When you've lost the language, debate is impossible.
As the Obama Administration moves beyond its first 100 days, the hyperventilation over "torture" continues at a fevered pace. Not only is sawing off a person's head with a rusty saw considered "torture," so is putting a caterpillar in their prison cell. There's no real discussion of types of actions, degrees of action, whether it's been declared legal/illegal in the U.S. vs. illegal per another country or institution, Geneva Convention restrictions for uniformed combatants vs. non-uniformed combatants vs. entities that never signed the Geneva Convention. You know, what some people call "details," and other people refer to as "just details."
When you've lost the language, debate is impossible. What we have instead are opinions disguised as analysis. Torture — according to today's definition — is severe mental or physical stress (no actual lasting, or permanent, physical or mental harm is necessary). The concept of torture is not just synonymous with "enhanced interrogation techniques;" today anything that is identified as "enhanced" is automatically considered "torture." The two words are treated as if they are identical, even though they mean qualitatively different things.
We could talk about a legal definition of torture — whom it applies to, whom it doesn't, how its abstract terms ("severe," "intimidating," "coercive," "mental anguish," etc.) are actually defined in a legal and practical sense, and what entities have the authority to make these determinations regarding the actions of American officials. We could actually have people versed in the law debate this.
But what's the fun in that when we can just apply our own (or some commentator's or website's) standards to the subject, and decide that something is torture if we wouldn't want that done to ourselves. Or, think that it's really not a nice thing to do to someone who wants to kill innocent people, because torture produces unreliable confessions (even if we're after information, not an admission of guilt). In other words, why ask questions like: if torture involves something "severe," what exactly is the non-abstract definition of "severe"? Is "severe" a quantified state (and if so, quantified by whom?). Or is it simply what you yourself consider to be stressful, and therefore "severe"?
Like I said, though, actually treating this subject like a real topic puts a crimp in a lot of people's style, not to mention interfering with blaming Bush for certain things that Obama is excused for doing. So, putting all the boring, technical stuff aside, I've compiled a list of opinions (since real analysis is so passé these days) about what constitutes "torture."
You can use these as a practical guide to condemn people you disagree with politically by pretending to take a moral high road that bears almost no resemblance to the real world in which you live. But, it does let you state things emphatically that require nothing more substantive than your (or some commentator or official somewhere) assessment to support your opinion.
1. Torture is anything described as "harsh" (as in "harsh interrogation techniques"), "severe," "intimidating," or "coercive." That makes amputating a person's head with a rusty saw "torture." It also makes coming home at 3 in the morning with lipstick on your collar "torture" when you are harshly and severely treated by your wife who intimidates you with a rolling pin (or a threat of divorce), and coerces you into getting rid of your bimbo girlfriend.
2. Waterboarding is torture as practiced by the U.S. against terrorists. It is not torture if practiced by the U.S. against American soldiers in training.
3. Sawing off a person's head is torture if practiced by a signatory to the Geneva Convention. Sawing off a person's head is not torture if practiced by a terrorist not formally affiliated with a recognized state. Rather, it's just a really bad thing (particularly for the person whose head is being detached), but understandable in some quarters because the person being decapitated is either a Jew or American (or both).
4. Rendition is a form of torture if practiced by the Bush Administration. However, rendition is part of keeping one's options open when practiced by the Obama Administration.
5. "Supermax prison is torture and death." This was written by someone with first-hand experience and must therefore be true, since it is just like journalists who experienced waterboarding and therefore have first-hand knowledge to assert that it is torture. This opinion is also backed up by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado, which said that moving Gitmo detainees – including many only suspected of crimes – to the country's most secure prison "is simply another form of torture . . .."
6. Loud music and sleep deprivation are torture when practiced on captured terrorists. Loud music and sleep deprivation when partying on a weekend at college is not torture. However, it isn't just any kind of loud music that constitutes torture. In one of the few, rare instances where the word "torture" is actually defined in concrete terms in an award winning documentary on torture (instead of simply repeating the phrase the Bush Administration practices torture), the specific "loud music" used to torture some random Arab guy picked up off the street named Abu Zubaydah was "The Red Hot Chili Peppers" which was "blasted at full volume for hours on end." So, now you know. Playing Aerosmith or Bing Crosby at full blast is not necessarily torture, but playing The Red Hot Chili Peppers really is — or tracks from Eminem's "Slim Shady" album.
7. Prolonged kneeling is a form of torture when practiced on captured terrorists. Amazingly enough, preventing people from prolonged kneeling to protest torture is also considered an action supportive of torture.
8. The use of mind altering drugs is a form of torture, unless used by liberals and college students in general, in which case it is a manifestation of the right to privacy and an exercise of basic freedom.
9. Arresting someone without prior notification that they are going to be arrested is a form of torture. "The torture process can begin at the moment of arrest . . . Taking someone by surprise is more jarring than if someone has time to physically and mentally prepare himself or herself for arrest." Legislation is needed immediately within the United States requiring all law enforcement agencies to notify suspected serial killers, drug dealers, child-rapists, and other criminals of an intent to arrest them within the next 24-48 hours to give them sufficient time to "mentally prepare" for their incarceration. Remember, like the terrorists at Gitmo, these people have not been convicted of anything. There's just a suspicion that they might have done something wrong, but no actual courtroom-quality "proof" of their guilt at the time of their impending arrest.
10. "Scenarios designed to convince a detainee" that their family may be harmed is torture. In other words, if Big Tony threatens to bust your nephew's kneecaps unless you pay him the "Ten Large" you still owe him from last month, Big Tony is not a loan shark. He is a torturer. Interestingly enough, no follow through action on this threat is required to constitute torture. Sticks and stones will certainly break one's bones, but words alone make you a torturer.
I hope this clears up any confusion on this matter. If not, remember the words of Mr. Spock from a Star Trek episode a long time ago. "In an insane world, only the sane are considered insane."
Dr. Jackson – As you say, “Irony is lost on the ironic.”
The quote of mine you produce in #137 doesn’t agree with your characterization – indeed it says the exact opposite, that I’m not ‘on board’ with torture because it doesn’t work. And it’s not like I didn’t restate that again later in the same discussion:
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2009/05/05/tortured-logic/comment-page-3/#comment-76627
I figured you were being deliberately obfuscatory before, pretending not to understand what I was saying. The fact that you actually put a contradictory quote up, to all appearances believing it actually supported your claims instead of directly undermining them… well, it just has to Jackson’s Razor.
As to the court decision itself… I’m inclined to agree it was wrongly decided, but since I’ve based my objections to the way detainees have been treated on the grounds of the Geneva Convention, it’s not really relevant to my points.
Raymond: “I’ve argued that we need a process [the courts] for determining guilt or innocence. …I’ve also noted that morally, I’ve no problem with torturing terrorists (once convicted) – but also argued that in a “real-world setting” it’s no more effective than other means and has major drawbacks, like recruiting more terrorists.”
Comment by Raymond Ingles | February 13, 2009
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2009/02/10/the-hopelessness-of-debate-part-ii/#comment-76482
Raymond. I conceded that you don’t believe torture will work. Your only concern is that it be legal , then it’s okay with you to torture someone … even though it produces ‘false results’ and makes things worse for the US in general.
