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

tomdispatch.com

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

#131

Post by ikeboy »

hartpuff wrote: post #126
ikeboy wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>not having been found guilty of any crime, are innocent.

That's not what innocent means. You should use unconvicted.

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

#132

Post by harryf »

pessimizer wrote: post #39
harryf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years ago it wouldn't have been news at all. Now it's hard to make things completely vanish. Its just the balance between scandals and outrage has shifted; far more scandals are floating to the surface in the Information Age and outrage has yet to catch up. But it will

20 years ago, it would have been far bigger news. There's been a gradual slide in the conditions in Turkey that make what's happening there now not very surprising.

Disagree. 20 years ago no one would have heard of this. And 20 Turkey was a far worse place than it is today, just about to have a military coup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Turkish_military_memora...

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

#133

Post by IkmoIkmo »

pdonis wrote: post #120

I notice that the article places all the blame on the Bush administration--yet it says the Obama administration quietly dropped the charges but did not release Zubaydah.

Charges is not the right word, he has to this day not been charged with anything whatsoever. He's held based on suspicion, allegations, stuff like that. Essentially awaiting a fair trial for over a decade, while being tortured in the process. It's quite insane.

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

#134

Post by Strom »

eric_h wrote: post #85

Same article on a website that is not awful http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176132/tomgram%3A_rebecca_go...

Good thing I clicked on it before it was changed. I have the complete opposite reaction. The Nation's page has a nice picture to set the theme and uses a wider space with a bigger font, while the TomDispatch page looks like something from 1999.

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

#135

Post by iandanforth »

overcast wrote: post #44
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…

Well it didn't deliver results, because none of it was true. So how could the guy give up any information that didn't exist?

Imagine you had a scale, onto which you put a weight labeled "100kg". You know it weights 100kg because it says so right there. The scale however, only registers 85kg. You take it off, you put it back on, the scale always says the same thing. You try different scales, they say 85kg, but you keep going because it's 100kg and you're going to find a scale that's accurate! Eventually you find a scale that says what you want.

This straw man illustrates that at some point, it isn't the tool, but the process that's flawed. Even if your tool is accurate, if you don't believe it, you can't get at the truth, and if you work hard enough you can find a broken tool to tell you what you want.

So perhaps there is some truth to the idea that torture can extract true information from people, but if the whole process operates like the above straw man, it totally invalidates the use of the tool.

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

#136

Post by woodman »

1024core wrote: post #61

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…

Both liberals and conservatives will eagerly switch off their brains when their pet interest is threatened. For conservatives it is their brand of culture, for liberals it is their brand of state. The puppet show is getting boring. As far as the identity politics, I can't think of a group more paranoid about government abuse in the US than white male birch society types.

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

#137

Post by anentropic »

overcast wrote: post #69
CocaKoala wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

well, either it means they were just gratuitously torturing him for fun, or it means they can't tell whether they were getting any useful information or if he had any to give

neither option suggests the technique is useful

it's also about as immoral as you can get

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

#138

Post by peejaybee »

overcast wrote: post #83
naasking wrote: post #78

Earlier 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. I think this case make it obvious that it's impossible to tell if the person you're torturing has the information you're looking for and is withholding it, or simply doesn't have the information. That's a textbook definition of "ineffective".

What's the alternative? I'm generally curious as to what would be considered more effective.

From the sound of it, "do nothing" would be no less effective, and a bit cheaper.

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

#139

Post by fiatmoney »

You would expect this to happen. Things like the Geneva Conventions are artifacts of roughly symmetric wars, where one could reasonably expect treatment & retaliation to be reciprocal. This explains things like restrictions on, eg, hollow point bullets - it's easy enough for everyone to use them, and it only serves to increase the severity of the conflict with no change in relative outcomes.

Now that the US doesn't actually fear having large numbers of troops captured, and even if they did their opponents have no desire to reciprocate treatment, they're "free" to engage in whatever horrific behavior they would like, and vise versa.

Lind is good on this: http://www.amazon.com/Generation-Warfare-Handbook-William-Li...

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

#140

Post by Aelinsaar »

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…

It's not JUST waterboarding... you just described torture in a nutshell. I suggest reading, 'Torture and Democracy', it's incredibly enlightening and has a fantastic set of sources.
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