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CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

theguardian.com

241–250 of 434 posts

Re: CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

#241
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's HN for you. I honestly don't know why I keep coming here. This is a safe space for rationalisation, we can't let 'the feels' creep in and threaten that. Also it would be way too 'political' if we assigned a moral valence to torture, and political discussions are discouraged here.

But it's totally okay to get political about COVID and deny, deny, deny here. Such an odd cross section of libertarian "freedom above all else" people and legitimately smart technical folks. I like the technical part, the "this is binary and I believe in freedom above all else" cohort turns me off pretty hard though.

> "this is binary and I believe in freedom above all else" cohort turns me off pretty hard though.

Randroids probably.

Ayn Rand is piss poor literature, and even worse as philosophy or life advice.

Re: CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

#242

Bonkers reading through this thread and seeing people discuss torture as casually and unemotionally as if it were just a regular ol' anyday thing. Like wow folks, this is not academic!

Same people causally rationalizing the environmental costs of Bitcoin, nothing new here.

Re: CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

#243
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No president is going to do anything about it because the intelligence agencies almost certainly have blackmail material on them all

More like: "Hey boss, remember JFK? It would be a real shame if something like that happened to you. Or your family."

Given that most presidents have huge egos that is a huge gamble for the CIA. All it takes is one tape to get out and then you've just started a civil war.

Re: CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

#244
post #210
post #170

If our country was just, everyone in the CIA who engaged in or authorized torture would be executed. I'm typically against capital punishment, but state sanctioned torture is such a far line past what is acceptable, I really think we'd be better off if we swept all these evil people off the face of the planet. Instead, they get cushy think tank and consultancy jobs as a reward for their evil 'service'.

The right not to be tortured and the right to not be murdered (by the state or anyone else) are practically uttered in the same breath. You can't fix violence with more violence, you have to fix violence with cleverness.

What is the clever path to fixing an unaccountable branch of government who keeps secrets from the people meant to oversee it to cover up their egregious acts?

They are effectively a rogue criminal organization with the power of state protection at this point. Making an example of the criminal acts we do have knowledge of seems the only effective recourse short of dismantling the CIA entirely.

Re: CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

#245
Making the post as anon. I fully support the CIA to use torture even on US Citizens. If you're caught planning a terror attack or something similar that could cause mass loss of life, torture is a reasonable last resort to extract information from a suspect

Re: CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

#246
post #23

> “Ammar fabricated the information he provided when undergoing EITs,” it said. “He later admitted to his interrogators/debriefers that he was terrified and lied to get agency officers to stop the measures … Ammar also explained that he was afraid to tell a lie and was afraid to tell the truth because he did not know how either would be received.” Which is pretty much all you need to know about torture.

> Which is pretty much all you need to know about torture. When torture or "EIT" is used for a source of intelligence, using that sole point of data as proof is fraught with peril. Dropping JDAMs on a building fingered solely by a detainee is sure to get random bystanders killed. Running a raid, similarly, might well be a trap. However, when one corroborates this with other sources of data, it is a "valid" technique.…

>when one corroborates this with other sources of data, it is a "valid" technique.

Couldn't you say the same about the technique of having 10,000 monkeys hammer randomly on typewriters?

Re: CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

#247
post #224
post #170

If our country was just, everyone in the CIA who engaged in or authorized torture would be executed. I'm typically against capital punishment, but state sanctioned torture is such a far line past what is acceptable, I really think we'd be better off if we swept all these evil people off the face of the planet. Instead, they get cushy think tank and consultancy jobs as a reward for their evil 'service'.

> , I really think we'd be better off if we swept all these evil people off the face of the planet. Steady! We must not become our enemy. We achieve peace and justice through peaceful and just means, or not at all!

We are already as bad or worse than our enemy by torturing them, covering it up, and using bad information to justify genocide against innocent civilians!

The idea that we are 'above' them is only possible because propaganda and secrecy keeps the horrors of what our country does out of the zeitgeist.

