Was harsh interrogation torture?

[thx1138]

http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2009/01/dealing-with-torturers.html

[hippifried]

There's a line that shouldn't be crossed. I'm not sure I can define it, but I know it when I see it. So does everybody else. In all situations where there's a potential for tension, there's always a line & we always know when we've crossed it, even if we don't see it until it's too late.

The real point is that we're Americans. We're supposed to stand for something. It's the other guys who are supposed to be the paranoid reactionaries. We're the ones who the rest of the world is supposed to want to emulate. Regardless of anybody's personal feelings toward anyone else, & regardless of what anyone else has ever done, we can't afford to cross the line & convince the rest of the world that we're just another gang of imperial thugs.

[Silcc69]

Ah the hell with that. If these guys are in fact conspirators against this country then use whatever method necessary to keep us safe.

[trish]

If these guys are in fact conspirators against this country...

What if it's not a fact? What if it's speculation, guesswork or a hunch? What if one of these guys is there because a warlord who doesn't like him turned him in for the five grand award? The whole point of due process is to ascertain the facts. With no due process, there are no facts.

"Was harsh interrogation torture?" Some of it definitely was and is. It seems ridiculous to me that there should be this gray area between what is and what isn't torture. If there's any doubt about whether some procedure is torture, then it is.

[El Nino]

Wow Tish, your tone has changed a lot over the past year.

[trish]

Wow Tish, your tone has changed a lot over the past year.
Maybe you’re being facetious…maybe not. If my tone has changed, I haven’t noticed. I hope its change you can believe in. But seriously, I believe I’ve always stood against torture [except in sex play :wink: ] and for due process. Perhaps it’s just my tone and not my positions. In any case we all evolve and grow. Thanks for noticing. 8)

[hippifried]

Ah the hell with that. If these guys are in fact conspirators against this country then use whatever method necessary to keep us safe.Yeah well... Torture doesn't work. It's an inefficient mathod of gaining incormation, so even if anyone thinks they can justify its use, they still can't use results as part of that justification. Use of torture is just a recruitment tool for one's enemies. It doesn't keep you safe. It paints a target on you. Respect is the best shield. You can't gain that by force.

[dafame]

Ah the hell with that. If these guys are in fact conspirators against this country then use whatever method necessary to keep us safe.

There you go again my man. This is another terrible statement. There are a couple of reasons why you can't do this.

For one it's a violation of international law. A law that we were involved with in its conception in the first place.

In addition to staining our reputation around the world as the leaders of the free world while openly committing and international crime, we are basically making the statement to the world that we don't give a fuck about them and there's nothing the can do about it because we're the Big Bad U.S.A... This is not the position that we want to be in.

Another thing this does is open up the possibility of our soldiers being tortured if and when any of them become P.O.W.'s and there really wouldn't be too much we could say about it.

Also you have to understand that if you can violate international law and our constitution under what the President deems a "Special Situation" then you're opening up the door for OUR constitutional rights to be taken away from us here. By giving a leader the power to violate the laws written in his or her country's constitution is opening up a can of worms that can be more easily opened by future leaders.

Plus, our government is well aware of the fact that there's a high likelihood that many of the men that we have illegally incarcerated are innocent.

[arnie666]

Ah the hell with that. If these guys are in fact conspirators against this country then use whatever method necessary to keep us safe.Yeah well... Torture doesn't work. It's an inefficient mathod of gaining incormation, so even if anyone thinks they can justify its use, they still can't use results as part of that justification. Use of torture is just a recruitment tool for one's enemies. It doesn't keep you safe. It paints a target on you. Respect is the best shield. You can't gain that by force.

Ah yes even more bollox that I would expect to be spouted on here. Torture isn't just an American invention you know.It isn't some kind of new method we have to extract intelligence. It has been used since time began.If it was so inefficient ,then why have countries even western civilised countries used it and are still using interrogation techniques that could be considered torture depending on how you consider the definition?

