Is it acceptable for the US government to torture people?

[boxman55]

You know Bill, I for one am glad our President is George W. Bush. Because if it was Al Gore we would have terroists turning on mercury filled light bulbs in New York or LA to help set off their destruction...Boxman

[AlohaBeth]

I for one am just thoroughly entertained by this and The Wither Iraq thread.  Can we start choosing sides and chanting our picks name?



the crowd goes wild, one girl in the back carries a sign saying I'm with Peckham yelling above everyone else "Bill-Peck-Ham-Bill-Peck-Ham" 

  

[BigSky]

Freedom is torture; up is down; right is left; black is white. I'm starting to understand the torture party's tactics. I'm sure next we'll hear that Bush is doubleplusgood.

Terrorism is such a heinous crime against society ALL rights are lost by those that conduct it and associate with it.

As such it is our RIGHT to do whatever it takes to protect society from them.  If that means torturing a few terrorists.....so be it.

[Bill Peckham]

At some point we'll have to acknowledge what we've done. Acknowledge it not to anyone besides ourselves. Just as we have had to learn to live with other times we've fallen short of our ideals, we'll have to learn to live with this sad chapter.

Watch this 10 minute segment of a meticulously documented film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yM1wc0dwtE

Then pause to consider all that we don't know ... yet

Black Sites At Sea?
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/06/black-sites-at.html

I have learned to trust nothing about detention and interrogation from this administration, so I am perfectly prepared to believe this story (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/02/usa.humanrights) on prison ships in the Guardian. It makes the non-partisan Reject Torture campaign (http://rejecttorture.org/) all the more salient.

[BigSky]

BFD

The very fact it has saved numerous lives makes it worth it. So in fact it  has worked.

Of course we could go back to not doing anything like happened under Clinton and watch again as 3000 people are murdered within minutes on live tv.

[Bill Peckham]

It is a very big deal and we'll be paying the price for years to come. Again and again, person after person, the people directly involved in carrying out this administration's policies have said that the policies have created a greater threat then they have prevented. Again and again, to a person. The policies amount to no more than sadism. With no point beyond feeding a visceral sense of power. We're already seeing the damage the policies have had on those carrying them out - we'll have to deal with the shattered minions for years and years.

I believe that supporters of this administration will wake up one day ashamed. Ashamed that they mortgaged the safety of their children and grandchildren for some marginal improvement in their own safety. Ashamed they chose themselves over future generations.

At least one thing seems certain, no matter who wins the Presidential election the torture regime will end.


 

[monrein]

I'm with you totally on this issue Bill.  The practices that have come to light are barbaric and at odds with the historical values of the United States. 

[xtrememoosetrax]

The practices that have come to light are barbaric and at odds with the historical values of the United States.

Yes, exactly. It's a terrible shame.

[BigSky]

It is a very big deal and we'll be paying the price for years to come. Again and again, person after person, the people directly involved in carrying out this administration's policies have said that the policies have created a greater threat then they have prevented. Again and again, to a person. The policies amount to no more than sadism. With no point beyond feeding a visceral sense of power. We're already seeing the damage the policies have had on those carrying them out - we'll have to deal with the shattered minions for years and years.

Yet you have no proof of that bill.

The very fact of the matter though is al-qaeda has taken an extreme hit to its ranks all over the world because of these polices.  Fact of the matter is by not having these polices, clinton and the dems let al--qaeda spread from a handful of countries in 93 to almost every country on the planet by the year 2000 and let them hit the US time and time again murdering thousands of civilians which were not killed by accident but deliberate targeted and murdered.  Fact of the matter is the policy of the dem party not to do anything lead to on the biggest terrorist attacks on US soil.

I believe that supporters of this administration will wake up one day ashamed. Ashamed that they mortgaged the safety of their children and grandchildren for some marginal improvement in their own safety. Ashamed they chose themselves over future generations.

At least one thing seems certain, no matter who wins the Presidential election the torture regime will end.

More like one day you will wake up ashamed that while the US was taking measures to protect itself you were stabbing it in the back.

The practices that have come to light are barbaric and at odds with the historical values of the United States. 

