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Director Brennan: CIA Won't Waterboard Again, Even If Ordered By Future President (msnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSNBC: CIA Director John Brennan told NBC News in an exclusive interview that his agency will not engage in harsh "enhanced interrogation" practices, including waterboarding, which critics call torture -- even if ordered to by a future president. "I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I've heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure," Brennan said. The CIA used waterboarding and other techniques on terrorist suspects after the 9/11 attacks. But in January 2009, President Obama banned the practices in his first few days in office with an executive order. When asked specifically about waterboarding Brennan could not have been clearer. "Absolutely, I would not agree to having any CIA officer carrying out waterboarding again," he said. Donald Trump is a staunch supporter of torture, saying he would bring back waterboarding and "a hell of a lot worse" to retrieve information from potential terrorists. Ted Cruz says he would "not bring [waterboarding] back in any sort of widespread use" by rank and file soldiers and agents, but as President he would "use whatever enhanced interrogation methods to keep this country safe."
If Brennen refuses an order from a Republican president, however repugnant, he's out the door. There will be any number of qualified sadists that would be happy to torture people, in the name of freedom, for the US government.
at least they're talking about it.
Yeah, that's the problem. With torture there is nothing to discuss. A humane person and a civil society would never consider it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
In Iraq 1 war the Iraqi army surrendered because they knew they would be treated decently, Bush and his cronies with the last Iraq war changed everything, the message was now clear to the enemies, if we capture you we will torture you.
so now your enemies will torture the living fuck out of your soldiers and they can say quite honestly "well the Americans did it and they didn't get reprimanded, so now we do it, except we are worse"
the whole point of the laws of war was that prisoners on both sides would be treated decently, if the enemy did it you could say with dignity "we dont do that" and haul them in front of the warcrimes with the knowledge that you were better than that.
Bush and his chums threw it all away and today he still sits as free man sipping whiskey and rye, smiling with his millions of dollars and Americans are perfectly fine with that.
If you are caught in battle now, be afraid, very afraid.
Later heard mumbling under his breath, contractors and extraordinary rendition are just fine.
It won't be a CIA employee. It will be a contractor.
This isn't a easy subject... if someone had your family in a direct harm situation, what would YOU do?
Who cares what the CIA does when each bloody branch of government can run its own intelligence services essentially duplicating the other. You don't think that mercenaries, branches of the military, or even off the books intelligences agencies won't continue to water board?
One agency not water boarding, what hilarity.
If this isn't a "thing that matters", I don't know what is.
You're talking about a potential rift of current governmental process in the most powerful nation on the planet. There are also those in the military who are saying they would refuse blatantly immoral orders, such as "killing the families of terrorists".
If large chunks of both the military and civilian governmental agencies start refusing orders, the implications of that will reverberate in ways I don't think anyone can predict. Best case, somehow it ends up smoothed over. Worst case, it becomes a civil war. Most likely, somewhere in the middle, with unforeseeable consequences that could spread well outside the bounds of the US itself.
Because you told the world when you did it before right?
Of course, the head of the CIA is a political position, and serves at the pleasure of the president. But if he raises a fuss and threatens to resign...
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Officers don't torture, they have "contractors" to do that shit. Seriously, does anyone ever read the torture memos?
Apparently the CIA has learned a lesson, though probably not the one you think. I doubt they now believe that torture is inhumane and lowers us to the level of those we fight against. What they learned is that torture is completely ineffective at yielding usable intelligence. Prisoners will say anything to make it stop, including making stuff up. Since the made up stuff is exactly what the torturer expects to hear, they often give it more credibility than any actual intelligence that is obtained.
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There is a kernel of truth in what you say - the US should live up to a HIGHER standard. Our founding documents say this country exists for the purpose of justice, freedom, and liberty.
That said, are you thinking that Al Quaeda was following the laws of war until after 9/11, that hijacking civilian airliners and crashing them into skyscrapers is okay? To claim that Al Quaeda won't follow the laws of war because the US may not have is of course a bit silly.
It "matters", but Slashdot should not be the venue to discuss it!
If you want to get all riled up about political matters that are unrelated to science/tech/computing, then go to Huffington Post, or Drudge Report, or Gawker, one of the many other sites out there that cater to such matters.
Leave Slashdot for stories and discussion that are specific to science/tech/computing.
It is one of the total failures of journalism that they keep acting like the jury is out on whether waterboarding is torture. It is torture by the definition of multiple US courts -- ones that successfully prosecuted Japanese soldiers for torture in the 40s precisely for waterboarding. It is a long-standing precedent that waterboarding is very much torture in the eyes of the US court system. The promulgation of this phony sense of ambiguity is a lie perpetrated by the media for the benefit of the neocon establishment.
The current CIA director will someday be replaced by someone else who may reinstate torture. The other possibility is that the CIA will hire folks in foreign countries to torture whomever the CIA wants tortured.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Have gnu, will travel.
