The Torture Memos

Overheal

LostinKildare wrote: »

Great reason not to investigate crimes against humanity. Gimme a break.

My point still stands: neither of his analogies involves a cover up. Neither requires investigation. No need for a "witch hunt."

And hey, maybe Obama will get a blow job from someone other than Michelle and they can go after him while he's still in office.;)

So you are saying you wouldnt go after the Bush Administration if they came out and said "Yep, we're torturing people."

The Mad Hatter

LostinKildare wrote: »

Great reason not to investigate crimes against humanity. Gimme a break.

My point still stands: neither of his analogies involves a cover up. Neither requires investigation. No need for a "witch hunt."

And hey, maybe Obama will get a blow job from someone other than Michelle and they can go after him while he's still in office.;)

Yeah, I love the republican sense of morality: torture good; sex between consenting adults bad.

LostinKildare

Overheal wrote: »

So you are saying you wouldnt go after the Bush Administration if they came out and said "Yep, we're torturing people."

Don't be willfully obtuse. I didn't suggest that we shouldn't prosecute if only they would admit their crimes.

Go back and read the thread. PJ argued that the pursuit of Bush/torture was a "witch hunt," and suggested we might do the same with FDR/internment. Responding to the issue of "witch hunts," I said the analogy sucked because, in a nutshell, there's nothing to "hunt out."

He's not wrong. We'd have to retroactively have to go after every former president with criminal charges. Wether it be for torture, or secret assassinations. Similarly Obama will one day face criminal charges for some inevitable slight.

This sets no precedent. As I pointed out, the Republicans have already set the bar pretty low for what crimes are deemed worthy of prosecuting a president (a sitting president, even). Lying about a blow job vs. war crimes. Yep, I think this is a bit more serious.

If we go ahead with this, it will change the country in very fundamental ways and will have repercussions that will be felt for decades.

I agree, if not for the same reasons you mean.

Nodin

JohnMc1 wrote: »

Just pointing out that she's a lying piece of you know what. .

Shit, you mean. Most politicians are. If Iraq had turned out better, they'd have continued kissing Bush's ass.

JohnMc1 wrote: »

They had doctors on hand to make sure the prisoners didn't suffer any permanent damage. .

As in physical damage. So they could keep them in pain over a longer period overall.

JohnMc1 wrote: »

Hence why Waterboarding is not illegal. .

It is torture. I pointed out to you that the US has prosecuted it for over a century as torture. You ignored that part.

Overheal

The Mad Hatter wrote: »

Yeah, I love the republican sense of morality: torture good; sex between consenting adults bad.

No worse than...wait, this isn't the lolocaust, that joke will not fly

LostinKildare wrote: »

Don't be willfully obtuse. I didn't suggest that we shouldn't prosecute if only they would admit their crimes.

Go back and read the thread. PJ argued that the pursuit of Bush/torture was a "witch hunt," and suggested we might do the same with FDR/internment. Responding to the issue of "witch hunts," I said the analogy sucked because, in a nutshell, there's nothing to "hunt out."

Still torches and Pitch Forks from where I'm standing. The Witch Trials were less to do with finding wrongdoers as it was Scapegoating on an epic scale. I think you missed the point.

This sets no precedent. As I pointed out, the Republicans have already set the bar pretty low for what crimes are deemed worthy of prosecuting a president (a sitting president, even). Lying about a blow job vs. war crimes. Yep, I think this is a bit more serious.

Weren't those charges laughed out of the courts?

LostinKildare

Overheal wrote: »

The Witch Trials were less to do with finding wrongdoers as it was Scapegoating on an epic scale.

You are incorrect.

Merriam Websters' definition of witch hunt: "the searching out and deliberate harrassment of those (as political opponents) with unpopular views."

From Wikipedia: "In modern terminology 'witch-hunt' has acquired usage referrring to the act of seeking and persecuting any perceived enemy, particularly when the search is conducted using extreme measures and with little regard to actual guilt or innocence."

The term has nothing to do with scapegoating. And in any case, neither "witch hunting" nor "scapegoating" can be rightly applied to internment by FDR, who ordered the internment himself, openly.

