Obama visiting CIA, prosecuting former interrogators?

[longeyes]

Perhaps the point is just to sow more chaos, leading to more social and cultural disintegration and more internal weakness in America.  Soros is the great divider, the great manipulator, and the great short-seller.  But when you light fires, you should make sure you have a good escape route; even the best can out-smart themselves.

The real issue isn't "torture," it's power, it's always power.  Most of human history is intimately involved with torture; it's always been an instrument of those in control, whether overt or covert.  Some cultures are built entirely on forms of what we call torture.

[HankB]

Perhaps the point is just to sow more chaos, leading to more social and cultural disintegration and more internal weakness in America . . .

Or maybe he just wants to distract us so we won't notice what else he's up to???

[Balog]

Do you think the power to execute criminals is one the .gov will handle responsibly?

Do executions happen on the decision of one (or a handful) of people, in the field, under pressure, to someone who hasn't been tried or convicted of anything?

[roo_ster]

Do executions happen on the decision of one (or a handful) of people, in the field, under pressure, to someone who hasn't been tried or convicted of anything?

Every time a serviceman drops the hammer on a perceived hostile.
1. One decision-maker
2. In the field
3. Under pressure
4. No trial

[Gewehr98]

Yup.

One man's description of warfare is another man's definition of execution or cold-blooded murder. 

You were a Marine, Balog? 

[Balog]

Yup.

One man's description of warfare is another man's definition of execution or cold-blooded murder. 

You were a Marine, Balog? 

Forgive me if I see a difference between shooting a hostile, and torturing a captive. I suppose those damn Laws of Land Warfare were emphasized too much by those wussy Marines. 

[Gewehr98]

I'm just concerned that you're ok with one type of warfare, but not another.

(Forgive me, my government-paid vacation time in the Green Zone was spent doing something you'd probably not condone...)

[Balog]

I'm just concerned that you're ok with one type of warfare, but not another.

(Forgive me, my government-paid vacation time in the Green Zone was spent doing something you'd probably not condone...)

Like I said, I just see a difference between fighting and torture.

Also, unless the Air Force had you torturing people I don't know why I wouldn't condone it. Especially since waterboarding is a fuzzy line. Were you doing something worse than that? I didn't think anyone (let alone the Air Force) was breaking bones or hooking people up to batteries in Iraq. 

[roo_ster]

Forgive me if I see a difference between shooting a hostile, and torturing a captive. I suppose those damn Laws of Land Warfare were emphasized too much by those wussy Marines. 

There is a difference, but what you wrote WRT blurred the line between execution and engaging hostile forces.  Not sure if it was intentional.  Clearly, I am not the only one who read it that way.

Up until recently, the kind of folks for which this sort of treatment is being contemplated were liable to being shot out of hand, according to the laws of warfare.


Anyways, there's torture and there's "torture(1)."

Even assuming the unleaded, fully-caffeinated, no-bull, "beat with a truncheon & zap with a car battery" torture, I think the subject might prefer the torture to a 5.56mm round to the melon at 100m.  If some rat b@st@rd knocks my teeth out seeking information, but doesn't kill me, I can get that attended to and live the rest of my life.  This is not an option if PVT Snuffy plants multiple 5.56 round in my COM.

For my own part, I think one of the right & proper reasons to prohibit(2) torture, (as opposed to "torture") is not for the sake of the tortured, but for the sake of our men(3). 




(1) "Torture" being the more-vigorous techniques that are just fine to inflict on servicemen in training and on a day-to-day basis, but suddenly too brutal to use on terrorists.  Joe Jihadi needs his beauty sleep or "we're just as bad as the terrorists," doncha know?

(2) I'll repeat, again, my utter contempt for the "John McCain" view on the legality of torture, whereby our policritters outlaw it so they can claim the moral high ground but assume that our men will use torture if the circumstances dictate that torture might save lives.  If they expect our men to do it under those circumstances, their moral course would be to legalize it for those circumstances.  Expecting men to not only perform a repugnant task, but do so under threat of prosecution is disgusting.

(3) Oh, not the bullsh!t claim that we ought to treat enemy combatants well or Joe Jihadi will treat ours poorly.  Joe Jihadi will mistreat our boys & girls to his advantage no matter what.  I suspect that, in the absence of prohibition, torture might become required in some circumstances.  That would be a fine way to produce some seriously traumatized servicemen.

