Sleep deprivation , what a horrible thing.
:wally
I don’t mean to piss on anyone’s parade, but what makes you think this is a new aspect of American foreign policy? The U.S. did many of the same things in Vietnam. Atrocities were rampant. Shit, I knew a guy who bragged about pushing POWs out of helicopters to convince others to talk. That’s on top of things like bombing civilians on purpose on Laos, using chemicals to destroy crops and drive people into starvation or submission, etc. etc. Or funding, supporting and training fascist regimes in Central America that did all this and more. Do you think Bush and the Republican Party invented this shit?
I find it bizarre that people NOW beging to cry out that this sort of behaviour will make people hate the US. It’s been going on a long time. Why are you just noticing it now?
MXR90: Au contraire, asshat.
Sleep deprivation is actually one of the most effective forms of torture. For example; during the witch hunts in Europe, they did indeed do all sorts of painful and humiliating things to the accused. Poking “witch’s teats” with needles, the rack, the bastinado, the Spanish boot, and all the rest of them. But the one thing that more often than not made them confess to things they did not do, and implicate other innocent people, was something they called “waking the witch”. In other words, they’d keep the accused awake for three, four, or five days in a row.
In short; not only is it cruel, but people would probably just start making shit up in order to make it stop. Hardly the best way to gather intelligence.
Yes, because hoping that someone who votes on moral issues would be against torture is a long shot?
Giraffe, I’m sure a lot of people feel like that, but surely some care more about truth than… whatever exactly that sick mish mash of loyalties would be.
RickJay I wasn’t noticing it before because I haven’t been alive that long.
But here I am, trying to make things right. And yes, I know they’ve been wrong to a certain degree for a while, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try to make 'em right, eh?
Not to mention, after a lil’ while you start hallucinating.
Obviously , burning people with cigarettes is wrong on every level. But if the Arab captives are “humiliated” by being wrapped in an Israeli flag, it says a hell of lot more about their own bigotry, than anything else.
And if they’re bigoted, the best way to win their hearts and minds is to infuriate them as deeply as possible.
Keeping America Safe:
One roadside bomb at a time.
From what I know of using sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique, you’re not necessarily looking to keep 'em awake 24 hours. A couple hours of frequently interrupted sleep in a 24 hour period combined with selective malnourishment and really bizarre (not necessarily even physical) behavior is sufficient to addle the average human in 3 to 5 days. “Goofy” is not the goal, but disorientation and the inability to think clearly can get everyone a long way toward the end of the interrogation process.
The danger is that the subjects tend to be open to suggestion and if the interrogator is not careful he may accidentally lead the subject to a desired statement as opposed to just letting him prattle on. The prattle is the ore which is mined for truth. Beatings and painful torture are pretty much useless because they tend to extract wild and false confessions. Like…you guessed it, The Spanish Inquisition. Heh, bet you weren’t expecting that. And that’s no good for anybody. YMMV
Oh yeah, one more thing. However you may feel about this whole Iraq war, we never intended to win hearts or minds. Except perhaps as war trophies.
What the hell are American prison guards doing with large Israeli flags in the first place? Did they pay for them out of their own pocket, or are Israeli flags part of Uncle Sam’s standard issue Arab torture kit?
Why exactly do you believe he would not have?
Could you elaborate on this compare 'n contrast please?
Sure he does.
He’s the President of the United States of America. If he issues an executive order, it’s followed. Moreoever, he doesn’t need the ‘respect of his minions’ to issue the order, could’ve very well issued it on his own and saw how many would go along with it.
If there is one thing we’ve seen, it is that Bush always thinks he’s doing the right thing.
This ia man who does not make mistakes.
Which would be a very good thing, if I could only understand who made all em myriad middlin’ mistakes in mesopotamia.
(I couldn’t resist).
Personally, I’d rather believe that people acted upon orders than someone created an ‘enviornment’ in which some sort of inherent inclination torture manifested itself.
Maybe I’m naive…
I’d agree that Bush most likely listens to his advisors, I remember but do not currently have a cite for the quote where he freakin stated with his bare face hanging outthat he doesn’t read the papers, he relies on his advisors to tell him what’s going on.
I don’t know… I think that the problem with ‘conspiracy theories’ is that they ascribe to people a literally inhuman capability to work together. Past a very limited social circle, all interactions will be bereft of any genetic imperatives to protect like-DNA. That is to say, self interest always comes into play, and sooner or later someone double crosses someone, or at least leakes something.
If there was an executive order, I’m sure someone knows about it… especially seeing as how we purged all the ‘not properly loyal’ CIA officers.
Call me a cynic, but I think it possible that he’d make such an order, and probable that it’d get out, sooner or later.
I’ve heard it said that perhaps Bush was not authorizing torture; he was authorizing…well, something else that is perfectly legal and clean.
Since when does it take the Commander-in-Chief to authorize legal stuff that men miles down the totem pole do? Maybe I’m just a naive little bleeding heart over here, but I need help in understanding this concept. It seems redundant to have the president issuing an executive order for vanilla interrogation, when surely that was the plan in the first place, right? Isn’t that basic SOP?
