Why the big deal over torture?

Great Debates
281

No.

A “reasonable person” would be unable to avoid the knowledge that his/her actions waterboarding someone was, in fact, severe to meet the definition of the law.

As mentioned maybe the first time you do it you could make that claim as a defense citing you simply did not know or have any reasonable way to know what you were doing caused severe anguish. Indeed others told you it was ok so you did it.

Fine. You do it. NOW you are faced with the inescapable conclusion that you are, in fact, causing severe mental anguish. Any “reasonable person” would HAVE to come to that conclusion. It is unavoidable unless you are mentally deficient. At this point, if you continue, you are now in violation of the law. No appealing to some attorney telling you it was ok should save you.

You have no basis for this assertion. Again you display your notion that a more overtly violent torture such as clubbing is “worse” despite being shown people who are waterboarded have been known to struggle so hard they break their own bones fighting against the restraints. That is the very definition of agony to me.

Maybe clubbing is worse, maybe not. Without testimony from a few people who had both done we cannot say. We can say however that waterboarding is severe and in the same ballpark at the least.

282

So is specific intent!

283

So it’s not severe physical, but mental (not having the ability to stop); you’re getting burned regardless (assuming you don’t pull away).

So by your definition it’s not torture to specifically intend to inflict severe mental pain on someone because they have the ability to stop, regardless of whether they actually endure the procedure or not.

That’s fine. I agree with that. I just think it’s a closer call whereas you do not. (I’m thinking of trainee pressure not to “puss out” thus lessening the likelihood you have the “ability to stop” at anytime).
whack-a-mole…
we’ve beat it to death. Agree to disagree. Although I still think you’re not reading the law correctly because reasonable person (objective) is the opposite of subjective (ask in the GQ thread).
Further, using multiple waterboardings to determine if it was severe would really depend on the person’s reaction to it. I’ve seen a doper describe it in excruciating detail that made me a believer, I’ve seen kids on youtube do it and laugh afterwards. I know thousands have endured it in SERE’s training w/o complaint.

Really Not All That Bright…I don’t know what you’re getting at.

284

So you keep saying.

Apparently though the reality is, in fact, different.

285

and you keep saying waterboarding is not torture in some circumstances, and torture in others.

286

Bwahaha…Archive Guy posted this in the thread on the Ticking Time Bomb scenario. Thought it was a legitimate data point for here not to mention funny.

287

I did?

I think what I just cited from the Inspector General report puts to rest your notion that it can’t be torture because we do it to SERE people. The IG noted what they are doing to detainees bears so little relation to SERE waterboarding as to be “irrelevant” as a comparison.

Also note they quoted a CIA interrogator noting it is “‘for real’ and is ‘more poignant and convincing’”.

So that point is pretty much lost to you in my view. It is different no matter how much you wish it were otherwise.

288

All I’m saying is it’s not categorically different. Whether it’s done on terrorist or on SERE’s it’s done to invoke the drowning reflex. That’s waterboarding. The degree to which it is done in one instance is not torture, and in another is torture. (Waterboarding Lite vs. MF’n Waterboarding) I totally agree with that.

This has all moved away from my point that the waterboarders likely did not violate the CAT based on SERE’s advice and lawyer memo’s that what they were going to do would not inflict severe mental/physical pain. Ugh.

I gotta go, this thread itself is becoming torture.

289

Can it legally be torture when done to a willing person? A person who is not in your custody? SERE trainees are not prisoners. At any time they can stand up and walk out. There may be peer pressure and the pressure to succeed and so on causing them to stay but that is not the same thing as being an actual prisoner who contemplates no end to it all (SERE people know they will be done in a week).

As noted before is someone who is into BDSM being tortured when they willingly accede to it? I would think it was torture of you captured me, tied me up and forced that on me. If I wanted to do it though I would not view it as torture.

I think it is important to note that SERE training is “tortuous”. That is the whole point. It is not torture for the reasons described above.