That statement shows how little you know about US history.

There were far more barbaric things done by the US, not to mention Canada or Britain.

Yet the fact of the matter in your statement clearly shows that the "barbaric" things of the past hold little weight to anything in the future.  Case in point being that those of today do not hold or see what was done in the past to protect the US as barbaric; thus your statement affirming that what is done now is at odds with the historical values of the US.

[monrein]

As you wish BigSky.  I claim no great expertise in any area actually and certainly not American history.  I just do my best to understand issues and come to some conclusion about what I read and learn in discussions.  I don't live in the US, I live in Canada but there are many around the world (including many in the States) who think that the US has lost sight of some important principles because of the trauma of 911.  And it was traumatic, extremely so. I do have many American relatives, both Republican and Democrat and I participate every so often in discussions with them.  Of course other countries Canada included have been involved in past atrocities and that should be remembered in order to behave better in the present and in the future.  I am very critical of many things in my country but I am also very loyal to my country.  I want it to be the best it can be and there is always room for improvement.  I believe that is what is meant by constructive criticism which is quite different than treachery or attack on Canada.

I will say that I do not enjoy the tone of your posts which I experience as verbal bullying.  Things are often not as black and white as you may wish them to be and verbally clubbing people does not a good discussion make.

I would love to hear from other nationalities on this issue but I can't blame anyone for not wading into the pond.  They'd most likely be characterized as ignorant knuckleheads unaware of the one real truth, so why bother. 



No need to reply to this silly rubbish I've just posted.  I'll self-flagellate some sense into my weak, deluded and clearly murky brain and spare you the trouble.

[BigSky]

I will say that I do not enjoy the tone of your posts which I experience as verbal bullying.  Things are often not as black and white as you may wish them to be and verbally clubbing people does not a good discussion make.

Doesn't matter to me if you enjoy them or not.  I am not going to sugar coat it to make you feel better about yourself.

FACT of the matter was you posted a falsehood and I put a stop to it.  If you do not like it, do not post falsehoods anymore.

Furthermore you really need to get off that high horse of yours where you think that no one is to post anything in opposition of your views or contradict your falsehoods.

BTW play the victim all you want, it seems to be your strong suit when you are cornered with the truth.

[xtrememoosetrax]

 

[monrein]

Well that's the first time I've ever been called a victim.  My husband cracked up when I told him that.   

[UNIBALLER]

Well after reading some of this I feel that I should make a post on this subject.

First I want to ask question to some of the more tenacious posters on this topic. What do you know about interrogation techniques and how to properly use them?


I agree with some of the posters in that torture is effective and should be used since it is an effective form of extracting the intelligence required to complete a mission or to prevent an enemy attack in order to save lives.

On the other hand I agree with the posters that are against torture. Torture has also been proven to be ineffective in retrieving intelligence since the information retrieved can be false in order to throw off and hamper operations; torture is also ineffective in the case of the detainee not having the information or being provided inaccurate information, he will tell the interrogator anything he wants to hear in order to stop the session, in this case though when proper techniques are applied and investigated it will be found out and alternate techniques of interrogation will be used to extract intelligence.

Overall physically torturing a subject has been proven to be an ineffective method of extracting intelligence since most enemy combatants become more determined to not provide intelligence out of spite to the interrogator also a properly trained militant will know that the intelligence gatherers will not allow the subject die or become seriously harmed since it will only resort in a loss of information.

There are other forms of interrogation that are much more effective in retrieving useful intelligence from a detainee that are more difficult to counter and have no lasting effect to the person being interrogated.

From my personal point of view I agree with any interrogation technique that provides timely and accurate intelligence to us troops on the ground in order to successfully complete the mission while preventing the lose of life for both sides(if at all possible).

[Bill Peckham]

Uniballer I wonder if you're looking at this as what would you do as an individual.

This is not the same as what should be the policy of a country; official government policy. 

If Jack Bauer is willing to shoot someone in the knee because he believes it will result in usable information and then he is willing to accept the consequences that is fine by me.

