I don’t know if it’s old news to Scylla, but this story and the argument flowing from it were first introduced on this board within a few days of the article’s publication back in May 2003, and have been brought up quite a number of times since. To the best of my knowledge, nobody’s successfully rebutted it.
I should’ve added: start on post 127 on that page.
No, it’s not impossible to get actual information from torture, nor is it by any means impossible to get bad info from other techniques. I simply don’t believe that torture buys us anything that comes remotely close to its cost.
The fact is, I don’t get the impression that we pick up a lot of people who have any real information to give us. Certainly no one in Gitmo is in possession of such urgent information as to justify the use of torture to get it. It is remotely possible that at one time someone there did have urgent info. (Unlikely given that these people were, as far as I can tell, picked up by bounty hunters and delivered to us with virtually no questions asked as to the legitimacy of them as an actual person with valuable information) But the last person to be brought there was what, three years ago? There’s certainly nothing current these people know that is going to save lives in any real sense. Assuming there is an important person there, do you honestly believe that Al Qaeda doesn’t know we have him, and made sure that nothing he knew is still of any value to us? These people may be evil by our standards, but there’s nothing to suggest that they’re stupid.
I think we as ordinary citizens over-estimate the danger of ‘getting a nuke.’ Having the ability to make one doesn’t mean you can make any, or many, or that you have any ability to deliver them assuming you have them. Does this mean I’m delighted about the idea of Iran having nukes? Hell, no! There are a lot of people in the world who have them that I’m not thrilled about, including our current administration! But I suspect that ‘getting the nuke’ these days has a lot more PR value than military value. It gets you an entree to the Big Boys club.
I guess I’ve felt for a long time that terrorists of any stripe should be treated as ordinary criminals (which as far as I’m concerned, they are), and that their religion is irrelevant. Identifying an enemy as Islamic buys us absolutely nothing unless you’re willing to eliminate all Muslims and anyone who might be Muslim. That pretty much covers everyone on the planet, don’t you think?
That’s the biggest problem we have right now - we have the biggest, most powerful military in the world, and it’s absolutely useless to us, because we have no way of knowing our enemy until he actually attacks us. This causes us to go blundering in (because some of us are too stupid to realize that it’s not everyone or that it’s impossible to tell who the hell it is, and some of those are in charge), and creating more enemies because we end up doing a lot of nasty things to innocent people. But then, hell, we’ve been doing nasty things to innocent people perfectly unintentionally for decades, maybe centuries. Take the Shah, for example. Now granted, we wanted him in power because of the Cold War, but the fact is, if you present what the Shah did during his reign, and compare it to the subsequent regimes, there are precious few westerners alive who wouldn’t say, well, of course they were better off under the Shah! Because by our standards, they were.
It doesn’t matter one damn bit. It doesn’t matter if the Iraqis had two sets of memories they could look back on, one with the Shah installed and propped up by the west, one with whatever they would have done on their own, and they themselves thought they were better off under the Shah. It might matter in two hundered years, but not right now. Because right now, the resentment is that we interfered.
I don’t know if the Middle East is the final part of the cost of the Cold War we’ll pay, or if we still have South America and/or Africa to go. But the Cold War created a LOT of the problems that we’re seeing and paying for today.
So my feeling is that, no matter how much they try to bring religion into it, what we have to do is to do our damnedest to keep religion out of it. Because religion isn’t the issue here, and it never has been, not even during the Crusades. Window-dressing, that’s what religion was then for the Europeans (which is not to say that there weren’t true believers; there were!), and that’s what religion is now for them. It’s a justification, and a way of recruiting cannon fodder. If you think the Mullahs ruling Iraq are primarily guided by true belief (no matter what they tell themselves to sleep at night), I think you’re wrong. They’re guided by a lust for power, and they use Islam to get it and to justify it, just as some of our leaders (not to name names) use Christianity to justify many of their positions (cough-TerrySchaivo-cough).