290

1.) Ability to stop *plus *initial consent.
2.) It’s not a definition of torture, it’s a distinguishing factor between two otherwise identical scenarios, one of which is torture while the other isn’t. Waterboarding someone who can stop it at any time who has agreed to undergo it as part of their training? Not torture. Waterboarding someone because we think they have information and/or we just don’t like them? Torture.

291

So the lawyers were going for “torture lite”?

C’mon…

You are having a hard time here trying to make a distinction that is not supported by anyone except the lawyers who wanted to torture people. Prior to their redefinition do you think it was torture? If it wasn’t, and was legal in their “not quite torture” guise then why redefine the law? For that matter why hasn’t the CIA not been using it all along? If it was useful and not torture what stopped them?

The lawyers redefined what constituted “torture” to get waterboarding just this side of legal. Which means it was torture and is torture unless you take the horrendously narrow (and now discredited) definition of what constitutes torture as gospel.

So some people went ahead and did it since the lawyers said “not torture”. They may have a defense there as a result of that. I say let a court figure it out.

What they did was torture. Period. You have a veritable mountain of evidence in this thread (not to mention others around here) attesting to that. They are not even a little bit in disagreement. Even Jesse Ventura (in his guise as a former Navy Seal) says that unequivocally. Yet perplexingly you continue to try to find the most slender of ledges to hang your argument on. That if we do it to SERE then it presumably is not torture. That dog won’t hunt I’m afraid.

If lawyers giving bad advice will save them fine (if that is how the law goes). I’d like to see it argued in court.

292

Here’s a big reason: We have laws against it.

Now, if the Congress want to repeal those laws & step out of the treaties mandating that we not torture, they need to do so explicitly. Let the world know that we think torture is A-OK.

What we’ve been doing instead is an idiot’s idea of Machiavellianism: We sign the treaties, pass the laws, & then say, “Oh, we don’t believe we have to follow our own word.” But that means no law we pass is trustworthy, & every single law can be flouted; because the legal principle we’re using is not, “torture is legal,” but, “we don’t keep our promises.”

293

Yes.

Now I’m just being mercury, so just because I’m passing on what I think the lawyers were trying to do, don’t take that as me advocating what they did. I can see me explaining the law/what it takes to violate the law/ect as me advocating I’m for waterboarding. I keep saying over and over I’m totally against it.

Anyways, The lawyers thought they were heroes. Honest. They thought they figured out a legal way to abstract information from high value terrorists. This information could be used to save American lives.

They defined “severe” according to how that word is defined by Supreme Court precedent and other interpretations of that word applied to pain in criminal law and other torture statutes/treaties. They concluded it did not quite rise to severe based on SERE advice. For “severe”, the pain must be extreme, they concluded waterboarding, although painful, did not rise to an extreme/severe level of pain.

They said it should only be used as a last resort. Waterboarding was used on 3 terrorists. One was KSM. KSM planned 9/11. He allegedly was planning other terrorist activity on US soil. The other two, who I can’t remember, were also “high value” terrorist’s.

The waterboarding occurred in 2002, 2003. Months after 9/11.

That was them…

For me personally, I think the CAT/2340 as written, can allow for torture lite. I have previously said it needs to be amended to not allow for this. Why does pain even need to be “severe”; why not just “inflicting mental pain and suffering” and put it to an objective standard. If you don’t understand the difference between the way it is written and the proposed way I just described, then I haven’t made my point clear in my previous posts.

294

You do realize your site is an ANTI-TORTURE article, right? :rolleyes:

295

Perhaps, as you suggest, these fellows were simply brimming over with noble motives, but permit us to be skeptical. Just as you say, they “figured out” a way to regard these actions as legal, therefore we are safe to assume that such legality was not apparent, but took some “figuring”.

Its true enough and fair that a lawyer in an advocacy role may twist the facts any way he wishes within the confines of actual perjury, but these were not supposed to be “advocacy”, they were to maintain at least the pretense of impartial and unbiased examination of the relevent law.