[Perd Hapley]

As an aside, you still haven't answered the pragmatic aspects of your belief. Do you really think the power to torture is one the .gov will handle responsibly?

   I just did.  I think government will handle it about as well as any other necessary and proper task.

Shoot, if torture is no big deal let's torture everyone!

No big deal?  Go back and look at what I said. 

[vaskidmark]

Would someone (anyone) please define the term for me?

I look in the dictionaries and read all sorts of stuff about the infliction of pain for the sake of inflicting pain, or causing injury to someone for the sake of causing injury, without any "end benefit".  I also read statements about behavior that "shocks the consious" of "civilized" persons.  Then I read all of the posts here and the words spewed about in the Intertubes and newspapers which seem to be discussing actions designed to elicit information from a person who would otherwise be unwilling to divulge said information.

So I'm perfused and complexed beyond description.

Folks are getting panties all twisted about stuff that would make the Spanish Inquisition laugh at its softness.  Nobody, so far, has told me or anyone else that I normally might meet what plan(s) to harm Americans - or citizens of other nations - were actually discovered in time to 1) foil said plot and 2) simultaneously/contemporaneously apprehend said plotters.  It has been told to the press that #1 and possibly #2 as well actually took place, but the specific details were not shared with the public.

I'm just not sure what "torture" means anymore.  You guys are not making it any clearer for my poor mind.

Anyone want to take a crack at it?

stay safe.

skidmark

[Balog]

I'd say techniques causing either: significant physical pain (car batteries etc) or injuries (cutting, fire etc).

The general reason for including waterboarding has been pointed out by RevDisk in other threads. Struggling against bonds often breaks bones, and the sensation of drowning is "significant physical pain."

[Balog]

Oh and fisty; any techniques you'd be against using on the (suspected) bad guys? Amputation, removing eyes, rape, sodomy? Just curious if your "(suspected) bad guys deserve whatever they get" rational extended all the way.

[LadySmith]

Anyone want to take a crack at it?

I'll give it a shot...

Torture: Inflicting pain and mental anguish for the purposes of punishment or coercion.
Torture is not mere discomfort. Torture is agony of the body and/or the mind.

Civilized persons frown on torture because it is seen as degrading to all parties involved. There is a need not to become like those who use torture.
Torture is not a guaranteed means of obtaining information or the truth.
Torture is time consuming. There is an intimacy involved in trying to crack someone.
We're facing an enemy where the use of torture is negligible. If we play nice with them, we're seen as weak. If we resort to torture, we're just as bad.

Torture inspires fear. Fear may inspire cooperation.
There is a chance that the desired information can be obtained through its use.
Torture offers victims the hope of survivability.

And then you get the whole can of worms that accepting the use of torture opens:
Who gets to use it and against whom?
What kinds of torture and how much?
When will it be used and where?
Will it be used against us?

[roo_ster]

I'll give it a shot...

Torture: Inflicting pain and mental anguish for the purposes of punishment or coercion.

LS:

I think that much too broad.  Under that definition every policeman, drill sgt, NCO, and parent is a torturer.

Just one example: My father was not perfect, but he was no torturer when he paddled my fanny, inflicting pain and mental anguish, in order to coerce me to never, EVER stick screw drivers into the power receptacle.

Similar examples can be drawn for LEOs, and NCOs quite easily.

I'll go one step further: There are times when the infliction of pain and mental anguish for the purposes of coercion is the right, moral, and loving thing to do.

[LadySmith]

LS:

I think that much too broad. 

Oh well, I tried.

And then there's that whole "pain is relative" thing. Paddling your fanny was enough to make you stop sticking screwdrivers in power receptacles (thank goodness) whereas I'd be willing to divulge state secrets for a bag of M&Ms.  

[longeyes]

I'm glad we are not going to use torture, whatever it is.

But I want to know what we ARE going to use.  I mean other than "reaching out" and "engaging in dialogue."

It sounds as if we haven't given up torture, we've given up fighting and even wanting to prevail.

We are too high-minded to destroy pirate strongholds for concern over collateral damage.  Our enemies, meanwhile, have no concept of collateral damage at all.  In their minds we are all one collective target to be destroyed.  We are one neck to sever.

