The Senate torture report

[Terr]

@andros

Since you’re clearly unwilling to engage on your personal definitions of torture, maybe you can answer this: Why is it “pragmatically” wrong to cause permanent injury?

Psychology. Because you need for the person under interrogation to have the hope of escaping (well, eventually being released) unscathed.

[Morgenstern]

@Czarcasm

Well, since we’ve got this torture report full of evidence showing that it doesn’t work, it’s only fair that we look at the evidence from these six CIA chiefs showing that it does.
Where is it?

Although the Senate report denies any useful information, the CIA maintains that such information did come from the detainees, including the name of Bin Laden’s gopher, which lead discovering his whereabouts, and the raid that killed him. Frankly, I never believe the Senate on much of anything else, so I’m inclined to view the CIA’s version as more credible.

Here read if for yourself.

[iiandyiiii]

@Terr

Psychology. Because you need for the person under interrogation to have the hope of escaping (well, eventually being released) unscathed.

That doesn’t address my hypothetical, in which a “real torture” method is more effective, and you have a detainee with critical info. Is it still wrong in that case?

@Terr

Relative morality.

Those are two words together that make a phrase, but it doesn’t answer my question.

[Lobohan]

@Morgenstern

Although the Senate report denies any useful information, the CIA maintains that such information did come from the detainees, including the name of Bin Laden’s gopher, which lead discovering his whereabouts, and the raid that killed him. Frankly, I never believe the Senate on much of anything else, so I’m inclined to view the CIA’s version as more credible.

Here read if for yourself.

Certainly, the guys who did the war crimes would never lie to make themselves look good. :rolleyes:

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

Seriously. If we’re gonna take the testimony of the CIA as unsuspicious, we ought equally to take the testimony of detainees as unsuspicious. It’s literally impossible to think of two parties less impartial.

[Lemur866]

Why isn’t it OK to anally rape prisoners, as long as you do it gently enough that they don’t suffer any permanent physical damage?

Or would it only be OK to anally rape prisoners if you don’t actually come at the end? Is the physical sensation of sexual pleasure experience by the rapist what’s the problem?

Or is it only OK to anally rape prisoners if you use an object to rape them? I mean, the interrogator isn’t getting his cock pleasured, and it isn’t causing permanent physical damage to the rape victim. So it’s just one of those things like keeping his cell cold, or giving him crappy food?

You know, the contention that hypothermia, stress positions, waterboarding, psychological torture and sleep deprivation aren’t really torture is fucking ridiculous. No, it has to be pliers and skinning knives, or it isn’t torture. But those medieval methods were discarded by Soviet torturers as outdated and inefficient. Simply chain a man with his hands behind his back for a day, and he will be in agony. Keep him awake for days, and he will be in agony. Chill his core temperature to hypothermic levels and he will be in agony.

And the enhanced interrogation people know this, because they talk about “breaking” the prisoner. It has to be one or the other. If sleep deprivation were just one of life’s little annoyances, how could that break an Al Qaeda terrorist? If a little loud music is not a big deal, how does that break the prisoner?

@O'Brian

‘By itself,’ he said, 'pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable – something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.

And so, because Winston Smith was not permanently physically damaged in Room 101, what happened in Room 101 was not torture according to Terr and Magellan. I salute you, it takes a very brave man to literally argue in favor of totalitarianism.

[tomndebb]

@Morgenstern

Although the Senate report denies any useful information, the CIA maintains that such information did come from the detainees, including the name of Bin Laden’s gopher, which lead discovering his whereabouts, and the raid that killed him. Frankly, I never believe the Senate on much of anything else, so I’m inclined to view the CIA’s version as more credible.

Here read if for yourself.

So, the Senate report points out that every bit of useful information was provided before he was tortured. They then point out that the guy began telling very different and contradictory tales following the torture. The the CIA guy comes in and says that it was all the lies he told after being tortured that really revealed how to find bin Laden.

Typical CYA nonsense from someone who is more interested in protecting his butt than in providing an accurate assessment.

[Knorf]

Here’s a BBC News article about this topic that may be of interest.

One point in particular:

“At no time did the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques lead to the collection of imminent threat intelligence, such as the hypothetical ticking time bomb,” says the report. In other words, all that mistreatment, all those hours of waterboarding, of dragging people hooded and shackled, up and down corridors, depriving them of sleep for days on end and subjecting them to white noise, did not actually yield any real information that stopped a terrorist attack.

Not true, says the CIA’s current director, John Brennan. In a riposte to the report, he said: “Our review indicates that interrogations of detainees on whom Enhanced Interrogations Techniques were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.”

But the Senate committee spent five and a half years going through a staggering six million pages of documents. They did not reach these conclusions lightly.

The CIA’s brutal interrogations did produce results, but they were frequently false leads. Humans, like animals, will do anything to make extreme pain stop.

Countless days and dollars were wasted, on top of the distress suffered by detainees, as CIA investigators chased worthless leads given out in extremis by desperate prisoners.

Aside from the very substantial moral concerns, and concerns about damage to the image and prestige of the USA internationally, and aside from pesky things like the Geneva convention, there’s this. Even to the extent that a little real, actionable intelligence is obtained (pointing out again that there are other, humane and arguably more efficacious ways to get this information than by using torture), because torture is so indiscriminate, because people literally start to lose their minds, because a lot of people who were tortured actually didn’t fucking know anything, and because even people who might know something important will blurt out all sorts of gibberish just to make the torture stop, from a practical point of view: torture is all too often a complete waste of time and resources.

