Intimidated by dogs: Yes. Have you ever had a slavering dog within inches of your throat, going wild with eagerness to rip you to shreds? Terrorizing a person who’s helpless to escape or fight back with the imminent prospect of being savaged by a predator is IMO mental torture.
Bible/Koran: Yes. Give a fundamentalist American Christian POW a Koran when he asks for a Bible. While you’re at it, treat a Bible contemptuously. Mock the symbols he holds dear and demand he worship symbols of what he despises as Satan’s work. This is mental torture.
Draped in flag: Yes. This is again mental torture. Being enveloped in the symbol of something one loathes as wholeheartedly as fanatic Muslims hate Israel is psychological abuse.
Female interrogator: More mental torture by degradation – especially since you left out the part about the woman daubing the prisoner with what she asserted was menstrual blood. To someone from a culture which regards any contact with a menstruating woman as pollution, that’s a vicious psychological assault. Flaunting female nudity before a man from a culture obsessed with female purity, indeed demanding that he interact with, respond to questions from, obey a woman partly undressed? Mental torture in my book.
Use of such tactics? No. As others have pointed out in threads discussing the abuse of American-help prisoners, intelligence obtained through torture is highly suspect. The more one applies the screws, the likelier the prisoner is to say anything to make it stop, anything that seems to satisfy the interrogators, whether it’s true or not.
The torture doesn’t have to be physical to be abusive and beyond the pale. Hey, I bet I could torture you just by showing you pictures. Pictures, yeh – let’s take someone you hold dear and I’ll show you (Photoshopped if necessary, or real-life if possible) pictures of that person being gang-raped, thrown in shit, and so forth. But I never touched you! Never left a mark on you! So how could you call that torture, eh?
Well, the ball is in the government’s court. If the allegations are false, open up the facilities to international, neutral inspection. Nothing like the light of day shone on something to expose any problems. The alternative, of course, is accusing any organization that dares to criticize torture of being anti-American.
Yes, of course. No problem whatsoever with US territory being invaded, US citizens illegally held and abused. None whatsoever. :rolleyes:
Wasn’t it under the Carter Administration that a rescue mission was launched? Oh, yes, so it was.
You really don’t get it do you? The whole point of the way these people are being kept is that the government denies these people are POWs. You then saying this is an acceptable way to treat POWs (which it clearly would not be) is utterly irrelevant. What is being done is being done to uncharged, unconvicted individuals.
Yes. I certainly include the use of attack dogs as torture. I include deliberate mental degradation designed to dehumanize an individual as torture.
I’m not answering the last question because it is absolutely irrelevant. These AREN’T people who are definitely guilty of terrorist activities in the past. These also AREN’T techniques that have been found toextract actionable intelligence in the past. I’ll ask you to justify your utterly ridiculous point from before again - if we know who the guilty ones are, and these are the only ones being tortured, then why on earth are we keeping thousands of others locked up in camps?
How long are you willing to try them, and just how far down the line are you willing to go? What if executing one in 10 of the ‘guilty’ ones without trial would get the rest to talk? What if executing one in 10 of the ‘innocent’ ones would have that effect? Killing the families/raping the daughters of those you want information from? If we are playing the stupid ass hypothetical game, where do you draw the line?
And somehow magically, in the middle of his inaugural speech, President Reagan was able to free the hostages? :rolleyes: (I do remember that that is when their release was announced.)
Just so, friend Zoe. Our enemies realized at that moment, the Ascension of St.Ronnie of Bakersfield, that the game was up. Thier primary allies, the liberal activist judges, were dependent on the feckless indifference and jackboot tyranny of the Carter administration. The rise of real Americanism would quickly render them mewling and helpless before our power. (You know, Gorbachev submitted his application for a Green Card that very day. True fact.)
It was but the first of a series of tributes laid at his feet, and the Shining Citadel on the Hill.
Well, once again the corrupt venality of the liberal tedia is exposed. The flushing of the Koran stuff is all hooey! Here’s that facts, straight from the horse’s…from the horse.
There you go, leaping to conclusions. Nowhere does the article say that anyone peed on anything: “a guard’s urine came through an air vent.” Camp X-Ray was built on the QT, so you’ve got to expect a few minor plumbing irregularities.
Don’t you just love the judicious use of the passive voice. Something happened, but nothing was done. Like a small boy answers to the presence of smashed lamps:“It broke.”
But “building on the QT” confuses me. Was Camp X-Ray built in stealth?
Just because we haven’t found the Klingon cloaking devices doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Anyway, we never justified our war against the Klingons by claiming they had cloaking devices, just that they had the potential to develop cloaking devices.