It’s also good to know that someone who’s focused on legal authorizations for torture now rejects and ignores the legal foundation he sought to focus instead on the Geneva Convention (which the terrorists didn’t sign), so as to maintain his ‘principled’ stand against torturing people without permission.
Jackson’s razor does indeed apply to you, an eponymous adage which reads: “Never attribute to simple stupidity that which can be adequately explained by deliberate stupidity.”
As does the second half of the other quote you cited. Irony is lost on the ironic. “But more irony is lost on the truly moronic.”
PS: If you want to retract your original quote finding “no problem” with torture once the courts approve it, be a man and retract it. But don’t piss on our leg and tell us it’s raining by saying that you simply “re-stated” it later.
Or, maybe you just don’t understand the difference between retract and restate? If not, be sure to get a good attorney if you’re ever charged with a crime, rather than representing yourself.
“Your honor, I am innocent of all crimes I am accused of. Let me re-state. Your honor, I’m guilty as hell of every crime I was charged with.”
Dr. Jackson – One can not have a moral problem with torturing people who deliberately harm and kill innocents (“It’s not that terrorists deserve better.”)… yet still find major practical problems with it, and conclude it’s a bad idea (not be “on board” with it). Lots of things don’t have to be immoral to be stupid.
Of course, there’s a separate, orthogonal moral problem that I’ve also discussed at length – imposing punishments for crimes without a trial is wrong. If we as a country decide that we want to punish terrorists and other unlawful combatants by torturing them, I’ll disagree and say that’s stupid… but not immoral. If, however, people say we can just punish people as terrorists/unlawful combatants without a trial, I’ll call that stupid and immoral.
It’s impressive in a perverse way that you seem genuinely unable to conceptualize this.
We’re now getting into the absolute bizarre realms of moral relativism.
It’s wrong to torture people without a legal decision allowing it (but then when the legal decision comes, we reject it because it legalizes torture).
And, while it’s claimed that torture is ineffective and produces counterproductive results — it’s morally okay. [We call that sadism].
So, we shouldn’t torture people because it will produce actionable intelligence that may save innocent lives. We can just torture them (when a court says it’s okay) because, well, it’s morally okay to torture them.
It’s still yellow rain, any way you slice it.
Re: “If, however, people say we can just punish people as terrorists/unlawful combatants without a trial, I’ll call that stupid and immoral.”
I think a major issue from the beginning is a trial [hearing, whatever] in what court? This is obvious from the fact that Bush kept the terrorists/unlawful combatants out of the US for one reason: to keep them from coming under civilian court jurisdiction – because the Left has an iron grip on those courts and has caused them to degrade to existing for the sole purpose of letting the guilty go free on the flimsiest pretext [see example in my post #51 above] – and to enact the academy’s latest causes célèbre [1], which is to say the same thing.
The Left claimed that the terrorists/unlawful combatants were being held without a trial [hearing, whatever], never mind that Axis POWs [POWs!!!], who have more rights under Geneva/LOAC than terrorists/unlawful combatants, were not entitled to a trial [hearing, whatever], so Bush started the military tribunals. Then the Left countered by claiming that existing military tribunals were inadequate [not regularly convened, if memory serves me]. Bush and Congress countered by passing a law establishing military tribunals, specifically to handle the GTMO captives, but that wasn’t good enough for the Left either because that still left them under military jurisdiction. The Left-dominated SCOTUS countered by giving the terrorists/unlawful combatants habeas corpus.
It’s no difficult task to connect these dots and see where they’re headed.
The fact of the matter is that in civilian courts, there must de facto be proof beyond all doubt or the accused goes free [Catholic priests being the exception]; in military courts, the level of proof is much lower [perhaps, “more likely than not”].
So, all the prattle about torture is just so much chaff thrown up to confuse the real issues [hurting America and getting Bush].
Dr. Jackson – You’ll note that “punishment” and “interrogation” are two different things. (Well, no, actually, you won’t. You haven’t before, at least.)
Sure, it’s wrong to torture people without a legal decision (i.e. trial) – it’s wrong (morally and legally) for a state to impose any punishment without due process. Anything else is just an invitation for abuse. (Which actually has happened, as I’ve pointed out before, not that you ever appeared to have processed that.) This applies even to “unlawful combatants”, seeing as Article 5 of the Geneva Convention explicitly says so… as I’ve also noted before.
As to the particular punishment of torture – I object to it because it’s politically stupid, because it has terrible fallout. For particularly severe crimes – like terrorism, or child rape – like I said, I don’t see how they deserve better than torture. But it’s still stupid, and I oppose it. (That’s the opposite of sadistic – I’m not big on dwelling on the suffering of heinous criminals, I’d prefer they just get killed quickly and be done with it. It’s not ‘alcoholic’ to note that people can choose to drink themselves to a stupor so long as they aren’t unduly bothering or endangering others. I think that’s also stupid, but I don’t see it as a direct moral concern.)
Now, torture as interrogation – separate issue. That’s pretty much always stupid, there are better ways (e.g. comment 84 above). It’s also immoral, especially so if you aren’t sure that (or don’t even care if) the person you’re interrogating even is a terrorist… but that gets back to the abuse I noted above.
These two get conflated a lot around here. Object to torture as an interrogation method, and you’re accused of wanting to coddle terrorists, wanting to deny them their just punishment. (See, e.g., Mountain Man.)
So, to sum up in a classification:
Torture as interrogation: Stupid & immoral.
Torture as punishment: Stupid & immoral if there’s no due process. If there’s actual, effective due process… just stupid.
We can torture people to punish them, but not interrogate them to save human life?
Immoral and sadistic.
More yellow rain.
Dr. Jackson – That’d almost make sense… if “enhanced interrogation” actually were the best (or only) way to “save human life”. But that, of course, is one of the most hotly-contested points in this discussion. (Like I said… stupid and immoral.)
I want you all to follow closely the ‘logic’ of Raymond’s thought process.
1. “Torture as interrogation: Stupid & immoral.”
2. “Torture as punishment: Stupid & immoral if there’s no due process. If there’s actual, effective due process… just stupid.”
Leaving aside the “just a detail” of what exactly constitutes “torture”, in Raymond’s world it is “stupid & immoral” to interrogate people using torture.
Instead of trying to get information from a terrorist through “torture”, Raymond now wants to talk about punishing a terrorist with torture. In this view, torture is also stupid & immoral if it’s not approved by a court. If it is approved by a court, it’s “moral”, but still stupid.
From this two conclusions arise:
1. Even though Raymond thinks it’s stupid to cut off a person’s head with a rusty saw (an example of torture), it’s okay to do that if the Court doesn’t object. [This is one example that everyone has agreed is “torture”]. It may be a dumb thing to do (I guess this means that a sharper blade could have been used instead of the rusty saw?), but it’s clearly not “immoral” to torture a convicted prisoner to death.
All of which leads to point #2:
2. The courts are the foundation of morality. The courts decide what is moral or not. So, in Raymond’s world, slavery was moral in 19th century America because it was legal.
It’s good to know that using Raymond’s template, we can all conclude that slavery was “stupid”, but not immoral.
This is the problem with a moral relativist using morality to justify a position.
