The Torture Memos

LostinKildare

Or is in the same general vicinity as suspected terrorists.

Overheal

oscarBravo wrote: »

From Andrew Sullivan in yesterday's Sunday Times:

Im sure we can trace that to western cinema: we've become desensitized to these things. Though in reality these things are still clearly wrong.

Nodin

Overheal wrote: »

Im sure we can trace that to western cinema: we've become desensitized to these things.

Torture? they used do it in public, long before the Cinema.

LostinKildare

Overheal wrote: »

Im sure we can trace that to western cinema: we've become desensitized to these things. Though in reality these things are still clearly wrong.

Check out this article about the influence of the tv show 24 and its right-wing creator. It's pretty shocking:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_mayer

Overheal

LostinKildare wrote: »

Check out this article about the influence of the tv show 24 and its right-wing creator. It's pretty shocking:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_mayer

Oh I know all about Mr. Bauer and his exploits. Quite a fan really. But yeah, they make torture look Cool on the show, and again, in reality, I don't think we have a good rationale for torture. As admitted in that article, Ticking Time bomb scenarios rarely if ever happen in real life. And I worry that Dick Cheney and his cohorts - who apparently watch and enjoy 24 - got caught up and said hey yeah, theres a thought... Keep in mind 24 came out in 01' and we started rounding up and torturing people, when?

It would not be beyond the realm of possibility that Dick and Co. got their wonderful idea to torture people from a bloody TV show.

Nodin

Overheal wrote: »

Oh I know all about Mr. Bauer and his exploits. Quite a fan really. But yeah, they make torture look Cool on the show, and again, in reality, I don't think we have a good rationale for torture. As admitted in that article, Ticking Time bomb scenarios rarely if ever happen in real life. And I worry that Dick Cheney and his cohorts - who apparently watch and enjoy 24 - got caught up and said hey yeah, theres a thought... Keep in mind 24 came out in 01' and we started rounding up and torturing people, when?

It would not be beyond the realm of possibility that Dick and Co. got their wonderful idea to torture people from a bloody TV show.

More likely they got it from the US Rights favourite nation....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hagai-elad/torture-the-truly-painful_b_190580.html

Lay down with the dog, you're going to end up with the same fleas.

Code Breaker

Considering they released these so called "torture" memos, it would only seem right that they release the memos showing the vital information they got by using enhanced interrogation methods. Let everyone see the results for themselves and the people can decide if the pros outweigh the cons...

Overheal

When you have no idea if youre going to get the passcodes to the Cylon Defense Mainframe or a great recipe for Chicken Soup - how are we to justify whether torture should be condoned or not?

Its a fine thing in hindsight to say "Oh, Well. Look. We dropped The Bomb and it ended the War in the Pacific." We had no way of knowing beforehand that would be the outcome. It doesn't really justify the use of The Bomb. The pair of them. What if Japan hadn't surrendered after two? Would we have wiped them off the map?

Code Breaker

Well it all depends on what you consider torture. Many would argue waterboarding is not torture while others would say it is. But how can anyone be against a technique which uncovers such important details and yet does not cause any physical harm? With the Japan sitation, the fact that they did not surrender after the 1st bombing shows us how determined they were to keep fighting, so who knows how long the war would have continued which would of caused even more deaths. In both cases the ends justify the means.

Overheal

Code Breaker wrote: »

Well it all depends on what you consider torture. Many would argue waterboarding is not torture while others would say it is. But how can anyone be against a technique which uncovers such important details and yet does not cause any physical harm? With the Japan sitation, the fact that they did not surrender after the 1st bombing shows us how determined they were to keep fighting, so who knows how long the war would have continued which would of caused even more deaths. In both cases the ends justify the means.

This has already been discussed. Waterboarding is Torture. Why? Well you can read here here here oh, and here. Short version: its torture, and we've prosecuted other countries for doing it to us (yes, Waterboarding).

Also saying ending the war by nuking japs somehow "saves lives"....