As far as "scapegoating" goes, a textbook case is the Bush administration's blaming of abuses at Abu Ghraib on a few "bad apples." Although he had approved as policy hooding, stress positions, nudity, the use of phobias, dogs, sensory deprivation, hypothermia, and sexual humiliation as ways to "soften up" detainees, when the scandal broke Rumsfeld said it was the worst day in his tenure as defense secretary:

"Clearly the worst day was Abu Ghraib, and seeing what went on there and feeling so deeply sorry that that happened. I remember being stunned by the news of the abuse."

Weren't those charges laughed out of the courts?

So? It's a very recent example of "going after" a president, which you seemed to be saying was unprecedented -- that "going after" Bush would be something new that would open floodgates that until now have been kept decorously closed. Maybe I misunderstood you.

Overheal

going after a president for getting head and going after a president for dropping the bomb... you see the connection, I am sure.

Bill blew up something in her mouth. wooooah!

I think I have to agree with the righties on this: the only reason Obama brought out these torture memos now and got everyone twittering about this shyte, now, is to act as a smokescreen. So now that all the media outlets are busy digesting this while running around in circles theres other things going on that arent getting the attention they deserve!

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5huSNmNuOM7efqSOexr5FlnMZFZWgD97Q7SB00

:mad:

Seriously though, you'd think he was just sick of hearing about bowing to saudi royals and shaking hands with dictators. His approval rating is already dipping around and below 50%.

LostinKildare

Overheal wrote: »

His approval rating is already dipping around and below 50%.

You have a link for that?

The latest poll I've seen, WashPost/ABC, has him at 69% approval. All others listed at Real Clear Politics -- FOX News, Gallup, Pew, Associated Press -- are 62-65%, except for the outlier Rasmussen (55%).

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html#polls

oscarBravo

From Andrew Sullivan in yesterday's Sunday Times:

The British government processed and interrogated more than 500 Nazi spies during the second world war in a situation in which the very existence of Britain as a free country was at stake and when Londoners endured a 9/11 every week during the blitz. But not one of the spies was physically coerced. Not just because it would have been immoral and illegal, because giving in to torture was not morally different from surrendering to Nazism, but because it would have produced false leads, dead ends and fantasies. The reason totalitarian states use the torture techniques that Bush did is to produce false confessions to create a reality that buttresses their ideology.

The Bush and Cheney ideology was that Iraq needed to be invaded because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda that put America under an intolerable risk. When the facts could not be found to defend that idée fixe, they skewed the intelligence. When there was no intelligence to skew, they tortured people to get it.


Or, to put it more simply: on March 27, 2007, when Zubaydah went before his combatant status review tribunal at Guantanamo, the judge asked him: “So I understand that, during this treatment, you said things to make them stop and then those statements were actually untrue. Is that correct?”
Zubaydah replied: “Yes.” This is partly how the entire war was justified: on a tortured lie. And this much we now know for sure.

Pocono Joe

oscarBravo wrote: »

You want to talk about slippery slopes: how would you feel about waterboarding, slamming against walls, sleep deprivation etc being used in county jails across America?

In extreme circumstances... if it could save the lives of innocent people, then I would support harsh treatment utilized in the memos we are discussing, for those who have taken the steps necessary to murdering people in cold blood.

"Slamming against walls"... So is what the WWE has been doing for years now considered torture?

Pocono Joe

LostinKildare wrote: »

Re your friend who was waterboarded, care to tell us the circumstances?

A long time friend of mine, who I haven’t seen in several years now, and who was once a Marine flyer, told me of some of the extraordinary training he had to go through to become a flyer. It involved tactics used by our enemies to extract information from flyers captured in combat. He told me of "simulated drowning" training he was required to go through. Although he did not use the word "waterboarding," I assume they are the same. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) he didn’t make it as a jet fighter, and was relegated to flying choppers.

And considering what his red headed wife did to him in the divorce, waterboarding was probably a walk in the park.

Pocono Joe

Personally, the outrage shown for these three cold-blooded, mass murdering terrorists isn’t worth a warm bucket of piss in my opinion. I read today a piece by Deroy Murdock at RealClearPolitics that was great... here is a sampling.