Any bets on whether Raymond now wants to argue that slavery is immoral (even if legal) because it’s ‘wrong’, but punishing a slave is moral (though “stupid”) if a court says it’s okay?
You just can’t make this kind of stuff up.
No, no — wait! Here’s another one. Raymond thinks Slavery is wrong because even if it’s legal, you can’t morally punish a slave (with or without torture) even though a court says it’s okay, because even though Courts bestow morality through their decisions, only the decisions Raymond agrees with are moral. The other decisions are immoral and stupid, even though they aren’t moral but really are.
No no — wait wait! I’ve got it now. Slavery is immoral because it didn’t involve cutting off a person’s head with a rusty saw for running away from the “Massa”. If it did, it would be punishment, and thus ‘moral torture,’ but “stupid torture’ because Massa killed a perfectly good slave.
Whew. The yellow rain is at flood level now!
Ray
I’m gonna ignore your Torture = OK if a judge says so arguments & your last few comments & leave you to Phil.
Re your 150 & torture:
Repeat after me: a validly elected Administration, charged with keeping the country safe & with the consent of the appropriate members of the minority party is of the opinion that, while Torture is illegal, Waterboarding* not being torture, was not illegal.
*Meaning, of course, pace John McCain, the process used by the 21st Century CIA not that of either the Japanese in WW II or Torquemada.
Obviously, we’re not saying, like Mae West “too much of a good thing is never enough”!
Your statement from Maj. Shrink Burney that the interrogators were not getting the info they felt they needed answers my question:
“If the CIA was getting beaucoup info from the guys without EIT, why would you think that they’d ask for permission to use EIT?”
Add Maj. Shrink to the long list of people having “recovered”, a/k/a, “false” memories” or buyer’s remorse. He was maybe against EITs before he was maybe for them & now maybe he’s against them. Or something like that. Whatever & Nevermind.
Re your desire to have a Banana Republic trial against members of the Bush “Regime”, do we go after Slick Willie for his Extraordinary Renditions & do we add all the Dems who approved of the 2002 EITs before they disapproved of them? And, please, we’re talking 2002-04 here. These EITs haven’t been used since then. Like Shakespeare’s Henry V, “in peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility”. In the case of a war, a just one, sometimes sensible strong people us techniques that “imitate the actions of the tiger; stiffen up the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favor’d rage; Then lend the eye a terrible aspect.
If so such techniques & the people using them must be judged by the time in which they were used. What was happening then? Would The One or his current AG have taken the pious position they are now taking? If so, could they have & survived in office? We, as a nation have never condemned ex post-facto wartime actions when they’d been officially-sanctioned at the highest levels by members of the major Political Parties. Historians may, academics may, bloggers may, but not future Administrations.
Re your #154: As Sedona notes, I guess it’s wrong to go to war & kill people without a trial.
As Phil notes in a later thread, apparently it’s OK to kill people with drones & possibly attack them for their nukes without a trial if you’re the Pres & have a (D) after your name. (But if any civilians are allegedly accidentally killed or wounded, then The One & The Hon. Hillary will immediately apologize & whine & call for an investigation.)
Re your #159: As Maj. Shrink would probably tell you, it’s difficult to determine what results any interrogation technique will produce, even the coffee & doughnuts from your alleged buddy, the good cop, technique. We have to rely on the skill of the interrogators to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s not, however, to use your phrase, “hotly contested” that EITs did, indeed, produce some life-saving info from some of these guys. It’s also not “hotly contested” that now that all future detainees know (the interrogation memos, a/k/a, “Torture” memos are a “CIA Tactics For Dummies” handbook) that nothing untoward will be done unto them (The One said that, & he means it, no? Well, today he means it!), none of them will tell us anything of value, regardless of how we threaten them. Not a good result, methinks.
And as I, a lawyer, can tell you, some interrogation techniques that would produce a mistrial in a criminal case or result in evidence being excluded as improperly “gathered”, may & must be used for military intelligence gathering. If that’s what one is after. And, now they aren’t being used anymore (The One said that, & he means it, no? Well, today he means it!) & haven’t been used since 2004 or 2005, alas.
And, Sedona:
you may be right about the de facto level of proof of guilt in civilian or Military Courts these days, witness OJ & claims from inner city DAs.
Someone once said that the ACLU thinks that all military trials are kangaroo proceedings where the accused is dragged before a panel of sadistic martinets, convicted on the basis of perjured evidence (which has been extracted by torture), & sentenced to fifty or sixty years of solitary confinement, chained to the wall of a subterranean dungeon, & fed on bread & water. Interestingly enough, in regard to the alleged terrorists, if one reads Justice Roberts’ dissent & Deborah Burlingame’s WSJ last Friday, one gets a different picture.
As either Roberts’ or Scalia noted, it would’ve been fun to have tried all the German prisoners on U.S. soil in WW II in Federal Courts. Hey, FDR could’ve gotten more appointees to the Federal Bench!
But, while all your points are, as usual, well taken, I don’t want us to confuse information produced from Military Intelligence Gathering with evidence appropriate to be introduced in a Civilian or Military court for purposes of a conviction. This is what the Left wants to do: make us conduct Military Intelligence Gathering techniques in the same limited manner in which we are allowed to interrogate suspects in the civilian criminal trial process. EITs are for Military Intelligence Gathering in situations concerning credible threats to the Country’s security, its continuance as a Nation. EITs are not a technique for a beleaguered constable who can’t find any evidence for a criminal trial.
Let me spell it out for the trolls: none of the info obtained only from the coercive EIT methods described would be allowed as evidence for conviction of the perp in a military court or civilian court trial. Ya see, then it wouldn’t be what we refer to as a trial! And, if a confession or other evidence which the prosecutor intends to use against a defendant in a criminal trial were proven to have been coerced, such defendant does not have a further burden of proving that such coercion amounted to “torture”.
The Law of War hasn’t changed. Just Administrations.
Anyone notice how Dr. Jackson claims to care about ‘details’, and then pretty much ignores that claim when anyone opposed to him tries to elucidate actual details? (Quite a few others here don’t seem to care much, either.)
For one thing, I deliberately used the phrase “actual, effective due process”. I.e. assuming that there’s no corruption, that the accused can confront witnesses, etc. You know, the system we’ve developed over several hundred years. It’s not a sufficient condition for a punishment to be moral, but it is a necessary one. (And one that the Bush administration claimed they didn’t have to do. And now the Obama administration seems to be following in their footsteps…)
Further, I was talking about – say, what are the exact words I used? oh, yeah – “heinous criminals”. Certainly, punishment has to be proportionate. Stoning someone to death for adultery is wrong, no matter how many courts okay it. If slavery itself is wrong, as I’ve stated, then defying it isn’t wrong. Slaveowners might declare it a crime, and even try to follow due process, but just imitating the form doesn’t mean it has the substance.
I was giving y’all the benefit of the doubt by assuming the people being tortured to actually be guilty of “heinous crimes”. It’s amusing and sad at the same time if you’re trying to use the possibility of mistaken or false accusations against me – since I explicitly talked about that in the second paragraph of comment 157, and used it (and have been using it) to argue for caution, restraint, and scrupulous due process. Follow the four links in that paragraph.
