Do you support forced interrogation/torture of suspected Terrorists?

[Cemetery_Savior]

@tomndebb

Actually, I am not sure that this was not what was actually happening before the Supreme Court (slowly) began breaking down the obfuscation of the administration and a tiny bit of oversight and inspection crept into the place.

I’m not sure whether it is scarier if it was totally random or if the torturers actually believed they had a plan.

tomndebb, I’d love to see a cite on that, not because I’m being nitpicky, but because I would find it interesting. Or at least what you read to get that opinion.

Thanks,
Cem

[Cemetery_Savior]

@vivalostwages

This is exactly the point that I believe the pro-torture brigade is missing. They’re fine with torture being done to someone else, but what if that “someone else” happened to be them or someone they love? I’m sure they wouldn’t support it then.
And for those who say, “Oh, that could never happen to me because I haven’t done anything wrong”…Well, it’s already happened to many people who have done nothing wrong. They were suspected of having done wrong, and that was all it took.
None of us is safe if we condone the torture of anyone.

I think it’s fairly obvious that I wouldn’t want to be tortured. Same for someone I love, or am even acquainted with.

As a position, however, I wouldn’t decry a war-time power’s usage of torture as a part of their military effort. If we’re OK with people killing people, why is torture worse?

-Cem

[Cemetery_Savior]

@MrDibble

Well, that depends on if you believe Seymour Hersh & Senator Lindsay Graham about Abu Ghraib.

Sad to say, I have no difficulty at all believing them.

MrDibble (love your sausages, btw), are you telling me that those two have stated child rape to be an institutionalized aspect of the war efffort? I’ll need a cite.

-Cem

[MrDibble]

@Cemetery Savior

IIf we’re OK with people killing people, why is torture worse?

I, for one, am not OK with people killing people.

[MrDibble]

@Cemetery Savior

MrDibble (love your sausages, btw), are you telling me that those two have stated child rape to be an institutionalized aspect of the war efffort? I’ll need a cite.

No, Hersh has (in regards Abu Ghraib), and Graham (as well as Rumsfeld) has given corroborating statements.

Knock Yourself Out

[GIGObuster]

@Cemetery Savior

I think it’s fairly obvious that I wouldn’t want to be tortured. Same for someone I love, or am even acquainted with.

As a position, however, I wouldn’t decry a war-time power’s usage of torture as a part of their military effort. If we’re OK with people killing people, why is torture worse?

-Cem

Because, as you ignored, in the war on terror torture gave us false information that lead us to Iraq and a waste of resourses on the war on terror. (the Iraq war now is a different deal)

Not to mention that then the information we got from torture lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

[Cemetery_Savior]

@GIGObuster

Because, as you ignored, in the war on terror torture gave us false information that lead us to Iraq and a waste of resourses on the war on terror. (the Iraq war now is a different deal)

Not to mention that then the information we got from torture lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

I suspect that we were planning on invading Iraq well prior to 9/11, and would have manufactured an excuse anyway. I don’t think that information gained from torture was the primary genesis of that attack, nor do I think you could provide a cite for that.

And, have fun trying to prove that chain of causality in your second paragraph. I’m not 100% sure what you’re trying to say there, but if it’s that some undefined “torture information” directly led to deaths, I’d like to see at least an ad hoc list of the information to which you’re referring.

-Cem

[Cemetery_Savior]

@MrDibble

No, Hersh has (in regards Abu Ghraib), and Graham (as well as Rumsfeld) has given corroborating statements.

Knock Yourself Out

MrDibble, I can’t find anything that corroborates Mr. Hersh’s statement that there was child rape in the AbuGhraib prisons. I do see that the statement was made, but some type of corroboration would make it more credible.

It’s probably late in the thread to make this type of distinction, but I woudl also think there’s a difference between “torture” and “abuse”. Before all of you land on me with the rage of 10,000 suns, I’d like to take a stab at it.

Torture: I would say this is ‘targeted’ abuse (physical or mental), applied for a gain (information, primarily).

Abuse: I’d say this is more the Lynn England (sic?) version, which is abuse for entertainment/pleasure.

I don’t think this distinction is going to make a whole lot of difference to most of this thread’s participants, but I thought it important.

-Cem

[Cemetery_Savior]

@MrDibble

I, for one, am not OK with people killing people.

No false inclusion implied…my apologies.

