The Slippery Slope

[Dumpy]

I hope you took my posts in the good humor in which they were meant.

Remember:

 

[BrianFromWA]

Water boarding has been legally defined as torture since the Spanish Inquisition. The United States has prosecuted others for this practice.

Short answer, yes. Maxiep's belief is irrelevant. These practices are legally defined as torture both in the US and by international treaty that the US has signed.

As for the story on the LA plot, please, read the news, not the talking points. That talking point has been debunked for a very long time. The so called plot, which seems to have been nothing but talk, was discovered well before the torture memos and the capture of the two so called suspects.

As to how many people to kill because I oppose torture: The US military and the FBI, hardly liberal bastions, have refused to participate in torture because 1) it is illegal 2) according to these experts it does not work. A person will say anything, true or not, will say what they know their captor wants to hear, to make the torture stop.

The US was determined to get information about Iraq's illegal weapons and ties to 9/11. The memos show they were frustrated by their inability to get such admissions from prisoners. They literally tortured harder. But there were no illegal weapons and no ties to 9/11. Yet I'd bet someone finally said so just to stop torture.

My question: how many are you willing to torture and kill in the name of "defending freedom"?

If you ask a woman for sex and she refuses, and then you get a bunch of your buddies, beat her to a pulp until she submits, you can say it "worked".

I don't want to get into too much detail, but at SERE training for every Air Force, Navy and Marine Flight Crew (I don't know about Army Helo pilots), things are done to the "students" that follow the definition of torture that you just proposed. The US military does it as training, partially b/c we seem to be the only participant in the Geneva Accords still left. They weren't followed by our adversaries in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I, Iraq II or Afghanistan. The military doesn't consider it torture. I don't know about the FBI.

It seems (and I don't know the story, just what was posted here) that in the case of the LA bombings the terrorists divulged information that they normally wouldn't have, without physical harm coming to them. They know better than most that the US soldiers or CIA men or whoever it was doing the interrogation cannot physically hurt them, and yet they still felt the need to divulge information that saved thousands of lives.

Look at what you're defining as torture. "Simulated drowning". In the Abu Ghraib events (which I thought were disgusting, btw, but not torture) people were taken pictures of while mostly nude or in compromising positions. I don't remember (though, as always, I'm happy to have someone educate me) if prisoners were "beaten to a pulp", raped, or otherwise harmed.

I read the Washington Post article by Evan Wallach a couple years ago saying how waterboarding is torture partially b/c we convicted Japanese war criminals of it (I'm not sure that's what crandc was referring to, but it's an article others have used in the past as the "torture proof"). I don't know about the specific cases that Judge Wallach brought up, but I think those were ancillary charges, b/c to my recollection (and I've studied the war in the Pacific and its aftermath a bunch) most Japanese war crime convictions were based upon the mal-(or no-)nourishment of the POWs, beheadings of captured troops, rape and pillage of the overtaken populace, and cannibalism of the victims. Not making them watch South Park or pretending to drown them.

Personally, I'm willing to scare criminals into telling the truth about things that might hurt other people. Isn't that what a plea-bargain is? If the criminal tells the truth about who they're working with/for or other aspects of a case the investigators can't find out, they don't have non-life-threatening things happen to them (like more jail time, etc.) that they don't want? I don't see much difference b/w scaring a criminal with more jail time to get the truth, and scaring a criminal with pretend drowning to get the truth. Each knows that the cop/interrogator can't actually hurt them. Unless you're saying that we've intentionally hurt criminals and gotten away with it. Which I haven't seen yet.

 

[barfo]

I don't see much difference b/w scaring a criminal with more jail time to get the truth, and scaring a criminal with pretend drowning to get the truth. Each knows that the cop/interrogator can't actually hurt them.

How do they know they aren't really being drowned? Do the interrogators tell them not to worry? Or does every prisoner know about waterboarding? Maybe they do now, but I'd never heard of it a year or two ago. Of course, I'm not a prisoner, either.

barfo

 

[BrianFromWA]

Let's put it into another context.

You get arrested, for, say, insert the violent crime. You didn't do it, and you're certainly not going to cop to it. The "bad cop" comes in and starts looking at you with menacing scowls, flexing, etc. You probably start laughing b/c you know there's no way on earth he can hurt you. B/c then HE goes to jail.

Even the people fired over Abu Ghraib were fired for making fun of the detainees and taking pictures. As I said, it's disgusting and shouldn't have happened, but they were not harmed and certainly not "tortured".

 

[barfo]

Yeah, but even in that scenario, there are actually bad cops. People occasionally die from police beatings. I'm not saying it happens a huge percentage of the time, but if I'm arrested for a crime I didn't commit, I'm not laughing at the cops.

War is a whole other ballgame, I'd guess (no personal experience here). Sure, maybe we know that the prisoner won't be harmed, but it seems to me that the enemy might actually believe some of the terrible things he's been told about us, and that he wouldn't be sure at all that he wasn't going to die.

barfo