Slander! The CIA's version is *totally* different from the Inquisition's.

...

When they weren't using funnels, the Inquistors used linen for their simulated drowning. Not cellophane!

Posted September 11, 2006 8:30 PM by bellatrys

You know, I was just listening to a rebroadcast of Junior Evil being interviewed by Matt Lauer. Junior Evil was being asked about torture, and kept insisting that he "was doing everything he could to protect Americans", and that he had to use what ever means necessary to get information from people "taken on the battlefield." Battlefields like Detroit, and Buffalo, and JFK Airport, I presume.

Jeralyn's list is disquieting, but I note that it leaves out my favorite of all the "techniques" used by the US to "control prisoners". That would be the "knee strike".

Army pathologists said the two detainees, identified as Habibullah and Dilawar, died as a result of repeated kneeings to their legs. The men died Dec. 4, 2002, and Dec. 10, 2002, respectively.

Brand, who's charged with involuntary manslaughter in Dilawar's death, said in a sworn statement read at the hearing that sharply kneeing a suspect in the legs was a common technique used to subdue prisoners. He said he'd used the technique to gain control of more than 20 detainees during his 10-and-a-half months of service in Afghanistan.

(snip)

Medical examiner Lt. Col. Kathleen Ingwersen said the forced immobility might have contributed to the blood clot that caused the 30-year-old Habibullah's heart to stop. According to an Army investigation, Habibullah was so badly hurt by repeated knee strikes that "even if he survived, both legs would have had to be amputated."

Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the pathologist who examined Dilawar, 35, testified via telephone that the severe beating might have aggravated a pre-existing heart condition. She said the tissue in Dilawar's legs had been so damaged by repeated blows that "it was essentially crumbling and falling apart."

http://sumoud.tao.ca/?q=comment/reply/230

I haven't seen any evidence that this "technique" has been prohibited.

Posted September 11, 2006 8:33 PM by beth meacham

I can't say how I feel about this, the language has no words.

I can say that what I know of torture makes this list far less innocous to me than it seems to many.

"The Stand-up" (making a victim stand for long periods of time) can lead to death. The legs swell, from being vertical, and the muscles get tired and the veins start to back up (which adds to the pain), and then a clot happens, and the person has a stroke.

People who will do these sorts of things are evil.

Posted September 11, 2006 8:34 PM by Terry Karney

These have all been in the news for years, BTW. I've been saying for years that every time Bush claims that we don't torture, he's lying his ass off.

And of course, there's the torture that even falls under the "causes permanent damage to organs" type that we outsourced.

Posted September 11, 2006 8:36 PM by Josh Jasper

Speaking of waterboarding: I took a course in kayaking while I was in Scotland. Playing a game (this was an army deal, we, having mastered the basics of getting from A to B were now playing keep away with a plastic shark) I was flipped over.

I had been trained in what to do, how to clear the skirt, and bail-out of the boat and swim to clear space and surface.

For a split second I panicked. I'd known I was going under, took a big breath and then realised I was stuck, underwater. I managed to regain my rational mind and do the drill (so that the next time I got flipped it was old hat).

So I, trained to deal with it, knowing I was about to be underwater, still had the lizard-brain kick in.

Waterboarding is torture.

Posted September 11, 2006 8:42 PM by Terry Karney

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn discusses this one in The Gulag Archipelago, in the section on NKVD tortures. He, too, says this one always works. Keep anyone awake long enough and they’ll break. My question is: if this one works so well, why have interrogators been using other methods that have far more potential for lasting physical harm?

(emphasis mine)

I'm certain #4 isn't benign at all, considering that there have been reports of video gamers in Korea and China dying from staying up too long to play their video games. (Reportedly, 50 hours in the case of the Korean video gamer.) Certainly, by itself, and in smaller chunks of time, it has less cause for damage perhaps. But combined with the other treatment, it seems a recipe for heart failure or other issues.

Posted September 11, 2006 8:47 PM by Piscusfiche

Although The "water cure" could kill outright, as testimony by US soldiers before a Congressional committee revealed.

And Dilawar's death shows that not even blows on bone are safe...

100 years, 1902 - 2002.

Posted September 11, 2006 8:49 PM by bellatrys

It's just torture with an extra requirement--you have to be able to phrase its description in such a way that most Americans can convince themselves it's not torture, exactly. "We're not torturing them, we're just keeping them up all night, letting them get a little chilly, and dumping some water on their heads."

The standard here is really intuitive. If the Iranians captured some Americans, and subjected them to this, what would we call it?

Posted September 11, 2006 8:56 PM by albatross

So much for the high road. These sick f-ing bstrds built a gawddamn subway and tunneled the country straight to hell.

Posted September 11, 2006 8:58 PM by Greg London

Last week, Bush gave his "Oh! you mean THOSE secret torture camps" speech.

He's proposing changing the law to make coerced confessions admissible in his new Star Chamber courts.

Which means that he has admitted that his prisoners were tortured into confessing, and could not otherwise be convicted in an American court.

And he made it sound as if he was personally involved with approving the exact techniques of 'interrogation' used. Which ends his pretence of plausible deniability: George Bush knew of and approved of torture.

Which we can now add to his war crimes indictment.

Posted September 11, 2006 9:04 PM by Bob Oldendorf

In between, abroad and at home - since, who knows for sure?

Posted September 11, 2006 9:09 PM by bellatrys

Hence the feds' interest in Terry Schiavo: if you can get the courts to agree that someone who's in a 'persistent vegetative state' can actually respond to sounds and make intellible mumblings, you can have a trial with someone who's brain-dead, and get away with it.

It's torture. Having a trial for someone who is brain-dead is not a way to avoid war crimes trials. Having trials without a real defense (witnesses, cross-examination, the whole nine yards) doesn't do it either, IMO.

Posted September 11, 2006 9:15 PM by P J Evans

I continue to wait for people to notice what the medical literature says about the various causes of hyperalgesia.

Posted September 11, 2006 9:30 PM by j h woodyatt

If Muhammad and Binalshibh ever go on public trial, they'll gladly confess to masterminding the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites, and then beg to be shot.

Posted September 11, 2006 9:53 PM by Jon Meltzer

What's really saddest about this nonsense is this:

Torture can make anyone talk. What it cannot do is give the interrogator any assurances that the victim is telling the truth, or telling the truth without a bodyguard of lies... or that the victim really knows what is of interest to the interrogator.

And the less said about interrogator presuppositions of what the victim has to say, the better. Even civilians engaging in only "third degree" understand that; ever heard of a false confession?

Posted September 11, 2006 9:58 PM by C.E. Petit

PJ in 43,

I would think the Bush administration's interest would lie in preventing the trial of the brain-dead, considering who's heading it.

Posted September 11, 2006 10:00 PM by Nancy C

Will the first act of the next President be an indictment of this one, or an undated pardon (just in case)...

Posted September 11, 2006 10:02 PM by marty

Nancy C, I don't think they've noticed yet. He is still walking around, after all. (How he does it is another question.)

(By the way, I saw those light-up needles at Michael's. The big ends must be for the bulbs. Maybe they need to look at LEDs or wheat-grain lamps instead.)

Posted September 11, 2006 10:11 PM by P J Evans

>4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.

>Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn discusses this one in The Gulag Archipelago, in the section on NKVD tortures. He, too, says this one always works. Keep anyone awake long enough and they’ll break. My question is: if this one works so well, why have interrogators been using other methods that have far more potential for lasting physical harm?

As someone else noted above this is as much torture as the other techniques. First - keep someone in the same position especially a standing position for a long period of time (40 hours!) and you do immense physical and psychological damage.

Professor Alfred McCoy author of “A Question of Torture" in an interview on Democracy Now Feb-17 2006

http://democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522228

>Oh, it's very simple. Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this research, and he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. It didn't take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain. All he did was had student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately breakdown.

>And if you look at many of those photographs, what do they show? They show people with bags over their head. If you look at the photographs of the Guantanamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr. Hebb’s original cubicle.

>Now, then the second major breakthrough that the C.I.A. had came here in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the C.I.A. studied Soviet K.G.B. torture techniques, and they found that the most effective K.G.B. technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand -- okay, you're not beating them, they have no resentment -- you tell them, “You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down.” And so, as they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they suppurate, hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down.

>Now, if you look at the other aspect of those photos, you’ll see that they're short-shackled -- okay? -- that they're long-shackled, that they're made -- several of those photos you just showed, one of them with a man with a bag on his arm, his arms are straight in front of him, people are standing with their arms extended, that's self-inflicted pain. And the combination of those two techniques -- sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain -- is the basis of the C.I.A.'s technique.

Posted September 11, 2006 10:13 PM by Gar Lipow

The first comment on the article about waterboarding:

Typical for ABC News. Go ahead and trot out a picture (probably faked based on Brian Ross' record) to go along with a story from unnamed sources and provide NO verification of facts. Your efforts to terrorize the American public based on distortion and misrepresentation are clearly coordinated with Terrorsts. I hope you achieve your desired state of gratification the next time a few thousand Americans die as you seem to hope for.

You make me sick!

...I'm led to wonder: Does it hurt to be that stupid?

Posted September 11, 2006 10:17 PM by Annalee Flower Horne

Annalee, I think it hurts to be that stupid and fear that you've been terribly mistaken in your leaders and ideology.

Posted September 11, 2006 10:24 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

What happens when that cognitive dissonance gets resolved? When the evidence becomes too hard to ignore?

Maybe it never does.

It seems like either we get a horrifying backlash from this stuff, or we get a national blind spot that will persist for years.

Posted September 11, 2006 10:46 PM by albatross

I can see three reasons that sleep deprivation isn't popular with torturers: one, it takes time and patience, two, the victim will hallucinate, making their information of questionable value, and three, permanent harm is probably possible after all.

Posted September 11, 2006 10:48 PM by Randolph Fritz

Torture can make anyone talk. What it cannot do is give the interrogator any assurances that the victim is telling the truth, or telling the truth without a bodyguard of lies... or that the victim really knows what is of interest to the interrogator.

That's why you have to do it to a lot of people, then see if their stories match up. I mean, to be thorough.

Posted September 11, 2006 10:55 PM by DonBoy

Annalee, I think it hurts to be that stupid and fear that you've been terribly mistaken in your leaders and ideology.

I seem to remember a poster from my first-grade classroom that said "An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."

But hey, if the right wingnuts had ever gotten that memo, creationism would have gone the way of the dinosaur over a century ago.

"Our FOUR chief weapons are surprise, fear, ruthless [in]efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the [government]."

Posted September 11, 2006 11:02 PM by Annalee Flower Horne

William Gibson tells a little story about interrogation.

Posted September 11, 2006 11:55 PM by Alexey Merz

#8 albatross: The standard here is really intuitive. If the Iranians captured some Americans, and subjected them to this, what would we call it?

Last night on The Price of Security Ted Koppel posed this very question to to [Maj. Gen.?] Harris, the current commander at Guantanamo, and he said it wouldn't be torture then either.

Which is horseshit.

Posted September 12, 2006 12:35 AM by Nell

Randolph sez: I can see three reasons that sleep deprivation isn't popular with torturers: one, it takes time and patience, two, the victim will hallucinate, making their information of questionable value, and three, permanent harm is probably possible after all.

I think we've already determined that by their methods of interrogation, torturers don't care about points two and three. If they cared about accurate information, they wouldn't be forcing confessions in the first place. The time factor might be a bit of a turn-off though, particularly if you're the sort that wants to see visible results immediately.

Posted September 12, 2006 12:46 AM by PiscusFiche

Randolph (#23) Sleep dep is a popular tool with a lot of interrogators, because as tortures go, it's mild. It's also one which the person who still has some scruples can convince themselves isn't really torture (because being in the Army, esp. in a combat zone, one gets to enjoy a lot of time spent with inadequate sleep). Hell, done with great judition it might not be torture, but the amount of oversight would have to be serious, and I still have a problem with it. But it does work, keep someone awake and a lot of the resistance they have breaks down, without actually imposing enough threat that they are afraid. They become more tractable, without becoming as unreliable.

DonBoy: (#24) Give me an agenda, and the right to apply torture, and everyone I talk to will tell a story so similar that it must be true.

Nell (#27) While the general is correct (and shows a pleasant consistency) you are right to say the politicians, and citizenry would think these practices to be torture, were the practised on us. Hell, we have a track record of calling most of them torture, and that in the recent past.

Posted September 12, 2006 12:54 AM by Terry Karney

Assuming you don't know anything important, or even if you think you do, can anyone think of a good reason not to immediately agree to, sign, admit or recant whatever an interrogator wanted to hear (something plausible, but not true) the nanosecond you got Shown the Instruments? It was good enough for Galileo.

Posted September 12, 2006 1:45 AM by Vian

The interesting thing is that these are all a certain *kind* of technique. I'm reminded of some things taught to me in a self-defense class once. (Bear with me. I'll have a point.) They taught moves like using knuckles to pinch hard (knuckles can pinch with some powerful crushing force) at certain nerves and soft spots--extremely painful, potentially damaging to nerves--with the note that, well, what are they going to say? 'Officer, she pinched me?' It'd be laughed off. It sounds like nothing.

An open-hand slap? That sounds like nothing--they're not *punching* the guy, Officer. I mean, what, he's whining about a little slap to the face? :ole he'd get from being too forward on a date? To get his attention? (No mention that it's probably a lot of slaps, and that slaps to various places--abdomen, say, or temple, or ear, or kidney--can do permanent damage, especially administered by a trained professional. Sometimes more than a closed fist.)

Making a guy stand in one place for a while? Oh, man, yeah, sure, that's not torture. What're they going to complain about next, *loud noises*? My neighbor's kid plays loud music. I have to stand in one place at work. That's clearly not torture, either, right? (No mention of blood clots, or days on end, or psychological damage. No mention that the CIA's definition of loud noises and bright lights and sleep deprivation are different than your neighbor's kids'.)

Dunking a guy in water? I do that all the damn time at the pool. It sounds like taking a shower. What are these people complaining about? Whine, whine, whine. Next thing you know, they'll be calling tasteless jail food torture, or yelling. Liberal pansies can't stomach doing what it takes--they can't even stomach little bitsy things like making a guy--a terrorist!--stand still!

