No, it’s because you constistantly pretend that torture is far less awful than it is. As I said; if you were right about how horrible extreme poverty is, they would ALL be insane, dead, or in violent rebellion. It CANNOT be as bad as torture, or the extremely poor would be acting far differently than they do.
You most certainly do, with your constant claims that it’s no big deal, that people would line up to subject themselves to it.
Whether it is torture or not seems to depend on who is doing it and who is suffering it.
(numbering mine)
So, implying that anything might be comparable (even if not as bad) as torture means I think torture isn’t bad?
And you know this how? My first hand experience with the living hell that extreme poverty is tells me that it is very bad. I (and I presume you) don’t have first hand experince with torture and we rely on second-hand information. People in extreme poverty are not insane or dead, they take jobs in slave-like condtions that I think, at least, gives torture a run for its money, particularly considering that poverty tends to last for years and years witohut any possible end. Some (many, most) cases of torture are definitely worse than that
If your position is that nothing in the world can be compared - suffering-wise - to any form of torture, then we’re at an impasse based on your utter lack of information on the subject.
I challenge you to find one case where I said it wasn’t a big deal.
Yes and so was Mahr Arar up in Canada. Oh wait got him confused with a different Canadian. The person I was thinking of wasn’t kidnapped in a New York airport by Bush’s henchman on behalf of the tyrant and sent to Syria to be brutally beaten for year.
How many innocent people have a similar story?
The criminals responsable for his daily screams for mercy and agony are thanks to the sociopathic vile brutal morons who support continue to support Bush.
You people are the evil brutal people in the world; you’re just as bad as the terrorists.
Actually you’re more evil. Terrorists don’t have a 100 thousand plus body count like you fuckers.
If you try to defend the mass murders please bring cite that proves Iraq “was a clear and present danger”, as the lies that were used to sell the war said.
Other wise
Terrorist= not as bad you.
You are clearly saying that torture is*** trivial***, you literally say that people will line up for it.
Which makes it much better than torture. If it was as bad as torture, they’d be too busy writhing in agony to hold down a job. Or as I said, insane, or suicides.
No; the problem is that you are ignoring the fact that torture is by nature worse than anything. The whole POINT is that it’s supposed to be so bad that you’ll do anything, anything at all to make it stop.
You said people would line up to be tortured; that it was luxurious being tortured.
Which Canadian was I referring to?
Since you quoted me, who’s “you”? What 100,000 body count do Peruvian authorities (or citizens, like me) have regarding the US’s War on Terror?
Otherwise
Insects = way more intelligent than you
So we went from “You **said **it was no big deal” to “You **implied **it was trivial”.
Luxurious is your own word. Exchanging a limted (as per my example) ammount of torture for freedom is not a luxury.
I said something like “Some people’s lives are so full of unending pain and suffering that torture is not that far from their everyday experience”. If that sounds like “Torture, every day of the week and twice on Sunday” there’s a seriuos problem of communication.
Torture is supposed to be worse than most things, but, one life’s experiences may make the reality of how bad torture is different. The threat of something may have me singing in 5 languages about anything yo wanted. A battle-hardened navy SEAL may take the real thing and only feel discomfort. It is torture in both cases, but the results are different.
In an E.R., at least where I live, it’s interesting to see that an upper class guy will be wailing like a little girl for the same injury a poor guy is only wincing. Their lives are different, the same injury is absorbed in a different way.
A life can be torture without any one direct person doing the torturing, you’re the one cheapening suffering by saying directly and intentionally applied suffering is always worse than “intrinsic” suffering.
No; what’s happening is that you keep pretending that torture is far less serious than it is, but don’t want to admit it.
Garbage again. NO ONE can resist torture. Waterboarding will make anyone talk.
No, I’m saying that the poor are clearly not suffering as badly as torture victims, because they don’t act like they are suffering anywhere near that bad.
You don’t want to admit I’m beating you, but whatever gets you through the night. You might want to take your Palantír for servicing, vis à vis you mind-reading, you’re waaaay off.
It took 183 waterboardings to make one guy talk, several days. Tough, hardened guy clamping up for weeks against the, according to you, silver bullet of torture
Show me the towel and I’m reciting Shakespeare in Polish.
Your “all torture is exactly the same and nothing, absolutely nothing in the whole of human experience, can even come close to it” thing is getting so old, might as well try to get a new, and maybe this time correct, idea.
This guy’s is clearly not sufferingat a level that any normal human could have the audacity to compare to torture. He’s isn’t acting like he’s suffering, so he possibly isn’t. He’s just seating in the shade. You’re right, how could I even have dared compare them.
“beating me” ? Hardly. you are just spouting obvious nonsense in an attempt to justify torture.