But how can anyone be against a technique which uncovers such important details and yet does not cause any physical harm?

What details.

And physical damage is not a prerequisite for torture.

The Mad Hatter

Overheal wrote: »

This has already been discussed. Waterboarding is Torture. Why? Well you can read here here here oh, and here. Short version: its torture, and we've prosecuted other countries for doing it to us (yes, Waterboarding).

Also saying ending the war by nuking japs somehow "saves lives"....

Well, assuming that the Japanese would have kept fighting for years unless the bombs were dropped (which is generally the case put forward by apologists for the bombing), that would be correct.

That said, I've seen evidence recently that suggests Japan were nearing surrender before the first bomb was dropped, and if this is true it would make it impossible to justify either bomb.

LostinKildare

Here is some breaking news on a high-profile prisoner who was tortured into giving critical false information that the Bush admin used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Rather convenient for them that he's "committed suicide."

The Arabic media is ablaze with the news that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of an Afghan training camp — whose claim that Saddam Hussein had been involved in training al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons was used to justify the invasion of Iraq — has died in a Libyan jail. So far, however, the only English language report is on the Algerian website Ennahar Online, which reported that the Libyan newspaper Oea stated that al-Libi (aka Ali Abdul Hamid al-Fakheri) “was found dead of suicide in his cell,” and noted that the newspaper had reported the story “without specifying the date or method of suicide.”

This news resolves, in the grimmest way possible, questions that have long been asked about the whereabouts of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, perhaps the most famous of “America’s Disappeared” — prisoners seized in the “War on Terror,” who were rendered not to Guantánamo but to secret prisons run by the CIA or to the custody of governments in third countries — often their own — where, it was presumed, they would never be seen or heard from again.

The emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, al-Libi was one of hundreds of prisoners seized by Pakistani forces in December 2001, crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Most of these men ended up in Guantánamo after being handed over (or sold) to US forces by their Pakistani allies, but al-Libi was, notoriously, rendered to Egypt by the CIA to be tortured on behalf of the US government.

In Egypt, he came up with the false allegation about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used by President Bush in a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, just days before Congress voted on a resolution authorizing the President to go to war against Iraq, in which, referring to the supposed threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, Bush said, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”

Four months later, on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell made the same claim in his notorious speech to the UN Security Council, in an attempt to drum up support for the invasion. “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda,” Powell said, adding, “Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.” As a Newsweek report in 2007 explained, Powell did not identify al-Libi by name, but CIA officials — and a Senate Intelligence Committee report — later confirmed that he was referring to al-Libi.

Al-Libi recanted his story in February 2004, when he was returned to the CIA’s custody, and explained, as Newsweek described it, that he told his debriefers that “he initially told his interrogators that he ‘knew nothing’ about ties between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden and he ‘had difficulty even coming up with a story’ about a relationship between the two.” The Newsweek report explained that “his answers displeased his interrogators — who then apparently subjected him to the mock burial. As al-Libi recounted, he was stuffed into a box less than 20 inches high. When the box was opened 17 hours later, al-Libi said he was given one final opportunity to ‘tell the truth.’ He was knocked to the floor and ‘punched for 15 minutes.’ It was only then that, al-Libi said, he made up the story about Iraqi weapons training.” . . .

The use of al-Libi to extract a false confession that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq was particularly shocking, because a Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded in February 2002 that al-Libi was lying, and Dan Coleman of the FBI (which had been pulled off al-Libi’s case when the CIA — and the administration — decided to render him to torture in Egypt) had no doubt that the emir of an Afghan training camp would know nothing about Iraq. “It was ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would have known anything about Iraq,” Coleman told [reporter] Jane Mayer. “I could have told them that. He ran a training camp. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with Iraq.”

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/05/10/ibn-al-shaykh-al-libi-has-died-in-a-libyan-prison/

Nodin

Code Breaker wrote: »

Considering they released these so called "torture" memos, it would only seem right that they release the memos showing the vital information they got by using enhanced interrogation methods. Let everyone see the results for themselves and the people can decide if the pros outweigh the cons...