There is much I am willing to believe in this life, or even entertain a notion, but that John Yoo was selected on the basis of his non-partisan and unbiased political views? There are leaps of faith, and then there are pole-vaults.

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And I’m sure quite a few of the torturers of the Inquisition thought that they were heroically saving souls from damnation. They were still monsters.

297

This is directed at the lawyers and not you (lawyers as you describe them here).

Why do the lawyers think they know the first thing about interrogations?

In other threads around here (I will find them if you need) we have shown, without any doubt, that torture is a terrible means of information gathering. The body of evidence for this is extensive. Trained interrogators recognize it as an awful means of finding useful information.

So why would they think they were heroes? If a plane crashed would anyone be comfortable with lawyers re-writing laws/regulations regarding airplane maintenance procedures? Re-writing them with no useful input from the people who know about maintaining airplanes?

It is absurd. As I noted before the psychologists primarily responsible for reverse engineering SERE techniques had zero interrogation experience. More, these guys were told to do what they did by the Administration…not trained interrogators who know the business.

I am curious (and this is pointed at you) where “severe” was defined by the Supreme Court such that the lawyers re-defining the law were following their guidelines.

Also, why is only three people relevant? Further, remember that while we are on about waterboarding there was plenty of other stuff that could arguably rise to the level of torture that was inflicted on many more prisoners.

As I noted previously why wasn’t waterboarding done prior to the DoJ (or whatever administrative arm it was) re-defining torture?

If it was not torture because SERE did it, and it was useful, they should have been doing it all the time. Yet they didn’t. It took an incredibly narrow re-interpretation of what torture is for them to start.

CAT/2340 did NOT allow for “torture lite”. Clearly it didn’t. It took someone redefining the law as written. Otherwise why bother with the re-definition? They did not change the law via the legislative process. They just decided it meant something different which till that point no one agreed with.

That should bother you…deeply. We are supposedly a nation of laws. Are those laws so ephemeral that they mean whatever a lawyer decides to make them mean?

298

The Rockets are getting killed, so I’m back for a lil while tonight.

I appreciate that. I appreciate the civil debate.

I don’t think they do. I’m not sure if they thought they did or not. Their job was to define what “severe” was. They used SERE advice to determine what level of pain waterboarding rose too. They concluded that it did not rise to previous interpretations of severe.

They were not re-defining anything. They were “defining” it. No one has ever been prosecuted under the CAT (the link to that article you provided confirms this.) Hence the need to apply outside interpretations of how severe was applied in other criminal cases regarding the level of pain that must be inflicted.

I will happily supply definitions of severe. I’ll be back with quotes and cites. Again, minor quibble with the word re-define regarding the CAT.

Not only three, but more importantly, high value. Focus on high value. This gets to something I have not yet talked about here because it may not be relevant under this topic (and I’m just one man!). But to answer, the President has been given inherent constitutional powers to act in a “necessity” or “emergency.” How far this can extend, and whether 9/11 rose to that level, is extremely debatable.

I agree, but I think waterboarding is the worst. The lawyers did for sure. We have enough to focus on with just waterboarding.

Because planes only attacked NY, Washington, and the one we overtook on 9/11/01. These methods were derived in a direct response to those attacks, having captured high value targets, and having those targets not giving up information. The DOJ was then asked what would be legal to get them to talk.

Yes. Lawyer’s interpret the law the legislature has written. I think the law is poorly written (it’s too tough to prosecute what a normal person would consider torture).

Unfortunately, I don’t think the lawyer’s interpretation of the CAT/2340 was extremely off base. As I said earlier, legal and immoral do not mean the same thing. It’s a policy decision to decide to do something that is immoral, but still legal.

299

The link is to provide evidence for the differences between Japanese waterboarding and The US technique…which you requested. It was not intended as evidence for or against the use of waterboarding as torture. You DO realize that, right?

300

I realize that. But at the same time, it pretty much destroyed your argument.