...and so on, ad nauseam. It's not just the euphemistic names for these torture techniques; it's using ones that can be summed up in a way that not only can they be dismissed with a laugh by people who don't understand what's going on, they make anyone arguing against the use of torture look really, really foolish. C'mon, Officer, I just pinched the guy. Big strong guy like that? It's not like I eviscerated him and stuck him in an Iron Maiden, right? I did something much more sophisticated and psychologically damaging. You wimps keep calling that *torture*, you'll call anything torture!
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Posted September 12, 2006 1:59 AM by little light

Vian (#30): No. The problem is, for certain values of problem, that they might expect you to know things you don't, and you won't have a clue what they are.

But yes, given a certain expectation of torture for tellig the truth, and nothing to be gained from refraining to answer, then talk.

The trouble comes when the interogator is certain that 1: torture give reliable results, and (this is where torture gets really ugly) only by the use of torture can results be obtained.

In that circumstance, though it seems counterintutive, one ought to bear up for just long enough to convince the sick bastards, that it was the torture (and not merely enlightened self-interest) which caused you to talk.

Otherwise they will feel the need to get creative.

Posted September 12, 2006 2:03 AM by Terry Karney

Terry:

"The trouble comes when the interogator is certain that 1: torture give reliable results, and (this is where torture gets really ugly) only by the use of torture can results be obtained.

In that circumstance, though it seems counterintutive, one ought to bear up for just long enough to convince the sick bastards, that it was the torture (and not merely enlightened self-interest) which caused you to talk."

Re sleep deprivation: I wonder whether you could produce that effect by feeding your captive Provigil at appropriate intervals? The stuff doesn't keep you awake so much as it makes it difficult or impossible to sleep.

Posted September 12, 2006 2:21 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I'm reminded of a rather grim piece of advice, namely "If you are caught, lie often, lie repeatedly, mix the truth in with the lies, so by the time you can't help but tell the truth, it will be impossible to tell what is truth and what is a lie."

Posted September 12, 2006 2:25 AM by xeger

albatross #8 & Nell #27 "If the Iranians captured some Americans, and subjected them to this, what would we call it?"

Wasn't it something similar that the North Koreans were alleged to have done to prisoners during the Korean War, and were vilified for?

The 'mirror method' is very useful sometimes. Just swap over characters playing roles and see if your attitude changes, eg, having UN inspectors in to audit the US nuclear, biological & chemical arsenal.

(I don't know if/how many Australians, or other nationalities in the UN forces, were captured, or even the numbers the different countries deployed. Like the Malayan Emergency, it has largely slipped under the radar of popular historic consciousness, which tends to leap from WWII to Vietnam via a generalized 'Cold War' in the fifties.)

Posted September 12, 2006 2:58 AM by Mez

I can''t figure out why they don't use scopalomine, or whatever the name for "truth serum" is. Probably illegal, and requires skilled interrogation, but seems to me to be less immoral than torture.

For Torture-in-a-Pill ... Some months ago I was prescribed Erythromycin, a common antibiotic, for an inner-ear infection. Took one tablet. One at a time, pain receptor centers in my brain fired-off, briefly, in rapid, random, rotation. For about four hours. I figured out what must be happening (none of the muscles or organs cramped or emitted unusual heat, or sparks), didn't go to the ER, and remained ...erm... about as sane as I usually am, but anyone who can find & replicate the cause for this extremely-unusual drug reaction could sell it to the Secretary of Torture for a fortune. (Unless, of course, those guys simply enjoy physically torturing people.) After the first administration, the threat of another would, I think, cause anyone to admit anything.

Posted September 12, 2006 3:16 AM by Don Fitch

Teresa: Yes, sort of. What I'd do (and this was a slightly less than theoretical problem for me) is wait until the questions started to get me hit when I didn't answer, and then steer the answers to fit the new questions; from the follow up to positive responses.

Pretty soon I figured I'd have to start lying, so I studied up on the subjects I thought would be likely to be of interest, so the lies would be credible.

For things about which no truth was possible (say war crimes I had committed, or other propaganda sorts of things) one just has to roll with it, and decide how much principle is worth how much abuse.

A painful calculus to be sure.

At times it's pondering a quick death, versus a long one; which is part of why torture is evil.

Don Fitch Scope, and Sodium Pentathol don't make one tell the truth, they make one want to be agreable. As such they take amazing amounts of training to use at all well, and the results are still only moderately reliable (because one can't know what little tics, turns of phrase and other subtle responses will cause the subject to think that's what one wants to hear).

That's part of why they aren't allowed in the collecting of evidence for trials.

The other reason is people who believe in torture don't see torture in the same way (as making someone tell you what they think you want to hear), and so it's seen as reliable.

Posted September 12, 2006 4:48 AM by Terry Karney

I don't want to trivialise what is a very serious and necessary discussion but I thought you all might be interested in the following.

My younger son was telling me over breakfast what they'd done in English class yesterday. They'd been working collectively on Wanted posters. Which had featured a raft of storybook baddies and popstars - and by popular agreement, George W Bush, for crimes against humanity.

Once I'd stopped choking on my cereal, I thought about that. A class of ten and eleven year olds in prosperous rural central England isn't going to come up with this based on in-depth knowledge of all the facts and facets of events going back to when they'd barely started school. But it's going to be a reflection of what they catch in passing on the TV news and primarily what they overhear their parents and grandparents saying at home.

David Cameron*, current Conservative leader is the local MP. This is about as mainstream-right wing an area as you'll find in the UK, old-style Shire Tories and die-hard Thatcherites all round.

And this perception of the current Bush administration is sufficiently prevalent locally for ten and eleven year olds to have picked up on it.

*Conservative canvassers knocking on our door asking if they can rely on our vote can expect to be told, 'not while there's breath in my body'.

Posted September 12, 2006 5:23 AM by Juliet E McKenna

Thank you, Juliet. That's a great thing to wake up to.

Posted September 12, 2006 5:28 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Terry: my own personal reaction to sleep deprivation, with which I am entirely too well acquainted, is pretty thoroughgoing crankiness; "tractable" isn't in it, though poor judgement definitely is.

I daresay the reason torture is preferred to drugs (apart from simple sadism, of course) is that pain is more trusted than pleasure.

Posted September 12, 2006 7:01 AM by Randolph Fritz

#37: Terry, that thought about pre-researching plausible lies: just imagine what a science-fiction fan might come up with.

"There was this guy from the CIA, and he had us trying to guess which of some funny symbols he was thinking of..."

It makes you wonder about some of the Cold War defectors and their stories.

Posted September 12, 2006 7:18 AM by Dave Bell

Darius Rejali describes how tortures like forced standing were developed to leave less evidence, not to be less brutal.

This law review article describes how Bush's legal eagles are as dishonest as they are depraved. The author of the infamous Bybee Memo developed a definition of "severe pain" - the "organ failure or death" standard - from statutes regarding health insurance benefits.

Posted September 12, 2006 7:25 AM by Andy Vance

To look at this in a somewhat different light, this is why I think that a Democratic win this November or even a Democratic president in 2008 is not going to solve things. The rot is too deep to cure just by changing governments. At best, a lot of people will need to be fired or arrested as well, at worst a full scale revolution is needed.

