Details here. “Highlights” (beyond waterboarding) include forcing some detainees with broken legs or feet to stand in stress positions, sleep deprivation for a week, some detainees were told they would be killed, some were subject to forced “rectal feeding” and “rectal hydration”, and ice-cold baths were used to bring on hypothermia on detainees.
No one should be trusted with the authority to use such techniques on anyone, in my view. No one can be trusted to always get it right, and never torture the wrong person, even if it were accepted that these techniques are effective (and I don’t accept that they’re more effective than other interrogation techniques) or morally acceptable to use on terrorists. No one should be saddled with a duty to inflict deliberate suffering on others.
One thing that interests me is the debate over whether the torture was effective, which seems to be a debate about hypotheticals.
Apparently the torture did yield useful information, and the claims that suggest otherwise merely assert “that the information revealed through torture could have been obtained through other means”. So a lot depends on how solid that assessment is.
And that is just what they are allowing us to see. These is the sweet wholesome activities that the CIA is willing to tell us about. Imagine what other depraved stuff went on under the banner of “God bless America” that they have just chosen not to mention. The things nobody bothered to write down or that only one or two people witnessed.
Honestly, once a person reaches the point where they are willing to torture another human being like this, based on nothing more than ‘my boss said they might know something we want’, that person is so debased they no longer have a place in useful society. They have proven themselves to be cold-blooded psychopaths.
I don’t care if the information was good and that’s the only way to get it. Torture is wrong and the US should never have done it. As many things as I despise Bush and Cheney for, this might be #1 on my list.
I’d be interesting in knowing what this means, too. The news articles I read indicated it was done “without medical need.” It sounds suspiciously like the interrogators wanted to stick something up prisoners’ asses and not call it rape.
Do you have a cite for this with details? Not that I doubt people have made this claim – I know many have. It runs counter to the Senate committee’s findings:
“The committee reviewed 20 of the most frequent and prominent examples of
purported counterterrorism “successes” that the CIA has attributed to the use of its
enhanced interrogation techniques. Each of those examples was found to be
wrong in fundamental respects. In some cases, there was no relationship between
the claimed counterterrorism “success” and any information provided by a CIA
detainee during or after the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. In
the remaining cases, the CIA inaccurately represented that unique information
was acquired from a CIA detainee as a result of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation
techniques, when in fact the information was either (a) acquired from the CIA
detainee prior to the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques or (b)
corroborative of information already available to the intelligence community from
sources other than the CIA detainee, and therefore not unique or “otherwise
unavailable,” which was the standard for effectiveness the CIA presented to the
Department of Justice and policymakers.”
In addition, such techniques often harmed the investigators’ efforts:
“The methods in question—which were based on discredited coercive interrogation
techniques such as those used by torturous regimes during the Cold War to elicit
false confessions—regularly resulted in fabricated information. During the brutal
interrogations the CIA was often unaware the information was fabricated, leading
CIA officers or contractors to falsely conclude that they were acquiring unique or
actionable intelligence when they were not.”
Experts who know more than you or I, think that torture leads to the victim saying anything to stop it. This set might include facts, but would also include random confabulations.
Aside from the fact that it’s evil, it’s like a pregnancy test that has more false positives than positives. Not something very useful.
Some more from the report: CIA officers threatened to harm some detainees’ children, and threatened to sexually abuse their mothers. There were allegations that (quoted) “rectal exams were conducted with “excessive force””. At least one detainee was acknowledged to be tortured to death (or died during enhanced interrogation).
I disagree with this as well. I feel this argument is a crutch for people who want an easy answer. It’s easy to condemn torture if you claim it doesn’t work.
I’m kind of ambivalent about this as a practical matter, but I disagree with making a broad principle of it.
In theory, suppose the two scenarios were available were 1) terrorists torture and kill everyone in the world (including me :eek:), or 2) the terrorists get tortured, I am absolutely in favor of Option 2. (I’m curious as to whether anyone would disagree with this.)
So I’m not in principle against torture in any circumstance. Now the devil is in the details. How serious is the terrorist threat, and what amount of advantage (if any) do various levels of torture offer over other options? I don’t know, hence my ambivalence.
Well, there is an easy answer. Torture is BOTH ineffective and morally reprehensible. Just because it would be a more interesting moral discussion IF it actually worked, doesn’t make it so.
Thank you. The article (my cite) seems to go easier than the language of the report itself, which refutes (or attempts to refute) the claim that any of the information was actually “extracted” specifically due to any of the techniques considered torture.
What do you think?
EDIT: it seems you answered this question seconds before my post.
Do you trust that the government has the ability to mostly eliminate any uncertainty about whether a specific detainee is actually a terrorist? What level of uncertainty is acceptable to you as to whether someone should be “allowed” to be tortured?