Does this mean Sodium Pentathol is back in fasion again?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
which critics call torture
stop. stop this. Waterboarding is by an overwhelming concensus a formal example of torture. the united states has in the past engaged in torture, full stop. it still engages in torture to this day at Guantanamo Bay without independent oversight and enjoys freedom from media coverage. In this regard the US is no different than north korea and iran.
even if ordered to by a future president.
but there was no formal order from the bush administration. the bush team crafted a doctrine by which terrorism became "enhanced interrogation" and through this clever violation of the geneva convention the techniques described in the CIA's handbooks stopped being torture entirely. You technically never tortured anyone before, and refuse to do so now.
President Obama banned the practices in his first few days in office with an executive order.
Its hard to put on the Nobel prize when youre the leader of a nation that runs a secret torture prison. Obama made a concerted effort to close this prison, but largely failed when congress and senate majorities handed him a non-stop shit storm shutting down the government twice and attempting to repeal healthcare reform more than 45 times.
Donald Trump is a staunch supporter of torture
And Martha Stewarts dog died in a propane explosion. Neither of these considerations is relevant to the topic. the point is Brennan is making a clever distraction from the actual problem. The united states under the Bush doctrine legally authorized torture by changing the definition of the word and then unanimously arguing theirs was a legally consistent and correct one. The judge that wrote the defense of this argument was later promoted in the administration in what was largely seen as a quid pro quo move by leadership.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Refusing, rather than carrying out with some enthusiasm and taking pictures, such orders would be a bit of a change in practice; but in the noble land of theory; hasn't it always been the case that military agents are supposed to refuse to carry out unlawful orders(with the obvious practical limits imposed by the fact that most soldiers have access to legal opinion only to the extent that somebody told a JAG to write up a terse summary of the rules of engagement)?
My (admittedly layman's) understanding was that while actually having the issue come up is considered a bad sign(since something has obviously gone badly wrong on the executive or legislative side if the military is being issued unlawful orders); but that while disobeying lawful orders is somewhere between 'disciplinary problem' and 'coup d'etat', depending on how many people are involved and whether they are brought into line internally or not; it is no more a desired outcome for the military to execute an unlawful order than it is for the judiciary to rule according to an unconstitutional law; or the executive to act without legislatively granted authority.
The only real change here is that we have an actually-high-ranked-spook not weaseling around and claiming that waterboarding is just the sort of practical-joking fun that we all did when we joined a frat.
Journalists seem to love acting like the jury is out on just about everything, because you should present BOTH sides of an argument even when one side is utterly batshit insane.
Sometimes, arguments only have one side.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Actually, as I understand it, there ARE no Civil Service job protections in the Intelligence Community. So you can be canned at any time for any reason.
Not that they DO, from things I've heard, but they legally CAN. . .
And LSD. Where do I sign up?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Tell that to the US courts who have deemed waterboarding to be torture for decades. We know it doesn't work, yet some people (yourself included) are willing to overlook that for some good ol' fashioned vengeance, regardless of the demonstrable harm it causes the US.
You suck at being a human being.
This guy acts like he's honorable.....when he and his people regularly do far worse than waterboarding.
Eavesdropping on every single person on the face of the earths communications - does that. But waterboarding is the line in the sand.
Hate to break it to him, being appointed CIA Director isn't the same as being on the US Supreme Court. His ass will be fired and someone more ambitious and willing to do what the POTUS orders will take his place.
I'm not for wholesale torture, but if there's a nuke in one of our cities that's going to go off in 6 hours, I think the gloves need to come off. I don't think that hundreds of thousands of people need to die Bc these douchebags suddenly get a shot of morals.
How about you just skip the articles that don't intrest you? Information is like bandwidth; it is always there but not always utilized. I appreciate the job the editors do, even if I don't click on every submission.
I'm amazed that people are taking this at face value.
The subtext is more like, "Because we found other torture methods which were more effective"
I think it is even worse than that⦠"WE won't water board anymore⦠Because we are having other people do it for us now"
What if we had an automated robotic, torture chambers made trough 3d printers with open source controllers and API as well as AI API for selecting terrorists on basis on who is the one at the top of the state and what methods he/her clique prefers/allows ? Would this fit then in precious space or you would still be annoyed?
CIA used waterboarding and other techniques on terrorist suspects
Keep it mind, these are so-called terrorists, i.e. never convicted or even tried in any court of law!!
They simply picked up various people who they thought were terrorists, and dumped them in their vans - sometimes, even people in the vicinity who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time!
And yet they call the USA, "civilised" west!
... yes, civilised as long as you don't happen to be a Muslim.
> When you have the country that describes itself as the beacon of freedom and democracy in the world ...
That reminds me, I wonder if any of Obama's aides ever took him aside and explained to him that what you just said is called "American Exceptionalism". If they told him that when he denies American Exceptionalism, that terms means he's denying that the US has a responsibility to act consistent with justice and liberty, because the country was founded explicitly to advance those ideals.
I'm sure he wouldn't have denied it had he known what the term means.
I'm selling my beachfront property in Arizona.
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Torture was already deemed illegal by the Geneva Convention. And yet, here we are again. It's probably not the President that will encourage water boarding again, it's probably their lawyer who convinces the leadership at the time that water boarding does not constitute torture and is as such perfectly legal. ... Not that this EVER happens.