If I replaced “We’re” with “society”, then I’d be closer to my point. If, as a society, we’re generally OK with killing people in warfare/combat/guerrilla, then why is it considered worse to torture? Is it the victim’s lack of control? Is it the seeming perversion of POW status?

-Cem

[GIGObuster]

@Cemetery Savior

I suspect that we were planning on invading Iraq well prior to 9/11, and would have manufactured an excuse anyway. I don’t think that information gained from torture was the primary genesis of that attack, nor do I think you could provide a cite for that.

And, have fun trying to prove that chain of causality in your second paragraph. I’m not 100% sure what you’re trying to say there, but if it’s that some undefined “torture information” directly led to deaths, I’d like to see at least an ad hoc list of the information to which you’re referring.

-Cem

Like if ignoring that the administration had to “catapult the propaganda” to convince others to invade would be a good argument. Part of that propaganda was to use the false information obtained by torture to convince others that Al-qaeda was in cahoots with Saddam in Iraq.

And I posted the link already from the New Yorker regarding “outsourcing torture” what I notice is only willful ignorance to deny yourself that the powerful use torture to find reasons to justify an evil path.

[Terrifel]

@Testy

Terrifel / Mr Dibble

Sorry, maybe I’m dense but I’m not following either of these comments.

Testy

I’m just expressing my sympathy for your position. Many people would probably insist that admitting you’ve watched a victim be brutally tortured-- “the kind that hurts and cripples”-- means that you actually were involved, and perhaps even share in the responsibility to some extent. However, no doubt these people have never actually been in the position of observing an atrocity and choosing to do nothing about it.

Perhaps if you’d share some more details of your experience-- who was the victim? Who was torturing him, and why? What precisely was done to him, and for how long?-- others would be better able to appreciate your perspective. Surely if this incident were in any way confidential, you wouldn’t be spouting off about it on a public message board to begin with, correct? I think we’d all find the debate enriched by your Real True Story of How Torture Works.

By a striking coincidence, my uncle once found himself in a remarkably similar situation. Back when he was working as a moist towlette distributor, Uncle Nemo attended a pedophile convention in the Dominican Republic, where he happened to watch kidnapped orphans being raped multiple times. I’m sure you’ve read about these sorts of things. Wealthy businessmen would travel from all over the world for the privilege of sexually assaulting Third World children. Not pantywaist crap like touching and stroking; we’re talking grown men cramming their penises into the buttholes of tiny babies. These guys were paying a lot of money, and they liked a nice tight fit; so there was a lot of blood as you might imagine. My uncle used to say that he’d never forget the sights and sounds etched into his brain.

And before anyone leaps to any conclusions… Uncle Nemo always pointed out that he had nothing at all to do with any of it, aside from being there.

Of course, everyone has their own opinion about whether children should be raped or not; but most people have never actually had the opportunity to observe the practice firsthand. Since his observation of the procedure gave him a uniquely privileged perspective on the matter, Uncle Nemo would often enter discussions on the topic to correct any misconceptions. For example, many people feel that child sexual slavery is never necessary, which is simply untrue. Most people involved in the child rape industry are simply trying to feed their families in a desperately poor environment.

Uncle Nemo was adamant in his belief that child sexual slavery should never be permitted, except when there is no other alternative. Unfortunately, this is sometimes the case, and it is simply wishful thinking to pretend otherwise. What if raping dozens of infants is the only way to defuse a nuclear bomb? What about you? What would you do?

[Cervaise]

All of you pro-torture advocates should be proud that you’re keeping company with the military thugs currently in charge in Burma.

[Testy]

@tomndebb

I have made no claim that a torture victim will necessarily lie. What I have asserted has been that a person committing torture will do so until he believes he has gotten the information he wants (otherwise why would he ever stop?). This means that he is going to continue the torture until his own preconceptions have been met, which means that the only thing that torture is capable of producing is confirmation of the torturer’s beliefs. It may happen that the torturer’s beliefs conform to reality, in which case torture will appear to have served some purpose, (although, since the torturer already believed that account, it would have been just as effective to act on the belief rather than inflicting unnecessary pain). However, since the torturer is going to be directed by confirmation bias, it remains a stupid method of extracting information.
Common sense is nothing more than the sum of one’s prejudices. (That is why Jack Bauer is so popular on TV.) Actual interrogators know and have testified that torture does not work, so just as putting butter on a burn and cutting off fluids to diarrhea victims were just common sense (until we figured out that they were the exact wrong response), so the “fact” that it is “common sense” that torture is effective indicates only that humans are capable of being misled by confirmation bias throughout history.

