Okay, thanks for the name.
I don’t think it’s fair to say he’s on the torturer’s side. He’s dealing with a powderkeg. If Bush and Cheney were taken away in shackles, the right in this country would have lost their shit.
Think how utterly insane and vile the RW has been since Obama took over. That’s with him being very conciliatory and reasonable to them. If he indicted the former president and cabinet, I honestly think CWII would be in danger of breaking out. All those simmering chuclefucks with their guns and bibles would be a lot more motivated.
So you determine the morality by whether the UN agrees with it or not?
Why do you think I do?
Here’s the problem. You will never, ever, ever know that the torture you are doing will be effective and thus morally justified. Never.
That idea, as pointed out earlier, is a fanciful dream created by the writers of 24 and people who want to rationalize the use of torture. It lets the people who actually engage in torture, or order others to do so, feel better about themselves and the atrocities they’ve committed.
The CIA is simply an evil organization that needs to be terminated. Even the interrogators were moved to tears by the torture but were told to continue by higher ups.
It’s sad that Americans are more outraged by a thief getting shot than our government knowingly and willing inhumanely torturing detainees.
It is a simple subject. For decades you (that is in the public rhetoric) in the USA have held yourselves above the soviets, above the north Koreans above the totalitarians explicetly in judging them on the use of torture, on the repression. We knew that the USA was having pretensions and the 9/11 has tested them.
Now the USA can either make excuses like some are making here in this thread or it can heal its reptuation. I know that for the pro americans outside of the usa it is harder to defend them and the idea that behaving like the soviets and the north koreans with prisoners has made the americans safer and stronger… it is a strange one that is so disconnected from your past that it surprises me.
I disagree. The taser is meant to inflict pain AND to incapacitate people. No one complies after being teased because being disabled is so unpleasant; they comply to avoid further pain.
That is all it’s used for. Incapacitating someone is part of gaining their compliance: how can they resist?
So you determine the constitutionality of an action by whether you agree with it or not?
(e.g., your rhetorical question is absurd, off-the-mark, and bears no relationship to what BobLibDem actually said. You’re just flailing around without any conceptual coherency.)
This assertion does not bear up under close scrutiny. Surely the goal of a war is to incapacitate all the enemy combatants, isn’t it? To prevent them from functioning as enemy combatants, aye? So how does torturing a captured enemy combatants prevent him from functioning as an enemy combatant when his being captured has already prevented that?
No, it isn’t.
And torture, regardless of whether or not you think it might be effective, is something that we, as a nation, a culture and a society, long ago agreed was reprehensible and forbidden.
[
](Geneva Conventions - Wikipedia)
Your arguments have all been made decades ago and found wanting; they were rejected. Torture is wrong, and illegal.
Tased people don’t choose to comply. They can’t resist because they’re lying on the ground twitching. The pain aspect is secondary at most.
No, it isn’t.
We don’t abide by the fucking Geneva Convention because the UN made us sign it. We signed it because we thought it was a good idea.
Torture and depravity make fighting wars harder, not easier. The Geneva Conventions weren’t a bunch of nonsense dreamed up by pacifists who wanted to hamstring America. It was invented by soldiers. Soldiers like the idea that they can surrender without being shot, they like the idea that if they’re taken prisoner they won’t be tortured, and so on. Allowing enemy soldiers to surrender is a war-winning tactic, not a fantasy dreamed up by college sophomores.
If we’re fighting a country, do we want soldiers of that country to surrender? If we’re fighting a country, do we want enemy civilians to provide us intelligence? If we’re fighting a country, do we want the civilians of that country to believe they’d be better off if we won and their government lost?
Or do we want them to believe that if we win, they’ll be massacred and tortured and their family members will disappear into nameless prisons? You do understand that the perception that American soldiers aren’t Mongol savages out to pile up pyramids of skulls for fun is a perception that would be practical to encourage? You do understand that winning a war requires undermining the enemies will to fight, and when we torture people’s friends and neighbors we do the exact opposite?
The moral depravity exhibited by the right-wing media-industrial complex to this torture report would be shocking if it wasn’t so predictable. We really do have a sizable number of people in this country who think we should operate more along the lines of Stalinist Russia or Franco Spain or Fascist Italy or the Mongol Hordes. I guess torture is OK as long as the government says it’s OK, because right-wingers know that the government will always use torture only for good. Trust me, I’m a government contractor torture specialist, and I’m here to help!
We were not “fighting a country”.
What does this matter? The nazis were prosecuted and executed for the war crimes for using the very same ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ - it is interesting that they invented the phrase for the gestapo, and it was later adopted by the kgb - against the ‘terrorists’ that were the anti-nazi resistance who were not the state actors but not-uniformed saboteurs and fighters. There is no difference at all.
the pretention of legalism fails before the actual history of application of these concepts.
We’ve had a long run of huge moral humiliations. Abu Ghraib, torture, hell, if you want to go back a way, My Lai… No shortage of them. As a patriotic Yank, I find these hugely harmful, as well as shameful. They are strategically damaging, and they have cost us the good-will of some of our best allies.
Even if torture were as effective as it is in spy movies, we shouldn’t be using it, as it costs us more in the cooperation of our friends than it gains us in raw intel.
I’m only grateful that you believe we can heal our reputation, as, sometimes, I wonder if that is even possible.
Loath as I am to agree with Terr, the truth is a bit more nuanced. The goal of a war is…the war’s goals. Replace the dictator, reclaim the land, seize the land, free the hostages, “teach those bastards a lesson,” prop up the domestic economy with war spending, whatever.
The strategic goal is usually to deprive the enemy of the ability to resist. Incapacitating the enemy is one way to do that. But simply knocking out their communications and supplies is another. Bypassing them entirely and cutting them off leaves them as fully-functional as before…and unable to operate effectively.
Norman Schwartzkopf won his war by launching the main thrust of the attack behind the Iraqi operational lines. The “Highway of Death” had no real operational value: the war had already been won. (The war was won the moment Schwartzkopf said, “Go!” but few knew it at that time.)
The US signed and ratified the UN Convention against torture. We, in theory if not practice, said we are against torture and that there are no exceptional circumstances which make it acceptable. Even the Jack Bauer-esque situations are a violation of the convention which the US accepted as a limit on it’s ability to make an independent decision with regards to torture.
That’s more legality than morality. The laws of land warfare are basically the body of all similar agreements. We enter those agreements to try and reduce the inhumanity when political disagreement enters the realm of resolution by the Clausewitzian “other means.” In some cases those agreements include limits on what might otherwise seem to be moral. That’s generally done to prevent escalation into grey areas that it’s believed will lead to undue risk of completely negating the purpose of the convention.
Attacking the basis of all those agreements by not being a trustworthy actor with respect to them tends to negate their effectiveness in reducing the inhumanity of war (note - reduction not complete elimination.) Being an untrustworthy actor within those systems, and risking escalation of inhuman/immoral methods those systems tried to constrain is a moral issue IMO.
Not exactly. You incapacitate (wound, capture, kill, turn into a fine red mist, etc) the enemy in order to meet the goals of the operation or inhibit the enemy from being able to meet their goals. Violence is the tool not the end in and of itself. It can be a fine line since there’s considerable overlap in meeting the goal and killing the enemy to reduce their capability or willingness to resist you achieving that goal.
It’s just another example of proof that democracy is a fallacy in the USA.
All this hand-wringing nonsense by the political class and national media; anyone that mattered knew what was going on and they accepted the CIA was above both national and international law.
The Bush Administration was fascist in inclination and practices.
And just to remind folks, torture is a crime in the US.