I waterboard!

Great Debates
441

Hooo-daddy.

It’s BECAUSE Sevastopol loves peace and freedom and justice so much that he’s willing to kill and destroy and torture. Or, to be fair, not so much to do those things himself, rather he’s certainly not going to shed any tears when the bad people who advocate killing and destruction and torture get what’s coming to them. Oh, wait. Ooops.

He’ll cheer when the vermin who supported the war are treated like vermin, because that’s what vermin deserve. And he defines vermin as those who treat other people as vermin because they believe that’s what vermin deserve, including those who merely cheer as the vermin get what they deserve.

You know who else thought civilization’s human vermin should be treated like vermin? Lots of different people of various political movements, that’s who.

Congratulations on putting yourself firmly in the pro-human-vermin-extermination camp, Sevastopol.

442

Scylla, thank you for settling the topic: “Is it torture or not”. Your balls are plentiful, and I applaud your passion for the truth. You’ve answered the “what”, let’s move on to “why”. Scylla, I’m curious. After your experience, would you perform this on someone that had kidnapped or threatened the lives of your family? Let’s just assume, for a moment, that these people ARE as bad as Cheney says. That they are the “worst of the worst”, intent on killing as many Americans as possible. Maybe I’ve seen too many episodes of “24”, but I sleep better knowing that if someone is going to blow up a nuclear bomb in my city, that the CIA, FBI, LAPD, NSA, SS, and even Jack Bauer would ALL be willing to waterboard the guy with the abort code within an inch of his/her life. I know I would. I mean, we’re not talking about waterboarding Paris Hilton for driving drunk on a suspended license. This is reserved for people that have information that can SAVE LIVES and they won’t give it up.

I think torture is a double-edged sword that will eventually result in repurcussions that the fragile American psyche is not prepared to handle. I don’t want my cousin or friends serving to experience this torture at the hands of a vendictive warlord. I don’t want to make more enemies for this country. I believe in the Geneva Convention. But our enemies don’t care about any of that. Out where the metal meets the meat, a little waterboarding, finger smashing, hot needles in the eyes, or electrified ballsack is probably the fastest and most effective way to save American lives and protect the immediate (not long term) needs of those serving to thwart these immoral zealots seeking the destruction of our country.

443

Um, did you read beyond the OP? The argument you raise has been exhaustively discussed and IMHO debunked already.

444

Underlined for your pondering.

If you are willing to build your own sense of safety (real or perceived) on the use of torture you are not in a position of moral superiority.

445

Are we still debating whether people would torture to save the lives of their children, or to keep a nuke from taking out New York City?

Thing is, that’s not what’s happening. We aren’t waterboarding prisoners who are about to set of a nuclear bomb in New York. We aren’t waterboarding prisoners who have the interrogator’s daughter hostage. We aren’t waterboarding prisoners who know where the secret anthrax bioweapons lab is, and we have only hours to stop them.

That does not happen. Debating what you’re capable of in certain extreme situations is all well and good, but what does that have to do authorizing torture by the cops, the FBI, the CIA, and soldiers?

Yeah, all you tough guys who don’t hold with coddling terrorists are all hot to torture them. Except you always come up with a scenario, where you KNOW the guy is a terrorist, and you KNOW he knows where the bomb is, and you KNOW that there’s no other way to find the bomb. Except, that’s bullshit, because that never happens.

You want to know a more realistic torture scenario? You’re on a patrol in Iraq, and you search some guy’s house, and you turn up bomb making equipment. You take the house owner prisoner. Now, are you gonna torture that guy? Electrodes to the testicles, until he starts naming his buddies? Is that the standard you want?

You claim you don’t want to see Paris Hilton tortured for drunk driving. Except when torture becomes official policy, somehow it doesn’t remain confined only to the “worst of the worst”, because the torturers are beyond the law, and anyone who doesn’t like what they do becomes the next target.

The idea that we oppose torture because we’re concerned about being unfair to Khalid Sheik Muhammed is ludicrous. Sure, terrorists and murderers don’t deserve a fair trial. Except, how do you know your prisoner is a terrorist murderer? What method do you use to determine who is a scumbag who doesn’t deserve the right to a trial, and who is an innocent person who does? Some sort of tribunal seems in order, which reviews the evidence against the prisoner. And the government will argue that the prisoner is a criminal who deserves to have his civil rights taken away, and I suppose we should appoint an advocate for the prisoner, to make sure any evidence that he’s innocent gets revealed. And then an impartial third party will review the evidence and listen to the arguments on both sides. And only after careful consideration and due process do we declare that a particular prisoner is a scumbag who doesn’t deserve a fair trial. And those who aren’t deemed scumbags, well, I suppose we could go ahead and give them a fair trial after this tribunal, but perhaps we should skip a step and let them go free, after all, we’ve found that they didn’t do the crime they are accused of, so it would be pretty wasteful to hold a trial for a guy we already declared innocent. How’s that sound?