We've gone from asymmetric warfare to asymmetric morality, and, frankly, I consider the whole thing to be an absurd game that could only be devised in the Academy, where innuendo is equivalent to mayhem and rough contact is left to the bedroom.

[Gewehr98]

You don't want to know, nor should you.  Common knowledge is exactly that, and negates any element of surprise if they know just exactly what we're going to do.  I could just spit over Obama's latest security breach.

I still consider interrogation techniques as a viable part of the intelligence organ, as distasteful as that may sound to some.

We can all quibble about the morality of interrogation and just exactly how the information should be extracted, but do we really want to discount the value of the timely intel collected from bad actors when the lives of our own sons and daughters are on the line?

It goes back to that saying, "We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."

Violence can be all sorts of things, all sorts of icky things that make people squeamish or even claim the moral high ground. Some even break down that violence into good and bad violence, to better assuage their conscience.  To me, dropping 70K pounds of ordnance on Iraqis hunkered down in their trenches was no better or worse than waterboarding our buddy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I'm not so certain Mike Rowe would undertake performing the latter for a Dirty Jobs episode, but it is indeed a dirty job. 

If it makes one feel any better, violence is also visited upon those who are selected to perform certain military functions, as a prerequisite to their training.  It's not unlike cops getting tasered before they get their tasers issued.  I won't go into specifics, but suffice it to say I was ordered to take a week or two's worth of leave after my "graduate" level survival courses to decompress.  I was pretty much in shock afterwards for a while, because who would've thought that Uncle Sam could beat up one of their own both mentally and physically in the name of training? Sure, I'd seen the Navy SEALS videos, but they're SEALS, right?

Those same graduate survival courses got myself and several of my fellow USAF/Navy SRO aircrew members volunteered (a military euphemism, if ever there was) at the end of my career to go play in the shithole that was Baghdad, because folks so trained could detect the evasion techniques used by detainees under interrogation, and help steer the questions accordingly.

It doesn't mean you have to be the resident APS warmonger, or even remotely like the concept, but you do what you have to do.  LadySmith would make it really easy for me to get info out of her, but I was more than prepared to use the tools and training at my disposal to get answers.  Been there, done that, got the tour credit and the fruit salad for my shadow box.  Now all I can do is play mind games with my friends and family to either get a rise out of them or elicit answers when they try to be evasive. I've also been known to mess with the mental health folks at the VA during sessions.  You'd think they'd learn to look up a vet's DD-214 before jumping in with both feet.    

[MicroBalrog]

(1) "Torture" being the more-vigorous techniques that are just fine to inflict on servicemen in training and on a day-to-day basis, but suddenly too brutal to use on terrorists.  Joe Jihadi needs his beauty sleep or "we're just as bad as the terrorists," doncha know?

1. The person you're torturing is quite likely to be Joe Camelherder instead.

2. The people who undergo torture as part of their military training knowingly sign up for it. Medical personnel review the training process to avoid health damage.

3. Sleep deprivation is not 'just' sleep deprivation. Do it long enough and you'll drive the guy permanently insane.

4. Waterboarding is not 'just' waterboarding. It carries the hazard of permanent brain damage, for one.

[LadySmith]

LadySmith would make it really easy for me to get info out of her, but I was more than prepared to use the tools and training at my disposal to get answers. 

Please put away your tools and training. I'm on the verge to confessing to your avatar right now. 

 

All kidding aside, thank you for sharing the perspective of someone who's actually BTDT.

[roo_ster]

1. The person you're torturing is quite likely to be Joe Camelherder instead.

2. The people who undergo torture as part of their military training knowingly sign up for it. Medical personnel review the training process to avoid health damage.

3. Sleep deprivation is not 'just' sleep deprivation. Do it long enough and you'll drive the guy permanently insane.

4. Waterboarding is not 'just' waterboarding. It carries the hazard of permanent brain damage, for one.

MB

First and foremost, RTA(1).  IOW, spend the time to read the docs BHO dropped.  You might make fewer ill-informed statements after having done so.

1.  Oh, for the love of Pete, stop assuming our folks in service are Evil Bastards who seek to pick up random peasants and beat the snot out of them or are Stupid Bastards and take any random tip and start in on the guy hammer & tongs. 

Second, it is not torture(2), to use any of the enhanced techniques so described in the classified document dump.  You would know this if you RTA.