Posted September 12, 2006 8:15 AM by Martin Wisse

Martin,

I pray for a revolution at the ballot box.

Posted September 12, 2006 8:58 AM by Nancy C

Martin Wisse is right. We've had this rot since McCarthy, and arguably since colonial days.

Already we're getting the usual calls for "national reconciliation", "moving on", and "Democrats have to show they are better than that".

Well, no. Before we move on, we need to reestablish justice in the United States of America. That means impeachments, trials, prison sentences, asset confiscations, and lifetime banning from public office.

Posted September 12, 2006 9:03 AM by Jon Meltzer

Let's consider the, ahem, logic of the Shrub maladministration:

(1) We are the good guys.

(2) They are the bad guys.

(3) They want to hurt us.

(4) We have to stop them.

(5) So that we can get reëlected (for some values of 'we').

(6) Therefore we have to find out what they plan.

(7) They don't want to tell us.

(8)So we have to make them.

(9) Because they're the bad guys it's perfectly okay to hurt them.

(10) Because we're the good guys we have a right to defend ourselves by any means we believe necessary (the sound you hear is Malcolm X rolling in his grave).

(11)Since we're the good guys, God is on our side.

(12)If we have to do any harsh or cruel thing to defend ourselves God will forgive us.

(13) It's okay to torture because we're the good guys and God will forgive us.

And...

(14) In any case when we do it it isn't really torture.

(The tremor you are now feeling is the result of John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Luther King simultaneously rolling in their graves.)

Posted September 12, 2006 9:05 AM by Fragano Ledgister

(11a) Because we are born again and saved, we are predestined to go to heaven, so like good vulgar Calvinists we may do what we will without consequence.

Posted September 12, 2006 9:12 AM by Jon Meltzer

John Meltzer #47: Good point!

Posted September 12, 2006 9:21 AM by Fragano Ledgister

Note: I suspect this predestination interpretation is not what Calvin himself believed, but what he did believe is really a subject for another thread.

Posted September 12, 2006 9:43 AM by Jon Meltzer

Call me paranoid, but I read
medical care arranged by the CIA
combined with
They withheld medication.
and I'm wondering what exactly they're getting people hooked on, and what it would get written up as if they didn't survive withdrawal.

Posted September 12, 2006 11:10 AM by DQ

It's interesting to me (as a foreign observer) that some Democrat sympathists seem to almost believe no Muslim in the world means harm to the US, yet they paint all Republicans as bloodthirsty sadists who will gladly torture anyone just for fun.

Don't you think some of those folks might genuinely believe this could yeild valuable information that could help save lives?

Posted September 12, 2006 11:18 AM by Meagen

You seem to have missed the one blatantly obvious bit of torture... standing for 40 hours.

(Come to think of it, there's one other issue that's missing from all of these discussions. How is prisoner compliance enforced? These are interrogation methods... but what if the prisoner refuses to stay standing? How is that enforced? If prisoners are beaten for refusing to stand, then beating up a prisoner isn't, technically speaking, an "interrogation" method.)

Posted September 12, 2006 11:19 AM by John Palmer

#51: Don't you think some of those folks might genuinely believe this could yeild valuable information that could help save lives?

No. Because it doesn't work. It gives you bad information. It gives you bad information, that in the best case, wastes valuable time and manpower and in the worst case leads to thousands of needless deaths.

And either they know this and are doing it for fun or show or they don't, and are criminally negligent.

And even if it did work (which it doesn't), a basic part of morality is not doing things that might be convenient or useful because they are wrong.

Posted September 12, 2006 11:37 AM by BSD

Teresa in #33: Re sleep deprivation: I wonder whether you could produce that effect by feeding your captive Provigil at appropriate intervals? The stuff doesn't keep you awake so much as it makes it difficult or impossible to sleep.

Not necessarily-- when I was prescribed the stuff a year or two ago for hypersomnia, at first 50mg/day kept me alert and active instead of asleep all day. After several months, even 200mg-doses weren't keeping me awake anymore. But it's probably a bit much to expect most (or even any) of the prisoners to have the same wonky brain chemistry as me.

Posted September 12, 2006 11:49 AM by Julie L.

#51 - Nice little straw man you have there.

I don't know any democrats who believe that there doesn't exist a muslim in the world who means harm to their nation. But bombing the crap out of and torturing those of that population who meant your nation no harm quickly changes their indifference to hatred. And that's what the current US administration has done. The western world is less safe than 5 years ago, the US is turning into a war-criminal-harbouring police state, and people who call themselves "good republicans" are going along with it. Pathetic little dupes.

Posted September 12, 2006 12:00 PM by Paul Lalonde

Meagen, because even Moussad has disavowed torture and they've actually been in the 24 Hour to Detonation scenario (as unlikey as it is).

Sure there are people who mean us harm. Shoot them on the battlefield. Fire until you run out of ammo or the body stops moving. But once they're in your custody they are your responsibility.

I could write a book about terrorist goals and methodologies but one of the terrorists mid-term goals is to force their target to violate their basic principles to prosecute their struggle against the terrorists. This gives the terrorists advantages. This proves the moral "decline" (for lack of better word) of their target.

In short, being stipped of/abandoning our rights, violating our basic humanity and acting in a barbaric manner, all serve the goals of the terrorists. I'm not being sarcastic here. By igniting a "War" against them gives them political standing (proof that their ideas have some power we have to stop), changing our behavior this way, abandoning basic standards, begins the breaking of the social contract between the governed and the government. This is a terrorist goal.

Posted September 12, 2006 12:06 PM by Steve Buchheit

If you say "The Muslims are all bloodthirsty murders and we can't have peace in this country until we kill them all" on a public forum, people will call you racist, or at least say you're vastly oversimplifying the question.

If you say "The Republicans are all bloodthirsty murders and we can't have peace in this country until we kill them all", a disturbing number of people will agree with you.

Posted September 12, 2006 12:10 PM by Meagen

Also, it's interesting how word choice can make something seem different. You say "stress-and-duress interrogation" and it brings to mind the image of the movie cop beating the movie arsonist until he confesses which school the bomb is under. You say "torture" and it brings to mind American soldiers coming back from Vietnam with their fingers cut off and their legs horribly broken.

Posted September 12, 2006 12:19 PM by Meagen

#58 - The movie cop beating the arsonist is just a way to de-sensitize the population to the use of torture. It's a fantasy put forth by the worst kind of writer. In fiction torture always seems to produce correct information, except when applied to our hero, who nobly resists then misdirects.

US "approved" torture techniques kill and permanently maim people. There are at least two recorded deaths of prisonners in US hands dying to having their knees repeatedly kicked. Lovely. And popular televison (can anyone say "24"?) just re-inforces the stereotype that torture is acceptable when done by the "good" guys.

I'm looking forward to seeing a change back to civility.

Posted September 12, 2006 12:36 PM by Paul Lalonde

If you say "The Republicans are all bloodthirsty murders and we can't have peace in this country until we kill them all", a disturbing number of people will agree with you.

Few of them are here, though.

I know a number of Republicans who are perfectly reasonable people who hold views that are incompatible with my own--I'll not say "some of my best friends are Republicans", because honestly they aren't, but I know a bunch I can have a civil conversation with.

