waterboarding

[system]

<p>Has anyone seen “Catch a Fire,” a true story about a man in South Africa under apartheid? While he was at first apolitical, just trying to do his job and stay out of trouble, after he was tortured because they thought he was involved in a terrorist plot, he joined the ANC and actually did what he had been falsely accused of doing. I thought the movie was quite well done. The situation then, of course, was different from that today, but it does make the point that torture does create terrorists–and that innocent people can be accused and tortured. Even if torture were guaranteed to give accurate information–which it certainly is NOT–how many innocent people is it OK to torture in order to find the one that actually knows something?</p>

[mathmom]

<p>An awful lot of people seem to think torture doesn’t work…</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bowden[/url]”>http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bowden&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p><a href=“http://www.cvt.org/main.php/Advocacy/TheCampaigntoStopTorture/WhatCVTknowsaboutTorture[/url]”>http://www.cvt.org/main.php/Advocacy/TheCampaigntoStopTorture/WhatCVTknowsaboutTorture&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p><a href=“http://www.pacificviews.org/weblog/archives/000847.html[/url]”>http://www.pacificviews.org/weblog/archives/000847.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Just think of the number of false confessions we have discovered through the Innocence Project. And those victims presumably weren’t even tortured, but they still admitted to crimes they didn’t commit.</p>

[Allmusic]

<p>I think if you are being “waterboarded”, and can’t yell uncle, like this reporter did, it is possible you will say almost anything to get the torture to stop. False confessions are ever so common, even for people who aren’t being tortured, just questioned intensely.</p>

[driver]

<p>Mathmom:
The first article you linked–the Atlantic article by Mark Bowden–doesn’t support your anti-torture premise. However, it is the best–by far–article on the subject of the moral and practical aspects of interrogation that I’ve ever seen. Frankly, I don’t know how I missed it, but I’m grateful to you for having posted it (no sarcasm…I’m 100% serious).</p>

<p>This is a very long, and very profound article, and I’m going to give it its own thread–it’s that important. I actually know Mark Bowden–author of “Blackhawk Down” and “Killing Pablo”–from his days with the Philadelphia Inquirer. There is no one in the business who has anything close to the access he gets to special ops people, whose trust he has earned.

All these suspects are questioned rigorously, but those in the top ranks get the full coercive treatment. And if official and unofficial government reports are to be believed, the methods work. In report after report hard-core terrorist leaders are said to be either cooperating or, at the very least, providing some information—not just vague statements but detailed, verifiable, useful intelligence. In late March, Time reported that Sheikh Mohammed had “given U.S. interrogators the names and descriptions of about a dozen key al-Qaeda operatives believed to be plotting terrorist attacks on America and other western countries” and had “added crucial details to the descriptions of other suspects and filled in important gaps in what U.S. intelligence knows about al-Qaeda’s practices.” In June, news reports suggested that Sheikh Mohammed was discussing operational planning with his captors and had told interrogators that al-Qaeda did not work with Saddam Hussein. And according to a report in June of last year, Abu Zubaydah, who is said to be held in solitary confinement somewhere in Pakistan, provided information that helped foil a plot to detonate a radioactive bomb in the United States.

The civilian sensibility prizes above all else the rule of law. Whatever the difficulties posed by a particular situation, such as trying to find poor Jakob von Metzler before he suffocated, it sees abusive government power as a greater danger to society. Allowing an exception in one case (saving Jakob) would open the door to a greater evil.</p>

<p>The warrior sensibility requires doing what must be done to complete a mission. By definition, war exists because civil means have failed. What counts is winning, and preserving one’s own troops. To a field commander in a combat zone, the life of an uncooperative enemy captive weighs very lightly against the lives of his own men. There are very few who, faced with a reluctant captive, would not in certain circumstances reach for the alligator clips, or something else.

<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bowden[/url]”>http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bowden&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[citygirlsmom]

<p>so long as whatever we do to others they can do to your child…</p>

[mathmom]

<p>“The first article you linked–the Atlantic article by Mark Bowden–doesn’t support your anti-torture premise.”</p>

<p>LOL. That’s what I get for skimming! I promise to read it more carefully. :)</p>

[fundingfather]

<p>CGM, you continuously post along these lines as if the people like KSM are equivalent to innocent children - they are not. They are the ones who will go to great lengths to kill our children. If they had the means to do so (and they certainly are trying to get these means), they would replicate Hitler’s atrocities. So, rather than trying to equate KSM to our children, ask yourself if we had captured Hitler and by water boarding him we could have prevented the holocaust if that would have been the correct thing to do. This is a far better analogy than equating KSM to children.</p>

[citygirlsmom]

<p>how do you know these people are guilty< because someone tells you so, gee, do you know that many innocent iraqis were tortured in our prisons</p>

<p>guess because pakistan tells us they are a terrorist, we are to believe it?</p>

<p>with no trials, no evidence, no nothing…three years later and nada</p>

<p>so if your kid was in say, Italy, and he was grabbed as a suspected terrorist, this would all be okay with you</p>

<p>how do you know that baker in India was a terrorist? huh? he was innocent btw, but he was tortured, wow</p>

<p>my point is valid, if we can grab anyone and torture them, how would you feel if your son was grabbed?</p>

<p>we have gone to great lengths to kill innocent children…ten times who have been killed here, and actually in a totally different country…</p>

<p>what DID iraq do to us?</p>

[citygirlsmom]

<p>please, ff, you believe that ALL that are in our war prisons are guilty? without a trial, how do you know that? </p>

<p>are we a guilty before innocent land now? that would make the founding fathers proud</p>

[Allmusic]

<p>FF, but the problem is, you can’t really compare most of the Gitmo prisoners to Hitler. Many of them are innocent (of course, we don’t know which ones, since they aren’t afforded rights under law).</p>