We’re in a really bad situation, and there’s one thing Scylla has dead to rights: vigilance alone can not protect us. In fact, there’s pretty much nothing you can do to protect against a determined person who isn’t afraid to die in order to kill you, except to hope and pray that you manage to hit him with the fustest and the mostest when you finally figure out who he is. Since there’s no way to know, what you want to do above all is to make sure you’re not doing anything that would justify being a part of that enemy in a normal mind, and that if you’ve done anything that would in the fairly recent past, you should admit it and try to make it right somehow. Again, I’m not talking placation here. I’m talking doing the Right Thing and figuring out what that is by considering it from the other guy’s standpoint, not just your own. In short, try not to create a bunch of new enemies, and in fact, try to un-create some that may not be as far gone as others.
So, I don’t think we should be using Islamo-anything to be identifying an enemy. I think we need to do everything we can to redress political and economic injustices for which we have been responsible, and I think we need to be doing everything in our power to avoid creating new enemies unnecessarily. Unfortunately, we’re already locked up in Iraq, and to a great extent, that’s a no-win situation, because whether we stay or whether we leave, unless Evil Captor and some others are right and I’m totally wrong, and the situation in Iraq really calms down after we leave (and this is totally possible, it’s not like I’m infallible here!), we’re going to be blamed for a lot of violence. It won’t be until, if ever, a stable democracy and a reasonable life exists in Iraq - in short, until things are significantly better than they were under Hussein - that we will not be continually blamed for new things regardless of what we do at this point, whether it’s the ongoing episodic violence we’re seeing now, or the full-blown civil war I fear if we pull out. We’ve probably set back any hope of settling the Middle East peacably by fifty years or better, because at best, we’re going to break even. Best case, we’ll be simultaneously thanked and hated for “liberating” Iraq when most Iraqis didn’t ask to be liberated. But all of that is political, not religious. When we let them define it as religious, or let them provoke us into defining it as religious, we make it a thousand times worse, because now we haven’t just alienated the people who are suffering politically and/or econcomically, we’ve alienated the majority of people who share that religion.
Er, that would be the mullahs ruling Iran!
That sounds like a cost benefit analysis to me and I often hear the “torture doesn’t work” (or something like it) stated as a fact. Does this link, which indicates that the London hijackings were foiled as a result of information extracted from a captive by torture? Liberal agonies | Leader | The Guardian (I have no idea how reliable this publication is).
[QUOTE=Oy!]
Certainly no one in Gitmo is in possession of such urgent information as to justify the use of torture to get it. It is remotely possible that at one time someone there did have urgent info. (Unlikely given that these people were, as far as I can tell, picked up by bounty hunters and delivered to us with virtually no questions asked as to the legitimacy of them as an actual person with valuable information) But the last person to be brought there was what, three years ago? There’s certainly nothing current these people know that is going to save lives in any real sense. Assuming there is an important person there, do you honestly believe that Al Qaeda doesn’t know we have him, and made sure that nothing he knew is still of any value to us? These people may be evil by our standards, but there’s nothing to suggest that they’re stupid.
[/quote
Good point. What about our right to detain enemy combatants during armed comflict?
I spent my entire childhood and most of my yougng adult life living in fear of nuclear holocaust. I guess its been bred into me.
Hey! don´t go out giving ideas like that.
[QUOTE=col_10022]
That sounds like a cost benefit analysis to me and I often hear the “torture doesn’t work” (or something like it) stated as a fact. Does this link, which indicates that the London hijackings were foiled as a result of information extracted from a captive by torture? Liberal agonies | Leader | The Guardian (I have no idea how reliable this publication is).
col, the only answer I can give you is that I don’t claim to have all the answers. It’s hard to argue when the torture of one might save the lives of hundreds. But I can say that if we become the enemy in order to fight him, we lose the war if not the battle.
That being said, I think there are things that the more radical left view as torture that I do not. Even the business with Abu-Graib, tacky and shameful as it was, doesn’t quite qualify in my mind as torture. (I’m thinking here of the debasement and the controlled dog threatening; there may be things I’m forgetting that truly do qualify in my mind, so please don’t hold me to this 100%). I think what our people did there was wrong, but not because it was torture per se. It was wrong because it was degrading and cruel, and because it seemed to serve no useful purpose beyond the rather sickening amusement of the American participants; I do not believe in recreational torment (torment being a different thing from torture in this context; you may have been tormented by your classmates in junior high <I was>, but I doubt you were tortured), and it sickens me that there are people who find this entertaining. Similarly, I don’t believe that the blindfolding and shackling of prisoners who have shown themselves to be dangerous in order to transport them safely is torture. It’s less than ideal, but it strikes me as a necessary thing, and pretty much the least that could be done to ensure safety.
