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The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

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Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

#111

Post by kobayashi »

evan_ wrote: post #72
ikeboy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 e…

> Virtually everyone seriously condoning torture believe it is effective. I think a very high number of "torture proponents" are simply in favor of hurting the "bad guys" and don't even care that there might be information to be had. Donald Trump said it best, to an arena full of cheering supporters: "If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing" In his mind, and the minds of his constituents, t…

Donald Trump and his supporters are not the individuals who ordered the torture/enhanced interrogation (T/EI). If one watches/reads General Hayden's comments on the topic, he's disgusted by any call for punitive T/EI. He begins talking about this at about 34:50. https://youtu.be/GBx-ECt6vUo?t=34m50s

The discussion on the US' RDI program begins at about 30:25.

Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

#112

Post by yuzi »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #41

Before, 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 waterboarding was a piece of software it would be considered too crashy and unreliable and a replacement that worked better would be sought immediately

Only there is no possible replacement so they just continue using the same horrible thing. If there is one thing people are terrible at it's understanding that not doing something is often a viable option.

Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

#113

Post by david927 »

vijayr wrote: post #54
pessimizer wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

Maybe we have Jack Bauer to blame, he always seems to get information within seconds using fear of violence and torture.

We like to think that propaganda was something the Soviets and Fascists did decades ago and doesn't happen in the modern world. But 24/Jack Bauer and films like Zero Dark Thirty are straight propaganda. The first step in fighting it is identifying it.

Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

#114

Post by RobertoG »

ufmace wrote: post #103
RobertoG wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's something that also bother me about HN. People downvote when disagree. I think that downvoting should be used for uncivil comments, not related comments, spam.. Otherwise we will finish in an echo-chamber. When we disagree we should answer. This is what I'm going try to do. First, you say "If given the opportunity, they would kill every single one of us". That's not true. Those terrorist acts have politic goals.…

I don't entirely agree with either side, but I will say that: > First, you say "If given the opportunity, they would kill every single one of us". That's not true. Those terrorist acts have politic goals. Certain segments of the western Political scene very much want to believe this, but I'm skeptical. They said that Hitler wasn't serious about his rhetoric either, that it was all politics. In fact, he meant it all,…

I assume you are talking about ISIS here. This is my current understanding.

The explicit goal of ISIS is the creation of a caliphate. A caliphate is an area governed by a caliph that enforce their strict interpretation of the quran in their limits.

The terrorist acts that we suffer in the west have mainly two aims: terrorize the civil population so they force the governments to stop acting in the area and attract fighters to their cause.

If something, their ideal world is not one where they kill us all but where they convert us all.

Can you tell me where you heard/read that they want "to kill us all"? Is in the same place where they say that they just "hate our freedoms"?

Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

#115

Post by towlejunior »

spangry wrote: post #47

Interesting 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 may be sickening, but at least they don't intentionally misinterpret headlines in order to segway into grandstanding.

Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

#116

Post by hartpuff »

ikeboy wrote: post #95
pjc50 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be hard pressed to find an instance where an average American civilian was affected by the KGB per se. Remember that most of the Cold War was a proxy war, fought in the middle east and South America. The FSB their successor did assassinate a dissident in London (Litvinenko), which the UK government ignored until Russia became sufficiently persona non grata lately.

I meant to ask whether the average Russian was affected by the KGB.

AIUI the CIA is not supposed to operate domestically, so the comparison between the two is not exact (I don't believe the CIA would operate domestically the same way as the KGB did anyway, though, but the KGB was basically just helping to prop up an openly tyrannical state), but even if the KGB has the CIA beat on home turf, I think the CIA 'wins' abroad.

Even just taking the example in this thread, a monstrous program of 'black sites' set up around the world specifically to torture innocent people indefinitely, where is the KGB version?

Leaving aside any comparisons, if they're a distraction, why is an organization that does the terrible things the CIA has done throughout its history not only tolerated in a civilized democracy, but actually still viewed generally positively?

Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

#118

Post by pdonis »

hartpuff wrote: post #66
spangry wrote: post #47

Interesting 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, whi…

> 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?

Yes, they did.

Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

#119

Post by ikeboy »

hartpuff wrote: post #116
ikeboy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant to ask whether the average Russian was affected by the KGB.

AIUI the CIA is not supposed to operate domestically, so the comparison between the two is not exact (I don't believe the CIA would operate domestically the same way as the KGB did anyway, though, but the KGB was basically just helping to prop up an openly tyrannical state), but even if the KGB has the CIA beat on home turf, I think the CIA 'wins' abroad. Even just taking the example in this thread, a monstrous progr…

> a monstrous program of 'black sites' set up around the world specifically to torture innocent people indefinitely

I'm pretty sure everyone involved thought the person was not innocent. This is not a fair description.

Also, as far as I can tell the claim is just that he wasn't part of al-Qaida or some of the other stuff he was accused of, not that he's completely innocent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Zubaydah#Biography_and_ear...

>Zubaydah eventually became involved in the jihad training site known as the Khalden training camp, where he oversaw the flow of recruits and obtained passports and paperwork for men transferring out of Khalden.

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