I tell you why ,because applying various amounts of physical and psychological pressure if done correctly can give you an enormous amount of human intel.The key is then analysing this intelligence to see how accurate any of it is.This should all be done by people with years of experience who have a clear set of guidelines on how to extract this intelligence.The problem was like much of the Bush administration it was done half arsed and sadly there were embarrassments.

Just because there are some high profile stories of American fuck ups in the media , so called experts who claim to be former 'interrogators' (often people who claim to be something they are not or exaggerate their involvement, people with poor performance/disciplinary records and psychological histories) which is then lapped up by the media doesn' tell you of the times it have saved lives or provided leads which has lead to arrests or the killings of some very naughty people.

[Oli]

Ah yes even more bollox that I would expect to be spouted on here. Torture isn't just an American invention you know.It isn't some kind of new method we have to extract intelligence. It has been used since time began.If it was so inefficient ,then why have countries even western civilised countries used it and are still using interrogation techniques that could be considered torture depending on how you consider the definition?

I tell you why ,because applying various amounts of physical and psychological pressure if done correctly can give you an enormous amount of human intel.The key is then analysing this intelligence to see how accurate any of it is.This should all be done by people with years of experience who have a clear set of guidelines on how to extract this intelligence.The problem was like much of the Bush administration it was done half arsed and sadly there were embarrassments.

Just because there are some high profile stories of American fuck ups in the media , so called experts who claim to be former 'interrogators' (often people who claim to be something they are not or exaggerate their involvement, people with poor performance/disciplinary records and psychological histories) which is then lapped up by the media doesn' tell you of the times it have saved lives or provided leads which has lead to arrests or the killings of some very naughty people.

Nice bit of moral equivalency. 'It's OK if it leads to positive results' is a poor way to judge something that is reprehensible to the civilized world.

We, the United States of America, have signed numerous international agreements vowing not to do exactly what we have been doing for the last 6 years. That John Yoo said it was technically outside the Geneva Conventions doesn't make it either legal or moral.

IMO, it cheapened us, endangered our soldiers now and in future conflicts and gave our enemies a recruiting tool all for questionable intelligence.

[hippifried]

Torture is unreliable. It always has been. The only reason people are tortured is because somebody thinks it's fun. Maybe we're looking at the wrong people to start with.

[trish]

Oli and Hippiefried are right on. Torture is immoral regardless of whether it yields results; and in fact it rarely if ever succeeds. The intelligence agencies and the military agree that enhanced interrogation techniques have been unreliable and inefficient. The resources and time spent tracking down dead-end "leads" demonstrates torture is vast waste of time. Besides that it definitely is not worth the political fallout that immoral practices tend to bring.

[hippifried]

A caveat:

As distressed as I am by the inhumanity shown by my government over the course of the last administration, I'm just as distressed by this MSNBC driven rush to create a prosecution frenzy over so called "war crimes". I don't have a problem with something like a "truth commission", but I don't see where criminal investigations are going to accomplish the goal of letting the American people know what's really been going on. Right now, all we have is piecemeal reports & lots of conjecture.

We have to be very careful how we approach this issue. I don't want to see more fiascos like "Whitewater" or "Watergate". Vindictiveness is counterproductive. We've got better things to do than tangle up the government & its resources on payback & witch hunts. President Bush is gone. President Obama has lots of political capital to spend on getting this country back on the right track. There shouldn't be a rush to flush all that capital down the toilet by revitalizing the lunatic fringe.

[trish]

http://www.slate.com/id/2210059/

[arnie666]

Oli and Hippiefried are right on. Torture is immoral regardless of whether it yields results; and in fact it rarely if ever succeeds. The intelligence agencies and the military agree that enhanced interrogation techniques have been unreliable and inefficient. The resources and time spent tracking down dead-end "leads" demonstrates torture is vast waste of time. Besides that it definitely is not worth the political fallout that immoral practices tend to bring.

There have been six occasions where the loss of airliners with the associated loss of life have been prevented by the use of torture. The question is whether you believe the lives of say 200 innocent people on each airliner is worth a westernised state losing the moral high ground and the dirty terrorist scumbag losing his or her fingernails.