To me, torture has a pretty specific definition: the infliction of the maximum (or generally increasing with that as the upper limit) of physical pain possible without causing the expiration or incapacitation of the subject. There are other types of interrogation techniques and/or prisoner treatment that I find pretty damned reprehensible (such as serious humiliation or the terrorizing of a prisoner without actual intent to carry out the threatened action or the debasement of significant religious items), and certainly likelier to result in a PR liability than in useful information, but they are not torture. That doesn’t mean I approve of them, but they’re not torture.
What’s acceptable to use? I don’t know. None of them is a very reliable method of interrogation, but you’re right; it’s not impossible to get valid information from them, and there is no fully reliable method of interrogation. So I guess you’re right; it comes down to a cost/benefit analysis. I don’t see that torture or some of the other methods I find marginally less reprehensible buy us much, and they cost us hugely, IMO, and in multiple ways. When we torture or humiliate or debase, we lose any chance of turning the object of that treatment into a good and consistent source of information. We degrade ourselves in every sense in doing it, and we lose what has become far and away the most important aspect of this kind of “war,” the fight for the hearts and minds of the people. As long as we alienate the source population, we merely serve to create many more enemies. Since, as I discussed above, there is no way to truly protect ourselves against this kind of enemy, our only option is to try to make fewer of them. We can do that by killing them all off (and where do we stop?), or by working to avoid creating more and try to win back those we already have as enemies. Basic morality is similar the world around, regardless of the religion or philosophy backing it, because basic morality comes down to the things you need to do to live in a group - you don’t kill, you don’t steal, you don’t lie, and you treat the other person as you want to be treated yourself.
I guess my best ruler for defining interrogation rules would be to look at what we would consider acceptable for the interrogation of Americans. Let’s face it; there is no method of interrogation that anyone is going to welcome being the recipient of. But we can look at what we would consider acceptable, and what would cause us true, justified outrage. And those should be the standards we apply to the prisoners we capture whom we believe to possess information we need.
In our particular situation, we have an added quirk, which is that in neither Gitmo nor the Iraqi prisons is there much reason to believe that the majority of prisoners know a damn thing we actually need. So what I would add would be that we need to know just who it is we’re interrogating and why. Were they swept up because they happened to be walking on the street after curfew? The chances are good they don’t know a damned thing of any interest, and they were returning from visiting a friend or family member. I don’t think that questionable interrogation methods are appropriate to use in such situations. And yet, I don’t get any sense that there has been any serious effort to differentiate the people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time from those who we have a very good reason to believe are (or were) knowledgeable about any real threat. I hope I’m wrong, and we’re just not getting any details. But we’ve heard a lot about interrogations, and nothing whatsoever about how they decide who to interrogate. Maybe I’m missing it, or they just haven’t considered that part interesting enough to report. I hope that’s the case.
I don’t approve of the idea that one person gets to decide that someone is an enemy combatant, and that’s that. I don’t approve of the fact that the concept of “enemy combatant” seems to have been invented by the Bush administration to create a group of people who for no reason or any reason, can be held indefinitely, with no charges, no trial, no help, no recourse, and no hope. It’s a terrible precedent. People should be treated as either criminals, or prisoners of war, and there should be no circumstance in which the president or anyone else has the right to simply decide that someone will be imprisoned indefinitely and treated in any way he decides is proper, without anyone being able to even so much as object. It puts the president above the law, which is apparently where he has viewed himself from the start. But it’s wrong.