Enquiring minds wanna know, dammit!
Never been in the military have you.
Inigo Montoya: I don’t have cites right now, and to be honest I didn’t have the stomach to follow along wth the abu graib situation as it unfolded.
I was under the impression that the people most often with the captives were soldiers who were not specificially trained in psy ops. IIRC, there was somewhat minimal oversight by cia agents/contractors/etc…
Could be remembering incorrectly and I don’t have any cites.
Well, see… this is part of what I wonder about.
There were several reasons used to ‘sell the war’ to the American public.
[ul]
[li]The first was a somewhat-dangerous-maybe-imminent-threat of WMD.[/li][li]The second was a set of imagined connections to global terror.[/li][li]The third was that we were doing it for the people, as we failed to protect their museums and get the water and electricity right back on, but made sure to safeguard the oil and carve their nationup in the granting of Coalition of the Willing tim no-bid contracts-for-freedom! er…[/li][li]Then of course, there was the line that what we were doing there would produce a ‘domino’ effect in the ‘muslim world’. They were right. But in a bad way. [/li][/ul]
So I am left to ask, are these people incompetent in the administration of the nation and its armed forces, or was there some other agenda that I can not quite figure out?
executive order=law.
Unless congress overturns it.
If you are an army interrogator, that’s pretty much your job description, you’d need no orders to get down to business–apart from your immediate command sayng, “Get jiggy wid it” (sorry for the technical jargon). It’d be odd for Tha Prez to issue this command. If we’re talking about civilian interrogators, then I suppose their duties would at least be vaguely acented to by The Prez, but detailed by the detail that details those particular details.
Wouldn’t it be great if I’d just shut the hell up and slink away to some corner for a while?
No, you’re probably right. This war was (is) huge and protracted. We haven’t done this kind of thing in 30 years, and I don’t think we’ve ever done it this way. What most likely happened was the higher echelons simply never considered that their underlings would behave so contemptably. ( I initially called BS on Abu Ghraib because the Psy guys I knew would NEVER pull that kind of crap–let alone allow a camera into and OUT OF the office. ) Would civilians have been given instructions to interrogate? Maybe. But then if you take a weekend warrior or untouchable civilian and put him in those conditions with minimal (because of a misplaced expectation of professional behavior) supervision, well this kind of thing can happen. And it did. I’d be less inclined to call it “incompetence” than … well, is there a word for :smack:
If this is standard operating procedure, why haven’t we heard of this in every country in which we have troops or which we’ve been at war with?
But wouldn’t the decision to fight a war such that you needed to employ ‘civilian interrogators’ ultimately lie with the commander in chief?
I mean, if you’re relying on people over whom you have very little control and who have little to no accountability…
Nope, please develop/defend your position.
If this is standard operating procedure…
Well, I don’t know how to respond to that exactly. The Army trains folks to be interrogators. their job is to extract useful information from prisoners as well as just asking the right questions of regular people they have the pleasure to meet in a professional capacity. Brutalizing captives is contrary to the GC, but I’ve been away for so long I can’t recall if dinner menus, conversation topics and nap times are addressed. Two reasons we’ve not heard about it before pop into mind. 1) Brutalizing prisoners is not SOP (because, as I said, it’s not helpful) and 2) big scale of operations increases the chance of poor behavior and its subsequent discovery.
But wouldn’t the decision to fight a war such that you needed to employ ‘civilian interrogators’…
Absoloutely. We’ve been tinkering with a hybrid military/civilian system. The optimist in me says the weaknesses in such a system remained unknown until they were tested. Took a long time to invent a feasable aircraft, telephone and flushable toilet–that’s how you make new stuff. You put something together, see where it fails, fix it, repeat as necessary… The pessemist in me says, “OK, and the administration doesn’t care because they’re a bunch of 3rd world peasants anyway.” If I were the POTUS and found this war necessary, I might have responded differently than GWB; but I’m not him, I’m not privy to the same facts as he is, and I’m not sure how much of the shenanegins was his fault any more than Ray Crok would be to blame for a burger flipper spitting on my Big Mac.
So if it’s not SOP, what caused it?
Fair enough, but shouldn’t we hold the chief executive office accountable for his decisions? If, for instance, he was to implement a new policy that put americans at risk at home and abroad and endangered our troops abroad, would he be blamed?
Trying to hybridize the military is an interesting concept, but that doesn’t excuse any mistakes made along the way.
THe difference is that in many of those cases, we used test-pilots and/or volunteers. And the others weren’t all that lethal.
One is obligated to follow different standards of behavior when dealing with the
inflicting of death and destruction and the loss of human life than when designing a flushable toilet.
Well, this is what puzzles me.
Why is this going on?
Seriously. If it’s systemic, why haven’t we seen it before?
If it’s not systemic what caused it?
Whose fault was it?
Who knew what, when?
Who allowed what, when?
Hor far up does this go? Higher than the directive to ‘take the gloves off?’