I do think that we need to find a politically correct term for torture , I was thinking 'rigourous physical questioning'. Not only that but torture is such a wide ranging term. Many lefties would consider stress positons and a bit of white noise or having your eardrums blasted with Britney spears to be torture.I would agree about Britney ,in all honesty I would prefer a kicking.

My own opinion is torture is wrong except in extreme cases. For instance a well known recentish case in the 1980's I believe was the German Police asking a court for some kind of legal order so they could make a psycho sexyal child kidnapper 'talk' as they had intelligence that this girl would die soon. Permission was given he talked and the little girl was found alive.

Would you have said that was wrong and if so ,could you explain that to the little girls parents? Yes it is a soppy heart renching argument but then the left do love to trot out these arguments themselves when pleading for the 'rights' of some murderous paedophile when he has no functioning toilet in his cell.

[trish]

Of course it was wrong. But who said that some good things won't come from immoral acts? If you’re going to judge an action merely by its consequences, then you have to ask:

1) What are the consequences to our freedom and civil rights when we forego due process, suspend habeas corpus and restrain prisoners based on suspicion only? Remember, it’s due process that determines guilt in a free society not confessions extracted via “rigorous physical questioning".

2) How many al Qaeda recruits, how many insurgents, and how many suicide bombers has this horrendous policy of enhanced interrogation and indefinite detainment inspired? Have we ourselves inspired those six attempts on airliners? Does torture feed back into the cycle of violence?

3) And because of the increased number of the above, how many thousands of lives have been lost because we've been torturing prisoners?

4) How much time and money is wasted tracking down false leads extracted from people under torture, people who either know nothing or aren’t about to tell you anything worthwhile no matter what you do to them? Can you really show torture is an efficient method of acquiring information?

Torture is immoral even if very occasionally some good can come of it. And only the weakening of civil liberties and ill will await the nation that adopts torture as a policy.

Can we look the other way when a Jack Bauer tortures a citizen in the hopes of finding out where and when some evil plan is going down? I think the answer is no. We cannot endorse torture as an official policy. It’s immoral. So it’s got to be illegal. So what do we do if Jack is found out? He broke the law, so we bring him to trial, simple as that. If he actually prevented a tragedy, odds are a jury will acquit him. If his interrogation yielded bad information and the tragedy was not circumvented, Jack may have to spend some time in jail. That’s the risk Jack takes. Why do you suppose, “The government will disavow all knowledge of …etc.?” It is because we as a nation cannot condone actions as clearly immoral as is torture.

As least Jack works on the run in the field. He is one man making a spur of the moment decision. Gitmo was conceived in its entirety as an immoral institution. It has lost us credibility and respect, internationally and among our own citizens. It has to go, before it costs us more in the way of lost liberties, lost respect, ill-will and terrorist deeds.

[hippifried]

There have been six occasions where the loss of airliners with the associated loss of life have been prevented by the use of torture. Really? Got a list?

Sorry. I keep hearing about all the attacks & whatnot that have been avoided & averted since 9/11, but I ain't buying it. All I've seen so far is bumbling ineptitude & dumb luck.

Nobody's going to be hijacking any more airliners. Not because of anything done by government, but because the flying public won't put up with it. They're never going to leave it up to the authorities to handle the situation again. Been there done that, & the whole world watched over 3000 people die at the hands of 19 guys armed only with a couple of knives, plastic forks, & a bunch of chutzpah. Those days of that kind of passivity are long gone. It had nothing to do with Guantanamo.

[El Nino]

umm, look deeper into the story

[hippifried]

No. It's not my job to research somebody else's claims. If you have something, show me.

[El Nino]

show yourself

[hippifried]

You don't have anything. you don't know what you're talking about. Still.

[thx1138]

John Ashcroft: "we were wrong to torture" http://www.prisonplanet.com/homeland-security-chief-we-were-wrong-to-torture.html

[thx1138]

OOps: Make that Tom Ridge. NOT Ashcroft.