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Yeah, that's the problem. With torture there is nothing to discuss. A humane person and a civil society would never consider it.
Then it's a good thing we're only talking about waterboarding. Thousands and thousands of military personnel go through it as part of routine training (as have many journalists!). Notice that the CIA director didn't say they'd forgo it because it was torture, he said they'd forgo it because that institution doesn't need the wear and tear of needing to continually talk about it. Because people like you can't tell the difference between something that people volunteer to experience on a regular basis and actual torture, and it's way too much trouble to put up with those who, out of ignorance (feigned, willful or otherwise), can't muster the presence of mind to understand the difference.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Waterboarding is by an overwhelming concensus a formal example of torture.
Then so is eating MREs. Military personnel undergo both, regularly, as part of their training.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Waterboarding is a form of psychological torture. The problem is torture is a huge, arbitrary gray area: any form of coercion is uncomfortable, yet at some point we call it "torture". In other words: we know inflicting extreme pain is torture; and we know inflicting mild discomfort (e.g. a fucking prison cell?) is *not* torture; and somewhere in the middle we argue over where something goes from not-torture to torture.
To some people, torture must be physical; and to some, it must include physical pain. Some people don't recognize simple torment as torture, and some people don't recognize small pains as torture (is a static shock now and then torture? It's not something most people consider as more than an annoyance in daily life).
Wiping your ass with pages of the Qu'ran: is it torture? You can inflict as much psychological harm on a highly-religious Muslim by doing such things as you can by physically torturing someone's small child in front of them. By the same token, waterboarding is only psychological: it makes the subject experience a fear of drowning without the physical possibility of drowning, and so is not a physical form of torture. Can you believe waterboarding is torture and also believe that violating someone's deeply-seated religious beliefs is not torture?
The sense of ambiguity is very real. Torture is one of those words used in a meaningless sense in politics: the line is twisted, blurred, and outright smeared to say what we want. We categorize high forms of torment as torture, and then dismiss other *worse* forms as not being torture because they don't offend our personal sensibilities and wouldn't bother us. Until we have a dialogue about *why* the term "torture" is ambiguous and practically meaningless, we cannot address the problem of inhumane treatment of prisoners of war.
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There are some traditions. Certain instruments of government are considered more independent of the Presidential administration than others, and thus the terms of their directors are intentionally not supposed to coincide with the Presidential terms.
I think that CIA, NASA, Federal Reserve, and FBI are in that category. Cabinet secretaries are, naturally, appointed by the President directly.
With respect to the current issue: CIA will not torture. But a contractor, or an agency of another government, will.
He won't be in charge much longer and things will change. All it takes is one more attack like 9/11 or something worse and support for waterboarding will return.
They always had other methods. Sleep deprivation is a time tested way to get the truth out of anybody. But it takes 3 or 4 days.
And the 'bunched pantie brigade' have declared it torture as well, so not much gained, might as well just get out the battery charger.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, I was going to post something like that too. Reminds me of the timeshare I visited a couple years ago, that convinced me to never trust any timeshare company, ever, no matter what. I went to a "presentation" from Wyndam, that promised us a "free" cruise (i.e. "you only have to pay for taxes and port fees, so probably about 80 bucks"). I figured, Wyndam is a huge company, right? So no matter how sleazy the presentation is, you just say you don't want it, they let you go after a couple hours, and now you have a weekend getaway at like 75% off. They can't actively be scamming people out of things they explicitly promised, can they?
Turns out, yes they can. The way they do it it: *Wyndam* promises you certain things, but the actual redemption of the useless coupon they give you, goes through a third party. That third party, which is technically entirely independent of Wyndam and thus doesn't legally have to care what Wyndam may or may not have promised, then requires you to pay like 200 dollars in "booking fees", which go directly to them (I'm sure Wyndam gets a cut of this), in addition to the *actual* legitimate fees that go to the various locations visited. So instead of getting it like 75% off, it's more like... 10% maybe. All technically legal.
Same token, I imagine "the CIA" can say that they've never waterboarded anyone... they just gave their detainee over to some private organization they're paying, and then conveniently looked the other way. They never actually explicitly *told* that organization to waterboard anyone... or at least you can't prove they did...
Many people play Slug Bug and punch their buddy in the shoulder. That does not make beatings less of a form of torture.
Having your buddies, who you trust, give you a taste of this treatment is more in the Slug Bug category. Having a bunch of masked thugs bum rush you in your cell and drag you out of your cell and vigorously waterboard you 183 times in a month (6 times a day) is about as horrific a thing you can do to someone without leaving physical scars.
Acid while someone is fucking with you and has the resources to construct an 'acid nightmare house'?
Tripping balls while undergoing the 'Ludovico technique'?
Sounds almost as bad as being locked into an EDM festival sober. But whatever works for you.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That means that it is not secret.
References:
Hillary Clinton's apologists (she knows better than telling her own lies).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I think it is even worse than that⦠"WE won't water board anymore⦠Because we are having other people do it for us now"
I wonder if they'll make the torturers train their replacements...Will there ne no end to outsourcing?!
