Well, that should teach these non-terrorists not to be easily mistaken for terrorists any more.
The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
121–130 of 179 posts
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#123Interesting 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 e…
Here is some research to back up that torture is ineffective: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v527/n7576/full/527035a...
But it is behind a paywall :/
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#124Interesting 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 e…
> 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.
Not that simple. They "say" they believe is it is effective. The reason they do it is not necessarily the same.
People have sadistic tendencies and will torture and inflict pain on others just for pleasure and amusement. Bullies do it on playgrounds, people in power do it to their subordinates, others torture animals for pleasure and so on.
I don't buy the idea that just because they ended up as advisory experts to the Pentagon, or they rose into power it somehow means those tendencies are not there.
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#125Same article on a website that is not awful http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176132/tomgram%3A_rebecca_go...
OK, we changed to that from http://www.thenation.com/article/the-cia-waterboarded-the-wr.... We'll also use the article's title (which you have to scroll down to see), which doesn't suffer from the problem users have pointed out with the Nation's title.
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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#…
I was thinking more generally, about the fact that these sites are set up and used specifically to avoid due process. I mean by definition, the people being tortured, not having been found guilty of any crime, are innocent.
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#127Interesting 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…
To be fair: " And even if it had been true, what the CIA did to Abu Zubaydah—with the knowledge and approval of the highest government officials—is a prime example of the kind of still-unpunished crimes that officials like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld committed in the so-called Global War on Terror." ... from very near the beginning of the article.
Although, to be fair I can't read the article because of its abhorrent pop up...which redirects me when I try to close it.
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#128Interesting 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…
So you ask them 30 questions 10 of which you know the correct answers. Also if you have several prisoners you can compare answers. This should give you a good idea about the validity of the answers. Just waterboarding till you get a story you like is obviously bullshit but this also does not tell you much about the potential efficacy of torture.
> "(...)" This should give you a good idea about the validity of the answers."
And this is exactly, how we learned about the witches and why we had to burn them.
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#129As a free member of the western world, happily able to pursue "the dream," and unexposed to the direct effects of war and humanitarian crimes, what am I to do? If you think about it, the domestic conditions in the US, relative to many of the places in the non-western world, are such that we have no incentive to ACTUALLY do anything to change things for the better. Sure, we get upset about reading articles like this. But is getting upset for 5 minutes, writing an article, making a movie, or even settling into the mindset of being jaded and skeptical about our own country's leadership really the toolset we are left with at the end of the day to cause change? Is there revolution in the modern west? Or are we neutered by the relatively great living conditions we take for granted?
Re: The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You may be interested in a recent revival of his thinking from the left - [1][2] - the idea there is that he doesn't mean "enemies" in the sense of a mortal fight, but rather "agonists". This is explicitly directed against the Habermas type of discourse that is directed towards achieving a consensus, and advocating not to bury conflicts. Basically in response to a "mainstreaming" of political parties (probably not so…
I think Mouffe's "agonistic democracy" to be provocative and maybe even a more powerful description of politics than, say, Habermas (I retain affection for Rawls) but, like you, I don't think I can buy her efforts to claim Schmitt. Her argument that social media tends to work against agonism by enforcing epistomological closure (to use the trendy term) and thus leading people to a totalistic worldview is, I think, an unconscious rebuke of the extent of Schmitt's own friend/enemy distinction. But I haven't read her major texts, just the collections she's edited and contributed to, so I probably should spend some time on that.