If we need a new category of prisoner, I don’t have a problem with a new set of rules being established. But they must have checks and balances; the decisions can not be solely in the hands of a single individual, with no recourse or way to question that decision. Otherwise, how do we differ from a dictatorship? This new category is not something that should be thought up on the fly by a single person and declared to be so. That’s not the way America is supposed to work. We’re all subject to the rule of law, or at least we used to be. The fact that no individual is above the law is the defining characteristic of America as it is supposed to be. And this president, who preens about his patriotism and claimed in 2004 to be able to remember having made any mistakes, tossed it away like a used tissue, not only in the matter of “enemy combatants,” but in the matter of bypassing FISA and several other things as well, I believe. And we, the American people, re-elected him and have said “yes sir, no problem sir” at every turn. I’m so proud of my people.
So enemy combatants? Maybe. Let’s get a definition down on paper that’s a little more definitive than “The president says so.” and a set of rules for treating such people, and we’ll talk.
Hey, I was born in 1956; I grew up in the same situation. But I’ve tried to learn to not allow myself to be stampeded into terror. I’m not dismissing the risk. I’m just saying, there are already plenty of ways to kill plenty of people, and Iran already had most, if not all of them. This doesn’t make that great a difference.
Yeah, Uruguay’s been pissing me off lately too. You go to the U’s and they have the nerve to come before USA (although after United States, so maybe I’ll let 'em live a while longer)!
That would be “unable to remember having made any mistakes.”
I’d wager it’s because it is not as if it’s Scylla – or his loved ones – making any sort of sacrifice, so he doesn’t think of it as “a big deal.”
I say don’t even torture then, and I still think it’s an ineffective tool, but I’m fully aware that this one is still up in the air.
I don’t think we should get oil after this is done, other than through normal channels and at normal prices. If that’s what you meant, then we agree here.
No problem here. I was an open proponent of going after the Taliban, unlike my stance with regards to Iraq. I still don’t hold the people responsible, and we basically left them with a Mayor of Kabul (not that I have a problem with him, just that he’s got little power outside of the city), not a leader of their country. I think we should help fix that, and also help rebuild.
Actually, I think Condi was likely more involved in this than you think. While it’s a turnaround from the administration’s stance of a week ago, I think they realized that more innocent bloodshed was going to turn this against them fast.
I never said Bush wasn’t responsible, but I’m also realistic. Bush isn’t going to step down even if it would help the Iraq situation. I do think he might be willing to let someone go as a nod to appeasement, and I figured Rumsfeld is probably the least liked of his cabinet members in the Middle East.
Sure there is, but it’s not the Iranian administration behind this (unless you have proof otherwise, of course). The head of Iran is just waving his penis around with some of his rhetoric, which is the same kind of crap we do ourselves. I fully believe that there is plenty of room to meet in the middle.
You know, rjung, I’m tempted to just say you’re out of line with this, and leave it at that, but I’m going to present you with an opportunity to claim the moral high ground with something substantive.
Would you be good enough to share with us some details as to which of your loved ones are making any sacrifice due to this misbegotten adventure, and in what way? If it’s you making the sacrifice[s], please provide some information as to the nature of it [them].
For extra elevation, please see if you can provide evidence of how you know Scylla to be remaining unaffected, either directly, or indirectly, through his loved ones.
That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to avoid. I don’t think Scylla is like that; I think that there are many conservatives who are not like that.
Yes, there are certainly some who are like that, and it looks as if we hit the jackpot when it comes to the top brass in the current administration. But can we stop assuming that every person who vehemently defends conservative policy is at best a selfish bastard and at worst someone who recreationally clubs baby seals? Then maybe they can stop assuming that we’re some kind of touchy-feely idiots who think that all the world’s problems can be solved if we just kick off our shoes, join hands and sing, or that we’re automatically going to value the preservation of a single insect over the preservation of a thousand human lives. We might even be able to communicate ideas to one another. There’s a revolutionary thought.
Scylla and I became involved in a long thread dealing with school vouchers a few weeks ago. We started out practically at each other’s throats, convinced that the other was an idiot at best and a villain at worst. That’s not where we ended up. We ended up realizing that we had more in common in what we were trying to achieve than we had differences. Our differences came from our individual honest, thought-out assessments of what the best thing to do was. And you know what? I’m by no means sure he’s wrong. And I’m willing to bet you that he’s by no means sure I am.