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
The healthcare reform plan you cite was passed when Obama's party had a majority in the House and Senate for 2 years, and a fillibuster-proof majority in the Senate for 6 months. In fact that's precisely why the healthcare reform plan was passed with such alacrity - the Democratic party minimized debate to make sure it was pushed through before they could lose that fillibuster-proof majority.
That Obama didn't take advantage of that same window to close Guantanamo tells you either his "concerted effort" was not as concerted as you believe, or the Democratic party was not as enthusiastic about closing the base as you've led yourself to believe. Guantanamo wasn't an issue which suddenly came to the forefront in recent years. Shutting it down was one of Obama's first campaign pledges. You can't really blame the Republican party for his failure to keep that promise when his party was in control for his first 2 years, with literally no way for the Republicans to stop him for 6 months of those 2 years.
just hit em with a board, preferably a 2x4
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Sounds like you have a problem with people disagreeing with you.
Or that you are having trouble persuading people in the free market of ideas.
Tired of hearing people say I don't have the right to my opinion.
For a while Sweden declared spanking to be child abuse. Then they realized people should have some say in their own lives.
1. The US Constitution says that treaties count as law of the land.
2. In 1953, the Department of Defense adopted the principles of the Nuremberg Code as official
policy" of the United States. (Hasting Center Report, March-April 1991) - so he not only has
the duty to follow "lawful orders", but equally to "refuse to follow lawful orders" (the Nazis in
the camps were "just following orders".) http://www.omjp.org/ArtLarryDi...
3. In general, studies show that torture actually doesn't work - the person being tortured will
tell you whatever you want to hear... *not* necessarily the actual facts (is that right,
Cardinal Torquemada?
And I was just talking to a friend last night, who'd been in combat in 'Nam, and saw torture *used* (and was stopped from killing the person being tortured to save them from worse). None of you assholes who are for torture have ever been there, or know someone who was there, so bugger off.
mark
So, question: you didn't even bother to log in to post the above. Exactly why should anyone here care what your story preferences are?
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
So ... what if I suspect YOU have knowledge of an imminent attack? Are you okay with me chopping off your fingers, one joint at a time, until you tell me what you know? Sure, at first you'll protest that you don't know anything about any attack, that you're a loyal citizen, but I know that's a lie. Snip snip snip ... why won't you tell me where the attack is going to take place? I'm running out of fingers, soon I'll have to start on your toes.
And as for "Fighting the enemy with all means necessary is the ONLY way to win a war." -- okay. Let's say you're in charge. Here's a document authorizing bombers to nuke the Middle East, North Korea, Libya, and anywhere else considered to be part of the extended "Axis of Evil" until the ground has all turned into glass. Please sign it. That's guaranteed to kill all our enemies in the regions and nuclear weapons are part of "all means necessary" -- are you okay with ordering the deaths of millions of people, many of whom are innocent, to defeat the enemy? If so, please report to the nearest mental hospital and check yourself in as a psychopath. If not, then we agree that there are lines we should not cross -- now we just need to negotiate where they are.
Since I suspect you're going to bring up Hiroshima and Nagasaki, remember that the US Congress had formally declared war on Japan and Truman specifically instructed the Secretary of War to select military targets for the weapons according to his diary. It was not indiscriminate bombing but carefully planned and targeted attacks.
in the noble land of theory; hasn't it always been the case that military agents are supposed to refuse to carry out unlawful orders
Only since 1946, and then only if you're on the losing side of a war. People on the winning side that disobey orders (lawful or unlawful) get to see first hand what the inside of a military prison looks like.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Donald Trump is a staunch supporter of torture
Evidently CNN is too, based on how often they subject their viewers to him...
So here are two ACs lamenting what a shithole this site is. As I asked the guy above, why should your opinions count if you don't even bother putting a pseudonym behind them? Like it or not, "politics" has a rather large intersection between "the people who read slashdot have an interest in this topic" and "stuff that matters." As someone else (who did bother to log in) pointed out above: if you don't like these stories, don't read them. There's even a handy mechanism for helping you do this... if you bother to log in.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Then it's a good thing we're only talking about waterboarding.
http://www.public-access-proje...
http://www.historycommons.org/...
In the aftermath of World War II, Japanese officer Yukio Asano is charged by a US war crimes tribunal for torturing a US civilian. Asano had used the technique of “waterboarding” on the prisoner (see 1800 and After). The civilian was strapped to a stretcher with his feet in the air and head towards the floor, and water was poured over his face, causing him to gasp for air until he agreed to talk. Asano is convicted and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. Other Japanese officers and soldiers are also tried and convicted of war crimes that include waterboarding US prisoners. “All of these trials elicited compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and resulted in severe punishment for its perpetrators,” reporter Evan Wallach will later write. In 2006, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), discussing allegations of US waterboarding of terror suspects, will say in regards to the Asano case, “We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II.”