He wasn’t a “tough hardened guy”; he was a mentally ill man we were repeatedly torturing to get the various false confessions and leads we wanted.
I don’t need any; I’m simply observing that they don’t act at all like torture victims.
You don’t need any experience to voice an opinion on a subject? Great! That’s the spirit! We’re #1!!! Ipse dixit all the way!!!
Which extremly poor people have you been observing? or are you going to duck the question again? Which? where do they live? How do you know so much about poor people?
Wiki? Your college teacher?
Your logIQ< 1.5?
When basic human nature is involved, no you don’t - you just need to know what humans are like. I don’t need to know a thing about New Guinea tribesmen besides the fact that they are human to know that they’ll be unhappy if someone lights them on fire, for example.
The ones on the news, who AREN’T writhing in agony.
So you know what foods or words or colors or days are taboo for them? You know everyting that makes them tick? Of course setting them on fire is (universally) bad, but maybe eating chicken on a Monday sends them to hell (in their beliefs) and if you see someone giving them chicken you’d think “no torture”.
So the answer is none that is really relevant to specific discussions.
Ahhhhh, the news. The new standard of proof is “If I didn’t see it on the news, it doesnt exist”. you know, I havent seen anything on Darfur on the last two weeks, it must be lovely to go there, no news of people suffering or anything.
Should I post links to news items of people writhing in agony? Would that make reconsider your position?
You’re giving a nice example of Monday-armchair quaterbacking.
Ají de Gallina and Der Trihs, this hijack is not moving tis discussion forward–and Ají, you’re making this way too personal.
Start a new thread, (preferably in the BBQ Pit), or drop it.
[ /Modding ]
America is not ready to prosecute the criminals. It is not even ready to investigate what happened. It is only ready for coverup. Which is why international tribunals exist, because they are better positioned to do justice in the cases. But America considers itself to be above the law.
Quite right. Where would we be if we starting prosecuting people for things they did in the past?
Oh hold on, aren’t all crimes that are prosecuted things that happened in the past 
It seems that if any justice is ever done it will be in spite of the Obama executive and not because of it.
an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo
Long article well wroth reading
The Obama administration is dragging its feet as much as it can and it is up to others to try to bring light to what happened and is happening in the hopes that justice might be done someday.
We also know now that Cheney ordered the use of torture not for preventing any attacks, as he claims, but to try to obtain a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda which would justify the invasion of Iraq. That is what torture was used for: to try to save Cheney’s ass.
I thought of this thread recently when the story came out about the EU fining Intel $1.45B.
If Intel simply refuses to pay the fine? I would imagine the EU will not allow Intel to do business there any more. Wikipedia says they’re just under 500M people, bigger than we are…that would be a huge market to lose.
While they may not be able to drag Cheney et al off to prison, they can make life difficult for us. They can refuse to support future political agendas of ours—politically, economically, whatever.
I say release the memos and other proof, serve up the rat bastards. We’re aiding and abetting if we don’t. They used the age-old “better to beg forgiveness than ask permission” and the POTUS is supposed to adhere to a higher standard than that. Send a message to future officials that we’ll give them some latitude, but not this level of abuse of power.
This. It is no longer (and never was) just a few “bad apples”. It is one government at odds with another. Personally, I wouldn’t be upset if some people did go to jail over all this. A US trial, a US jail, for breaking US laws. If they are convicted by a Spanish court, I guess they’d better not go to Spain. The arrest warrants will be waiting.
But consider: The people who “engineered” Gitmo, and “enhanced interrogation” or whatever euphemsim you want, could not have done it unless many many other people supported them or looked the other way. So, to say “it’s not us, it’s them” is not true. Congress could have said no. The courts could have said no (some judges did). But it was not said often enough or strongly enough. Hell, “we the people” could have simply voted them out. It would have at least been something.
As far as coming here and dragging people away, I say no. If Spain were to do that, they are no better than we are (we’ve already done it).
I don’t think that’s a realistic scenario nor one being contemplated by Spanish authorities in the least. Remember that this is an independent investigation, not one ordered by the Government. What is happening is rather pragmatic despite its inherent idealism and that is simply Garzon and a couple of other judges, using the legal system in as much as they can to keep the issue on the front burner. Note that they are also being helped by a growing number of American legal experts (ACLU & others) who are also using said system. In that sense I think Spain is, for the time being, more of a staging ground for what many hope will ultimately be resolved by the rules of law in the US – as you point out yourself.
I’d also add, that despite my strong support for Obama, I am at a loss to explain his recent behavior. After all, he was the one who (rightly IMHO) set the gears in motion by releasing the original documents. That’s one Genie that’s not going back in the bottle no matter how hard he tries to hide it, which, incidentally, is grotesquely reminiscent of the actions of the prior Administration. I think that’s obvious, why doesn’t he?