That was addressed earlier in the thread, tbh.

Sand

Also saying ending the war by nuking japs somehow "saves lives"....

The USAF killed 100,000 people in a single nights firebombing of Tokyo, as opposed to the 80,000 killed at Nagasaki. The use of atomic weapons might get the headlines, but 6 months of continuous firebombing of Japanese cities built mostly of wood and paper killed far, far more people than the two, isolated atomic attacks. Not really much of a moral distinction between firebombing civillians and nuking them really. Children affected by birth defects after the war might not deserve it, but neither did the children of the era who had conventional weapons dropped on them.

If the use of nukes displayed both a capability and will to the fanatics amongst the Japanese that convinced them they they could not conceivably resist, then yes, there is a case it saved lives. Another 6 months of USAF bombing would have killed far more - though such was the scale of the destruction at that point the USAF had run out of targets worth bombing.

Overheal

Ack. I think you could have gotten the same dramatic effect by dropping the bomb off the Coast from Tokyo.

Code Breaker

Well if the destruction caused by the 1st nuke didnt force them to surrender then dropping the bomb off the coast of Tokyo certainly wouldnt of done it! And its obvious that protecting the lives of the Japanese people was not Japans top priority, if it was they would of surrendered after the 1st nuke.

Overheal

Its not that they underestimated the power of the nuke or they weren't phased by it - according to the History books they called Bluff on the assumption that there was no way the US had more than One of these superweapons.

Manic Moran

Overheal wrote: »

Ack. I think you could have gotten the same dramatic effect by dropping the bomb off the Coast from Tokyo.

I doubt it. We may know what that mushroom cloud means, but I don't think it would have been quite as self-evident to someone. The only way of getting that 'dramatic effect' would have been with the death and destruction which resulted from the single bomb. Otherwise you basically end up with an interesting light and noise show.

NTM

Overheal

I guess morbid curiosity played into the decision as well - they wanted to know the real world destructive power of this spanking new weapon.

Manic Moran

Which I think makes the point: If the US wasn't particularly sure about the destructive power of the weapon despite having blown one up in controlled circumstances in the New Mexico desert, how could a 'demonstration drop' off Japan reliably impress the Japanese that it was particularly destructive?

On other news entirely, Ms Pelosi seems to have forgotten a basic rule of politics: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. She's pretty much dominating the news right now on the torture issue.

NTM

Overheal

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=227352&title=dan-choi-is-gay

Code Breaker

Well Nancy Pelosi has lost all credibility after that horrific press conference, as if she had much to begin with!
If the democrates go through with these "show trials" surely Pelosi will have to be the first person to take the stand?

LostinKildare

The Republicans are attacking Pelosi thinking they can make it too politically costly for the Dems to want to pursue a torture investigation. The old "we're taking you down with us" tactic.

But that strategy only works when the other side stands to lose more than you. But the Dems can easily afford to take the hit. They can live without Nancy Pelosi.

The GOP, on the other hand, is teetering on the brink of disaster. The harder they push against Pelosi, the more likely she is to go nuclear. They may be backing her into a corner that will require her to do things that the Republicans are not going to like.

af_thefragile

Ron Paul had this to say about Torture a few days ago...
In case any of ye might be interested...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skeom9K8fww

Code Breaker

Well I would argue that the democrates are now in a much worse position than the republicans in terms of the torture debate because they knew what interrogation tactics were being used back in 2002 and didnt object at all. But once a few years passed and people started to go back to a pre 9/11 mentality, thats when they begin to critcise and conemn the Bush administration as if they themselves had nothing to do with it. And now that Nancy Pelosi has pushed herself into a corner by claiming the CIA mislead her and Congress, you can be sure the CIA will release every minute from every briefing showing exactly who knew what and when they knew it.

