Don’t forget the rectal feeding and rectal prolapse!
No new thread is needed – this thread is about the Senate torture report.
What is your opinion about these examples of torture from the report:
*Forcing prisoners with broken legs and feet to stand in stress positions
*Rectal feeding and rectal hydration without any medical need, causing rectal prolapse in at least one instance
*Threatened sexual abuse of detainees’ mothers and children
And this is precisely the point. Perhaps 7 days without sleep would be “torture” to you, but 5 or 6 would fall shy of that. While one guy might break after 4 days, another might be able to endure 8 or 9. One needs to keep in mind that the point of these techniques, whatever they’re classified as, is not to simply cause discomfort or pain, it is to cause someone to break. To have them feel that doing the horrible thing of betraying there side by revealing information is a more attractive option than staying true to their cause and withholding that information, and choosing to accept more discomfort or pain in the process.
That was not my point. My point went to the claim that my DI friend said the same thing about his role as Terr did. That the DIs wanted to break the recruits in order that they could then rebuild them in Marine fashion. A lot of it was mental.
As an aside, one thing he shared was that he and his fellow DIs would oil the browns of their hats, and then one getting in a recruit’s face and screaming at them, making sure that the brim of the hat always hit the recruit in the exact same spot on their nose. To the point that it wold be super-sensitive to the slightest touch.
Maybe. Depends for how long, how much pain there is (which could vary drastically), and the chance for causing permanent damage,
I’m unfamiliar about rectal prolapse. But this doesn’t make it seem horrific. And I’m not sure what one might do to cause it. Could be horrendous, maybe not, particularly if the person had a propensity for the condition. But I’m only going by what I just read, so I could very well be wrong. Leaving that aside, I don’t necessarily think inserting something into the rectum constitutes rape. It could, but if done as a legitimate medical procedure, it loses the idea of “rape”.
No.
The fact that different people can endure different things with differing levels of success shouldn’t have anything to do with whether something is torture or not. Sleep deprivation causes pain and discomfort, and if for long periods of time this pain and discomfort can reasonably be described as “severe”. That’s torture.
That doesn’t matter – slowly pulling one’s fingernails out or dripping acid on your crotch is also designed to “cause someone to break” – and of course it’s torture.
Yep, that’s definitely one of the goals of torture.
The “breaking” in military training is not the same as the “breaking” of torture. In military training it describes ridding one of the “bad” habits and expectations of non-military people, and building up discipline and similar characteristics to make one into a better team-member and military member. The “breaking” in torture describes turning one into a quivering mass that will do anything you say – to take away someone’s humanity. They are totally different concepts.
The “breaking” from torture would make terrible military members.
This doesn’t make any sense to me. This certainly seems like it fits the “severe pain” qualification in the definition of torture. There’s no indication in the report that these stress positions were arranged in such a way that would be gentle on someone’s broken limbs.
Are you kidding? “Rectal prolapse is a condition in which the rectum (the lower end of the colon, located just above the anus) becomes stretched out and protrudes out of the anus.” That sounds pretty horrific to me.
According to the report, it was caused by repeated rectal hydration and rectal feeding without medical need. I’ll also note that the report said that this caused anal fissures and severe hemorrhoids.
This wasn’t a legitimate medical procedure. The report explicitly states that there was no medical need – there was nothing wrong with the detainees’ digestive processes, so even if they needed to be force-fed (or force-hydrated) the legitimate medical way would have been through the mouth.
He explicitly states he will wait to read it before commenting on whether the interrogation methods were appropriate. This criticism is just that the report was conducted in a partisan manner, and doesn’t address the content at all (except for the lack of interviews and recommendations, which sounds like reasonable criticisms). Saying “it’s out of context” requires the actual context. If the context of the “rectal feeding” passages was directions on how to not interrogate detainees, then that would change things, but no one is denying that these things took place. In light of that, it’s totally reasonable to discuss whether these actions were torture, and whether they were wrong, etc.
IV bags are the standard form of hydration; there was no reason not to use IV hydration, except that the added humiliation and pain from rectal hydration broke the spirit of nonviolent resistance the prisoners were showing. (And yes, these prisoners were no Gandhis–nonetheless, in this case they were practicing nonviolent resistance.)
This is 100% wrong. Take the scale I offered earlier:
…things move from unpleasant to really unpleasant to horrendous to torture?
