Torture doesn’t work. Haven’t you been reading along? Even if it did work, it’s evil. If you want America to be evil good for you. Just vote for Republicans. 
You must have missed thisthen.
It’s against the law for American soldiers to rape civilians and if they’re caught they’re court-martialed.
Probably the reason that there’s less talk about rape in the media is because everyone agrees that it’s a crime. There aren’t any pundits loudly proclaiming that it’s absolutely essential that we rape to keep us safe, or trying to mince words about exactly how far a soldier has to put his penis inside an Iraqi girl before it stops being a “sexual intimidation technique” and becomes “rape”.
I’m not convinced that turture is such bad PR from the perspective of societies that themselves engage in torture as people assume.
It’s a mistake to assume that people in very different cultures will react to things the same way you would. (This was, IMHO, the most fundamental mistake Bush & Co. made in invating Iraq.) While you might be horrified at the very notion of torture, people in many other cultures accept it, and these people might interpret your unwillingness to engage in it as wimpiness.
I once read that one or more of the big Bolsheviks (inc. Stalin, IIRC) interpreted the relatively easy conditions of Czarist prisons as a sign of weakness, not of humaneness, and this increased his contempt for the regime and motivation to overthrow it.
It’s definitely bad PR in Western Europe, no doubt about it.
Lemur, your surrender scenario is plausable, but it could also work in the opposite direction. An army facing torturers that thought it would lose might be quicker to desert and/or panic & crumble than an army that thought the worst that can happen is for them to lose freedom for a bit.
I agree that this is the biggest thing. Once you let the genie out of the bottle it’s very very hard to control.
I recently read a book about the Gulag, and prisoners there were technically protected by all sorts of legal protections, but it was impossible to enforce as a practical matter.
I imagine the first tentative steps under Bush were done with this or that safeguard, and on people that they at least had good reason to believe had significant information, but if you let that continue it’s almost inevitable that safeguards get loosened, and the practice expanded etc.
Say what?
Last I heard what we were going to do at most was slap the wrists of the prime instigators of our torture programs.
Condoleezza might even get off without an indictment.
See post #22.
The people who gave the green light to torture made us all less safe, including our military who is out there fighting for us, by doing so (probably in pursuit of false confessions to back up their bullshit excuses for a war…torture is good at getting false confessions).
They also did so in violation of our laws. Do you suppose the law is only applied when convenient? Yes rape occurs in war. No it generally is not made much of a fuss about because it is covered under the UCMJ and a soldier caught doing it stands a good chance of a court martial. This would be akin to our government telling its soldiers to go ahead an rape, never mind the law, never mind the UCMJ. BIG difference.
It is worth noting the Geneva Convention has the full force of law in the US (not to mention other statutes prohibiting torture).
Another reason is that it’s not like we had iron-clad convictions of the people we tortured, that proved they were actually materially involved with Al Qaeda (especially at Abu Ghraib). There were a LOT of innocent people in captivity at that and probably every prison we’re running, including Guantanamo. We were torturing people who had NO information about Al Qaeda, who had never even met an Al Qaeda member, who were basically sold to us by their personal enemies under the guise of being a terrorist.
If you’re comfortable torturing people who may or may not be completely innocent, well good for you. I’d personally feel safer if people who thought that way were somehow “detained”, though.
If we had ten divisions of such men, our problems in the Middle East would soon be over.
Absolutely. Instead, we’d have big problems in the Midwest.
Your methods are unsound.
You’ve a list of these “cultures”, do you? At your fingertips, then? These, then, are admirable people, you would have us emulate?
Only if you consider the death penalty to be not that big of a deal. Here’s something recent, here’s a nice breakdown on the 160 executions carried out by the US military from 1942-61, the last time the military carried out the death penalty. The breakdown is
What’s the UCMJ say about the penalty for rape today? hmm?
Sorry, but “I’m ignorant of it,” doesn’t mean the same thing as “we don’t make a big deal of it”.
Since when? Is this another “I’m ignorant of it, so what I say must be true” statement of yours? I also wouldn’t use the word native to mean civilian, I mean these combatants we’re talking about torturing are natives themselves.
What confirmed enemy combatants? Have you been paying attention to the number of people who have been released from Gitmo because they didn’t do anything? Again, you’re arguing from a position of ignorance and making absurd strokes with a broad brush. The people being tortured aren’t all confirmed enemy combatants, a larger deal isn’t made of torture than other mistreatment of civilians, and the entire US Government doesn’t move to condemn it. A rather substantial part moves to defend it or attempt to characterize our actions as not being torture.
Besides all the other reasons, I’ll point out that torturing people by itself is enough to make us the bad guys. It’s enough to make us the people who should lose.
They aren’t benefiting from the “information gained”. First, because torture is a rotten means of gaining information, second because torture dries up other sources of information ( people don’t willingly talk to torturers ), and third, because torture inundates the torturers with false information.
We’re embarrassed in admitting that WE are the bad guys, yes. We are embarrassed to admit that our enemies are right to call us evil, to admit that the people who kill our soldiers are defending themselves against murderous torturers.
And how many of them are “radicals” because of the way we have been acting ? I put “radical” in quotes because fighting to the death isn’t all that radical if you expect torture if you surrender.
We’ll torture them because we are barbaric, not because torture is effective. “Asking nicely” is much more effective than torture. Consider Hanns Scharff, also called “the Master Interrogator”, who extracted plenty of useful information from his prisoners without raising his voice, much less torturing them. Of course, that restraint was no doubt due to the well known liberal softness of his employers, the Nazis.
Oh, please. I doubt that there’s a culture on Earth where people won’t react badly to torture by their enemies, including those that openly practice it themselves. We torture; and would we react to someone torturing and killing American soldiers, and videotaping it ?
I sense your mockery of dear Leader. Desist, or we shall turn St. Paul into a sea of nuclear fire!
It would be an improvement.
drop, St Paul native
Actually, no, you don’t.
Well, you do if you want to develop that kind and compassionate attitude towards humanity that lets you shrug off torturing people, not just as a (believed-to-be) necessary evil, but in fact a perfectly acceptible activity to be reacted to with a shrug.
You’re going to have to be specific. I am a bit of a compulsive leader-mocker, so I’d need to know which alpha-lemming before I could even consider compliance.
Yes, among other things including waterboarding and knocking a few heads against padded walls. Oh, and the belly slap!
What exactly are you referring to? Does this have anything to do with the cases of “torture” since 9-11?
That’s the point of enhanced interrogation…pain or the expectation of pain. That doesn’t necessarily make it torture. Yes, if done long enough anything can be considered torture. There must be some bright line beyond which we call a certain activity torture. Did they go too far? Personally I don’t think so and neither did Nancy Pelosi.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/05/intelligence-re.html
He could be referring to reports such as this example:
http://armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Detainee%20Report%20Final_April%2022%202009.pdf
pp 151-152
I know what you mean! Abu Ghraib wasn’t any worse than some light-hearted frat house hazing, but without the beer. Those damn democrats dumbing down the definition of torture! I mean it’s not like we killed anyone.