This wasn’t an enormous epiphany. I’ve had that experience before. I’m not a centrist for the most part; I’m hard core left wing. But that doesn’t mean that I have to assume that everyone who disagrees with me is either stupid or evil or (as in this case) utterly callous.
Yes, Scylla is going to care for the well-being of his family before anything else. That’s his job as husband and father, just as it’s his wife’s job as wife and mother. That doesn’t mean he’s indifferent to anything else.
So can we leave off the assumptions? Maybe we might actually reach some kind of agreement at some point. Maybe (and here’s another revolutionary thought) we might be able to get something done.
Considering I’ve been staunchly opposed to thise whole fiasco from the get-go, I’m not sure what would be the point.
If anything, the fact that I don’t have a direct stake in the issue and still want to put a stop to it ASAP (if not sooner) seems to indicate that my motivations are driven by something higher than personal self-interest.
Well, here’s a newsflash. You, and for that matter we (the entire left wing), don’t have a lock on good motivations or altruism. Or intelligence, for that matter. So why don’t you give the villification a rest for a while?
I find myself in pretty much the same position. Being right is one thing. I don’t see any need to be a dick about it. It taints us with a stink of mean-spiritedness, and undercuts our position by opening us to ad hominem attacks. And remember, the true test of an ad hominem isn’t its objective validity (or lack thereof); it’s the degree to which it is effective, either in making us look bad to lurkers and observers, or in wasting our energy while we denounce it.
Also, what Oy! said.
I’ve been called out of town for the next several days. Real life and all. Oy you’re very very nice. Nicer than I deserve.
RTF and I debated the cite he brought up back in '03. Basically, I think I talked about Plan of Attack again and the logistics of a rolling deployment combined with a lightning together.
It worked.
It has it’s drawbacks, too. That is legitimately one of them. Backseat driving is easy and I’m not convinced that the way we went wasn’t damn effective. Had we gone in slower, consolidating along the way, we may have allowed the time for greater resistance. From my very limited understanding of tactics, beating the other guy as quickly as possible to minimize damage to all involved is usually worth significant sacrifice to achieve.
But anyway, we had that discussion a couple of years ago.
I have to do some stuff. It’s possible I might be back to offer some more substantive replies later tonight, or early tomorrow before I head off to the airport.
Let’s see: gotta pack my sports drinks, hair gel, cell phone, ipod, toothpaste, mouthwash and laptop all in my carry-on luggage…
Swiss army knife…
electronic key fob…
Scissors…
Yeah that’s the part I have trouble with.
I think you have a somewhat limited definition of torture. Torture does not require the infliction of physical pain, but it does require the credibe threat of such pain. If tied you down and I covered your balls in gravy and I brought a hungry Doberman into the room, you might be scared enough to tell me you killed Jimmy Hoffa, give me your social security number and your atm pin.
My friend was a solicitor at the Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal and she was telling me about genicide rape camps (they were literally going to breed another tribe out of existence by raping and keeping all of the women of the tribe impregnated). The treatment of the men was not much better, there were put through castration daisy chains (they line everyone up and they tie down the first guy in line and tell the second guy in line to bite off the first guy’s testicles, if he refuces, they shoot him in the head, if he complies, then he is the next one to get tied down and they ask the third guy in line to bite off the second guy’s testicles). I don’t know what that has to do with anything you said but something you said made me thnk of these examples as well as all the other terrible crap that happens in war. We may want to think of Haditha and the rape/murder of that 14 year old girl as exceptions but almost every war without exception has these sort of incidences so at what point do you say that engaging in a ground war with significant civilian contact inevitably results in these sort of incidents? I’m not a peace at any cost type of guy by any means but I can’t believe that we still resort to war as anything but a last resort /boggle.
First of all, thank you. But I think you deserve it. Most of the time. This isn’t quite one of them.
No one is arguing that the way we went in wasn’t the most effective for conquering Iraq. It was, I think, and in any case, unlike Rummy and his buddies, I have no desire to overrule the experts who actually have a pretty good idea of what they’re talking about when it comes to military strategy and tactics.