Quite frankly, the easy way to make people understand this is simple: throw them in a cell for a few years, or decades, and waterboard them every few days. Sure you say that you've done nothing wrong, but we won't really be sure for another 10-20 years now will we. All these sociopaths and sadists who don't think it's torture will be singing a different tune pretty quick. I bet before that time is up you confess to a whole hell of a lot of things.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
You may be expecting an unqualified "no", but the right answer is it depends. The unacceptable kinds of torture are those, which leave the subject dead or damaged. (And I mean real damage — not as in "needs counseling"). It may be useful to confine the definition of "torture" to such methods only — as was done by some people already.
Waterboarding is certainly not damaging — a rough arrest by a police may be far more harmful to the suspect — and still be justified. Likewise, a prolonged criminal investigation may be far more damaging psychologically. And don't even get me started on the exploding use of "Hellfire" missiles (pun intended) by the highest-placed opponent of waterboarding:
Don't know about you, but I'd rather be waterboarded by mistake, than killed by the same mistake.
Dealing with the government is rarely pleasant, but waterboarding does not cross any real lines. If the duly-elected President charged with protecting us deems it necessary, his subordinates better get on with it. Or resign. As George Orwell pointed out decades ago:
Whether it is useful is another question, but "morally and ethically" there is nothing wrong with it. Deal with that.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"Truth".
You get the Disney version of it in those cases. People you trust administer a very gentle version of it. You volunteer for it as well.
Compare that to getting waterboarded an average of 6 times a day by mask wearing thugs yelling and screaming at you as they take you to the limit of what a crooked doctor will allow.
It is like saying that since people willingly participate in MMA that repeated closed fist beatings cannot be torture.
In short, your logic is tortured.
All your points are decent ones. However most of what we did is so far over the line as to not being debatable. Sleep deprivation, ear splitting loud music while being held in stress positions, making someone sleep on a cold concrete slab until they died of hypothermia, and so much more are all so far beyond the line that we should not be still discussing whether there is any validity to the "might not be torture" point of view.
We tortured a bunch of folks. We have brought our selves down to the level of all the despots and dictators that we vilified for such behavior. We hid it from our citizenry, and punished practically nobody for their part in it. The lack of accountability makes us complicit after the fact, we are harboring war criminals and torturers.
To quote my own post: why should your opinions count if you don't even bother putting a pseudonym behind them?
Trolls gotta troll, I guess.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
First, Brennan is a Democrat, so while he is pretending to be a disinterested party while attacking Trump and grabbing headlines, it's not surprising. This is the same administration that has pushed-through an Iran agreement that is guaranteed to eventually result in a nuclear war (giving Iran's Mullahs, who think they can bring about paradise by ending the world in nuclear flames, a decade-long path to nukes and a hundred billion dollars to play with), but OOOOOOH NOOOO.... WATERBOARDING is bad! This is known as worrying about all the wrong stuff.
Second, The US govt has routinely waterboarded its own military people as part of the training for certain jobs including some special forces and some aviation jobs. We DO NOT dislocate people's arms, break their bones, pluck-out their fingernails, electric shock their junk, burn them with cigarettes, poke out their eyes or anything else as part of their training. Left-leaning journalists, who were eager to attack the Bush administration, actually PAID people money to get waterboarded so they could write articles dripping with faux-outrage. Hence: Waterboarding is NOT torture. Addendum for morons: The form of waterboarding in this discussion is only superficially like the forms of waterboarding Japan used in WWII, which along with accompanying actual torture and cannibalism was condemned as torture.
Third, nearly everybody outraged by Trump's waterboarding comments is either a supporter of the Obama administration or in agreement with John McCain's and Lindsay Grahm's foreign policies - either of which means they support using drones to blow people to smithereens as perfectly acceptable, while whining about the horrors of splashing water on somebody's face while a physician stands by monitoring.
Which is worse: getting wet and a bit spooked, or having your flesh ripped apart and burned? With the former, you have no lasting injuries, with the latter you are DEAD.
Most of the people who pretend to be shocked/repulsed by waterboarding are completely dishonest in their outrage. These people who want to stop waterboarding to save three or four terrorists from being temporarily uncomfortable, on the pretense of being so very concerned about every individual no matter how evil he is, are also frequently allied with people who do not want to enforce the southern border of the US. Hundreds of US citizens are raped and/or murdered by illegal aliens every year.... apparently the comfort of individual terrorists is much more important than the LIVES of hundreds of Americans. It's not that waterboarding is directly tied to the border, but rather that the latter exposes these people as far less concerned about protecting individuals than they pretend to be while complaining about the former.
The public are idiots if they fall for this idiocy that is designed to deprive the west of even the most basic tools to defend itself from mobs of middle east cave men.
Because people like you can't tell the difference between something that people volunteer to experience on a regular basis and actual torture, and it's way too much trouble to put up with those who, out of ignorance (feigned, willful or otherwise), can't muster the presence of mind to understand the difference.
