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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

#41

Post by patrickg_zill »

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 often it is done, what level of use we get out of it, etc.

And, this is just 1 example - there could well be other methods of torture and many other cases of incompetence... makes you want to say "you know what? Let's just scrap the whole thing..."

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.

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

#42

Post by elcapitan »

HillRat wrote: post #34
booleandilemma wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm alright with it, as long as we know the person is a threat to our national security. The people who commit acts like the Boston Marathon Bombings, the Brussels Bombings, 9/11, etc. - these people are not our friends. If given the opportunity, they would kill every single one of us. So if the people who are on our side feel they need to use torture on these people to keep us safe, I'm not going to argue with them.

The German jurist Carl Schmitt essentially made the same argument: the power of the executive is the power to divide the world into enemies, and to declare a "state of exception" that allows the unfettered pursuit of those enemies. Such enemies need not be foreign, but may be domestic; not only criminal, but political. The Bush administration said that Abu Zubaydah was al-Qai'da; he was not. They said he helped bin L…

Without advocating Carl Schmitt, I think you are misrepresenting his views there. His concept of the 'Ausnahmezustand' (state of exception) is broader than just executive orders. He basically meant to describe the powers of a particular executive in a constitutional system by looking at the "not normal" case. This is similar to security in computers - you are not interested in the case where the computer behaves nicely. You want to know what you can do when things go wrong. So he described the power of the state as defined by what it can possibly do if they abuse them as the constitution enables it to do: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception."

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

#43

Post by pessimizer »

reacweb wrote: post #18
Maxious wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe torture can be justified to extract information from suspected terrorists, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll ... Only 15 percent said torture should never be used ... The Reuters/Ipsos poll included 1,976 people. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2.5 percentage points for the entire group" http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-torture-exclu...

We can see physical or psychological torture used effectively in many TV series. I have read that in real life, torture was very ineffective to make people tell something they want to hide. Generally people die without speaking or do not know any valuable secret. Remember at school. When one child get punished, all the other childs of the class become quiet. The main desired effect of torture is manipulation of popul…

> 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 starts to get into it, and when we cut to the morning after she's like "never leave me," and now the viewer is expected to sympathise with the rapist and his victim against the world?

It's a snapshot of the mindset of elites.

> Remember at school. When one child get punished, all the other childs of the class become quiet. The main desired effect of torture is manipulation of population. They do not care if the tortured guy speaks or dies, they want to inspire fear.

This is only way torture is effective. Except, in this context, the more accurate term for it is terrorism.

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

#44

Post by overcast »

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?

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

#45

Post by wodenokoto »

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?

Part of the result of any interrogation is to figure out if the subject has the information you want.

So it didn't deliver at all.

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

#46

Post by yuzi »

curiousgal wrote: post #33
jmnicolas wrote: post #21

This article will not change anything. By the time our day end we will have been bombarded by so much other information that it will just be one more forgotten thing. And there's so much things that are revolting that our brains are just shutting down as a self defense mechanism. Sociopaths in power don't even need to hide anymore, they know they are hidden in the noise. I mean look at Turkey : they help ISIS, they s…

>barely a blip in the news. This might sound harsh but look beyond the metaphor; if I wake up in the morning and find poop in the toilet, it's not really such a big surprise. But if I find poop on the kitchen table, well we have reason to be concerned now.

Unless everyone is waking up to find poop on the kitchen table every morning for so long that they then begin treating it as normal. Which is what the parent post is suggesting - that we are already there.

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

#47

Post by spangry »

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 and surprisingly amateurish organisation. Their actions over the past decades have ruined the United States' international moral authority. It's laughable whenever some US politician goes on TV and proclaims that America is some magical paragon of liberal democratic virtue. It's a sick joke.

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

#48

Post by brlewis »

7952 wrote: post #13
GordonS wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this kind of disgusting behaviour can ever be justified.

It is coneviable that circumstances could exist where the use of torture would prevent some greater evil. But the only proper place to make such an argument is in court as a defense against prosecution. The act would still be illegal and should still be illegal. The disgusting thing is trying to pre-approve illegal acts ahead of time and using that as a defence.

Such circumstances exist in three places: movies, TV shows, and fiction books. In non-fiction contexts the victim simply makes an answer up to get the pain to stop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_torture_for_i...

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

#50

Post by an_ko »

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…

I think the word “wrong” in the title was meant to be understood in the sense of “pressed the wrong button”—undelining technical rather than moral incompetence from the CIA. Torturing someone already strongly implies the latter.
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