I have not even addressed tihe issue of sadism, (although there is a fair amount of evidence that people who use torture are more likely to change their attitudes and behavior toward torture and begin to enjoy it). I have only addressed the issue that it is a stupid and unproductive method for discovering information. It does not work.

OK, I inserted the bit about conflating interrogation with sadism due to your last post on the torturer never stopping. I still think we’re talking past each other though. I’m talking about asking direct questions to which it is known that the victim knows the answer. The impression I get from you is that you expect the torturer to go on a fishing expedition which is a different thing and is indeed better done by other methods.
As far as the effect on the torturer goes, I agree with you. The ones I saw seemed to have no remorse or qualms at all. They would have slapped me into the seat just as willingly.

There are a number of additional arguments against torture: it corrupts those who use it; it turns the relatives, friends, and other people associated with the victim into enemies when they might have previously been neutral. However, my single argument in this situation, (particularly since so many advocates of torture seem to dismiss the moral and even practical implications of the act), is that it does not work. We should never rely on ineffective tools that are counterproductive.

Here is testimony from an Army interrogator (with an ironic last name) providing his experience with abusive interrogation tactics: they don’t work.
Here is the Washington Post article on The Torture Myth. It notes an historian who has reviewed the documents of the dirty war between France and the Algerian independence movement, in which torture was a fairly common feature, has found not a single incident in which torture resulted in useful information that had any effect on the war. It refers to two separate former intelligencve officers who note that torture does not work. It cites a report from the FBI that prisoners at Guantanamo who were beginning to provide information under FBI techniques were often subjected to “harsher interrogation” techniques by the military–at which point they stopped providing useful information.
Here is another essay by a retired U.S. intelligence officer who states that torture is ineffective.
And here is a claim by a CIA chief (as he weasels about what actually constitutes torture), that torture does not work. (Even the proponents of torture admit that it is a failed methodology, even as they rationalize their use of it.)

Torture actually harms (in a practical sense) the group using it. The author of my second link alludes to the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was removed by the CIA from FBI jurisdiction at a time when he was beginning to provide information and handed over to the Egyptians for “more effective” interrogation. Under toirture, he made claims of a non-existent Iraq/al Qaida connection that have been utterly disproven, even though they were used as a rationaization for the Iraq invasion. (See this New Yorker article, particularly page 6 (near the bottom, following an administration’s lackey defending torture).

TomnDebb
Tom, you’re right about the guy having an unfortunate name. Given what people tell me about that show the name must have a hell of an effect on anyone he interviews. Also, I’m personally inclined to discount that last one about torture causing the US to go to war. Obviously, no one checked anything and my own belief is that we had made the decision to have a war and the guy in Egypt would have been believed no matter what he said as long as it went in the direction they were looking for. I know, that’s what you said. Please take note that I said the information had to be checked. Blind belief would be stupid. (Obviously!)

OK, a bit of back-story here before I get designated as the SDMB’s official fiend or something.
Since the early '80s I’ve had a customer in Kuwait. They had slowly developed an enormous database of information about the city that would be extremely useful to the Iraqis. Afetr the invasion of Kuwait, the Palestinian system administrator contacted the Iraqi general in charge of things and cut a deal to exchange her knowledge of the system for a house in Baghdad. She got the house and the Iraqis carted the system off to Iraq.
As I’m sure you know, the system is cheap compared to the data it contains. While it was a very large system by the standards of the day and cost several million dollars, the data would cost at least an order of magnitude more to re-develop. On March 3rd, I drove from Al Khobar to Kuwait to see if I could find the backup tapes as I knew where they were kept and it was not an obvious spot.
When we got there, Kuwait might have been liberated but was far from peaceful. Bullet holes and trash everywhere, no electricity or water, small arms, mines and unexploded ordnance littering the streets and beaches, burned-out tanks and the sky still intermittently black from the oil fires. There were also a lot of disgruntled people who, as soon as it was safe to do so, had rushed out and picked-up some kind of gun and “joined the resistance.” This caused a lot of random gunfire in no particular direction as the “resistance fighters” learned how to use their new weapons. There were ex-taxi drivers carrying AKs that they were unsure how to load but felt like they were Rambo all of a sudden. This was the real hazard, the people. They felt they had been betrayed by the Palestinians they had allowed to live there and by their own leaders and they knew there were Iraqi soldiers still hiding in town. All-in-all, it was a damn dangerous place.