As a wise man (or, perhaps, just a wise guy) put it: You know, what some people call “details,” and other people refer to as “just details.”
Inwood –
Absolutely fine with me. I want the practice ended. Just ’cause I disagree with many of the people here doesn’t mean I’m a fan of the Democratic party or its adherents. Take ‘em all down.
Ah, so you haven’t actually read the article I linked to in comment 84.
Oh, I get it now. Despite the Constitutional provisions against cruel and unusual punishment, Raymond thinks it’s morally okay to torture people who are convicted of “heinous crimes”. That certainly clears it up.
This is moral relativism at its worst. Take a stupid position (torture is morally okay, just an unwise pragmatic action), and then instead of acknowledging the morally relative nature of the statement, double down with an idiotic ‘torture is okay if a court approves it’ position.
And when it’s pointed out that this means that courts assign morality, and that the courts permitted slavery (ergo slavery must be “moral” in this calculation), just say that slavery is morally wrong because it “failed”.
This is why “details’ matter. It’s “just a detail” that torture in any form is unconstitutional. It’s ‘just a detail” that the same body that allows for ‘moral torture’ (the courts) permitted slavery, which is not moral because it “failed” — the same way that Raymond says that torture fails, but is still morally okay.
This is why, ultimately, no one takes Raymond seriously.
PS: It’s also a great example of how liberals never really think through their own positions. They trot out one line of reasoning to support Position A, then reject the same line of reasoning when it’s applied to other outcomes they do not support.
When you’ve lost the language, debate is impossible.
Dr. Jackson –
I thought the argument – and the decision – was that the “Constitutional provisions” didn’t apply to the people being ‘subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques’? I’m glad you’re willing to extend Constitutional protections to the detainees at Guantanamo and our detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously, then, we need trials – and torture’s clearly out of bounds.
Of course, I never said that, and I think that goes rather too far. Here’s what I actually said:
Yeah, yeah, I know. “Just details.”
>I thought the argument – and the decision – was that the “Constitutional provisions” didn’t apply to the people being ‘subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques’?
*** Raymond: Focus. We’re talking about the way you construct your thoughts, not what I, Inwood, Sedona, or the Circuit Court said about enhanced interrogation techniques.
You’re the guy with the idiotic position that claims torture for punishment’s sake only is morally okay if a court approves it. Not only is this a morally-relative and completely inane position to hold, it’s self-contradictory, since torture-as-punishment is prohibited by the Constitution.
Thus, in Raymond’s world we can legally and morally torture convicted prisoners as punishment, except for the fact that the Constitution prohibits torturing prisoners as punishment.
You can’t even construct a coherent premise to support your position, which just shows how inane it really is.
And why, ultimately, no one takes you seriously.
Wow, still going on, and getting nowhere.
MM: It is Raymond after all, which means it has a certain comedic value, and provides some teachable moments for people looking in who really want to think about these issues.
But knowing it’s Raymond, we’ve got to spell it out exactly.
Raymond’s position is that:
1. Torture for punishment’s sake is moral. It’s just not a good idea to actually do it. But if you do do it, it’s a moral thing if a court approves.
2. “Terrorists are, indeed, excluded from the Geneva Convention protections. I totally agree that they are, legally and morally, beyond the pale and don’t have a claim to protections of the Geneva Convention or most other laws.”
Thus, the Constitution does not protect Gitmo detainees from torture, and neither does the Geneva Convention. We can go ahead and morally torture them for punishment (just don’t ask them for any information when you do it), if a military court/tribunal says it’s okay.
3. Of course, the present tribunal system set up to look at Gitmo detainees isn’t sufficient because, well, it just isn’t. So putting that aside, we still get to this point: torture as punishment (not for information) is morally and legally okay if approved by a court, even though it’s a bad idea to torture people in Raymond’s view.
And now we put it all together in the real world.
1. Morality is determined by court rulings.
2. While Terrorists are excluded from Constitutional rights and Geneva Convention protections, Raymond still insists that we need to extend Constitutional and Geneva Convention protections anyway because of the “U.S. principles, which we are allegedly trying to spread [whereby] detainees are innocent until proven guilty.”
3. And, once convicted according to US laws and procedures, torture is morally permissible — except these same principles prohibit torturing prisoners as punishment.
So, you really can’t torture people anyway — legally or morally — but you can torture the language to allow you to be a tough guy who has “no problem with treating terrorist scum like terrorist scum”, knowing that the way you’ve set up your template no torture can ever take place in the real world — even though it’s “morally” okay to torture.
Phil:
Re: “…the present tribunal system set up to look at Gitmo detainees isn’t sufficient because, well, it just isn’t.”
They might be now based on your thesis in “Pakistan Never Attacked Us.”
Following Raymond’s logic (if you could call it that) is like an Abbot and Costello routine. Sometimes I wonder if he really is a true believer, or if he just does it intentionally to wind us up for comedic effect.
Sedona; The hallmark of good Liberal Logic is to never let the real world intrude on your abstract view of it. This way you can show your anti-terrorist cahones by telling everyone you have no problem treating terrorists like the scum they are … except to get useful information from them to stop further attacks, or to torture them morally after a court says it’s okay knowing that torture is unconstitutional, and insisting that where the constitution doesn’t technically apply, those principles should guide our actions anyway so torture — though legal — is actually illegal, and though “moral” when a court syas it’s okay, impossible because no court would ever approve of torture.
Note to file: Just because someone believes X is torture, doesn’t make it actually torture. But that’s another issue (you know, the one I actually wrote about in my article)
Ray #166
I’m tired of your selective quotes & references. Always in favor of your POV. Not scholarly. Not honest.
Is it possible that you, like other Trolls in awe of The One, morally preening, want to pick out only what backs up the misleading evidence provided by the BDS folks?
This is for anyone who is not aware & thinks that torture was invented by Darth Vader, a/k/a. Dick Cheney.
Ray hrumphs that
“obviously [I, Inwood] haven’t actually read the [Hitch] article [he] linked to in comment 84.
Actually, I had. Independently. But because I’m a WW II buff & it didn’t compute with what I’ve read by Conservative & mostly Liberal historians, I researched quickly & found the following which did agree with what I’ve read:
Obama, Hitchens, Churchill, and Torture
Hitch backs up the president by twisting history.
Hitchens and Torture in Britain: What Took Place During the War
Ron Radosh May 6th, 2009
“… Hitchens points to …a facility known as … Latchmere House [where the] Nazi operatives it housed were treated non-violently…while Latchmere held 400, The London Cage, run by MI19, held 60 at a time, but had had a total of 3,573 prisoners …!
“The [motto of the Cage director…] was “Abandon all hope ye who enter here,” referring to five interrogation rooms. All of the details appeared in a major investigative report carried out by The Guardian in 2005, that made waves in Britain.
