The sad part is: despite reading this article and fully agreeing with it, conservatives in this country will just shrug and say: mistakes happen, let's not dwell on it. And they feel justified in taking this view because they know deep down that it would never happen to a white person in today's US. Case in point: John Walker Lindh -vs- Jose Padilla. JWL (a white guy) was actually fighting against the Americans; was taken prisoner, treated well, immediately put on trial and sentenced to 20 years (he'll be out in 7). Jose Padilla (a Hispanic male) was tortured for years in a Naval brig, without charges.
The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
61–70 of 179 posts
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#62Interesting implication from the title of the article: that it would be 'right' to waterboard some other men. Who are they, and what justifies their torture? And before someone says it, I don't think "gathering intelligence" is a sufficiently moral or practical justification. People being tortured don't tell you valuable information; they tell you whatever they think will make the torture stop. The CIA is a sickening…
>Who are they, and what justifies their torture?
>People being tortured don't tell you valuable information; they tell you whatever they think will make the torture stop.
You're already asserting your position, and disguising it as a question. Virtually everyone seriously condoning torture believe it is effective. If they were to believe it wasn't effective, they wouldn't order it to be done.
You may think it's not effective, but that should be argued on its own merit. You're assuming the conclusion, then pretending that everyone else does and are therefore unjustified.
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without advocating Carl Schmitt, I think you are misrepresenting his views there. His concept of the 'Ausnahmezustand' (state of exception) is broader than just executive orders. He basically meant to describe the powers of a particular executive in a constitutional system by looking at the "not normal" case. This is similar to security in computers - you are not interested in the case where the computer behaves nice…
When I read Schmitt (and it's been many years!), I can't disentangle the concept of the state of exception from his insistence that politics are fundamentally about the friend-enemy distinction, and that, as he says, the qualitative element of that distinction is its ability to flare into violence. So it's hard for me to see Schmitt's theory as anything other than the normalization of the diktat to resolve political…
I think you are right in your perception of his thinking, and I didn't mean to interpret his views in a friendly way - I just wanted to note that there is a more academic dimension to the way how he meant this. I think you are exactly right in your view that he is basically thinking the opposite of a "negotiated society", this is what I got from his "Constitutional Theory" of 1928 as well. It is very instructive though because he is probably the most literate and well-spoken opponent of the liberal constitutional society - that's what I meant when I compared it with software security testing, he's basically looking for all the loopholes and small inconsistencies in liberal societes. I think his notion of these extreme powers of government is an example of that, and history has shown (with the further development of the Weimar Republic) that he was right there. I am not sure if he meant it in a normative way, as addition to the idea of politics as a fight between enemies.
Having said that, this mix of academic, positive right thinking, in the context of the abolishment of a state of law and civil society probably makes this all even more evil.
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#64That's nothing. His buddies beheaded hundreds and exploded bombs in marketplaces in the same amount of time!
He did have brown skin. They all know each other, amiright?
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#65Before, we were told how tough it was on a person to be waterboarded. That it was so debilitating that it was only used in extreme cases. Now this guy is waterboarded 3 times a day for a month, basically at every meal (if you want to think about it in terms of frequency). It seems clear that it is not rare; and that it doesn't really deliver results. Again and again, we have been lied to about waterboarding, how ofte…
If your goal is to utterly break and dehumanize a person until they're rendered psychotic, incontinent, incapable of human interaction or ever being able to take care of themselves again, this is how you accomplish it.
We handled interrogations with Nazis better. We showed them respect and they gave us valuable information.
It leads me to believe intelligence wasn't the main motivator for the continued torture of these people, but only an excuse.
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#66Interesting implication from the title of the article: that it would be 'right' to waterboard some other men. Who are they, and what justifies their torture? And before someone says it, I don't think "gathering intelligence" is a sufficiently moral or practical justification. People being tortured don't tell you valuable information; they tell you whatever they think will make the torture stop. The CIA is a sickening…
> The CIA is a sickening and surprisingly amateurish organisation. Their actions over the past decades have ruined the United States' international moral authority.
I'm not even sure that's true. I think the perception of the CIA (perhaps due to generally positive portrayals of it on TV and in movies) is completely different to, say, the perception people have of the Stasi or KGB.
And yet did those organizations, which people rightly consider to be bad, actually do anything worse than the CIA has been doing in the last 70 years?
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#67The historical purpose and utility of torture is to produce made-up confessions and bullshit "intelligence" to lend some veneer of necessity to whatever course of action the high and mighty have already committed to.
Just about anybody with a Middle-Eastern-sounding name and the slightest plausible connection to or proximity with "Al Qaeda" (conveniently defined and delimited by the torturers themselves) would have been equally useful for this purpose. There is no "right" man, no "wrong" man. That's torture. It's a show, a blood pageant. It's reading the Tarot or goat entrails.
That's the system, the procedure you defend when you apologize for torture.
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I read Schmitt (and it's been many years!), I can't disentangle the concept of the state of exception from his insistence that politics are fundamentally about the friend-enemy distinction, and that, as he says, the qualitative element of that distinction is its ability to flare into violence. So it's hard for me to see Schmitt's theory as anything other than the normalization of the diktat to resolve political…
I think you are right in your perception of his thinking, and I didn't mean to interpret his views in a friendly way - I just wanted to note that there is a more academic dimension to the way how he meant this. I think you are exactly right in your view that he is basically thinking the opposite of a "negotiated society", this is what I got from his "Constitutional Theory" of 1928 as well. It is very instructive thou…
That's interesting -- I generally think of Schmitt as constructing a theory of dictatorship, but you're right: he's also black-hat hacking the constitutional order at the same time. That's a fantastic insight, I think, because you're really crystallizing him as a practitioner as well as a theorist.
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but the point of the article is that they were doing it to the wrong person. That doesn't mean it does not work. Causation does not imply correlation.
If it takes you more than 83 separate instances of waterboarding somebody to decide that they don't have useful information to share with you, then waterboarding is not an efficient way to get reliable information. If waterboarding is not an efficient way to get reliable information, then I'd be very curious to hear about what definition of "work" you're using where waterboarding might satisfy, but fail in this parti…
For all the times it didn't work, how many times did it work for others? One person, with no information, doesn't mean anything.
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We can see physical or psychological torture used effectively in many TV series. Almost exclusively by the heroes, and it always works almost instantly. It says something about the people writing them. I can't wait for the episode of Daredevil where he spends a month and a half torturing someone for information. Remember all of those scenes in movies from the 70s and earlier when halfway through the rape, the woman…
>Remember all of those scenes in movies from the 70s and earlier when halfway through the rape, the woman starts to get into it, and when we cut to the morning after and she's like "never leave me," and now the viewer is expected to sympathise with the rapist and his victim against the world? Actually, no. I've seen plenty of old movies, but I don't recall many rape scenes, much less such rape scenes where the rapist…
Old James Bond movies at the very least come close to that. I was rather shocked watching over on a plane recently.