Meanwhile, the ceaseless whimpering over KSM's waterboarding almost universally neglects his victims' agony. KSM masterminded the 9/11 massacre (2,976 dead, 7,356 wounded). He also, he said, "decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the City of Karachi, Pakistan." KSM financed the February 1993 Twin Towers bombing (six dead, 1,040 injured). According to the March 16, 2007, Wall Street Journal, KSM admitted he was "directly in charge" of "managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American Soil."

KSM has no regrets. In a Guantanamo military-commission pleading to U.S. Army Judge Col. Stephen Henley, KSM and four co-defendants wrote on March 5:

Your intelligence apparatus, with all its abilities, human and logistical, had failed to discover our military attack plans before the blessed 11 September operation. They were unable to foil our attack . . .
Our prophet was victorious because of fear. At a month distant, the enemy did not hear from him. So, our religion is a religion of fear and terror to the enemies of God: the Jews, Christians, and pagans. With God's wiling [sic], we are terrorists to the bone. So, many thanks to God.
The Arab poet, Abu-Ubaydah Al-Hadrami, has stated: "We will terrorize you, as long as we live with swords, fire, and airplanes." . . .
We will make all of our materials available, to defend and deter, and egress you and the filthy Jews from our countries. . . .
We ask to be near to God, we fight you and destroy you and terrorize you. The Jihad in god's cause is a great duty in our religion...Your end is very near and your fall will be just as the fall of the towers on the blessed 9/11 day. . . .
So we ask from God to accept our contributions to the great attack, the great attack on America, and to place our nineteen martyred brethren among the highest peaks in paradise.

Thus, my eyes stayed as dry as the Sahara upon learning that American counterterrorists had dampened KSM's nostrils 183 times. I prefer to cry for the 2,976 individuals whom KSM, Abu Zubaydah, and their colleagues slaughtered on 9/11. Of the 2,752 they killed at the World Trade Center, 1,125 (41 percent) were literally vaporized. These victims' loved ones do not have so much as bone fragments to bury, place flowers upon, or shed tears over.

Now that is torture.

Mr.Micro

Personally, the outrage shown for these three cold-blooded, mass murdering terrorists isn’t worth a warm bucket of piss in my opinion.

Presume you mean the CIA and the former Bush regime, official terrorists, who are no better than the terrorists that you allude to? What else can you say you have to stick to your dogma, especially now that Obama has disclosed the sordid little secret, soon to be followed by more abu Ghraib photos. More proud moments in the illustrious history of the democratic land of the free.

Nodin

Pocono Joe wrote: »

Personally, the outrage shown for these three cold-blooded, mass murdering terrorists

Its the general principal and these methods were used on far more than them.

LostinKildare

Pocono Joe wrote: »

A long time friend of mine, who I haven’t seen in several years now, and who was once a Marine flyer, told me of some of the extraordinary training he had to go through to become a flyer. It involved tactics used by our enemies to extract information from flyers captured in combat. He told me of "simulated drowning" training he was required to go through. Although he did not use the word "waterboarding," I assume they are the same.

Please read this article by Senior Chief Petty Officer Malcolm Nance, a former Naval Intelligence officer who underwent waterboarding in training and inflicted it on hundreds of GIs. As chief of training at the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school, he prepared troops to endure brutal interrogation methods. It sounds like it was the SERE program that your friend did, and that was the program on which the CIA based their methods.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/

Pocono Joe

Thanks for the Link Lost... First for the good read, and second for the most interesting comments section I have ever seen (well anyway, I read some, scanned some and will have to come back and read more later). It’s wild how the comments went on to become the trial of Jared Nuzzolillo (4th poster). Also interesting is the seeing the comments from 2007 viewpoints.

Malcolm Nance is certainly due his opinion. As I read your comment I figured I knew the slant your link would take me in (I was correct). I also noticed in the tone of your comment a sort of respect for Mr. Nance, and you very carefully avoided the word “torture.” You referred to “endure brutal interrogation methods,” excellent choice of words may I add. Is this man not a torturer in your viewpoint? Does the fact that is was done to a willing participant matter... is not torture, torture?

wyk

I like it. Besides the fact I believe we should treat all humans with respect, and not assume they are guilty without trial, and then torture them, and then criticize other countries for doing the same. What I like the most about this is it sends a message to all future presidential administrations and their henchmen that you actually can be held accountable. It's time to really think before you act because the impunity has been cracked.