Last, "quite likely" is a fuzzy term, but indicates great probability.  Given the thousands of folks picked up over the years, the filters at various stages, the very small proportion of that first number to end up in Guantanamo or similar locations, and the small number of those terrorists documented to have been given vigorous interrogation, you really think it was "quite likely?"

2. The very few terrorists who get the more vigorous techniques are also self-selecting and have had the techniques in questioned review by med & psych personnel.  RTA.

3. Forced calisthenics are not 'just' calisthenics. Smoke Joe enough and you'll work him to death.  As with many things, at some point a difference in degree can become a difference in kind.

If one had RTA, one might know that the terrorists were monitored by med & psych personnel.  Also, that this risk was considered, the input of med & psych types sought, and strict limits placed on the use of these techniques so as to prevent serious physical or mental harm to the terrorist. 

4.  This was known and taken into consideration and would be known by all who had RTA.








(1) Read The Article.

(2) Not torture from either the legal or practical POV.  If you RTA, you would have gleaned the first, at the least.  Matter of fact, you would have known that the legality of such techniques was what initiated the discussions.

[Gewehr98]

2. The people who undergo torture as part of their military training knowingly sign up for it.

Ok, I wish I knew the curriculum before I went through the school, but that's known only to the staff and graduates, none of whom talk about it beforehand (for good reason).  It's a pass/fail system, and if you fail, you don't fly certain missions and platforms, period. The unit commander personally apologizes to each and every graduate during debriefing on the last day, and your fellow crewmembers and graduates will commiserate over a beer upon your return, but in the end you have to gut it out. It's a necessary evil, for the eventuality that one may get shot down and captured by governments unfriendly to the U.S., or singled out for special attention on a hijacked commercial airline flight overseas. 

You may never need to use the training, but it's burned into your gray matter regardless, just in case.  My ex-wife tried to shake me awake from a nightmare less than a week afterwards.  I woke up with my elbow and forearm crushing her neck as I pinned her to the floor in the bedroom.  Neither she nor I could believe that I was capable of such sub-conscious actions.

Trust me, it's not on their website, and I'd have serious second thoughts about that career path had I known what was coming my way.

We had guys with anxiety attacks when the instructors came to our squadron every year or so for refresher training - myself included. No leaves allowed, if refresher training wasn't accomplished, that individual was grounded from flying until it was.

Sleep deprivation is nothing, and there's a shopping list of techniques besides it and waterboarding, so don't get hung up on those two as some sort of egregious examples of mankind's ability to extract information. 

Jfruser speaks Truth with regards to the selection process for interrogation.  They aren't your garden variety Welcome Wagon hostesses, not by a long shot.

[longeyes]

And now Obama plans to regale the world, again, with photos of supposedly abused detainees.

I'm convinced that the sudden thrust into the world spotlight of alleged American-inflicted torture serves only one true purpose: to destroy what's left of America's belief in itself as a moral--and more to the point--morally exceptional nation.  It is the next step in the multicultural mission.

A moral "system" that equates a terrified man to the loss of a city isn't a system at all, nor is it moral; it is a form of malignant narcissism, a terminal form of megalomania that has, truly, "lost its moral bearings."

[ronnyreagan]

It's a necessary evil, for the eventuality that one may get shot down and captured by governments unfriendly to the U.S., or singled out for special attention on a hijacked commercial airline flight overseas.

I don't understand why people bring this up as if it means anything in relation to what is or isn't torture. We train our people to resist torture. Part of that training involves basically torturing them - and because of this when we do it to a prisoner it isn't torture?

The final irony: the torture techniques around which the SERE training was devised were used by Chinese interrogators during the Korean War, not to gather actionable intelligence but to force false confessions from captured U.S. soldiers — confessions that could then be used in anti-American propaganda

[longeyes]

The rising hue and cry about torture, fomented by a small number of people with a less than moral agenda (IMHO), is itself a form of torture, a way of waterboarding the American body politic.  Life is full of grim ironies.

***

What happend at Abu Graib, we are now being told, was "systemic and widespread"--in other words, it is as American as baseball, apple pie, and mom.

Funny the same people who want to unmask our inveterate villainy refuse to address the systemic and widespread barbarity in the cultures with whom we have so many ongoing problems.