Volunteering the experience for training is not torture. Where did you get the idea that I thought it was? I figure you're just trolling. Not very subtle, are you?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The training and demonstration waterboarding are like playing Russian roulette with a cap gun. Everyone knows nobody is likely going to die today. Even so, perhaps you should read what those volunteers have to say about it. From one of those reporters who volunteered for it:
Believe Me, It’s Torture
If the courts, which have gone insane in recent years, had actually held waterboarding (as done in the US) to be torture as you assert, then huge numbers of US military personnel would have been imprisoned for torturing their colleagues during training (something that has been done for decades)
The error is not entirely yours though. The US federal courts are now as loony as a typical college campus and frequently just make crap up to suit their political preferences (which is how we got gay marriage, abortion on demand, etc as Constitutional rights even though they are not mentioned in the Constitution and yet rights explicitly in the Constitution like speech rights, religious rights, and gun rights are magically declared to have lots of limits). The Constitution makes the President Commander in Chief for all military matters (and the military has its own justice system) while providing no role at all for the courts in warfare. The founders did not require General Washington to get courts to approve of the tactics he used in war, nor did the other founders who led the country encounter such judicial insanity. No courts injected themselves into the fight when Thomas Jefferson sent the Marines to fight the Muslim pirates in Tripoli Libya (producing the lyrics: "from the Halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli..."). The Constitution also does not require judges to be lawyers nor to be members of the bar (a private club), two modern "requirements" that lawyers who've been elected as politicians have injected into the system out of loyalty to their evil profession.
After many decades, our federal courts have become thoroughly packed with idiots who are mostly people with brains pickled in ivy league universities (all the current Justices in DC are Harvard or Yale grads) who have no experience in the real world, and have never served in the military but all of whom are members of the bar association, that private lawyers guild that seeks to run the nation for its own ends. This is nearly unique in our history. In the past, the high court usually had some justices who were veterans and/or had degrees from other than Harvard or Yale. The federal courts did not in the past interfere with war fighting. If they had, then presumably all the Germans we captured in WWII would have needed to be read their Miranda rights, gotten defense council assigned, had evidenciary hearings, etc. and the American military would have been forbidden to bomb cities in Germany and Japan..... oh, and those of us who would be alive today would all be speaking German or Japanese. The modern activists in the courts who care nothing for their own oaths, nor the plain text of the Constitution, and who pretend to be unbiased judges, have inserted themselves into military matters they have no legitimate right to address. All their predecessors knew it; these dolts don't having been educated in a progressive model that thinks EVERYTHING is a matter for the federal courts.
Some people might not call sleep deprivation "torture" because, while it sucks, we've all been tired and we've all had shitty jobs that made us work after we didn't get enough sleep. Many people have been in college while working a full-time job and spent weeks or months under chronic sleep deprivation. It seems like too common a thing and too common a tolerated thing for people to imagine it as the bloody evil they want to envision under such a damning term as "torture".
Loud music and cold temperatures are both physically dangerous (you can easily damage someone's hearing), as well as painful (your body interprets cold as pain at some point). Some people might misinterpret loud music due to lack of information (it's physically painful and can cause physical injury), which only serves to illustrate that people try to measure the metric of coercion and torture by what makes them personally wince.
I have a hard line--a fairly universal one--at anything that can cause lasting physical injury; a few bruises are not a concern in the physical sense, and raise ethical, social, and psychiatric considerations instead (there are no psychological concerns with interrogation because interrogation is intended to produce an immediate psychological impact; psychiatric impacts--developed mental health issues--are a form of injury). That means I'll broadly define any deliberate trauma which causes long-term harm (physical, mental) as torture; and I'll raise questions about effectiveness and about philosophical considerations when you get down to short-term annoyances. In that large space is the gray area: something that is not *definitely* torture is not necessarily definitely *not* torture. Physically battering someone is not *definitely* torture because a bruise is a triviality; but the fear of being physically helpless and battered at the hands of your captors can inflict long-term psychiatric trauma, and so we might evaluate this as torture. Maybe you think slapping someone across the face is "intimidation" because it does no real physical harm and only serves as a method of frightening someone with the threat of further physical discomfort. Welcome to the gray lands.
Making someone look at an ugly, old, naked woman could be torture. What people find unattractive can be psychologically painful--naked fat chicks might actually inflict as much torment on a person as waterboarding. You can say the same for making someone watch gay porn, if they're disturbed by that sort of thing.
Again: we don't have a dialogue on what we perceive as torture. We don't have a dialogue on the political use of the term "torture". We've made it into a vague term that essentially means "something done to a prisoner which we don't like", and have demonstrated that we will happily accept some pretty horrendous stuff as long as we don't perceive it as being disturbing, while complaining about things which aren't nearly as severe. Bamboo under the fingernails and hot pokers on the flesh upset our empathetic reason; we interpret waterboarding as a physical assault rather than a psychological one; and we say nothing about the violation of people's religious sensibilities when we perceive those sensibilities as either not important (because we don't share them) or evil (because they are the beliefs of our enemies).
How is imprisonment not a form of torture? If imprisonment is an acceptable form of coercion, how is sleep deprivation not? How is waterboarding different than holding a thick rod over someone's head and threatening to beat them, in the case that you can make them truly believe and fear the threat?
Are these questions uncomfortable?
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Have you actually looked into the science of how waterboarding works? The ability to trick the hind brain into thinking its drowning is very interesting 'technically'.