WYK

LostinKildare

oscarBravo wrote: »

You want to talk about slippery slopes: how would you feel about waterboarding, slamming against walls, sleep deprivation etc being used in county jails across America?

This might be just fine with some right-wingers, but it wasn't fine with their idol Ronald Reagan, apparently.

George W. Bush’s Justice Department said subjecting a person to the near-drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn’t even cause pain, but Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department thought otherwise, prosecuting a sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.

Federal prosecutors secured a 10-year sentence against the sheriff and four years in prison for the deputies. But that 1983 case – which would seem to be directly on point for a legal analysis on waterboarding two decades later – was never mentioned in the four Bush administration opinions released last week.

This is coming up now in investigating the lawyers who authored the Torture Memos. They're in deep doo-doo.

[Human rights attorney and constitutional expert Scott] Horton suspects that Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury were well aware of the case law but simply chose to ignore it in order to give the Bush administration what it had asked for.

“[T]here was a court-martial addressing the practice of waterboarding from 1903, a state court case from the Twenties, a series of prosecutions at the [post-World War II] Tokyo Tribunal (in many of which the death penalty was sought) and another court-martial in 1968,” Horton said. “These precedents could have been revealed in just a few minutes of computerized research using the right search engines. It's hard to imagine that Yoo and Bybee didn't know them.

“So why are none of these precedents mentioned? Obviously because each of them contradicts the memo's conclusions and would have to be distinguished away. Professional rules would have required that these precedents be cited, failing to do so reflects incompetent analysis.”

http://www.pubrecord.org/torture/854-doj-prosecuted-texas-sheriff-in-1983-for-waterboarding-prisoners.html

The Mad Hatter

Pocono Joe wrote: »

Does the fact that is was done to a willing participant matter

Just picking a quote - yes, absolutely. I think that the knowledge that your interrogators are not going to kill you or let any physical harm come to you is of tremendous psychological advantage when being subjected to techniques like this.

LostinKildare

Pocono Joe wrote: »

Is this man not a torturer in your viewpoint?

No, he wasn't torturing them, he was training them in how to respond to being tortured.

Does the fact that is was done to a willing participant matter...

Yes, it makes all the difference in the world. It is like the difference between consensual sex and rape.

(And like rape, "real world" waterboarding -- of the torturous variety -- involves serious psychological trauma; in some cases doesn't cause any permanent physical damage, but in other cases does; involves the threat of imminent death; and will make the victim say anything to make it stop.)



Note that Nance is not the only SERE person who has labelled the reverse-engineered govt program "torture":

The military agency [JPRA, which runs SERE] that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."

Daniel Baumgartner, who was the JPRA's chief of staff in 2002 and transmitted the memos and attachments, said the agency "sent a lot of cautionary notes" regarding harsh techniques. "There is a difference between what we do in training and what the administration wanted the information for," he said a telephone interview yesterday.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/24/AR2009042403171_pf.html

Also see this:

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.
<snip>
They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective.
<snip>
Government studies in the 1950s found that Chinese Communist interrogators had produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister “brainwashing” but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene.
“The Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture,’ ” one 1956 study concluded. “But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”
Worse, the study found that under such abusive treatment, a prisoner became “malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate.”
In late 2001, about a half-dozen SERE trainers, according to a report released Tuesday night by the Senate Armed Services Committee, began raising stark warning about plans by both the military and the C.I.A. to use the SERE methods in interrogations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22detain.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

We have to ask ourselves why the govt would approve and push techniques that were known to produce false intelligence.

Some people, like Andrew Sullivan in the piece OscarBravo quoted above (great piece!), are beginning to connect the dots from last week's Senate report and are alleging that the govt knowingly ordered these torture techniques not (or not only) to extract true information that would prevent another terrorist attack, but with the express purpose of producing false statements linking Al Qaeda and Iraq -- in order to justify the Iraq War.

Unbelievable? Bush officials had been told time and again that victims of torture will tell you whatever you want to hear just to make it all stop.

See this article: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html.
It begins:

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

jank

Note that some right wing outlets are using the word "Tough Interrogation" instead of torture..