Everyone was putting Kuwaiti flags on the back of their SUVs and I thought we should have one as well in order to fit in. It might cause someone to pause before hosing us down with an automatic weapon and would be a reminder of the war if nothing else. The second day we were there, I walked to the police station to get one. This is a station in the middle of Kuwait city that was eventually blown up. There was a good bit of damage to the exterior and a crowd of heavily-armed civilians standing around the door. They looked like a stereotype of a Mexican bandit gang, weapons of all sorts dangling from their shoulders or pointing in random directions. A very scary group, more like a heavily armed mob than anything military. They probably wouldn’t have shot me on purpose but accidentally was another matter. I walked in and asked the guy at the front where I could find a flag. He didn’t know but escorted me down a long hall to an office at the end of the building.
On the way, we passed a room with an open doorway. There was blood and feces and urine all over the floor and in the heat of the day it stank bad enough to make you wretch even out in the hall. It had a bright green linoleum floor with the walls painted a horrible institutional green. Laying on the floor next to a heavy wooden chair were a pair of taped-up sections of broom handle from a big push-broom like they use to clean commercial areas. It was obvious that something very bad had been happening in there.
I talked with the police chief a while. I don’t actually know he was the police chief but he was sitting in that room and was in charge of things. He was out of flags but offered me a weird East-Block pistol instead. As I had to go back to Saudi I passed on the weird pistol and he told me to come back the next day. They also asked me about some ordnance they’d found. It was a case of grenades with no fuses that they couldn’t identify. They’d been picking up anything that looked dangerous and dragging it back to the station and had a huge room filled with dangerous things stored on metal shelving. I told them to stop doing that as they didn’t know how to store it and left the building.

I returned the next day and on the way to the chief’s office we went by the same horrible room but this time they had a man tied to the chair with his gutra pulled down over his face. There was a second man in the room that had, I think, been beating the victim with those sticks. He was holding them anyway. He grinned at me as we walked past, something that was incredibly chilling.
I asked about it and it turned out that the man in the chair was an Iraqi that had ditched his uniform and looted a thobe and tried to pass himself off as a Kuwaiti. The police wanted to know where the rest of them were. They’d just gotten the word that they’d caught the rest of them. The police chief didn’t have a flag but promised one for the next day.
I never went back, I didn’t want a flag that badly.

OK, that was my experience with torture. Admittedly it is nothing more than a frightening anecdote and it’s a data sample of one but nevertheless it worked for a specific question that they were sure he knew the answer to and that they could check. That is why it is such an uphill battle convincing me that torture doesn’t work, I’ve seen it. This is also why I keep saying I wouldn’t want it legal anywhere I lived.

Regards

Testy

[Cemetery_Savior]

@GIGObuster

Like if ignoring that the administration had to “catapult the propaganda” to convince others to invade would be a good argument. Part of that propaganda was to use the false information obtained by torture to convince others that Al-qaeda was in cahoots with Saddam in Iraq.

And I posted the link already from the New Yorker regarding “outsourcing torture” what I notice is only willful ignorance to deny yourself that the powerful use torture to find reasons to justify an evil path.

I have to parse those paragraphs, so tell me if I have your statements correct, please:

[ol]
[li]You’re saying that the Administration purposefully tortured people to get information, which it then “catapulted” into the media to justify invasion?[/li][li]I didn’t see your link (I’ll look for it), but I assume you mean that people torture others to find a reason to invade?[/li][/ol]

I don’t think either are accurate. I think that, if our Administration wants to invade someone (and I’m a firm fence-sitter on the Republican v. Democrat axis), they’ll manufacture a reason to do so, and they don’t need to torture someone specfically for that purpose.

Did I read your statements correctly?

-Cem

[GIGObuster]

@Cemetery Savior

I suspect that we were planning on invading Iraq well prior to 9/11, and would have manufactured an excuse anyway. I don’t think that information gained from torture was the primary genesis of that attack, nor do I think you could provide a cite for that.

Need to comment a little bit more on this.

It was my point in another torture thread that the only way I could see torture working (on the very few times it might work) would be to have an intelligent, reliable and trust wordy leadership, because only then I could see it avoiding a serious mistake like accepting and using torture information to go to yet another war.