As long as former torturers get to be pundits on TV talk shows, I see no path to fixing this. We need someone courageous and with power to start enforcing the existing laws against these people to the maximum or the problem is only going to get worse.

Re: CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot express how bewildering this comment is. The article in question is about using torture as a training tool -- inflicting brain damage on a person so that folks will learn the valuable skill of beating up defenseless people. Then this comment comes along and complains about the optics of it. Why? Because it undermines "Western civilization". And what's the problem with that? Because then Western civilization…

What about parent comment did you think had to do with optics? By my reading it has everything to do with the actual behavior itself, which they call "atrocities."

All of it. I wrote two paragraphs as an interpretation of a two-paragraph comment so I don't know how else to explain it at this point.

Re: CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

#249
post #18

Holy shit. This is nauseating. Why do we tolerate the existence of the US state anymore? What's the point of any of this? I _hate_ the feeling of the smacking the back of my head. And they did it, against a plywood wall, by gripping a towel wrapped around his neck and slamming him into it, for two hours at a time, just to 'train' people. Everyone involved - perpetrators and victims - needs therapy and rehabilitation.…

> Holy shit. This is nauseating. Why do we tolerate the existence of the US state anymore? What's the point of any of this?

Because we are not like them. We believe in peace, love, and human dignity.

That and the fact the US state has more military power than the rest of the world combined.....

Re: CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

#250
post #244
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right not to be tortured and the right to not be murdered (by the state or anyone else) are practically uttered in the same breath. You can't fix violence with more violence, you have to fix violence with cleverness.

What is the clever path to fixing an unaccountable branch of government who keeps secrets from the people meant to oversee it to cover up their egregious acts? They are effectively a rogue criminal organization with the power of state protection at this point. Making an example of the criminal acts we do have knowledge of seems the only effective recourse short of dismantling the CIA entirely.

I think that literally the only way to dismantle the CIA and other blatantly and obviously criminal portions of the US government without using violence is to spread wide the fact that they are a portion of the government that operates entirely outside of the rule of law, and that we can't be said to actually have the rule of law/democracy/freedom/etc if it doesn't apply equally to everyone.

If enough people shout about the emperor's nakedness enough times, eventually it will jump the gap from something everyone knows, to common knowledge[1] (something everyone knows that everyone knows). They will have to fall into disrepute, and that won't happen by us being quiet about it.

Right now, I think most people in the US think of the US as a place with the rule of law, and equal application thereof. The CIA's well-documented activities illustrate plainly that that is not true. The well-publicized summary executions of unarmed people by the police without trial or jury are getting noticed more often, as well. We can say it in plain words, often, to bring it to the level of common sense.

The vast, vast majority of people would like to live in a place with the rule of law, applied fairly and equally to all people. An even higher percentage would be on board without the rule of law, just so long as no special connected elites get unique treatment and free taxpayer money. This is a big tent.

There will, of course, be a subset of the population at all times that wants gun-toting, black-bag Jack Bauer 007 "license to kill" daddy to run around and exercise their best super reliable adult judgement and eschew the entire time-consuming nonsense of arrest and human rights and trial and just put a blowtorch to the balls of the Completely Obviously Guilty Bad Terrorist Guy immediately, as we have immortalized in so much of our entertainment. But I remain resolute in my belief that those people are a small minority of human beings, and are shrinking every generation. There isn't a month of my life that goes by that I am not beaming proud of the human race that we even gave the fucking nazis full on courtroom trials after WW2. If that doesn't show that we can absolutely get there on a long enough timescale, I don't know what does.

The usual tropes apply:

- sunlight is the best disinfectant

- teach, listen, learn

- treat others as you wish to be treated

- always stand up for the truth

We've been improving for thousands of years. In another few we'll get there yet.

[1]: https://www.epsilontheory.com/inflation-and-the-common-knowl... https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/

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