“At best, … under Churchill…the British military had two very different facilities that used very different methods of interrogation …
“So by avoiding any mention of The Cage, which I assume Hitchens must know about, he gives the impression that under immense pressure and the most dangerous conditions, the British got the intelligence they needed by being pure and moral, although “ruthless.” Sorry, Hitch…the British two track system indeed subjected many more from whom they needed intelligence to the most harsh of interrogation methods—including sleep deprivation, inhumane treatment, (standing on a prisoner’s back while forcing him to wash floors on his hands and knees) what journalist Ian Cobain calls “systematic ill-treatment” in what he calls a “torture centre.” They were forced to kneel while being beaten on the head, to stand at attention for 26 hours, threatened with execution without trial, and with unnecessary medical operations. One prisoner was deprived of sleep for four days and nights, and starved. Each time the guards passed, they kicked him. And this took place after the war’s end! Some prisoners were beaten regularly and pleaded to be killed.
“The Guardian story stresses that War Office archives do not establish… whether Churchill approved or disapproved of his actions. It is hard to believe, however, that the Government leaders would not have known anything…
“[The director said that before the Red cross could be let in, he] needed time to “remove from the Cage” what he called “secret gear which we use to check the reliability of information obtained” from the prisoners.
“So whether Churchill knew…, Hitchens certainly does. So why does he make it appear, by writing only about the one that used soft methods, ignore (sic) the more well known camp that used torture? Could it be that he too, like other journalists smitten with Obama, wish to single out only the evidence that backs up the misleading evidence provided to the President which he cited in his press conference?”
Read the whole thing. And learn not to accept at face value everything you read which fits a template.
Inwood: Yeah, but did Churchill have a court order to morally-torture, and did he do it to punish instead of interrogate?
After living a long though perhaps unsuccessful life, this discussion thread, like all threads, must someday die. Some must die slowly and agonizingly, and others should be put out of their misery.
I come bearing a stake and some garlic. My hand rises in righteous anger, intending a quick, sure blow so that this thread experiences a quick, painless death. Though it has tortured me since May 5th, I do not wish to inflict unnecessary suffering on it.
Die, beast, die!
MM: You forget, the title of this article is “Tortured Logic”, and there’s so much more that Raymond has to give.
MM
Discussion threads die, but old Liberal Templates never die. Nor do they fade away.
None dare call the Liberal Template the Big Lie.
Prediction: Am History (or Islamo-American History) Profs all during the 21st Century (if we’re still able to use the Gregorian calendar!)will be teaching that Bush tortured & Churchill, for one, did not.
It’s fascinating how hard Dr. Jackson has to work sometimes to misrepresent. At least the title of his article is honest.
Well, actually, if you don’t want to comprehend someone’s position, you can always misunderstand. The incoherency of the premises here is entirely in the ones you desperately want me to have. My premises are actually pretty straightforward, and have been explained repeatedly and at length. You just don’t want to understand them, and hence exhibit, well, “deliberate stupidity”:
1. Torture as interrogation is a very poor tool. “It’s not that torture cannot ever work, just that it doesn’t work reliably. Other techniques work at least as well and don’t have the collateral disadvantages that torture does.” It’s stupid to use it when better tools are available.
2. Jose Padilla and John Walker Lindh aside, the current crop of detainees are not U.S. citizens and don’t fit under the Constitution. (Timothy McVeigh was a U.S. citizen, and got Constitutional protections.)
3. The detainees are addressed by the Geneva Convention, which mandates that prisoners of war are presumptively subject to its protections until a competent tribunal has determined that they do not qualify. (It’s not like I haven’t been clear on this one, over and over, so the fact that Dr. Jackson completely disregards it in his comment 172 is either deliberate misrepresentation or breathtaking “deliberate stupidity”.)
4. If they are determined to be unlawful combatants, they are outside all lawful protection. They are “the common enemies of humankind.” Legally, they have no right to any good treatment.
5. Morally, too, they are not innocent – they’ve done terrible things, and I can’t see how they deserve any consideration or coddling.
6. Legal and moral are not identical, but we’re imperfect humans living in an imperfect world, and such legal procedures are the best system we’ve come up with so far for determining things like guilt or innocence. As I’ve noted, due process isn’t a sufficient condition to make legal sanction moral, but it’s a necessary one. To put it the other way – the absence of due process is sufficient to make any legal sanction immoral. (Even the Geneva Conventions recognize this.)
7. “Bush claimed that they didn’t have to do that ‘competent tribunal’ part. In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that that wasn’t the case. So, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal process was set up, and the most recent Court ruling is that these tribunals were ‘inadequate’.” (Yeah, right, “just isn’t”.)
8. These sorts of niceties are utterly vital to prevent abuse in nearly all situations, but there are exceptions. Police in “hot pursuit” can go places that they would ordinarily be unable to without a warrant (and rightly so). And “in combat things are different. When the bullets are flying survival and accomplishing the objective are the priorities, and everything else drops far behind. But the Geneva Conventions are for when you're not in combat.”
9. The UNCAT, which we signed (under Reagan), forbids torture.
10. Waterboarding is torture. Even as practiced on Zubaydah et. al., it’s not materially different from the procedure we court-martialed U.S. officer for in Vietnam.
Now, you can disagree with these premises, but I’ve stated them pretty clearly and explained why I accept them. And from these premises, it’s quite straightforward to derive the positions I’ve actually taken (as opposed to the ones you keep trying to claim I take). For example:
A. The vast majority of detainees have to get Geneva Convention protections – and hence, even if the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ weren’t torture, they’d still be ruled out – until and unless a competent tribunal had determined otherwise. (Premises 2,3.)
B. Even then, better to use the more effective interrogation techniques than to torture, even if legally and morally it’s permitted. As noted before, some things can be morally permitted but still stupid. (Premises 1,4,5,6.)
As a bonus, we can conclude:
C. The procedures used against Zubaydah et. al. were in violation of the UNCAT which we signed. (Premises 9,10.) That’s yet another reason they’re wrong, but I know you disagree with premise 10.
Of course, I long ago concluded that Dr. Jackson is either entirely unwilling or entirely incapable of having an honest discussion on this topic. You either agree with him, or else – so far as I can tell – he concludes that somehow you must be dishonest, so it’s okay for him to be dishonest back. There’s still the dim chance that he’s just being that deliberately stupid… but my goodness, what effort that must take.
Good news, though – I’m off for several days. A vacation with my wife for our 12-year anniversary. You shan’t have to worry about me troubling you for a while.
Inwood – That article is interesting. Of course, Scotland himself, in his memoir about the “London Cage”, denied that torture happened there. “We were not so foolish as to imagine that petty violence, nor even violence of a stronger character, was likely to produce the results hoped for in dealing with some of the toughest creatures of the Hitler regime.”
But hey, he may have been ‘recovering some memory’ so he’d have a ‘recovered a**’.
My point, however, was not that the British did no torture or commit no violations of the Geneva Conventions during the war. I was responding to your contention that I wanted to “make us conduct Military Intelligence Gathering techniques in the same limited manner in which we are allowed to interrogate suspects in the civilian criminal trial process”. (Since I, y’know, specifically quoted that part and all.)
The interrogations at Latchmere House were not at all like the “civilian criminal trial process”, and yet they weren’t brutal and violent either. Surprisingly, there are more than two options.
Raymond:
Re: “My point, however, was not that the British did no torture or commit no violations of the Geneva Conventions during the war.”
A minor point here is that the Geneva Convention of 1929 was in force during WW-II, and the next convention was not signed until 1949, and was a result of WW-II:
Section 11, Article 134
“The present Convention [1949] replaces the Convention of 27 July 1929, in relations between the High Contracting Parties.”