Then there are people like Carl Rove and Dick (never was a name more apt) Cheney. We can't have peace in this country until they and their ilk are no longer in power...and while I admit that, in my darker hours, killing them seems a fine way of removing them from power, I'd rather not go to the violent revolution stage just yet.

The difference between me and the morons currently botching up my country is that I can look at a person, know a few things about them, and reserve judgement*. I don't automatically assume that every Republican I meet is an evil, power-hungry bastard out to get me and mine. I judge people on their actions, not their thumbnail descriptions. And most of the people here also have this capacity.

This is a long way of saying that the denizens of Making Light are not going to oblige you in your attempts to paint us as knee-jerk Republican-haters. You'll get just as much excoriation for saying "all Republicans are evil" as you'd get for "all Muslims are evil".

*That and I have ethics--I never thought I'd say this, but thank you, Ann Coulter, for providing that phrase.

Posted September 12, 2006 12:37 PM by Carrie S.

#57 : if you don't want us to say that "all Republicans are evil", then you, the "non-evil Republican", need damn well get the evil people out of your party and stop your party's evil actions.

Got it?

Posted September 12, 2006 12:49 PM by Jon Meltzer

Meagen:

"If you say "The Muslims are all bloodthirsty murders and we can't have peace in this country until we kill them all" on a public forum, people will call you racist, or at least say you're vastly oversimplifying the question.

If you say "The Republicans are all bloodthirsty murders and we can't have peace in this country until we kill them all", a disturbing number of people will agree with you."

"It's interesting to me (as a foreign observer) that some Democrat sympathists seem to almost believe no Muslim in the world means harm to the US, yet they paint all Republicans as bloodthirsty sadists who will gladly torture anyone just for fun."

I'm sure you'd never mean to imply that anyone here holds views that even vaguely match that description.

"Don't you think some of those folks might genuinely believe this could yeild valuable information that could help save lives?"

I can point you to some older threads on Making Light if you'd like to learn more about how torture doesn't work.

Posted September 12, 2006 1:11 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

It is not wise, nor ethical, to advocate killing people of different political persuasions than your own.

GET A CLUE: Killing someone associated with ~any~ movement tends to make the victim a martyr in the eyes of their fellows, and often others of different views will see them in this light as well, NO MATTER WHAT THEY THOUGHT OF THE INDIVIDUAL WHEN HE/SHE WAS ALIVE.

If you truly wish to invalidate these individuals you must find a way to publicly shame them.

Posted September 12, 2006 1:24 PM by Lori Coulson

I've wondered for a long time why, exactly, Saddam kept denouncing the authority of the government and specifically the judge trying him. That he's delusional, arrogant, or stupid all smack of a conqueror's egocentrism - how could someone like that arrive at power in the first place, or hold onto it in the manner that he has?

But it makes perfect sense if it's a legal defense technique. Consider this - if, as we're seeing, Bush Co. has been using torture and themselves are in human rights violations, then the war under international law is illegal. Therefore the new governmental authority is illegal. As long as Saddam never admits that the new government has the legal authority to try him, he has grounds for a... not sure of the term but mistrial seems to fit.

It's a very long shot (banking off of two walls and a cow), sure, but given what he's done it is his only out. Too bad these torture techniques are giving him the legitimacy he needs to pull it off.

Posted September 12, 2006 1:31 PM by dolloch

Meagen:

If you say "The Republicans are all bloodthirsty murders and we can't have peace in this country until we kill them all", a disturbing number of people will agree with you.

If that's true - and I don't believe it is - it's only because a single person's agreement would be "disturbing".

What's up with the hate? I mean, I've never heard anyone, ever, under any circumstances, say anything worse than "defeat the Republicans in elections, and put those who've committed crimes in jail". So why the pretense that there's bloodthirstiness going around?

Posted September 12, 2006 1:36 PM by John Palmer

Oops. My logic brain is broken. I meant to include a bit about Bush being guilty of War Crimes in addition to an illegal invasion, which would add more weight to the argument that a government established by Bush would be biased at the least.

Still a stretch, but a slight bit more plausible.

Posted September 12, 2006 1:42 PM by dolloch

#38 - Juliet, ever heard of proxy votes? I can assure you that Conservative Central Office has.

The War against Terror. Will someone please wake me up when we start fighting one, against ALL terror.

Torture - what the fuck are you talking about? It is illegal. The fruits of torture cannot be admitted in any court of law in any of our countries. Those who practice it are criminals. Those who authorise its use are criminals. Those who use any information resulting from it are criminally stupid, at the very least, and very probably criminals because they do not report the crime to the relevant law enforcement authorities (at least under our brand spaking new Anti Terrorism laws).

Those who use the tactics of barbarians make themselves barbarians. The lesson of Nuremburg is that ends DO NOT justify means.

Posted September 12, 2006 1:45 PM by Martyn Taylor

#57 If you say "The Republicans are all bloodthirsty murders and we can't have peace in this country until we kill them all", a disturbing number of people will agree with you.

I'm getting really fckng sick and tired of these sorry attempts to change the subject by trying to push guilt buttons by tossing out strawmen and watching everyone scramble to prove that they are not the strawmen. You know damn good and well that no one thinks that. You're simply being manipulative.

The point is that torture is wrong. Even if it did help, it would remain morally wrong. The fact that it does not yield any true or useful information just makes the moral decision all the easier.

Posted September 12, 2006 2:16 PM by Caroline

Meagen --

...some Democrat sympathists...

That's a fascinating phrase. Reminds me of people talking about communist sympathisers. Next thing you know, people'll start talking about fellow travelers. (I know, I know, this is obvious, I just like to point it out when even /I/ can recognize this sort of thing.)

I'm a "Democratic sympathist," and I absolutely do not doubt there are Muslims in the world who mean harm to the US. (More of them than before 9/11/01, but anyway.) I also do not doubt that doing unto them what was done to us in, say (since you brought it up), Vietnam... is really not much of a good idea.

Also, I kind of resent the idea that I'd want to kill me some Republicans. And, actually, I've never seen that suggested in any forum I've been in, so I'm sort of baffled.

Mostly, though, I'm thrilled (for some definition of that word) that we're getting someone in here to try and completely derail the point. Hi. Torture? Bad idea. Also, creates spiritual indigestion.

Posted September 12, 2006 2:35 PM by kate

Where is Meagen, the "foreign observer," actually located?

Posted September 12, 2006 2:47 PM by Laurence

#35: The 'mirror method' is very useful sometimes.

I'm waiting for the email or blog post to arrive that describes all the things that some Al queda people have done to american hostages, with a lot of ugly details, through and through, the tortures, the beatings, the humilations, the killings.

And at the end, switch it and say, "oop. sorry. that's what Americans are doing to other people."

Then let the rage that built in the reader's mind against these inhuman people all through the letter turn on the reader and eat their brain.

Posted September 12, 2006 3:25 PM by Greg London

#51: It's interesting to me (as a foreign observer) that some Democrat sympathists seem to almost believe no Muslim in the world means harm to the US, yet they paint all Republicans as bloodthirsty sadists who will gladly torture anyone just for fun.

