Earlier quoted context omitted.
The torture techniques they're using/have used/pretended to have stopped using but definitely did not have been known and used for decades; read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_and_CIA_interrogation... . A quote of a quote: "The Baltimore Sun reported that, former Battalion 3-16 member Jose Barrera said he was taught interrogation methods by U.S. instructors in 1983, used this technique: "The first thing we wo…
Do we have figures about how many people have been tortured? Even if 1 is too much for me, many people think in terms of "It's ok because it's a remote risk".
US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program
451–460 of 579 posts
Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program
#452Reading the report leaves me slack-jawed considering my own history. My great uncle was an officer of the Geheime Feldpolizei, a secret state security organization developed to combat native resistance against Nazi occupation during WWII. His job was to infiltrate and destroy Maquis French and their supporters (the resistance). The means they used were mass betrayal, example executions, torture, even the wholesale destruction of entire villages.
In 1946 he was charged with Crimes Against Humanity and sentenced as a war criminal by an allied tribunal consisting mostly of official American personnel. He deserved exactly what he got. What he did was utterly unconscionable even in a time of war.
I cannot, however, imagine representatives of today's America having the same kind of tribunal against war criminals with the same kind of standing. It is now simply unimaginable in anything but lurid, obscene terms. Dark days indeed.
Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost. It was, and I think his point is borne out in the fact that numerous films and TV shows have depicted torture that would formerly have been the preserve of pure villains to tools available to heroic protagonists in sufficiently urgent circumstances. Never do you see…
I have a family member who was hooked on the TV show "24" which featured torture. I think that it is quite possible that there is some purposeful desensitization going on.
Maybe, but I don't think it was done actively. I remember when I was still at a certain military institution and the Dean was periodically pulling in all of the cadets in small groups during "Dean's hour", a period immediately following lunch, to remind us that torture is something that flies in the face of everything we were about to stand for, especially as we were about to graduate and head off to Iraq/Afghanistan. He even tried to get the folks running 24 to quit showing it so prominently [1]. I think it was really just about making money - torture has shock value just like anything else that pushes the established boundaries of violence for television. So I don't think there's some broader conspiracy, I think the people running Fox are really just assholes and capitalized on people's fears.
There's something to be said for the post-9/11 zeitgeist that it gonna take us a really, really long time to get over. We see it in super hero movies (if I have to watch Manhattan get pulverized one more time...) and in a more evolved and complex form with Homeland. I think it'll be years before we come to terms with how we've responded as a society and with what we've done.
[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9876686
Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. The crimes of others do not excuse your own. 2. There is abundant proof that the US engaged in a deliberate, not occasional, policy of torture, whitewashed as "enhanced interrogation techniques". 3. There is so far no proof that other western nations have recently had a policy of deliberate torture, except for the sad cases where the US creatively outsourced some of its torture needs to Poland and perhaps a few ot…
if any of those were true, there would be no war. in reality, everything is excused when it is against the enemy. but even then, the problem here is that 1) most things were done just out of sadism. for no real benefit. US tax payers pretty much paid for a BSDM dungeon for some sick CIA operatives. 2) several cases caught lawful citizens and great pains were taken to make it look like nothing happened.
> in reality, everything is excused when it is against the enemy.
This is meaningless if you get to define any innocent/held-without-charge person as 'enemy'.
Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Then again, these guys did not get rolled up for signing too loud in church. They have valuable intel in their heads." Why does terrorism frighten people so much that they're willing to throw away basic principles like "innocent until proven guilty"? Honest question. I see comment after comment after comment in this thread that indicates the commenters are unbelievably frightened of terrorism, to the extent that the…
> Why does terrorism frighten people so much that they're willing to throw away basic principles like "innocent until proven guilty"? Great question, and one we should always keep in mind. The death toll from terrorism on US soil since 9/11 is indeed very low. That said, the people plotting against us are intelligent and adaptive and wish to do us harm. If they succeed, they might destroy the free society which we've…
They won. They won when the US gave itself the license to enter into a perpetual state of universal war, three days after 9/11.
Look at what the US has done. Really, look at all the things it has done -- the surveillance, the drone strikes, the infiltration of civil protests, the use of military equipment by the police force, the lies to justify the war in Iraq, the lies to justify the torture, the violations of international human rights, the targeted killings of "enemy" US citizens, the re-definition of every single one of these words -- and then tell me how the US has upheld its values against terrorism.
Then look at countries like Iceland where the nation apologizes over a single justified death at the hands of a police officer, or Norway where after a killing spree and bomb attacks the first consideration by government officials is not about how to punish the murderer, but how to guarantee due process for someone evidently guilty of such heinous crimes.
The United States are not the good guys. I'm sorry, but you're not. No matter how much you want it to be true.
Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. We can't just keep whining "come on, guys, you really ought to stop" to our leaders. This is happening in our names, and our hands are dirty. Stopping this is our own responsibility.
And how shall we proceed?
A start would be to stop looking to someone else to show you the way. What have you tried?
Working in groups is what makes it so damn easy to discredit, re-brand and dilute movements. Protesting? C'mon, we're way past the useful application of protesting.
Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're probably too morally outraged by all this to appreciate the humor in the phrasing of that sentence. How about the humor in sentences about raping?
I'd be pretty happy if HN could muster the same uniform moral outrage about rape jokes involving non-terrorists (e.g. gamergate) as it has shown in response to my comment about terrorists being cold. But I guess my priorities are out of whack.
your priorities are shown to be out of whack by the idea that you believe all of the people receiving these treatments are 'terrorists'.
Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been shown that torture is among the least effective way of extracting information from unwilling informants. http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/an_fbi_interrogator_on_the_...
What is the most effective? Anyway, that's really counter-intuitive. I mean, I guess I could deal with pain, but losing body parts, skin or eyes? I would talk pretty fast.
Sure, it worked great during the Inquisition. Evidently they killed a lot of Satanists, witches and wizards. It must've worked -- there don't seem to be any around.
Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has also been stated by many interrogation professionals, so it's not like it's just uninformed civilians running around saying "torture doesn't work, so don't use it"
I hate torture. One of the problems is that many interrogation professionals also say it works.
To be fair, it's a lot easier to just rationalize what you're doing than to admit you've been doing unspeakable things to humans for no real benefit.
Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno, 59 degrees seems quite chilly if you've just been stripped naked and soaked with ice cold water. Note no mention is made of whether the detainees were dried or clothed first either.
@rayiner > Oh my god they were quite chilly And abducted, held without trial, tortured, waterboard, anal raped, threatened, beaten againast a wall, and other things besides. A lot of them while also being totally inoccent (and in any way, without trial). What exactly have you suffered besides a comfy middle class existance that gives you the moral superiority to laugh at that? Would you also laugh at jews in Dr. Meng…
Keeping in mind that we disagree as to how many, if any, of the detainees were "totally innocent" (as opposed to procedurally innocent), are you really going to compare our treatment of terrorists to the Germans' treatment of jewish civilians?