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm
Dr. Jackson –
Actually, despite my actually describing those premises and their consequences in exhaustive detail, you don’t seem to want to understand them. Consider:
1. Torture is not the best way to get information. Better ways exist. “It’s not that torture cannot ever work, just that it doesn’t work reliably. Other techniques work at least as well and don’t have the collateral disadvantages that torture does.”
2. Jose Padilla and John Walker Lindh aside, the detainees subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ have not been U.S. citizens and thus don’t come under Constitutional protections.
3. Prisoners of war are addressed by the Geneva Conventions, however, and prisoners presumptively get GC protections until and unless a competent tribunal determines otherwise.
4. “Bush claimed that they didn’t have to do that ‘competent tribunal’ part. In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that that wasn’t the case. So, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal process was set up, and the most recent Court ruling is that these tribunals were ‘inadequate’.” (And that’s me saying “just isn’t”. Uh-huh.)
5. We’re imperfect humans living in an imperfect world – due process is imperfect, but it’s the best system we’ve yet devised for determining guilt or innocence. As I noted, it’s a necessary condition for legal sanction to be moral, but not sufficient. Barring evidence of inadequate or corrupt process, though, we are justified in presuming legal decisions to be morally consequential. But the converse principle is stronger: Lack of due process is sufficient to make legal sanction ipso facto immoral.
6. Legally, unlawful combatants (so judged by a tribunal) are outside of the legal framework. They have no legal rights, and are “the common enemies of humankind”.
7. Morally, they’ve done terrible things, and don’t deserve any protection, consideration, or coddling.
8. The UNCAT (which we signed under Reagan) forbids torture.
9. Waterboarding, even as practiced by the CIA in the last few years, is torture.
Now, from Premises 1-7, it’s easy to derive my actual positions, which I’ve stated before. Morality isn’t determined by court rulings, but court rulings are necessary to implement morality in the real world (p5). The Bush administration was right to assert that terrorists are not protected by the GC (p6, p7), but flat wrong to assert that no proceedings or tribunals were necessary, and then to institute inadequate ones (p3, p4, p5).
Now, what to do with unlawful combatants, once properly determined so? They don’t have any rights, and have done terrible things. Execution’s fine, harsh treatment’s fine – they put themselves “beyond the pale”. Interrogation’s cool, too, and makes sense when we think they know something of value. But (p1), there are better, more effective techniques than torture (or ‘enhanced interrogation’.) And we agreed not to do that (p8, p9) anyway.
Now, you can disagree with those premises if you like. I know lots of people here don’t accept (p1). But that doesn’t make them incoherent. Quick analogy: different premises lead to different geometries. There’s Euclidean geometry (given a point and a line, there’s exactly one parallel line through that point), hyperbolic geometry (more than one parallel line), and elliptic geometry (no parallel lines). These different premises lead to different conclusions in the systems… but each system is perfectly coherent.
You got a problem, argue with the premises. Thankfully, though, my wife and I leave on a vacation for our twelve-year anniversary tomorrow, so I won’t have to see you marshal your efforts to misunderstand yet again. Have fun with the last word!
Looks like I have to break my response up a bit to get it accepted. Ah, well. Part 1:
Dr. Jackson –
Actually, despite my actually describing those premises and their consequences in exhaustive detail, you don’t seem to want to understand them. Consider:
1. Torture is not the best way to get information. Better ways exist. “It’s not that torture cannot ever work, just that it doesn’t work reliably. Other techniques work at least as well and don’t have the collateral disadvantages that torture does.”
2. Jose Padilla and John Walker Lindh aside, the detainees subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ have not been U.S. citizens and thus don’t come under Constitutional protections.
3. Prisoners of war are addressed by the Geneva Conventions, however, and prisoners presumptively get GC protections until and unless a competent tribunal determines otherwise.
4. “Bush claimed that they didn’t have to do that ‘competent tribunal’ part. In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that that wasn’t the case. So, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal process was set up, and the most recent Court ruling is that these tribunals were ‘inadequate’.” (And that’s me sayi
ng “just isn’t”. Uh-huh.)
Part 2:
4. “Bush claimed that they didn’t have to do that ‘competent tribunal’ part. In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that that wasn’t the case. So, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal process was set up, and the most recent Court ruling is that these tribunals were ‘inadequate’.” (And that’s me sayi
ng “just isn’t”. Uh-huh.)
5. We’re imperfect humans living in an imperfect world – due process is imperfect, but it’s the best system we’ve yet devised for determining guilt or innocence. As I noted, it’s a necessary condition for legal sanction to be moral, but not sufficient. Barring evidence of inadequate or corrupt process, though, we are justified in presuming legal decisions to be morally consequential. But the converse principle is stronger: Lack of due process is sufficient to make legal sanction ipso facto immoral.
6. Legally, unlawful combatants (so judged by a tribunal) are outside of the legal framework. They have no legal rights, and are “the common enemies of humankind”.
7. Morally, they’ve done terrible things, and don’t deserve any protection, consideration, or coddling.
8. The UNCAT (which we signed under Reagan) forbids torture.
9. Waterboarding, even as practiced by the CIA in recent years, is torture.
Part 3:
Now, from Premises 1-7, it’s easy to derive my actual positions, which I’ve stated before. Morality isn’t determined by court rulings, but court rulings are necessary to implement morality in the real world (p5). The Bush administration was right to assert that terrorists are not protected by the GC (p6, p7), but flat wrong to assert that no proceedings or tribunals were necessary, and then to institute inadequate ones (p3, p4, p5).
So, what to do with unlawful combatants, once properly determined so? They don’t have any rights, and have done terrible things. Execution’s fine, harsh treatment’s fine – they put themselves “beyond the pale”. Interrogation’s cool, too, and makes sense when we think they know something of value. But (p1), there are better, more effective techniques than torture (or ‘enhanced interrogation’.) And we agreed not to do that anyway (p8, p9).
You can disagree with those premises if you like. I know lots of people here don’t accept (p1). But that doesn’t make them incoherent. Quick analogy: different premises lead to different geometries. There’s Euclidean geometry (given a point and a line, there’s exactly one parallel line through that point), hyperbolic geometry (more than one parallel line), and elliptic geometry (no parallel lines). These different premises lead to different conclusions in the systems… but each system is perfectly coherent.
You got a problem, argue with the premises. Thankfully, though, my wife and I leave on a vacation for our twelve-year anniversary tomorrow, so I won’t have to see you marshall your heroic efforts to misunderstand yet again. Have fun with the last word!
>You can’t even construct a coherent premise to support your position…
And, it appears that you can’t even understand what the premise of your own arguments are: “Thus, in Raymond’s world we can legally and morally torture convicted prisoners as punishment, except for the fact that the Constitution prohibits torturing prisoners as punishment.”
I talk about the illogic of believing that torture as punishment is moral and legal if a court says it is, but impossible under a constitutional government that forbids cruel and unusual punishment. Raymond spends his time talking about Jose Padilla and John Walker Lindh and Prisoners of War.
