Terr grew up in the soviet union yes? The totalitarian security values are not surprising. it is the same that is seen among the israelis who came from the soviet sphere and have very different values from the original from the w. european and even maghebine countreis.
I wish Terr was alone. Sadly, he is not. Listen to Hate Radio. Look at your right wing Facebook friends’ postings. There are plenty of people who think that if the US does it, it is right, no matter what it is.
I said it there and will make it clearer here;
If the Bush administration had set up a series of death camps, complete with gas chambers and crematoria, and had rounded up 100,000 Iraqi children and gassed them all to death, in an effort to terrify and pacify the Iraqi population, Terr and magellan01 would support it. (More precisely, magellan01 would say “well, it’s over now, so it doesn’t matter, and this shouldn’t have been publicized.” They would also argue it had worked, even if it had not.
FOX News and many (not all, but a frightening number) of its viewers would also support death camps. There is not a doubt in my mind this is true.
**
There is nothing so criminal and disgusting that the country’s authoritarian, fascist idiots won’t support.** Literally nothing, up to and including the most heinous crimes against humanity. Germans are ordinary people like any other, and Germany did not lack for men and women happy to run the death camps. That’s thekind of people Terr and magellan01 are; they’d have been good little SS worker bees.
35% might be a more accurate number. People will do heinous things if someone with authority tells them to.
It is disgusting, and it is less than useless. I have mentioned before that I tried to have electrolysis for hair removal. I hated it so much and after only three sessions knowing that I could never take torture under electricity. And that was controlled stuff! I’d tell you anything you wanted to know, even make shit up that I thought would make you happy to make you take away the electricity.
You don’t get good data from it. You just make more terrorists. And there’s the other thing they are not getting - this isn’t stopping terrorism, just angering people and starting it all over again.
Terr is disgusting. I stopped reading that thread too.
Blaming 24 for the resurgence of torture advocacy is like blaming Birth of a Nation for the early 20th century resurgence of white supremacy in America. Both works may have been influential, but only because they stimulated dark sensibilities that already existed. They didn’t sow any seeds in and of themselves; they just spread more manure over ground continuously cultivated by fear and loathing.
This country (my country) did not suddenly discover torture post 9/11. The USDOD taught coercive techniques to Latin American forces in the School of the Americas from 1961 until its “closure” in 2001. Considering what happened right about that time, we can assume the succeeding institution WHINSEC (Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) continued merrily along with the same curriculum.
What surprises me somewhat is that we’re still apparently arguing the efficacy of torture as an interrogation tool. (Maybe we can blame 24 for legitimizing that erroneous idea to some degree.)
I’ve seen few people in this current argument who don’t treat the idea of information extraction as the major motivator in our (or any) government’s use of torture. I think even Torquemada knew that’s never been the reason.
Torture is what governments do to repress a belief or practice they’ve deemed to be a threat to the state. The targets of torture are not the individual victims, but the class or subset of people they represent. Even when torture has been used to extract confessions, these are also targeted at the larger group. Torture and the products of torture send a message of mastery from the state to the target group: you are subject to our will and any time we wish we can own your body and your mind
And if that message happens to broadcast more widely outside of the target group, so much the better as far as a repressive state is concerned. That’s why the Bushies used torture, and that’s why the true believers like Cheney were and are open and unapologetic about it. Because torture doesn’t work if it’s practiced in secret. It was the Bush administration’s message to militant Islam and more broadly to the entire Muslim world.
Unlike some of our citizens, the Bushies were (IMO) not so stupid as to believe the smokescreen of “ticking time bomb” scenarios or the general value of intelligence gleaned from coercive interrogation. It was worse than that. They were stupid enough (or evil, venal and shortsighted enough) to believe the US is so “exceptional” that we can do these things and bear the blowback with little consequence.
The blood on our hands can be washed right off, and really who can see the stains on our souls?
Is there something you’d like to share?
For what small comfort it provides, I believe this is accurate, at least for most. It isn’t that people have become bloodthirsty monsters; it’s more of a “just nation” fallacy. If we’re doing it, it must be because we have to and because it works, because we’re the world’s leader and God’s most favored nation, and we don’t hurt or kill anyone for no good reason. The idea that we’re in the wrong— that we might have tortured innocent people and not even gained anything useful from it— isn’t just false, it cannot even be considered.
I’ve heard my own family members, those closest to me, lately say (in these exact words) “I support torturing those people.” Even hearing what’s in the report, it just solidifies their resolve. I despair, I really do.
I don’t see why we have to bring Hal Briston into this.
American Exceptionalism at it’s, base, finest!
CMC fnord!
You know that brings up a really great point…you would get me to say pretty much anything if you water boarded me as I’m afraid of drowning, or put me near spiders as I am terrified of them. Afterwards you’d have useless information and I’d spend the rest of my life looking for payback. Probably even irrational payback due to the mental scarring of my injuries.
There seem to be a few topics that are bringing the psychopathic crowd to the fore lately. Depraved, authoritarian and panicky is no way to go through life, son.
It’s ignorance, plain and simple. They think everybody being tortured deserves it, and then think it’s a useful tool for getting intel that saves lives. These beliefs seem to be impervious to facts.
And the other thing that is rarely mentioned is what it does to the torturer. Torturing makes monsters on both sides. Yes, I am sure some people already came to the plate monsters - these are not the kinds of people we want to put in charge of the waterboarding. But we don’t want to put regular people who aren’t bad in charge of it either! I just don’t believe you can torture people day in and day out, have them in your power, and not be irrevocably damaged as a human being.
I can forgive ignorance.
But for so many people, this has become willful ignorance, which caries with it such a strong emotional investment that it is almost unshakable. Terr, for example, is convinced that torture is only defined by pliers on fingernails or the iron maiden or the rack. He is unwilling to consider a broader definition than that, and unwilling to accept the possibility that his definition might be inconsistent or flawed or limited, even when those inconsistencies and flaws and limitations are pointed out in excruciating detail.
It’s pretty typically human, really. That’s the depressing part.
I think politics does play a role in this -
The IRS under a democratic admin examines some folks for application of being a non-profit: “Government is full of jackbooted thugs!!!”
The CIA under a GOP admin tortures people: “Meh, watcha gonna do? They are terrorists, after all.”
Note that, according to the Senate Report, it was literally the same guy who got in trouble for training Latin American death squads that was tapped to run the torture program.
Hell, they just gave us the sanitized stuff, the Reader’s Digest version. What’s in the full array of documents, from which this charming extract was derived? We can make a couple of reasonable guesses: if there were stuff in there that made this all seem reasonable and worthwhile, it would have been included, the Pubbies would have insisted. So, the bigger pile of shit is shit that is exactly as bad, or worse. Or much, much worse. About the only thing it can’t be is better.
So either the real truth is no better than what we have been told, or its worse, including much worse. Either way, a mighty sobering thought.
This, +1,000,000.
The people in my family who’ve been in the military do not support torture. My dad had two tours in Viet Nam; my cousin was sent to Iraq and Afghanistan five times; my cousin’s husband was in the Gulf War. Not one of them has ever said or posted anything to support the use of torture. They are actually all quietly anti-war, because they’ve actually been there and seen stuff the rest of us can’t even contemplate.
It’s the rah-rah’ers, the rabid “supporters”, not the actual military members, who trumpet the support of torture both IRL and virtually (FB, etc). No doubt because we civilians are unlikely to be captured and tortured by the opposition, ever.
YMMV, of course.
Not that I doubt you, but can you cite that?