But GWB supposedly believed that Iraq had WMD, and in specific places. That’s what he said, and that was the reason we had to go in RIGHT NOW (then). This was the entire justification for what could easily have resulted in hundreds of American deaths (we were fortunate, and our soldiers will skillful - this is exactly the kind of thing they DO train for) and could and did result in thousands of Iraqi deaths. You pretty much give him a pass because GWB believed it, but didn’t 100% know it, although he claimed he did. OK, I can understand that often you are very, very sure of something, but you don’t have quite enough evidence to absolutely prove it. It doesn’t justify the lie, but it would mitigate it to some extent (oh, who am I kidding; no, it doesn’t. But I’m trying to see it from your side.) We supposedly knew pretty precisely where they were, but we couldn’t wait for weapons inspectors; it was that urgent.
But I find it fascinating that these urgent WMDs that were such a threat to us that we had to go in THIS MINUTE (well, this month, anyway) weren’t considered worth detailing 100 men to secure. Hell, they appear not to have been worth 1 man to secure.
This is not the action of a man who believes that there is an imminent threat. It’s not even the action of a liar who thinks it’s worth bothering to convince anyone else that there was an imminent threat.
This has nothing to do with our tactics. One hundred extra soldiers could easily have been deployed specifically for that task - it’s not like every single asset we had was deployed in April 2003. But they weren’t. Why not? Hussein was at liberty; he remained at liberty for months. He had loyalists around him; those were the guys we were fighting, not only at the immediate time of the initial invasion, but well after. If there was any time in his entire life when it would have been worth deploying his WMDs, this would have seemed to be the time. It was certainly something that would be considered a highly possible, if not likely, thing for him to try to do.
I mean, based on the evidence, it doesn’t just seem likely that GWB didn’t know for sure there were WMDs in Iraq; it sounds as if he knew for sure that there weren’t! I mean, that seems unlikely, since just about everyone in the world thought there was at least a decent possibility that somewhere the man had something that could be plausibly called a WMD. And yet, we didn’t take one single step to secure the areas that we claimed were most likely to house them?
If Hussein had had one nuke, a large city in Israel or a significant portion of our initially deployed forces could easily have been so much nuclear dust right now. If he’d had other forms of WMD, the same thing applies with (probably) fewer deaths.
So the choices I see are that either Bush didn’t believe in the slightest that there were WMDs where he claimed to know there were for a fact, or that this was the most stunning incompetence in the history of warfare: to invade and completely forget why you were invading within a week of doing so. If that latter was the case, why wasn’t there anything whatsoever done about it? If someone was that stupid, he can barely tie his shoes in the morning; it doesn’t seem to me a responsible thing to keep him in a position of high responsibility, and it doesn’t seem to me a smart thing to not inform the public that yes, serious mistakes had occurred, but at least that same incompetent who was responsible was no longer going to be in charge of anything more complicated than taking out his own garbage. And yet there was nothing. The sites were looted by Iraqi civilians, who quite easily could have been those Al Qaeda ties Cheney still claims existed or those foreign agitators who supposedly caused all the trouble for our first year or three, let alone an Iraqi with an agenda.
Scylla, at this point it sure looks like you’re either refusing to think it through, or you’re being disingenuous about it. And that’s not the guy I’ve been speaking so highly of the past couple of days (and I know you didn’t ask for it, so you don’t owe me a damn thing; I’m not trying to lay an obligation on you when one doesn’t exist). It’s unworthy of you. You’re better than that. You’re bright, well-informed, and intelligent. You’re also not a hard-core Bush supporter, although you do in general support him wrt foreign policy. But you can think Bush was wrong without then saying that you think it was the wrong thing to invade Iraq. So I’m confused.
Oh, boy, sounds like fun (not)! I didn’t know you were still actively working in a field that would require travel.
You might just want to re-consider that list of carry-on items. 
I hope your trip is successful and easy. But I’m not planning to let you off the hook here. I’d really like an answer, and I’ll nag you. 
I’d be particurly scared because I’m female! Hey, where’d THOSE come from???
I stand by my definition. What you’re describing is torment, but not torture. However, I admit that my definition may not be the same as the commonly accepted one. And note that I didn’t approve of torment either.
I can only agree with your last statement in its entirety.