No one said there are no extremists out there out to do us harm. And no one said that all republicans are sadists. I yawn at your lame strawman, then spritz it with gasoline and watch it burn.

I find it telling that the unsaid basis of your argument appears to be "two wrongs make a right". That if someone, anyone, is out to kill someone from my country, that gives carte blanche to ignore rules of war, to lie about reasons for war, to hide the true costs of war, to chuck liberties for the people the government is supposed to represent, to chuck human rights that should apply to all people.

We've had worse and managed not to sell our souls.

Don't you think some of those folks might genuinely believe this could yeild valuable information that could help save lives?

Don't you think it interesting that these people are being tortured before they had any sort of trial? That people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time have been tortured and held captive for nothing more than being near someone of interest?

More importantly government should never weild the sort of power that allows it to treat humans as non-human.

#57: If you say "The Muslims are all bloodthirsty murders and we can't have peace in this country until we kill them all" on a public forum, people will call you racist, or at least say you're vastly oversimplifying the question.

And you would be the person who would know "oversimplification" when they see it. see "Democrats paint all Republicans as bloodthirsty sadists" comment by you.

If you say "The Republicans are all bloodthirsty murders and we can't have peace in this country until we kill them all", a disturbing number of people will agree with you.

Right because everyone here has been calling for the assassination of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. And a vast majority of posts explicitely call out for such action. Er, wait, no. I guess you just made that up.

#58: You say "stress-and-duress interrogation" and it brings to mind the image of the movie cop beating the movie arsonist until he confesses which school the bomb is under.

Right. Lets get rid of search warrants. Cops can be trusted never to abuse their power. And there's always a bomb under a school bus thats about to explode. In the movie theaters, anyway, which appears to be the limit of your edu-ma-cation.

You say "torture" and it brings to mind American soldiers coming back from Vietnam with their fingers cut off and their legs horribly broken.

Right, like John McCain surviving years of torture in Vietnam. He is a massive advocate of using torture against Al Quada. Oh, wait. No, you're just full of shit.

What are you, some new breed of moron?

Posted September 12, 2006 3:47 PM by Greg London

Greg, the first thing that would happen to that letter would be that the "oops" line would be removed from the bottom. It would then be retransmitted into the aether, and would thereafter be cited by those who seek to justify America's current course of action. "See? They're animals! They deserve whatever we choose to dish out to them!"

Posted September 12, 2006 3:47 PM by Andrew Willett

#73: the "oops" line would be removed from the bottom.

The better to eat your brain with, my dear.

Such a post would have to be done with a skilled and subtle writer. The opening line would say something about al queda, and all the horrible things they are doing. Then it would slide into a list of evil deeds, but never actually attribute the deeds to al queda, just let the reader make the association/assumption. Then the letter would close with the "oh, that was all american stuff"

It would require a writer far more skilled than me. But the idea woudl be that if the surprise end is deleted, the remaining letter doesn't actually attribute the actions to Al Queda.

Not that some knuckleheads woudl still misread it and take it as truth, but you can't convince the knuckleheads anyway.

Posted September 12, 2006 3:54 PM by Greg London

According to her livejournal, she's in Poland. She writes good English for a Pole. According to her deviantarts page she's only 21. Tcha, she's just a sprat, throw her back.

Posted September 12, 2006 4:04 PM by NelC

Sorry, my remark #75 was in answer to #70: "Where is Meagen?"

Posted September 12, 2006 4:06 PM by NelC

The Book of Margery Kempe has a detailed, first-person account of being waterboarded.

Posted September 12, 2006 4:37 PM by Lila

>..some Democrat sympathists.

If English is a second language for Meagan then I will phrase this correction more gently than I otherwise would have. "Democrat" is a term for a members of the Democratic party. When referring to he party itself the term would be "Democratic" ."Democrat" as an adjective (i.e. the "Democrat Party") was a usage deliberately spread by Republican partisans for a number of reasons. It is a lot easier to turn "Democrat" into an insult than Democratic (i.e. Dummycrat, Dimmycrat, Demoncrat etc.). Also they don't want the Democratic party able to associate itself with Democracy - hence trying to leave that party with only the shorted verion of the name. Generally replacement of term "Democratic" with the term "Democrat" is a sign of an abusive wingnut. Now that this has been pointed out to Meagan I'm sure she won't make that mistake again.

Posted September 12, 2006 4:39 PM by Gar Lipow

Someone asked 'how do you enforce keeping a prisoner standing for 40 hours?'

The answer is that you chain them up. Chain their feet to the floor and their wrists to a high bar. Alternately (see photos from Abu Ghraib) you wire them up to a car battery and put them on a small box in a pool of water. If they move, they get electrocuted.

Here's a question: how long is the US military permitted to keep a soldier standing at attention without rest?

Posted September 12, 2006 5:02 PM by beth meacham

Meagen made everyone jump through her hoop. When will we learn to just say "Cite one source that has said any of that," and ignore them completely until they do?

Posted September 12, 2006 5:36 PM by Xopher

beth meacham @ 79

I'm told half an hour max, because soldiers will begin to fall out.

Posted September 12, 2006 5:37 PM by P J Evans

Sidenote: I wrote "Democrat sympathists" to stand as shorthand for "card-carrying Democrats, people who vote for the Democratic party, and people who live in other countries and thus can't be said to be either Democratic or Republican in the strictest sense but their opinions on US politics are heavily based on the Democratic worldview". Thank you for the correction.

Most people seem to have taken my comments as direct arguments or statements of fact. Um... to state the obvious, they weren't. They were my observations on the political blogosphere as I see it. If I say something like "I'm getting the feeling that some Americans hate their fellow Americans more than they hate the people who actually want to kill them", the proper response is not to cite your cousin Bob who hates terrorists and is actually friends with a Republican so your whole little strawman theory falls apart, you idiot!.

The proper response is to ask yourself: "How did this girl get the idea? Does she just read the wrong blogs? Maybe there's articles out there written by Democrats that aren't openly hostile towards Republicans? (if so, send me a link!) *I* know very well Bush is the worse President we've ever had, but how does this argument look from the outside?"

Back on the original topic. Torture is morally wrong, there's no question of that. The thing is, any country's army first priority is not morality, but rather doing anything they can to protect that country. Sometimes that means doing things that are morally wrong. Sometimes that means doing things that are morally wrong, and then finding out they were futile. I believe that it's better than not doing anything.

It occurs to me that the relatively recent Abu Gharib scandal may be still clouding the issue. If people assume what happened there is standart procedure (as far as I can tell, it was baisically some soldiers dicking around on duty), they would naturally come to the conclusion that the list of CIA-approved torture refers to things regularly done to any shmuck caught in the desert or stopped by airport security.

I think it's wrong to assume the torture is being applied indiscriminately, or serves as the primary or only source of intel. If you have some information, and you need more, and you think getting more information is necessary to save the lives of your countrymen, and you are quite sure this one guy has the information you need... well, some people would rather keep the moral high ground and put innocent lives at risk.

Most of those people are not in the army. For good reason.

Again, this is my *opinion*. If you start picking it apart and labelling things as "strawman" and "pushing buttons" and such, you're missing the *point*.