Perhaps Hannity will bring out his own English dictionary as the oxford version is obviously defiled liberal filth.

Pocono Joe

Does Ann Coulter read this forum?

Read her piece from yesterday MUSLIMS: 'WE DO THAT ON FIRST DATES'
http://www.anncoulter.com/

Now look at post #39 back on 22-04-2009 in this thread... coincidence?

Nodin

Pocono Joe wrote: »

Read her piece from yesterday MUSLIMS: 'WE DO THAT ON FIRST DATES'
http://www.anncoulter.com/

The usual badly thought-out, childishly unresearched nonsense. Glib, shallow, and unoriginal.

Thousands of our troops are waterboarded every year as part of their training, but not until it was done to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- mastermind of the 9/11 attack on America -- were liberal consciences shocked.

Why would people be "shocked" by training soldiers to perpare for what the unscrupolous enemy might do to them, ie torture....?

However - as a few posters here have done - this also ignores the long history of US prosecutions for using this method, both abroad and at home.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html

As non-uniformed combatants, all of the detainees at Guantanamo could have been summarily shot on the battlefield under the Laws of War.

"unlawful combatants" are entitled to a trial.

Coulter also ignores the more awkward methods ( beatings and rape with implements ) that were used. Theres also no contemplation of the consequences - false information given to stop the torture, the desire for revenge created, the propoganda value to the enemy of the US.

LostinKildare

Pocono Joe wrote: »

Does Ann Coulter read this forum?

She's a notorious plagiarist, so maybe she did rip you off.

Overheal

Yeah but I'm Ann Coulter and so is my wife: There, I just plagurized 1,342 other boardsies AND The Life of Brian :pac:

banquo

OT, but not worth starting a new thread.

The Onion, First 100 Days wrote:

DAY 91: Rahm Emanuel takes a deep breath, counts to 10, and reminds himself that it's not the envelope's fault.

LostinKildare

So, we've got Ronald Reagan condemning torture, we've got George W. Bush himself condemning torture. In an effort to comply with the Republican party's desire to return to "party roots," here's another Republican idol -- "big stick" Teddy Roosevelt -- on waterboarding:

Having defeated Spain in the Spanish-American war, U.S. troops occupied the Philippines and other former Spanish territories. But the Filipinos were not anxious to be annexed. They fought back, and a long guerrilla war ensured. That's when the American military discovered waterboarding - a technique brought to the island by the Spanish, who had first employed it against heretics during the Inquisition). The Americans adopted it for use against the Filipino insurgents, as a means of extracting information.

The "water cure" scandal first surfaced in 1902, when the U.S. governor of the Philippines, William Howard Taft, spilled the beans under oath in front of a congressional committee. One newspaper called his testimony "a most humiliating admission that should strike horror in the mind of every American." The subsequent official report described the workings of the water cure:

"A man is thrown down on his back, and three or four men sit in his arms and legs and hold him down, and either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a pin...is simply thrust into his jaws...and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose...until the man gives some sign of giving in or becomes unconscious...His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but who cannot drown."

Roosevelt sent a cable that read:

The president desires to know in the fullest and most circumstantial manner all the facts...for the very reason that the president intends to back up the Army in the heartiest fashion in every lawful and legitimate method of doing its work; he also intends to see that the most vigorous care is exercised to detect and prevent any cruelty or brutality and that men who are guilty thereof are punished. Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American military.

He then had the perpetrators thrown out of the Army.


And a bonus quote for those who like to refer back to our venerated Founding Fathers:

"Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause... for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country." -- George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

The Mad Hatter

The reference to 'inhuman conduct of any kind' is a nice touch, as it covers the renaming of torture as well.

Jack Sheehan

Pocono Joe wrote: »

Personally, the outrage shown for these three cold-blooded, mass murdering terrorists isn’t worth a warm bucket of piss in my opinion. I read today a piece by Deroy Murdock at RealClearPolitics that was great... here is a sampling.

So its about revenge then? Or is it just that you dont care a damn about basic human rights as long as the person invloved is a terrorist?

The Mad Hatter

Jack Sheehan wrote: »

So its about revenge then? Or is it just that you dont care a damn about basic human rights as long as the person invloved is a terrorist?

Or is suspected to be a terrorist.