Legal Counsel. Ten or so enhanced interrogation techniques had been proposed for possible use on any detained members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban who had been trained to resist conventional interrogation, and the people who would be using them wanted to be sure they were legitimate. Memos on this issue by Yoo, Bybee, and other legal experts have been published online, and I have read them carefully. They analyzed every applicable law against torture and concluded that none of the enhanced interrogation techniques that had been proposed--included the waterboarding procedure--violated any of them.

Torture was not traditionally a separate crime like burglary, arson, etc. The main U.S. statute on it, section 2340 of the U.S. Code, implements those provisions of the 1994 Convention Against Torture that U.S. negotiators had agreed to and the Senate had ratified. Because this statute only dates from the mid-1990's, there was no case law interpreting it for Yoo, Bybee, and the others who studied the question to go by. But it is revealing that the Justice Dept. itself argued in a case before the Sixth Circuit that, in a different context, that conditions like those the jihadists in question were exposed to were not torture under U.S. law.

I will try to find the archived documents on this subject, which run into the thousands of pages, and post the link. They are not easy reading, but I think they are a valuable antidote to the propaganda the jihadists' defenders like to spread. Sorry to burst your bubble, but exhaustive, specific, well-reasoned legal research by highly skilled analysts carries a lot more weight with me than offhand cracks by people who don't understand the first thing about the issues.
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You are using intelligence and facts against emotion and self loathing. It's an uphill battle.
 
JasperL said:
Just so I'm clear, this is how we're counting this.

If I hit you in the face, wait a minute, hit you again, and do that 36 times in one day, then that counts as ONE? But if I hit you in the face 17 times on Monday, and 18 times on Tuesday, that counts as TWO in right wing land. That's great.

And if Person A gets hit 1 time on Monday, and person B gets hit 35 times on Monday, A and B have each been beaten only once! I am pretty sure B will be surprised his treatment counts on the "Right Wing 'We do NOT torture'" scale the same as what A got, after all he was struck 35 times versus only once....
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Well, first I'd love to see you try to hit me once much less 35 times...Second, that is a different situation. There is an agenda to counting every time water was spilled in the room as a separate time. And that is to demonize the CIA, when all they were doing in acting on the direct intent, INCLUDING Feinstein, who told them they were legal in doing such...Now they want their heads on pikes....

What do you think will happen the next time, and there will be a next time, that America is attacked, and a CIA interrogator is told to get information from someone...?
 
joG said:
I just wanted to know, what I was talking about and had it done to me a little harsher than proposed in the legal brief. We do not want the police treating citizens suspected of crimes that way. But to call it torture in that relatively light form is absurd, makes mock of the meaning of the word and especially of the victims of the real thing.
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Several things - what makes something 'torture' versus not-torture?

You went through it in a very controlled environment, done to you by fellow soldiers or other friendlies. I'm unclear why that you lived through it and have by your account not suffered any long term harmful effects is a good measuring stick. Just as an example - thousands at least police officers have been tased as part of their training, and they lived through if fine, I'm sure it was painful or unpleasant. But it seems obvious that if a suspect was in a room being interrogated at the police department, and was tased 183 times over five sessions, suffered induced hypothermia, was forced to stand in their cell for hours or days with their hands shackled over their head, during questioning, we'd conclude that he or she was tortured or we're great at self delusion.

So I'll accept you have an informed opinion on it, but you can't say it's "absurd" for e.g. those who have also gone through it, in fact designed the program and participated in hundreds of waterboarding sessions, to conclude it is obviously torture. This person's opinion is more informed by experience than yours and considers how the 'technique' affected hundreds of individuals. And it's consistent with how we've labeled the technique for a century or so when our personnel haven't been doing it with the blessing of our government, and consistent with the views of those who endured the technique when done to them by our enemies.
 
Amadeus said:
Torture is a pretty simple concept. You seem unable to cope with the definition, so you're trying desperately to pass it off as something else (like a true Cheney disciple), while admonishing others for calling it what it is -- torture.
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Oh you think the US started endorsing Enhanced Interrogation with Bush, and Cheney?

"In the United States President Clinton authorized extraordinary rendition to nations known to practice torture, called torture by proxy.[2]"

Extraordinary rendition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So, it's not that libs don't believe in harsh interrogation, no. They are just ******s that can't do their own dirty work.
 
j-mac said:
Oh you think the US started endorsing Enhanced Interrogation with Bush, and Cheney?

"In the United States President Clinton authorized extraordinary rendition to nations known to practice torture, called torture by proxy.[2]"

Extraordinary rendition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So, it's not that libs don't believe in harsh interrogation, no. They are just ******s that can't do their own dirty work.
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I'm a liberal. Are you:

1) Calling me a *****?
2) Saying I support extraordinary rendition?
3) Saying I support torture by proxy?

If you say it, you better mean it.
 
whysoserious said:
I'm a liberal. Are you:

1) Calling me a *****?
2) Saying I support extraordinary rendition?
3) Saying I support torture by proxy?

If you say it, you better mean it.
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What you going to do, tough guy?
 
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