It is a very different thing to have torture as a standard government policy routinely inflicted on a guy picked off the streets of Kandahar by a platoon lieutenant because he was carrying a shovel.

[UNIBALLER]

Bill it is not up to the soldiers on patrol to interrogate someone that is captured. NO interrogation is done at that level, it is all done by trained interrogators and intelligence personel.

I am not looking at this as an individual. I'm looking at this as someone who knows the policies and doctrine are and follows them. I also know the results that using the proper techniques that are required based on the what the individual decides through his actions and motives and mindset and overall ideology will provide the most useful and accurate intelligence.

There is NO standard policy on how to interrogate an individual since all persons are unique in their own way. Being kind and sympathetic will work on one person where as depriving sleep,  using stress positions and spatial disorientation will be effective on another.

The policies and doctrine that are followed are the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Geneva and Hague Conventions, and the Nuremburg Principles which all basically state that any thing that you do that is considered a crime you WILL be put on trial and punished for to the fullest extent of the law! ex. killing an unarmed person is murder.  The main principle of the Nuremburg Principles is that saying you were only following orders is no excuse for committing a crime.

Canada and America along with many other countries signed in agreement and follow these "rules".

Also Jack Bauer isn't real and comparing real life to movies and t.v. something that really bothers people in the profession of arms since it should be very obvious that it is what it is FICTION!
Comparing fiction to real life is something that will not help your argument, all it does is make people educated and experience in the topic take you less seriously when you attempt to counter and poke holes in their facts.



BTW I do not try to personally attack or insult anybody in my posts I just provide my insight and point of view in case anyone might be offended or upset by any of my posting.

[Zach]

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
  Edmund Burke

Great quote, Uniballer!

[Bill Peckham]

Platoons are making the decision to pick someone up and it is platoons that are picking people up and preparing them for interrogation with sensory deprivation and "softening". And average soldiers are the ones being given the responsibility to interrogate without the training to interrogate. We don't have to talk about this in the abstract there are actual cases, actual first hand accounts readily available in written form or video.

You stated that you had read the thread so I made the assumption that you read the discussion on the difference between war and torture and the just war theory. I assumed you would recognize the reference to Jack Bauer in the context of previous discussions, that the comments were in the context of this thread, a thread that stretches for many pages and not as a stand alone comment to your post.

If you'd like feed back on your post outside the context of this thread then I would say you seem to be straddling a fence that can't be straddled by a government and certainly is not being straddled by the current US administration - your post read like the inner thoughts of someone at the pointy end of the spear, not the thinking of the Decider.

[UNIBALLER]

Platoons do not decide who to pick up unless they disarm and detain a combatant or a combatant surrenders to them. The desicion to capture specific individuals for interrogation is decide by the intelligence branch and use the troops at the platoon level to carry out the action. The "sensory deprivation" done at that level when a person is detained is for security purposes so that the detainee cannot see what is going on around them and is used in detering them from attempting escape or assualt on the detaining team. This is done by all countries and has been done throughout the history of warfare.  The "softening" you mention is illegal unless the person is armed and resisting, it is  assault and is punishable and in most cases the person is punished for the crime the same as a civilian would be.

The cases that you have mentioned where regular untrained soldiers have interrogated is a failure of the chain of command and I can guarentee that their superiors have been dealt with and punished for it accordingly and depending on the extent and type of interrogation techniques used by those soldiers would dictate whether they were accountable for their actions and punished also.

Also what is considered torture and what is not? That is a more important question when a discussion like this is brought up.

[Bill Peckham]

Take ten minutes and watch this 10 minute segment of a meticulously documented film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yM1wc0dwtE

Then pause to consider all that we don't know ... yet

Black Sites At Sea?
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/06/black-sites-at.html

I have learned to trust nothing about detention and interrogation from this administration, so I am perfectly prepared to believe this story (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/02/usa.humanrights) on prison ships in the Guardian. It makes the non-partisan Reject Torture campaign (http://rejecttorture.org/) all the more salient.

You are describing the US military pre2002  ... that is what is at issue what we now have or what you describe, what use to be

[monrein]

The Maher Arar case is an unfortunate example of extraordinary rendition.