Posted September 12, 2006 5:39 PM by Meagen

Martin: "To look at this in a somewhat different light, this is why I think that a Democratic win this November or even a Democratic president in 2008 is not going to solve things. The rot is too deep to cure just by changing governments. At best, a lot of people will need to be fired or arrested as well, at worst a full scale revolution is needed."

Absolutely. Nixon is 30 years gone but his evil minions, Rumsfeld and Cheney, are not only still around, they're running things. Simply kicking out Bush -- who, judging by past ventures, probably isn't even capable of coming up with the things his administration has attempted -- only addresses the surface of the problem.

I'm not sure of the solution, unless it's term limits for White House staffers, who are not elected and not directly accountable at the ballot box (when the process works, that is).

Teresa: "Republicans mysteriously believe themselves to be constantly subjected to dreadful slurs and hateful treatment, when in fact very little of that actually happens."

Interestingly, in "Spanking the Donkey," Matt Taibbi says much the same thing about right-wing Christians: they need enemies. They need something to fight against, some sort of adversity that tests faith, in order to feel "real." When there are no bogeymen to fight, they make up some, which justifies their position as "Christian soldiers" and their tactics as "self-defense."

I recommend that book, and his columns (many of which can be found online at Alternet).

Posted September 12, 2006 5:48 PM by murgatroyd

Again, this is my *opinion*.

Right. And it's just my opinion that you're a serial killer, a pedophile, and that you like drinking baby's blood.

Whether it has anything to do with reality doesn't matter, because it's just my opinion...

Making assinine sweeping statements about the behaviour of a large group of people and hiding behind "Just my opinion" is something I'd expect from a grade schooler.

I just spent a weekend with some 10 year olds who had recurring conversations that went something like:

one: "You suck!"
other: "Mom!"
one: "Just kidding"

Let me know when you grow up...

Posted September 12, 2006 5:50 PM by Greg London

No, Meagen, you're stating things as if they were facts and then claiming they're "just your opinion."

"Ovaltine is better than Moxie" is an opinion. "Democrat sympathists...paint all Republicans as bloodthirsty sadists who will gladly torture anyone just for fun" is not an opinion, but an inaccurate statement of fact, that is to say, bullshit.

And if you, after reading the posts here by professional military interrogators saying that torture is well known to be futile, still think it's "better than doing nothing," than you're an evil person, because you know that it will be futile and yet advocate it anyway, so you must be advocating it because you enjoy it.

And if you haven't bothered to read any of the extensive explanations above about why torture is useless in obtaining valid information (as opposed to forcing a victim to confess to a predetermined story), then you're an idiot and we shouldn't waste any more time on you.

Look at me, jumping through the hoop. Well, she wasn't a driveby troll. Like that excuses me.

Posted September 12, 2006 5:58 PM by Xopher

some soldiers "dicking around" on duty.

Posted September 12, 2006 6:05 PM by Greg London

It's not just the euphemistic names for these torture techniques; it's using ones that can be summed up in a way that not only can they be dismissed with a laugh by people who don't understand what's going on, they make anyone arguing against the use of torture look really, really foolish.

This is a side tangent, but exactly the same kind of approach is used to rationalize the abusive punishment of children as "just spanking". Most of us got spanked at some point when we were kids, so we remember it wasn't all that bad, right? So if you describe things like beating the kid with a belt or a hairbrush, hitting them on the face or the front of the torso or the legs and feet, and/or leaving bruises and sometimes blood as "just a spanking" -- well, anyone who'd say that's wrong is obviously just a soft-headed liberal who doesn't believe in discipline.

More generally, this is an instance of "terms needing to be clearly defined before any meaningful discussion can take place."

Posted September 12, 2006 6:05 PM by Lee

#84: Okay, so you use the example of slandering one person... to show that I shouldn't make sweeping statements about large groups of people... and back it up with incidental dialogue of one person slandering another and then quickly withdrawing the slander under threat of prosecution.

That... makes absolutely no sense.

How can a sweeping statment like "sometimes a country's army has to do things that are morally wrong to protect the citizens" be anything *but* opinion? It's not a fact. It's not an argument. It's still something I believe in. It's part of the mental model I have of the world. How am I supposed to cite sources for that?

Posted September 12, 2006 6:19 PM by Meagen

Sometimes that means doing things that are morally wrong, and then finding out they were futile. I believe that it's better than not doing anything.

Would that include the German invasion of Poland in 1939?

Posted September 12, 2006 6:28 PM by James D. Macdonald

How can a sweeping statment like "sometimes a country's army has to do things that are morally wrong to protect the citizens" be anything *but* opinion? It's not a fact. It's not an argument.

Well, you can start by saying that it is your opinion.

Posted September 12, 2006 6:29 PM by P J Evans

No, Meagen, you're stating things as if they were facts and then claiming they're "just your opinion."

Everybody states their opinion as if they were facts.

"Ovaltine is better than Moxie" is an opinion. "Democrat sympathists...paint all Republicans as bloodthirsty sadists who will gladly torture anyone just for fun" is not an opinion, but an inaccurate statement of fact, that is to say, bullshit.

"Ovaltine is better than Moxie" is a statement that can be proven true or false with testing. "I think Ovaltine is better than Moxie" is an opinion. In the same way, "It seems to me like Democrat sympathists..." is an opinion.

People here have proven, *extensively*, that most of what I said was very plainly not a statement of fact. They are, in fact, my opinions and observations.

And if you, after reading the posts here by professional military interrogators saying that torture is well known to be futile

"Torture is well known to be futile" is stated as a fact. It needs to be proved as such.

Please cite your sources. Until then, I will ignore you.

Posted September 12, 2006 6:31 PM by Meagen

#89: Would that include the German invasion of Poland in 1939?

Funny you should mention it. See, it seems France and England had all those troops ready to attack Germany right back, but they felt that would make them no better than the Germans. They decided to keep the moral high ground.

Well! That turned out pretty well.

Posted September 12, 2006 6:36 PM by Meagen

Please cite your sources. Until then, I will ignore you.

Right back at you, babe.

More specifically, since you seem to have problem with specifics, any statement by you will be inferred to be simply more of your bullshit idea of "opinion". (which is a Humpty Dumpty notion of you can say anything you want to say and call it opinion, and therefore need no citations or facts or anything else that is reality based.)

Unless you say something to the effect of "Alice here says no muslims are out to kill us" or "Bob here says we ought to kill all republicans", you're just trolling.

Or stupid.

Or both.

bye bye.

Posted September 12, 2006 6:46 PM by Greg London

Everybody states their opinion as if they were facts.

Wrong. Some of us take care to use phrases like "in my experience..." and "I think..." and "My opinion is..." to signal when we're expressing an opinion.

Please cite your sources. Until then, I will ignore you.

Promises, promises.

Posted September 12, 2006 6:50 PM by Lexica

Please cite your sources. Until then, I will ignore you.

Right back at you, babe.

Yeah... that's very productive.

And if you, after reading the posts here by professional military interrogators saying that torture is well known to be futile, still think it's "better than doing nothing," than you're an evil person, because you know that it will be futile and yet advocate it anyway, so you must be advocating it because you enjoy it.