Note to file: “non-uniformed enemy combatants are not ‘prisoners of war’ under the Geneva Convention.” But that’s “just a detail”. [The Geneva Conventions apply in wars between two or more states. … The Geneva Conventions do not recognize any lawful status for combatants in conflicts not involving two or more nation states. A state in such a conflict is legally bound only to observe Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and may ignore all the other Articles. Note: Article 3 applies only to Article “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.”]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_combatant.
I talk about the illogic of believing that “it’s okay knowing that torture is unconstitutional, and insisting that where the constitution doesn’t technically apply, those principles should guide our actions anyway so torture — though legal — is actually illegal, and though ‘moral’ when a court says it’s okay, impossible because no court would ever approve of torture.” Raymond spends his time talking about the Geneva Convention from which “Terrorists are, indeed, excluded”, but we should apply those principles any to not torturing them for interrogation — just torturing them for punishment.
The “problem is,” despite the fact that Raymond says the courts don’t determine morality, in his world view court-approval bestows morality. [God certainly doesn’t!]
The “problem is”, despite the fact that Raymond opposes torture, he supports torture if the courts approve it.
The “problem is’ that despite the fact that Raymond says that “waterboarding … is torture,” the courts have not made this determination. A journalist has, some politicians have, and people who oppose waterboarding have. But these are opinions, and like assholes, everyone has one. “I believe”, “I think”, and “in my opinion is” are not legal judgments.
The “problem is”, Raymond still cannot honestly address a subject and therefore engage in an honest debate.
See Mountain Man. I said that Raymond had a lot more to offer, even if only to further illustrate the Tortured Logic of the liberal thought process.
Let’s try it again with the right coding:
>You can’t even construct a coherent premise to support your position…
And, it appears that you can’t even understand what the premise of your own arguments are: “Thus, in Raymond’s world we can legally and morally torture convicted prisoners as punishment, except for the fact that the Constitution prohibits torturing prisoners as punishment.”
I talk about the illogic of believing that torture as punishment is moral and legal if a court says it is, but impossible under a constitutional government that forbids cruel and unusual punishment. Raymond spends his time talking about Jose Padilla and John Walker Lindh and Prisoners of War.
Note to file: “non-uniformed enemy combatants are not ‘prisoners of war’ under the Geneva Convention.” But that’s “just a detail”. [The Geneva Conventions apply in wars between two or more states. … The Geneva Conventions do not recognize any lawful status for combatants in conflicts not involving two or more nation states. A state in such a conflict is legally bound only to observe Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and may ignore all the other Articles. Note: Article 3 applies only to Article “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_combatant
I talk about the illogic of believing that “it's okay knowing that torture is unconstitutional, and insisting that where the constitution doesn't technically apply, those principles should guide our actions anyway so torture — though legal — is actually illegal, and though ‘moral’ when a court says it's okay, impossible because no court would ever approve of torture.” Raymond spends his time talking about the Geneva Convention from which “Terrorists are, indeed, excluded”, but we should apply those principles any to not torturing them for interrogation --- just torturing them for punishment.
The “problem is,” despite the fact that Raymond says the courts don’t determine morality, in his world view court-approval bestows morality. [God certainly doesn’t!]
The “problem is”, despite the fact that Raymond opposes torture, he supports torture if the courts approve it.
The “problem is’ that despite the fact that Raymond says that “waterboarding … is torture,” the courts have not made this determination. A journalist has, some politicians have, and people who oppose waterboarding have. But these are opinions, and like assholes, everyone has one. “I believe”, “I think”, and “in my opinion is” are not legal judgments.
The “problem is”, Raymond still cannot honestly address a subject and therefore engage in an honest debate.
See Mountain Man. I said that Raymond had a lot more to offer
Phil
Ray can’t stay focused. And there seems to be a fine line between being a glib, clever dilettante & a blithering idiot. He has crossed it here,
Oh, wait, he is focused. He’s a Marxist. Groucho, that is. Whatever Bush did he’s against it. And he’s sure it’s torture.
Ray, who was claiming that The Brits under Churchill did not torture, ya see, has given up trying to defend that bit of nonsense in view of the now disclosed existence of the London Cage. (For the benefit of any who join sporadically & don’t want to go back & find what the then 60 year old records showed as to why the director (quoting Dante) said the motto of the Cage was really “abandon hope, all ye who enter here, see below.) But, of course, faced with facts, or as P says, “details” Ray just “neverminds” the Cage & harkens back to Latchmere House, where seldom was heard a discouraging word, OOPS, where the interrogation techniques “were not brutal & violent” (two new terms in the mix!).
And Ray pretends that he has come up with the remarkable discovery that there are numerous ways to get info & that my thinking is binary: Torture vs. Lollipops & Roses (the latter being SOP now). It’s just that if Bush used any of Ray’s many interrogation techniques, it was Torture. For sure.
PS: Here’s what the records show happened at The Cage. It wasn’t lollipops & roses, that is):
The British two track system indeed subjected many more from whom they needed intelligence to the most harsh of interrogation methods—including sleep deprivation, inhumane treatment,(standing on a prisoner’s back while forcing him to wash floors on his hands and knees) what journalist Ian Cobain calls “systematic ill-treatment” in what he calls a “torture centre.” They were forced to kneel while being beaten on the head, to stand at attention for 26 hours, threatened with execution without trial, and with unnecessary medical operations. One prisoner was deprived of sleep for four days and nights, and starved. Each time the guards passed, they kicked him. And this took place after the war’s end! Some prisoners were beaten regularly.
Hey, seems that the lollipops & roses didn’t always work for the Brits (surprise) & they had to resort to measures that even Dick Cheney hasn’t endorsed!
P
I’ve got it.
It’s not so much the tortured logic that bothers me. It’s the EMTs — The Enhanced Morality Techniques.
P
How do we know that we’re winning this argument?
Maybe when Jon Stewart makes fun of The Hon. Nancy, Nancy with the (D) following her name, through her own words.
Now, Stewart is an acquired taste & much of his stuff seems to consist of making funny faces & silly noises at famous people’s public video appearances, but here, in addition, he lets her own babbling do the job & sums it up thusly: a slow dance away “from ‘I definitely was not told’ to ‘I was told but they used an auxiliary verb with a slightly more passive mood.”
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=227326&title=waffle-house
H/T Fox News Two Minute Drill
P
In view of the penchant of some commenters to take snippets of one’s comments & make them seem to be something other than what they are, let me say for the record that I am not suggesting that Stewart has suddenly become a Dittohead.
In fact, I think he is doing this for the team: Pelosifreude is hurting The Party & The One & she must be sacrificed here.
And, let me make myself perfectly clear, again: I’m not saying that The Hon Nan cannot survive this; I’m saying that she normally wouldn’t have to just survive.
PS Jon Stewart, who’s smarter than you or I, meant passive “voice” in the quote in the previous comment. I’m smirking at him as I write this.
P
What a farandole.
Democrats: CIA is out to get us
“Democrats charged Tuesday that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on harsh interrogation techniques in order to deflect attention and blame away from itself….”
Read more: “Democrats: CIA is out to get us – Manu Raju – POLITICO.com” – http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22439.html#ixzz0FS975pVn&A
Mr. Ingles:
Re: your #184 and 185
“1. Torture is not the best way to get information. Better ways exist.”
You have made this claim several times, but I don’t recall if you gave any examples.