There are few methods of torture worse than waterboarding that don't either cause lifelong disfigurement or eternal thumb-sucking of the soulless body, which is why waterboarding was the preferred beverage of a discerning hegemon in the first place.
As much as I'd like to think that "noooo, not the rug!" would lead to a actionable blubbering in satanic Arabic, it probably wouldn't.
"A lot worse" is not something Trump himself could stomach watching, no matter how easy it might be to mouth the words in front of adoring hordes of sycophantic, authoritarian followers.
I'm not suggesting some opinions are more valid than others--what I am saying is that if you don't care enough about the site to actually log into it, then you're not actually a member of this community, pseudonymous or otherwise.
Really, I don't care if you're a 3-digit uid, or a 8-digit uid, but have a damned uid before you act all wounded about how this site has gone down hill.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
The whole purpose of military personnel undergoing it is so that they are better mentally prepared to face and resist torture at the hands of the enemy.
Ask the many journalists who deliberately had it done to them while writing (or broadcasting) about this very subject.
Sure, let's ask them! Guess what? They say that it is torture.
People who have, by your definition, been "actually tortured" - like McCain - say that waterboarding is torture.
In short, it is obviously torture.
And you're scum for repeatedly defending it here.
And for those of you who do not know, Frank Herbert used a lot of Arabic and Islamic themes in Dune.
Coming full circle ...
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The whole purpose of military personnel undergoing it is so that they are better mentally prepared to face and resist torture at the hands of the enemy.
So you're saying that we are systematically subjecting thousands of military personnel to torture? Yes or no.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yes, we do.
Yes, we do.
So everyone's all upset about rough handling during questioning, dished out to a small handful of known mass murderers and their associates, but we're all just fine with the long-standing, routine use of those same exact experiences as learning experiences for thousands and thousands of people? The administration says it no longer authorizes what it called torture, but is still doing it anyway - that's what you're saying?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Who said anything about "same exact experiences"? Waterboarding as used in SERE training, or on volunteers who want to see what it's like, is nowhere near as harsh as the real thing.
And, of course, there is a big difference between doing something (no matter what it is) to a volunteer as part of their training, with numerous safeguards in place (including the provision to stop immediately), and doing something to an unwilling victim to force them to divulge information - or, as some presidential candidates have quipped recently, because "they deserved it".
Err it's not ok to follow an unlawful order, that is the difference between a thriving democracy and a dictatorship. I would hope if a president or prime minister has a brain snap, ordering the military to kill demonstrators/protesters that order would be declined.
Instead of this being a bad bad thing, it's a health good thing that you need.
Posting as AC via Tor for obvious reasons.
It "matters", but Slashdot should not be the venue to discuss it!
I worked on software that (I didn't know at the time) was sold to the NSA for use in spying on American citizens. The whole war on terror stuff may seem generalist and largely theoretical to you, but it sure as hell isn't to me.
I hope that you have a long and fulfilling career where you never do something that later turns your stomach and makes you question everything. Just be aware that not everyone here is that lucky.
C'mon, if your gunna go AC/Tor at least give up some juicy details!
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Yes the intellectual debate of voluntarily training vs tourture continues to rage
I'm pretty sure the head of the CIA or any other equivalent government role is not protected by union laws ;)
He's trolling. Playing the role of the conservative nationalist (for a very long time here). First he tries to claim I don't understand the difference between training and torture, and now shows that he doesn't.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'm not the AC, in fact I have deliberately checked the "Post Anonymously" box to ask you : why does an opinion count only if it has a name, fake or otherwise, attached to it? If anonymous opinions don't count at all, do opinions from low-ID slashdotters count more than newer members, or are all attributed opinions equally valid? Is an opinion attributed to an obvious pseudonym less worthy than an opinion with a real name attached to it?
Because you can follow who said what. Doesn't matter if it comes from MagnoliaFan or Steven P, Jamesworth III, being able to put an opinion/statement with an entity helps give it some validity. For all anyone knows any of these conversations with AC after AC after AC could be the same person posting again and again, two people in conversation, three or more. It's too hard to follow and give any weight to because it could be anyone saying anything.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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LOL
Why would imprisonment be torture? It's possible to imprison someone so that they are reasonably well treated, with adequate food, shelter, exercise, rest time, etc. There need not be any physical harm threatened, as long as the prisoner doesn't attempt to escape, nor any psychological coercion. Imprisonment is the denial of freedom, nothing more.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Dude, are you immortal? Do your family affairs go on hold when you're in prison? Is freedom valuable to you? Is it distressing to know someone else is in control of your basic life decisions, your movements, your growth, your development?
You're going to get older, you're going to stay isolated from your friends and family, you're going to stale knowledge, you're going to lose time to build your finances. Long-term, you *will* end up poor, because a chunk of financial growth is lost, and you move closer to the end of your time period for financial growth; never mind that you don't just get released back into a fully-functional life, but instead get dumped off into a world where rent and mortgage went unpaid, your stuff was repossessed or destroyed (dumped on the street in eviction), and you start with nothing, homeless, alone, with few places to turn.