The lines for each of us will be different. Hell, if someone has acrophobia, having him stand on the edge of a tall building would be horrible. Forcing him to stay there might be the worst thing he could imagine. Similarly, an arachnophobe and a claustrophobe might be able to stand on the end of the building all day long, put put some spiders on one or a bag over the head of the other, and they’re ever to spill the beans.
Huh? But that doesn’t mean that all things that are designed to induce discomfort and/or pain are torture.
One of? What are the others?
Good thing I didn’t say they were then.
I’ve had injuries. Even to my legs. And most of the time I could stand a certain way with minimal pain but if I moved another way it would be excruciating. So it’s not a question of gentle, it’s a question of how uncomfortable/painful. The most effective thing would be to place someone on the brink of that pain, so it is fresh in their mind, then threaten them with dialing it up. Again, the person has the ability to avoid the discomfort. They just need to reveal information.
I said I didn’t know about this so I looked it up. I also provided a link so you could read it. Evidently you chose not to.
Now, evidently this rectal feeding does have some benefit. The question you raise is a legitimate now: Why do it if the person can ingest food orally? I don’t know the answer, but perhaps this is a safer way to get nutrients to someone who is intent in not having food administered. That would be my guess.
If IV bags are the answer in all cases, then why does the concept of rectal feeding even exist. And while I agree that it would be humiliating, I’m not sure about the pain. Kinda depends on the the size of the “meal”, I would think.
It’s interesting how similar your reasoning here is to the reasoning of Big Brother at the end of 1984, as they decide exactly how to break Winston.
Please. It puts the entire report into question. Not that it automatically renders it invalid in total, but each claim is suspect. Each one has to be researched for accuracy and truthiness.
If the right did this, you guys jun the left wold completely ignore it. But since it ostensibly puts policies associated with the right in a bad light, you will cling to it like Obama clinging to his last strand of credibility.
The fact that we actually have people defending this shit and trying to conflate it with military training convinces me that for some, there is literally nothing the U.S. government could do, especially under the administration of their preferred party, that would not be defensible.
If it came to light that the Bush administration had ordered the deaths of one hundred thousand Iraqi children in gas chambers, I’m quite certain that act would have at least several happy defenders here on the SDMB.
What you describe is torture. Even if someone has no problem with getting acid dripped on their crotch, dripping acid on crotches as a procedure to get people to talk is still torture. Someone might, for some strange reason, like getting their fingernails pulled out, but that’s still torture. Sleep deprivation for long periods of time similarly qualifies – it causes severe pain and discomfort.
If it’s “severe pain”, then it sounds like it fits the definition.
To bring pleasure to the torturer, I suppose. Some torture is done for one reason or the other, and some is probably done for both. Torture is also used for punishment, sometimes (see below about the “rectal feeding”).
Then how is it relevant? It’s a use of the word “breaking” that’s totally different and unrelated.
That’s torture. People tortured for information similarly have “the ability to avoid the discomfort. They just need to reveal the information.” Definitely torture.
Huh? I quoted it.
What benefit?
It’s not a safer way. It wasn’t done for medical reasons – CIA interrogators used it as a means of “behavior control” to end hunger strikes and water refusal. One CIA officer noted “While IV infusion is safe and effective, we were impressed with the ancillary effectiveness of rectal infusion on ending the water refusal in a similar case,”. They did it for punishment – to end water refusal, which could be treated with IV infusions (which are safer and more effective, since the rectum is an inefficient way to absorb nutrients).
Glad you find it interesting. Question is, do you find any of it wrong? Here it is again:
After you answer, the nice nurse here will take you to your next appointment in Room 101.
Read more here. It was done for “behavior control” (punishment), and is never medically necessary unless it’s impossible to get food through the mouth and stomach. It has risks of harm, and is less effective, then other methods.
And if someone in authority made you move in such a way that it was excruciating until you gave up information they think you had, you would be perfectly okay with that? You would be okay with this happening to your friends and/or family?
Absolutely. And so far, no one has provided a single iota of information that discredits the CIA documents’ text from the report.
If neither the left or the right are capable of producing a report that is accurate about what our government has been doing in our name, then how can we ever possibly know what the government is doing? Is there anyone at all that you would trust to be accurate and non-political with regard to reports like this? Are we the citizens supposed to just sit in the dark and assume everything is on the up and up and that there’s nothing to see here? You’ve set up an impossible situation where no one at all can be trusted on anything, so we are then incapable of ever knowing the truth. Do you really believe this to be the case? Or are you seriously suggesting that only ‘your side’ can be trusted to report on government activity? Either your being overtly partisan, or you’re ok with burying your head in the sand when it comes to US government activity.