Manic Moran

I'm fairly confident Pelosi will survive this in the long term, she's not about to be turfed out of the Speaker's position right now. However, even if she were to go, I wouldn't see that as a bad deal for the Democrats: The Coast Liberals are, I think, too much in charge of that party, they need to have greater Blue Dog influence.

NTM

LostinKildare

Code Breaker wrote: »

Well I would argue that the democrates are now in a much worse position than the republicans in terms of the torture debate because they knew what interrogation tactics were being used back in 2002 and didnt object at all. But once a few years passed and people started to go back to a pre 9/11 mentality, thats when they begin to critcise and conemn the Bush administration as if they themselves had nothing to do with it.

Your version of history is straight outta Fox.

First off, though, the fact remains that Pelosi did not authorize or commit acts of torture. As many people did. Now the Republicans are trying to divert attention, scapegoating her for not doing enough to stop the GOP’s torture program, while the people who developed and continue to advocate for their torture program escape blame? Oh, hell no.

And cmon, let’s get real. Pelosi had no authority to stop what was happening. She was the minority senator sworn to secrecy, and her only avenue of protest was to the majority senator or the White House. If she had gone public with the classified information, she would have been prosecuted. Under 18 USC 798:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information . . . Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

Not to mention that it would have been impossible for her to defend herself or prove that the administration was in fact torturing people because the evidence itself was secret.

Do you not remember how Bush et al. unequivocally lied repeatedly, stating that the treatment of every detainee and every wiretap both foreign and domestic were in full accordance with existing laws? Apparently you are unaware that they were challenged by various Democratic senators and representatives who were for the most part ignored by the media and the public because all proof was classified and therefore they could not corroborate their claims. Democrats in Congress made several attempts to pass bills that specified that waterboarding was torture. Those bills that never made it to law because Republicans blocked them, and the one that finally made it to the president’s desk was vetoed by Bush in early 2008.

If you want to pursue this obvious diversionary tactic by the Republicans then please explain exactly how Pelosi, or any other dissenter for that matter, could have effectively acted in a way that would have stopped the torture any sooner. And while you're at it, do a little research on the courageous men and women in the government, military, and private sphere who lost their livelihoods and reputations when they spoke out about the illegal and immoral things that were happening under Bush.

All this Republican fingerpointing about what Pelosi knew and when she knew it will just ramp up the pressure for a full and complete investigation of just what the hell everyone knew and when they knew it, and what was ordered done and who ordered it. Pelosi herself has several times called for such an investigation. Bring it on.

jank

Sean Hannity Vs Keith Olbermann

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Sm8Os3mXv8&feature=related

JohnMc1

LostinKildare wrote: »

Your version of history is straight outta Fox.

:rolleyes: LOL. Keep telling yourself that while she continues to drop herself even further into a huge mess. She's lying out of her backside. She's changed her story 5-6 times already.

LostinKildare

Um, did you not read the post? I didn't say she isn't lying. I don't know if she is. I was disputing Codebreaker's statement that

the democrates are now in a much worse position than the republicans in terms of the torture debate because they knew what interrogation tactics were being used back in 2002 and didnt object at all. But once a few years passed and people started to go back to a pre 9/11 mentality, thats when they begin to critcise and conemn the Bush administration as if they themselves had nothing to do with it.

I'm saying it's not true that nobody objected til now. And I'm saying if Pelosi was told about waterboarding in September 2003 (which still would have been after the fact, in violation of the law) what could she have done about it? Various other people (not just in govt, and not just Democrats) did speak out about things they did know, to little or no effect. The Bush White House grossly suppressed dissent.

Of course, by accusing Pelosi of complicity, her attackers are admitting that what the Bush administration did was criminal. If they want to cling to the argument that what the Bush administration did was not torture, then Pelosi did nothing wrong. You can't have it both ways.

In any case, this just makes it clear that Congress is too partisan to handle the torture issue, and that a special prosecutor should be appointed to deal with the whole stinking thing. Which is want the Left wants anyway. And if Pelosi goes down, big deal. Progressives are still pissed at her for taking impeachment of Bush off the table.