You get to think about that every day as you rot away in a prison cell.
Maybe freedom isn't important for mental health. Maybe the U.S. government should arrest every child at birth, put them into education camps, and then stick them in labor camps to perform necessary work. Maybe the solution to poverty is to arrest anyone who's poor.
Maybe you're just insane, stupid, or retarded.
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If he's that stupid to make a statement like that, he should be replaced. He's clearly not qualified for the position. No matter who gets the job, that should be clear.
It's also conceivable that I see something between treating people as they like and torture. Imprisonment isn't pleasant. It is more pleasant than being tortured.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Therein you suggest there's some imaginary, undeclared line somewhere between "treating people unpleasantly" and "torturing people." Sleep deprivation has been suggested as torture, but why would it be? People go without sleep due to shitty work schedules all the time, and we don't accuse their employers of violating the Geneva Convention by threatening to fire them if they try to shift their time around.
Does waterboarding do any harm further than imprisoning someone? They both remove control and instill feelings of fear and isolation.
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Of COURSE there's a fuzzy imaginary line between treating people unpleasantly and torturing them. We're using the English language. It's fuzzy, and typically doesn't have sharp lines. There are quite a few things that one person might reasonably consider torture and another might reasonably disagree. Shaking someone's hand is not normally considered torture, even if you don't like that someone. Pulverizing every bone in someone's hand would normally be considered torture. There's no sharp line in there, because we're talking about applying pressure to various parts of a hand.
People who are waterboarded claim that it's definitely torture. People in Scandinavian prisons typically do not claim to be tortured. There is a difference.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'll point out that someone is much more likely to claim something unpleasant and--especially--frightening is torture if someone else has suggested that, just like people claim every little thing anyone does now is terrorism. That's a stabilizing argument, not a counter-argument: I'm pointing out a weakness in your argument based on the specific situation in which it most frequently applies, which is not the same as defining a reason your conclusion is wrong.
My point is that, yes, we have fuzzy lines, and we haven't sat down and decided where we want to actually draw them or how we want to redraw them when the lines are questioned. What we have, instead, is a popularity contest: if we were to set up stands and subject people to waterboarding in a controlled environment, most people would discover that cold water to the face is unpleasant and that the experience is kind of disturbing, but that they're not that terribly upset about it; do this enough and publicize their testimonials and you can change the media dialogue, and the public will re-define waterboarding as not torture.
The politicians can and do respond to this. If the public never made a huge deal out of waterboarding, it's likely the current CIA manuals would include a small section detailing the concern, the evidence (media circus), and the conclusion that waterboarding is not torture and is simply an effective interrogation technique. As I've shown, we can produce such a situation simply by modifying the media dialogue.
A few zaps to the arm and you'll probably laugh it off, but the same stimulation in an interrogation setting is an infliction of pain and fear which produces acute and, possibly, long-term psychiatric trauma and thus is torture... or, well, it's not torture, because we've gone around with the CIA PR booth zapping people and making funny YouTube videos and explained that this is merely an "annoyance" that will "encourage" POWs to cooperate.
Do you see the problem?
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At the very least, you can point out that imprisonment is more like torture than giving someone money, and waterboarding is more torture than imprisonment. The line is always going to be artificial and imperfect.
As far as waterboarding goes, it's not just cold water on the face. The sort we're talking about is designed to replicate drowning without actually killing the victim, and is generally considered torture by people who have experienced it. I have read that it's a lot worse than what soldiers are subjected to in training.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Even then, you get these ranges of what is and isn't worse, and these areas where people think X is worse than Y and others think Y is worse than X. You can modulate how people interpret events. You can change things around by changing perception, as I've stated, using public campaigns to get more people to think Y is worse than X and so X is okay.
I prefer diplomacy because it's more efficient. I like beating people, but only people who need to be beaten--like when some dude is trying to rape some girl at a party, you hit him with a wrench, and that's cool. We can come up with all kinds of arguments about torture, ranging from whether we're dealing with an insurgent who's a child-murder-rapist and thus deserves it to the need to extract information to save lives; and we still have to ask all kinds of questions. Diplomacy answers those questions more effectively than torture.
Diplomacy makes you ask questions. You realize a lot of terrorists and insurgents feel they're justified, they feel they're under attack, they feel they've got a moral requirement to do what they did. For many, this becomes irreconcilable, and they must believe firmly that their opponents are pure evil, else they have to question themselves--which only makes the world too threatening to survive. Often, these views don't hold up when someone has to deal with a compassionate and sympathetic human being who wants to understand them. People love to talk about themselves and they love when you're interested in them, and they will start to question their preset views when you support their sense of self-worth.
Occasionally you find the guy who just wants power and doesn't care who he hurts, or who enjoys watching people scream as he peels their skin away from their flesh, or who gets a rush from the power over others as he rapes and murders their children in front of them. Those people you cannot effectively interrogate by any means; you simply hit them in the face with a brick until you feel sufficiently zen, and then send them to be burned. Get a dog to replace them, because animals are much more sophisticated and civilized.
More considerations nobody makes
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