[Bill Peckham]

Christopher Hitchens is a good writer, who takes his job seriously. In this thorough Vanity Fair piece he recounts his thinking and experience around waterboarding - including asking that he be waterboarded. The strongest part of the article is on page two when he lays out the strongest arguments on both sides of the question - should the US waterboard people? which is really a way to rephrase the question that is this post's subject line. The answer is, I believe, No.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808
Believe Me, It’s Torture
What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience. The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist—not inflict—it.
by Christopher Hitchens

[Bill Peckham]

Now the book is out- clearly documenting just how far off track this administration has taken us.
From Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals review in the NY Times (via Matt and Andrew at the Atlantic)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin:

In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was “all preventable.” By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, “50 or 60 individuals” in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, “I don’t want to hear about that anymore!”

After 9/11, our government emphasized “interrogation over due process,” Ms. Mayer writes, “to pre-empt future attacks before they materialized.” But in reality torture may well be enabling future attacks. This is not just because Abu Ghraib snapshots have been used as recruitment tools by jihadists. No less destructive are the false confessions inevitably elicited from tortured detainees. The avalanche of misinformation since 9/11 has compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose chases. The coerced “confession” to the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to take one horrific example, may have been invented to protect the real murderer.

The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. Exhibit A, revisited in “The Dark Side,” is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His fabricated tales of Saddam’s biological and chemical W.M.D. — and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda — were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two F.B.I. officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: “They were killing me. I had to tell them something.

"We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all," - Frank Rich on Jane Mayer's new book on Cheney's torture regime.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13rich.html?hp

Buy the book if you can stomach knowing what was done in your name http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Inside-Terror-American/dp/0385526393/

[Bill Peckham]

Do you think President Bush believes John McCain was tortured? This would be a tough question to answer since technique by technique the US now does the same thing.

I think it was a war crime when the Vietnamese subjected McCain to "enhanced interrogation" (e.g. stress positions, withhold medical care, fake executions, exposure to temperature extremes). Does our President?

[Bill Peckham]

There has been only one review of Jane Mayer’s critically important book The Dark Side in the conservative press, Cliff May writing in Commentary. May's book review isn't available online but now there is a review of the review. It is hard to know what conservatives and supporters of the current administration really believe when it comes to the torture the current President approved but May's review does provide some insight into their thinking and where they went wrong. So terribly, terribly wrong.

This is from J.L. Wall's review http://johnschwenkler.wordpress.com/2008/11/23/torture-and-the-problem-of-statelessness/

The supporters of the current administration seem to hang their arguments on the idea that people in question - the evil doers - are stateless. This it seems to be the point of the May review. Wall writes:

The argument against torture, at its most basic level, has never been that terror suspects necessarily should be granted the full Constitutional rights of American citizens (the answer and extent are different, and later, questions), but that we grant them basic status as human beings.

Basic status as human beings: this is distinct from the concept of universal human rights. It is not a statement that there is a basic natural right held by all humanity to have counsel, or see evidence against them, or receive halal meals if they want them. It is a statement that there is a basic standard expect of us—you and me—in how we treat our fellow human beings; that so long as we acknowledge their mere humanity, we are morally—so much more morally than legally—obligated to treat them as more than animals. At its core, this is what the torture debate is about, has always been about, and will always be about.

That is the core issue - it's not a question of Geneva Conventions. What is at issue is how humans should be treated. How do our actions comport with basic natural rights held by all humanity? There is no ticking time bomb at issue, it is a question of separating some humans from others and treating this segregated group as less than human.

It's wrong. It is the wrong thing to do. And it is also illegal, no matter how many pieces of paper carry the signature of the President of the United States.

Wall concludes his review of a review with a binary choice - describing a true fork in the road:
There are two solutions to this: the first, and preferable one, is that we do not torture, and we do not mistreat prisoners and detainees. The second is that we withdraw from the Geneva Conventions, and announce that we reject the belief that the standards therein are objectively true.

Normally I doubt that life offers such a stark choice but I think in this case it is accurate to say there isn't a gray area. Our government took a wrong turn and now it is time to undo the evil that was done.