51–60 of 179 posts
Well if he didn't hate the CIA before then he probably does now.
Good point. The argument could be made that the CIA agents involved have provided material support for terrorism.
Reminds me of this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure this kind of disgusting behaviour can ever be justified.
"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...
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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 nice…
So it's hard for me to see Schmitt's theory as anything other than the normalization of the diktat to resolve political conflicts; if the state demands orthodoxy amongst its "friends," and the executive is empowered to punish deviant "enemies," and the executive's decision to impose an exception is unreviewable (which is a Schmittian prerequisite for executive power), then the state of exception essentially never ends -- as Germany found out with the Reichstag emergency.
What are your thoughts -- am I taking him too far? Can he be read a bit more kindly, perhaps as a more formal and rigid version of the old saw, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact?" Or was he, like Machiavelli, more descriptive than prescriptive in his assessments?
As I said, it's been years since I read Schmitt, but I found him to be, ah, bracing as a thinker, a kind of prebuttal to the concept of a negotiated society that would later preoccupy thinkers like Habermas. I'd just rather live in a Rawlsian or Habermasian world than one in which political disagreements are treated as a flashpoint for war.
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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…
Actually, no. I've seen plenty of old movies, but I don't recall many rape scenes, much less such rape scenes where the rapist is meant to be sympathized with, or where the rape victim takes pleasure in it.
Trevor would be so into this story
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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 particular instance.
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 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.