446

Maybe?

I think maybe you need to read the thread.

447

Sounds good. Better anyhow than the scenario where a ‘terror suspect’ who happens to be a citizen of one of the USA’s most strident allies is held as prisoner at Guantanamo Bay for…years…under conditions that defy all conventions, before even being allowed their right to a trial (fair or otherwise). That’s how the US treats its allies?? No wonder its creating enemies the world around.

Great OP, btw…got me suckered in for the whole thread. If there is any ‘good side’ to these discussions, it is that it is increasing awareness and perhaps shifting public perception.

Good forum…might just have to subscribe…

448

What kind of man wouldn’t be willing to damn himself, sell his humanity, and spend the rest of his life in prison if it meant a chance of saving his family.

I’ll put it this way: I think there are some one way doors in life. You walk through them and you can never go back or be what you were beforehand. You are something less of a human being for having so walked. I’ve walked a few of those doors myself, and would not like to go further.

I think you have to have some sort of empathy and awareness of others to be a human being. If you don’t truly empathize with the person and are incapable of understanding what they feel then you would not be an effective interrogator. If you do understand it and you do it I think it is going to destroy you as much as the other person.

If it doesn’t than you’ve basically crossed that one way door, abandoned your humanity and become something dissociated like a Dahmer or Dennis Rader.

Either way, I think if you torture you are putting an end to yourself as a member of the human race.

“Fast and effective” is an excellent ethic if we’re talking about a cure for indigestion. Sterilizing hemophiliacs would be a fast and effective way of eliminating that disease, and I’m sure we could cure a lot more diseases and save lives in the long run if we just experimented on prisoners in jails.

449

Hmm, no real possibility of defeating? Because it wouldn’t be it batshit crazy to think that the Japanese, in 1941, had the foresight to predict that the US would have the means (the undeveloped and untested, until July, 1945, A-bomb) and the impudence to incinerate over 200,000 civilians for the purpose of expediting Japan’s surrender? It’s common knowledge that it was the A-Bomb that finally defeated Japan, as Hirohito unmitigatedly expressed:

“Moreover, the enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”

It seems pretty apparent that the Japanese, having developed a formidable military force and a strategy that all but annihilated the US Pacific Fleet from the get-go, was standing on pretty firm ground in its belief that it could defeat us. Had it not been for devastating Japanese strategical errors along the way, a bit of sheer luck for the US forces, combined with the US decision to commit an atrocity of immense proportion, history may very well have been written differently.

Further, it’s not the least bit batshit crazy to invade a sovereign nation in the middle east (with no exit strategy), completely dismantle its government, botch the occupation and restoration leaving its citizenry in a state of upheaval and instability, and then strut around on an aircraft carrier in front of a big sign that says “Mission Accomplished”? Way to instill world confidence in your foreign relations policy.

Sorry for the hijack, but really…

450

While I don’t disagree with you that terrorism is warfare of last resort for an organization that has no country and, therefore, no means of matching the mighty US Military Industrial Complex, I’d argue that the psychological warfare on ourselves borne of the very terrorism we fear has potentially far more damaging repercussions than the individual acts of terrorism that kill a handful of people here and there.

The psychological warfare of which I speak is the self-dismantling of the very principles that govern us in order to protect us from the enemy. The most dreaded repercussion is that we have essentially become our own worst enemy.

451

By the time that the U.S. employed the atomic bomb, Japan was defeated in all but acknowledgment. There are numerous debates over how many weeks or months the war might have continued without the use of nukes, but the eventual outcome was a foregone conclusion. The debate over the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not over whether the U.S. would have won but when.

The discussion over whether the attack on Pearl Harbor was insane rests on a totally separate set of conditions. Japan looked at a United States that had exercised an almost extreme form of isolationism for 22 years and its leaders believed that in the aftermath of sufficiently disastrous battles, the American citizenry would compel the government to sue for peace. Instead, the U.S. citizenry rose up and took on a two-ocean war and provided enough materiel to win both of them. (I am not naively stating that we, not the U.S.S.R., defeated the Germans, but much of the Soviet war effort rested on U.S. supplies.)

So the question is whether or not the Japanese command should have known that an attack on the U.S. would inspire us to fight to the finish. (And the quotation from Yamamoto that closes the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! has not been verified, so it is unclear that even he knew that the attack was a mistake, although he had argued against that attack prior to its preparation.)