<p>A more apt comparison, is comparing Osama bin Laden to Hitler. I would have less of a problem waterboarding the mastermind of al Quaida, like Hitler, than the minions, many of whom have no more to do with killing Americans, or a holocaust, than you do.</p>

[FountainSiren]

<p>Interestingly, it would appear that the hand-wringers above believe that all of our soldiers/interrogators (known miscreants?) are guilty of waterboarding indiscriminate innocents–as if on a terror production line. </p>

<p>Is there, in fact, any evidence for this?
Even a reason to presume it is true?</p>

<p>Links would be appreciated…no so much, more *SOS </p>

<p>[*same-ole-crap]).</p>

[Allmusic]

<p>Can’t prove anything with links, as you know, FS, since we have no way of proving who is innocent and who isn’t.</p>

<p>I linked an article from that dreaded Rolling Stone :p, a month or so back, which chronicled a reportedly innocent young man’s harrowing escapades at Gitmo. You may recall that you and your pals sounded trompsed upon it.</p>

<p>So, would you be likely to believe ANY evidence that innocents are being waterboarded? </p>

<p>I thought not.</p>

[fundingfather]

<p>

I would have less of a problem waterboarding the mastermind of al Quaida, like Hitler, than the minions

I hardly would call KSM a “minion” so I assume that you believe that the waterboarding that was likely to have been used on hime was appropriate?</p>

<p>And to CGM, if my son were captured by a terrorist group, I would go on international TV and plead to whatever sense of humanity that they have left in them that they water board my son rather than do what they normally do. I assume that you would do the same if it were your daughter.</p>

[gla]

<p>Murat Kurnaz,
<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murat_Kurnaz[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murat_Kurnaz&lt;/a&gt;
Khaled al-Masri;
<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Does anyone claim that the U.S. policy is to torture- in violation of the law- only those known to be ‘terrorists’?</p>

[emeraldkity4]

<p><a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644.html[/url]”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>how much sympathy will victims of “clean” torture get from the public?</p>

<p>How long will it take before these techniques are used on US soil?
<a href=“http://www.slate.com/id/2152268/[/url]”>http://www.slate.com/id/2152268/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>

It is only a matter of time before new rot sets into the U.S. military, thanks to the new MCA. This is inevitable when you codify a two-track interrogation system. In the 1970s, the Brazilian military had a similar two-track system, and the state had to eliminate its torturers in order to preserve itself. As Brazilian journalist Elio Gaspari observed at the time: “Unless everyone in the army participates in torture, you very quickly develop two kinds of soldiers.” He called them “the combatants,” who fight the terrorists with torture, and the “bureaucrats,” who are committed to preserving the military’s everyday functioning and discipline. In Brazil, the day came when the combatant-torturers refused to accept the orders of the bureaucrats and regarded with contempt their peers who were committed to army discipline. The generals eventually concluded that “[t]he torturers were going to have to be isolated, marginalized and eliminated, so as to save the Army.”</p>

<p>And this corruption will not be limited to the military. Two-track interrogation systems have similar corrupting influences in domestic policing, particularly as former interrogators and MPs seek jobs as police officers after being decommissioned. The military tortures in the Franco-Algerian War soon seeped into French policing in the 1960s. And in the United States, this kind of slippage has happened twice: initially, as the water tortures of the Spanish-American War began appearing in police stations in the 1920s, and again as electrical techniques used during the Vietnam War appeared in Chicago policing in the 1970s. These torturers-turned-policemen-turned-torturers were especially attracted to techniques that were clean, and there is every reason to believe that the clean techniques now approved in the Iraq war will, sooner or later, appear in a neighborhood near you.

</p>

<p>Is this what we want?</p>

<p>

The Mayor of Cincinnati proposes to arm police with tasers and stun guns. He believes if police had such weapons, they would have detained Nathaniel Jones without causing his death. Instead, TV audiences across the country saw police clubbing Jones on the squad car video camera.</p>

<p>But before Cincinnati turns to stun guns and tasers, we should ask in whose interest it would be to have violence that cannot be easily seen or documented, no matter how nonlethal it is. We may be outraged by violence we can see, but how likely is it that we will get outraged about violence that may or may not leave traces, violence that we can hardly be sure took place at all? A victim with scars to show to the media will get sympathy or at least attention, but victims without scars do not have much to authorize their complaints to a skeptical public. A trial can focus on the specific damages of a beating - where did the blows allegedly fall? Were the strikes professional, necessary or neither? - but what precisely can a trial focus on with electric shocks that leave few marks?</p>

<p>Let me remind you of a different event.</p>

<p>On March 3, 1991, police pulled over Rodney King and two other passengers in Los Angeles. Most Americans saw how that incident ended.</p>

<p>LAPD officers beat King senseless with metal batons. Many will remember that police fractured King’s face and legs. But how many remember how many times police fired electric stun weapons at King during the incident? And how many can say how much shock passed through King’s body as he lay on the ground?</p>

<p>From the start, the King incident was about the sudden remarkable visibility of police violence captured, by happenstance, on amateur video. The Christopher Commission observed that without the video, it is doubtful there would have been an investigation.
…</p>

<p>What would the police camera have shown if the police had used stun weapons on Nathaniel Jones instead of clubs? Nothing, perhaps; out of sight is out of mind. Niccolo Machiavelli once advised princes to use stealthy violence because people will get less alarmed. He said, “in general, men judge more by sight than by touch. Everyone sees what is happening but not everyone feels its consequences.” Before American citizens let princes decide for them, they better think about the consequences of using violence they can’t see.

<a href=“http://www.collegenews.org/x3015.xml[/url]”>http://www.collegenews.org/x3015.xml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;