Since we do have untruth, injustice and the Bush way coming from this administration; torture, as it is set right now, can only lead us to more wars (Iran anyone?)

If you agree that this current leadership was already planning the Iraq invasion, then that leads to the realization that the Libi (the Arab guy) information was obtained just for the consumption of the undecideds on the way to the Iraq war.

An even worse justification then for torture since the invasion was coming no matter what.

I have to come to the idea that it is misleading to think the invasion of Iraq would come if no evidence (good or rotten) was found to justify it.

Of course one justification then was to find evidence that Al-Qaeda was working in Iraq in cahoots with Saddam. Since the torture evidence showed a connection to Iraq (later shown to be a false connection) Powell used that bit in his now infamous speech to the UN.

I can grant then that torture was effective: it worked to lead others to support the invasion.

[Little_Nemo]

If torturing another person is “the least bad of the choices available,” then it should make no difference that you are guaranteed to spend the rest of your life in prison as a result. A person who makes the decision to torture should never be permitted to imagine that society will wink and allow them to go unpunished-- the goal should at least be worth the ironclad certainty that you are sacrificing your own freedom.

I agree with you on this. Torture is wrong and illegal and anyone who does it should face the consequences.

On your pedophilia rant, on the other hand, I have to feel I won that round. The fact that you apparently felt you couldn’t adequately defend your position on torture and needed to start talking about an entirely different subject seems like an admission of defeat to me. Say hi to the family and tell them I’m looking forward to our Thanksgiving get-together.

[Cemetery_Savior]

@Terrifel

Uncle Nemo was adamant in his belief that child sexual slavery should never be permitted, except when there is no other alternative. Unfortunately, this is sometimes the case, and it is simply wishful thinking to pretend otherwise. What if raping dozens of infants is the only way to defuse a nuclear bomb? What about you? What would you do?

I thought this was asked and answered back a ways in the thread.

I forget who asked the corollary earlier in-thread: If you’re concerned with your moral sense, and thereby refuse to rape the children (why does it always come down to child-rape?), you feel better. What happens when the (presumed) **millions of survivors ** confront you with your choice and what it meant to them? When the Earth spins into multiple cataclysms from nuclear winter, **when the mutant hordes ** ravage the land, stealing your canned food and bottled water? When your fallout shelter is raided Cormac McCarthy-style for vittles? When the very skin on your body sloughs off in mortal resignation?

Got carried away…my apologies.

-Cem

[Testy]

@MrDibble

Of course you do - every debate has sides. This one has two - pro- and anti-torture.

Or as I like to think of it: My Side, and the Wrong Side.

Not tortured - assaulted by government troops.

But you are still OK with doing it to IED-factory guy or gun-carrying insurgent. Followed by extra-legal execution. So what difference does the legality make, if you’re happy to circumvent the laws anyway.?

Mr Dibble
Well, sorry to hear that you were assaulted by any troops at all. However, I’m not quite ready to accept the definition of my position as pro-torture. (Thank you very much for that, BTW.) As I said earlier, I’ve had experience with it and it’s extremely ugly. What I have maintained from the start, because I’ve seen it happen, is that torture can produce usable information in a rapid manner. Please note, I’m not claiming it’s moral or has no side effects. I’m not claiming that there are no pitfalls and ways it can backfire. I’m simply saying that it can work.

The legality makes a great deal of difference, as several people have pointed out. What I am willing to do or have done personally has nothing to do with what I would promote as government-sanctioned policy. A lot of that has to do with the personal friends I’ve lost in some extremely ugly and premeditated ways. Look at it as an attitude caused by a personal grudge and fear of a very credible threat if that makes it more readily understandable.

Regards

Testy

[MrDibble]

@Cemetery Savior

MrDibble, I can’t find anything that corroborates Mr. Hersh’s statement that there was child rape in the AbuGhraib prisons. I do see that the statement was made, but some type of corroboration would make it more credible.

The only direct corroboration I know of is a statement from a former prisoner from the Taguba Report - top of page 2 of This PDF File.

[sciurophobic]

Just because something is used for the wrong reasons does not make that thing inherently wrong. Torture is most likely used for the wrong reasons 99 times out of 100, but if we are capable of guaranteeing that it is only used that one time then I see no reason to oppose it in that specific circumstance. Of course, such a guarantee might arguably be impossible no matter how many safeguards are taken.