The bottom line for me is that it is likely this whole torture fiasco will ultimately prove to have done more harm than good.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@iiandyiiii

That doesn’t address my hypothetical, in which a “real torture” method is more effective, and you have a detainee with critical info. Is it still wrong in that case?

We’ve established it’s a horror, we’re just negotiating the device.

[EndlessEntropy]

Is it safe to say the election** of George W. Bush in 2000 was the worst thing to ever happen to this country at the very least since japanese internment?

[elucidator]

Worse than the Beach Boys.

[Richard_Parker]

If the OLC memos finding torture to be legal were based on lies told to them by the CIA about the nature of the torture regime, does the Detainee Treatment Act still immunize the torturers from prosecution?

It’s been years since I looked at this, but I wonder if that revelation might actually change the landscape of who can be prosecuted.

[crowmanyclouds]

@Terr

Because of Constitutional rights that apply to US citizens.

Exactly which Constitutional rights? Enumerate them for me.

CMC fnord!

[puzzlegal]

@Lemur866

…You know, the contention that hypothermia, stress positions, waterboarding, psychological torture and sleep deprivation aren’t really torture is fucking ridiculous. No, it has to be pliers and skinning knives, or it isn’t torture. But those medieval methods were discarded by Soviet torturers as outdated and inefficient. Simply chain a man with his hands behind his back for a day, and he will be in agony. Keep him awake for days, and he will be in agony. Chill his core temperature to hypothermic levels and he will be in agony.

And the enhanced interrogation people know this, because they talk about “breaking” the prisoner. It has to be one or the other. If sleep deprivation were just one of life’s little annoyances, how could that break an Al Qaeda terrorist? If a little loud music is not a big deal, how does that break the prisoner?

And so, because Winston Smith was not permanently physically damaged in Room 101, what happened in Room 101 was not torture according to Terr and Magellan. I salute you, it takes a very brave man to literally argue in favor of totalitarianism.

This.

I don’t really give a shit whether they got some information that helped kill Bin Laden, or prevented some bomb going off somewhere. It wasn’t worth it. We have damaged ourselves as a nation. We have committed moral atrocities.

And because of that, we have greatly increased the risks to our citizens abroad. There will be lots more bombs.

The best we can do now is to stop torturing, and to try and convict the people who made it happen. And it will still take a generation or more to clean the stain off our nation.

[tomndebb]

@Terr

Because of Constitutional rights that apply to US citizens.

Every one of the more than twenty occurrences of the word “citizen” in the U. S. Constitution refers to citizenship, voting rights, eligibility for public office, or judicial action.
The Constitution does not limit any protection from government action to “citizens” either explicitly or implicitly. Rather, it extends Constitutional protections against government actions to all persons.

[crowmanyclouds]

@tomndebb

Every one of the more than twenty occurrences of the word “citizen” in the U. S. Constitution refers to citizenship, voting rights, eligibility for public office, or judicial action.
The Constitution does not limit any protection from government action to “citizens” either explicitly or implicitly. Rather, it extends Constitutional protections against government actions to all persons.

Vinny Gambini: [Annoyed] Hey, your honor please, huh? … Now. Mrs. Riley, and only Mrs. Riley.

He’s never gonna learn anything if we keep giving him the answers!

(Just MHO but I think it’s slightly more effective to make someone discover their wrong about something than it is to simply show them that they’re wrong. Takes a lot longer . . . but it’s more satisfying.)

CMC fnord!

[Terr]

Zadydas v. Davis:

“It is well established that certain constitutional protections available to persons inside the United States are unavailable to aliens outside of our geographic borders. See United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 269 (1990) (Fifth Amendment’s protections do not extend to aliens outside the territorial boundaries); Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763, 784 (1950) (same).”

[Ibn_Warraq]

@tomndebb

Every one of the more than twenty occurrences of the word “citizen” in the U. S. Constitution refers to citizenship, voting rights, eligibility for public office, or judicial action.
The Constitution does not limit any protection from government action to “citizens” either explicitly or implicitly. Rather, it extends Constitutional protections against government actions to all persons.

Agreed. It should be noted, and this is not meant to minimize the horror of slavery, but even slaves accused of crimes had the right to due process and trials.

One of the great ironies is that black men accused of killing their masters in Georgia of the 1840s were given trials and even on a tiny, tiny number of occasions acquitted whereas if their grandson did the same thing forty years later, he’d simply be strung up from the nearest tree.

[elucidator]

Zadydas v. Davis:

Human rights correspond very closely with US citizen’s rights. As I understand it, such was the plan. Now all we have to is live up to it.

Be that as it may, human rights are not exclusive to our citizens. We have signed many international agreements to affirm that.

[BobLibDem]

Zadydas v. Davis:

“It is well established that certain constitutional protections available to persons inside the United States are unavailable to aliens outside of our geographic borders. See United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 269 (1990) (Fifth Amendment’s protections do not extend to aliens outside the territorial boundaries); Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763, 784 (1950) (same).”

Who gives a fuck? The UN Convention Against Torture specifically forbids its use by any signatory state on anyone anywhere and also specifically forbids farming it out to non-signatory states. The detainees have a right not to be tortured not only on US soil but on any soil.