452

I recommend you read my statement once more. I can appreciate what you are saying and said as much in my own statement:

I bolded the key word in my statement with which your statement of “not whether…but when” agrees. Yes, I know that the decision to drop the bomb was made with the intent of ending the war with Japan more speedily. After Midway, it was clear that the tides had turned in our favor and Japanese defeat was a foregone conclusion. I never said that it wasn’t, at the time the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I simply stated that Japan had no way of predicting that outcome. I dare even speculate that had the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan even earlier in the war, Hirohito may have acknowledged the folly of declaring war on the US that much sooner.

Whether they expected us to fight to the finish is only one element to the equation. The Japanese expected to fight to finish, regardless of the US response, and also believed they had the means to defeat us.

Does any nation declare war on another nation without the reasonable expectation of winning that war? Reasonable, in their eyes? As I stated, the Japanese had built a formidable military force, they did their research and, in an informed manner, predicted (albeit incorrectly) their success, based on their own power and their expectations of our capabilities. You need only realize that Japan’s defeat was anything but perfunctory for US --it really did test our mettle as a nation-- to understand that the Japanese rationally believed, prior to declaring war on the US, that they had the means to be victorious.

I don’t see that in the least bit crazy. Ill-conceived, maybe, but not crazy. In no way am I trying to justify war in any shape or form. However, I do take issue with oversimplifying and rewriting history by ignoring the actual events of WWII by painting with the “batshit crazy” brush. If WWII teaches us nothing else, it should teach us to never underestimate what your enemy is capable of and the profound price of war on all parties.

453

Incidentally, I’ve found this thread to be quite an interesting one that has been very eye-opening, despite, and perhaps because of, the fact that it meandered so greatly. I do apologize for my part in the digression.

As far as Scylla goes, that was unhinged what you did there, but glad to see that you make informed judgments as opposed to rash, biased ones. Admittedly, I’m a bit perplexed by anyone who could be unsure of whether waterboarding is torture. It is, always has been, and always will be. The history of, particularly with regard to the US position on, waterboarding determines as much.

I don’t believe it’s ever right for any human being to torture another human being for any reason whatsoever, regardless of religious or political persuasion. As many others have said, it’s barbaric. Doesn’t matter if its effective or not, it’s beneath us as rational human beings. No good can possibly come it…ticking time-bomb scenario included.

Without ignoring the keen insight of the Scylla’s OP, the ones that had the most profound effect on me were margin’s initial and followup posts in which he represents the ideal interrogator’s perspective. You, sir, have my utmost admiration and appreciation for not only serving, but representing this nation with dignity and honor that outshines the muddied values and vindictiveness of many armchair warriors. Your sentiment encouraged me to bid goodbye to a wee bit of cynicism that has become an uncomfortable burden these days. Thank you for giving me hope that there’s still a chance for humanity to prevail.

454

Why do people always forget about the oil embargo?
The Japanese saw this as an act of war.
They were forced to choose between doing two things

  1. Do nothing and see their reserves dwindle rapidly to the point where their fleets would just be hulks of iron bobbing on the ocean
  2. Strike now, hard and fast, and just hope for the best, maybe force a peace before the full might of production of the US could be brought to bear.

Which would you choose?

455

Welcome, Brown Eyed Girl. Thanks for your reasoned and insightful posts.

456

Good point. But does it negate a reasonable expectation to win? Do you really believe that Japan simply “hoped for the best” without an inkling of the hubris that must surely be present in a nation that is already attempting to expand its borders into China?

457

Well, it was their only hope and maybe not totally unreasonable.
If the attack had found their primary targets, the aircraft carriers, and had knocked them out (as well), The US attitude to the war might have been slightly different. Would the idea of a US, willing to sign some sort of non-agression treaty, have been such a silly idea?

458

Bull, they could have either negotiated in good faith with the US or other embargo countries, ended their war on China and Korea or at least declare war openly before attacking.

The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor cannot be twisted into a defensive move. They needed the oil to continue their war on the mainland.

What a load of crap.

Jim

459

Yes, it was a silly idea. Even if Japan got the Carriers in their **sneak ** attack, the US would have gone to war. To think otherwise is foolish.

As it was, FDR wanted an excuse to join the Allies in war against the Axis. I do not believe for a second Japan believed that the US was going to sue for peace, unless they were getting advice as bad as Bush did with the Iraqis welcoming our troops with wine and flowers.

460

I agree with you on that.
I think they expected some sort of reaction. They were probably hoping for some sort of Lusitania incident. Maybe even an attack on the pacific fleet.
They most likely didn’t expect it to be that successful. Luckily it wasn’t successful enough.
Whether it was entirely luck or not that the carriers were out will remain in the area of conpiracy theory.

I believe they may indeed have underestimated America’s taste for war.
I also think a comparrison with Saddam would be more apt. In that they believed that if they played the game right they could get some gains.
They both underestimated US ruthlessness in the pursuit of its goals.