Since I have still not read any posts here by professional military interrogators saying that torture is well known to be futile, I will consider myself free to think that it's better than nothing without being an evil person.

I will also consider this whole exchange a gigantic waste of everyone's time.

Posted September 12, 2006 6:53 PM by Meagen

#94: Everybody states their opinion as if they were facts.

Lexica, I was -||- this close to replying to this, but pity, she didn't cite any source to back it up.

Posted September 12, 2006 6:54 PM by Greg London

Yeah... that's very productive.

Right back at you, babe.

Posted September 12, 2006 6:55 PM by Greg London

Meagen, Terry Karney is a professional military interrogator.

You, on the other hand, are a jackass.

Posted September 12, 2006 7:06 PM by Xopher

I'd say Meagen is a troll:
* Irrelevant strawmen - CHECK
* Demand for data as means of devaluing disagreement - CHECK
* Disingenuous tone, shifting to hurt tone - CHECK
* Swooping in to stir the pot with no intro/posting history - CHECK

I wonder if his/her IP address comes from anyplace interesting...

Posted September 12, 2006 7:31 PM by Larry Brennan

One of Teresa's former posts on this is here-- this is one of the ones that talks specifically about how and why torture is generally ineffective. (It's one of the posts I refer to when I want to link people to Issues With Torture.)

As Xopher says, Terry Karney is a professional interrogator.

Also, Meagen, the article Teresa links to in this post-- the one about Abu Zubaydah-- does seem to indicate problems with the general torture thing.

Posted September 12, 2006 7:37 PM by kate

I can't begin to express how much this sickens me.

There is no excuse for torture. None. And there never will be. Because the moment a person/government stoops to these sorts of behaviours, we become lower than our lowest enemies. What sort of ethical or moral high ground do we have then? None.

If torture could save me or mine from pain or suffering, still I would refuse to support my government in perpetrating it. If torture were to happen to the worst criminal in the world, and save millions of innocents, still I would denounce it. There is no justification for abuse of others in the name of justice or freedom or safety, and there never will be.

Posted September 12, 2006 7:44 PM by Leanne Veitch

Here's another authorized torture.

Posted September 12, 2006 8:03 PM by Greg London

Meagan: I don't give a good Goddamn what they believe, any more than I care that the Pope truly believed the Sun goes round the Earth. What they believe is wrong, and they are denying teh evidence, the facts and what is morally right in the pursuit of some flawed ideation that beating, freezing, humiliating, drowning and otherwise torturing people, in my name on, putuatively, my behalf.

Booth thought killing Lilcoln was the right thing to do (sic semper tyrannis, and all that). It wasn't and his believing it gives him not a whit of legitimacy.

As for the side note that some people actually want to hurt me, so what?

There are people who commit crimes, does that mean I get to ask the police to whomp on suspects? No. because doing that is wrong, and it doesn't work, which means innocent people suffer, guilty people get away with things, cops become corrupt and society is debased.

You are right about word choices. If I say, Negative reienforcement stimulus to train a subject out of non-responsive answers it sounds a lot better than when I say, Applying 3 volts at 25 amps when the subject says he doesn't know the answer.

They are the same. Stress and duress interrogation is torture.

When you allege that the Army's sole duty is to win, at any cost, you are wrong. I can say this a a member of one army (the US), who has trained with a lot of other armies (to include the British). My duty is dead simple, because I swore an oath which prescribed it in plain words: To uphold and defend the Constitution, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Do I want to win? Yep. Do I prefer coming out of it with alive, with all my parts intact, you bet. Will I give up my humanity so some weak-kneed fool who's seen one too many movies where putting a gun to someone's head gets the answer which saves the day can sleep easier... not for anything.

Because you know what, when it comes down to it, I don't give a damn about him. I give a damn about me, and my mates. I am an interrogator, these are not abstract issues to me (I probably know more about torture than anyone else you are going to come across. I know some of the soldiers in the Dilawar case, the Colonel Pappas, of Abu Ghraib, was in my chain of command; I have seen what happens to people who start down that road: they give up some of what makes being human worthwhile, and it increases with time, until they are base and shriveled.

You are right when you say Abu Ghraib is coloring how I view things, but you are wrong about the nature of the events. What you don't know about Abu Ghraib and Khandahar, and Gitmo, well it would fill volumes.

I think it's wrong to assume the torture is being applied indiscriminately, or serves as the primary or only source of intel. If you have some information, and you need more, and you think getting more information is necessary to save the lives of your countrymen, and you are quite sure this one guy has the information you need... well, some people would rather keep the moral high ground and put innocent lives at risk.

Most of those people are not in the army. For good reason. What "good reason" would that be, because as I read it, you are implying it's a bad thing to think those things; which is wrong.

Again, this is my *opinion*. If you start picking it apart and labelling things as "strawman" and "pushing buttons" and such, you're missing the *point*.

What is the point? You dressing the thing up as being your opinion, and so free of scrutiny, doesn't fly, because your opinion is based on a slew of false assumptions. In short, you are wrong.

If I know someone has the info, I don't need to torture him. If I do torture him, I am not (let me repeat that, just in case I wasn't clear), repeat, not going to get useful info (much less intel) by waterboarding him.

If I don't know he has the info, well torture becomes worse than useless, because it will get answers to questions, they'll just be the wrong answers, because he can't tell what he doesn't know.

When it comes to sources, Army Field Manual 34-52 (field interrogation) as well as any number of studies, from the Inquisition, to the present. Practical experience, and the testimony (supported by external facts) of those who were tortured. The US pilots the Vietnamese tortured gave up not one piece of actionable intel, in the course of hundreds of man weeks of torture.

Some of them had useful info; none of them gave it up.

For the testimony of professionals who repudiate torture, here I am.

here is a list of my posts on the subject.

For stuff I wrote here, specifically, the best description I've made of how it works, was here

But I'm only one person, so what value my testimony?

Well, I was taught by people who knew, but you don't know them. You could read "The Interrogator" by Hans Scharf (he worked for the Luftwaffe, asking questions of 8th AF pilots who were shot down), or you could read Chris Mackey's book, "The Interrogators" about his time in Afghanistan (NB, I know him, so you may want to take that into account when I recommend the book, you may think that changes the merit of what he wrote).

The long and the short of it is pretty short: torture doesn' work, full stop.

Posted September 12, 2006 8:07 PM by Terry Karney

Meagen, two of the people you've been arguing with are former military interrogators. I'm tired at the moment and can't remember whether it's proper for me to identify them in public, so I'll leave it to their discretion. I'll nevertheless tell you this much: you have been professionally assured that torture is futile.

You still have an open offer from me: if you want, I can direct you to earlier posts and comment threads at Making Light where the specifics and technicalities and utility/nonutility of torture are discussed at length, by a mixture of experts and (mostly) intelligent non-experts.

I was struck by one of your questions:

"How can a sweeping statement like 'sometimes a country's army has to do things that are morally wrong to protect the citizens' be anything *but* opinion? It's not a fact. It's not an argument. It's still something I believe in. It's part of the mental model I have of the world. How am I supposed to cite sources for that?"

You talk as though it's impossible to judge, qualify, or support such a statement. In fact, it's entirely possible to do those things. I personally believe that it's necessary to do them in order to becom