Just so I don’t have to go back through this labyrinth of logic, can you tell us what methods are better? [Since you used the plural, please give more than one.] Thx.
Sedona: Since Raymond is on vacation, I’ll give you his response:
“Torture” (i.e. any method I, Raymond, don’t like unless it’s approved by a court, and then used only for purposes of ‘moral’-punishment, and is an action I will just arbitrarily define as “torture” even though it’s never actually been declared as torture by a US court) is ineffective because:
1. There are journalists who have been waterboarded and said it was very unpleasant, and would “confess” to anything (even though the purpose of the exercise is to obtain information, not secure a confession), and
2. Some people involved in waterboarding (notice how waterboarding is the de facto example of “torture” because it has the same name as something the Japanese did to US prisoners, only the two actions are radically different?) said it definitely is torture (while others say it isn’t, and have legal opinions to back it up — but this is “just a detail”), and
3. Some people threatened with a political prosecution for supporting waterboarding, and whose families are threatened by kooks on the Left, say that maybe they wouldn’t approve waterboarding after all now, which means it is torture and ineffective, and
4. There have been no attacks on the US since 9/11, and even though the US repeatedly used brutal enhanced interrogation techniques (i.e. torture) against captured terrorists to secure information (not confessions) to thwart other attacks. This is not evidence that the ‘repeated torture’ actually worked. Rather, we can only conclude the following:
A. All this “torture” was ineffective and unnecessary
B. The information it produced could have been secured — and secured on a timely basis — simply by treating them like suspected criminals with the right to remain silent, or by asking them nicely for the information instead of doing it meanly.
C. And did I say that torture is ineffective in getting a confession, and inadmissible in court too? I don’t want to forget to make that point.
D. Oh, and Waterboarding is definitely torture, so it doesn’t really work.
That about does it, except for links back to Raymond saying the same thing in earlier comments (usually followed by me, you, Inwood, Mountain Man or someone else pointing out the inanity of the comment), or links to the Guardian or some other “objective” source that repeats the same assertion with no further evidence.
Sedona
Ray has already anticipated your question in your # 195. See my response in my #190.
Let me tell you this.
Various Department Store Magnates are credited with saying “Half my advertising budget is wasted. Trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Probably so with torture or EITs. ☺
Ray’s attempt recently was to pick up on the BDS’ focus solely on the Brit’s WW II, er softball procedure at Latchmere as the Gold Standard for Interrogation Techniques.
(Hi, I’m Lord Whimsey. And this is my colleague, Group Captain Ambrose Silk. We’ll be chatting with you by the by while you’re staying with us, Herr von gutem Schrot und Korn. I say, old boy, remember the goal that Smithers scored for Eton in ’32? Good show, what? Remember the girl he was going with, Agatha Runcible? She’ll be visiting you at some point as a Red Cross representative with some parcels Say, could you do me a favor? Tell me something about how you chaps, you know, feel about the Austrian Corporal, anything; small stuff, say.)
Ray & assorted wusses like Hitchens want to believe that this showed that one could get info from softball tactics & QED, the US should use only, repeat, only softball tactics on hardened fanatic Islamofascists whose only goal is to blow up the Great Satan. Thing is that maybe such softball worked on a few Germans who’d gone to Oxbridge & could be sweet talked by fellow Oxbridgeians but judging from so few few in Latchmere (400), softball works, but up to a point, Lord Copper, & apparently only when one realizes that the next step is hardball. That’s why the Latchmere/London Cage ratio was 1:9. Perhaps we could say that never before were so few softballed while so many hardballed.
When I was in the Army & the Army Reserves, we were given “torture” classes by some guy who’d never been in combat much less been a POW. (It was like the diversity class to which I was subject on civvy street, where a white consultant, probably making more money than I with less education, but there I go…, told us attendees that we didn’t know what it was like to be a woman, a minority, or a poor person!) We soldiers were always told that if captured all we had to give was our name, rank, serial number, & date of birth, no matter how they tortured us & that we must be given “three hots & a cot” by the enemy. Right. I was kinda hoping The Gideons had gotten to the place & that there would be a Bible by my cot. Now it would be a Koran.
Finally to science: To the question of whether there’s any “proof” that hardball actually has produces something of value, the Far Left’s AmeriKKKa bible saying that it never has & never will.
Obviously, CIA & military interrogators, being bureaucrats, will always claim that they got “useful” info from captured wretches & saved the country from Armageddon or something untoward. And, on the other side, “social justice” anti-war advocates will always claim that the wretches while under duress will always say something to make the duress stop & that something will always be of no value. It’s like the WW II bombing studies which “scientifically” dismiss the effects of the Allied Air War, which studies, are IMHO, a splendid sample of sham science with spurious specificity.
Specifically, you might look at this quite recent blog comment blog, Torture, Social Science, and Ethical Responsibility. .
The money quote:
“But here’s where things get complicated. My original thought was that good social science research that shows that torture does not extract useful intelligence information would be the final nail in the coffin in any public argument in support of torture. But what happens if one of us gets access to the relevant data, does the empirical analysis, and then discovers the opposite: that torture does lead to useful intelligence information. What do you do then? Sit on the results? Would any political science journal publish such a paper? How would that look in a tenure review? (‘Right, she’s the one who said torture was valuable…’).”
http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/05/social_science_torture_and_eth.html
Inwood: You not only nailed the academic peer-review process, you underscored another theme I been arguing. The Left imagines a world in which they think we should all live, then adopts an abstract, antiseptic template to extrapolate the particulars of that world, and then insists that this thought experiment be applied to the real world on its terms.
It’s like my old Commie friends at the U of C used to argue. Capitalism is bad because we can point to its real world deficiencies. Communism is good because the theory is preferable. The fact that it’s execution in the real world shows it to be a horrendous system doesn’t negate their beliefs. It just illustrates how far fallible humans have deviated from the norm. No need to reconsider their theory; just execute communism better.
No need to ask whether Raymond ideas run counter to the way the world actually functions. Just try double hard to be “better” than the terrorists.
P
Panetta, Head of the CIA, part of The Administration, has accused the Speaker of lying and politicizing national security.
Now Pelosi has issued a response that blamed the Bush administration rather than the CIA by name for any errors in connection with the briefings.
“My criticism of the manner in which the Bush administration did not appropriately inform Congress is separate from my respect for those in the intelligence community who work to keep our country safe,” it said.
Is this Pelosifreude 6.0 or 7.0? My computer can’t handle this.
Nancy should’ve asked herself: When will I make the CIA, in its own self-defense, tell what I knew & when I knew it?
It’s not the EITs so much as it is the EMTs (Enhanced Morality Techniques).
And, trolls, can it be that the failed politics of sturm und drang about “torture” & Gitmo as a charnel house might make the moral preeners in the Administration act like adults & give up such EMTs & all politics, all the time, at least in the area of National Security?
PS There’s a Chuck Schumer You Tube of 2004 where he says that when they’re in the foxhole, most people would say about torture, “do what you have to do”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4CWk5LfoH0&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ebaseballcrank%2Ecom%2F&feature=player_embedded
Seems Chuck was for torture before he was against torture.
Or maybe he has never heard of alternatives like Latchmere.
Forgive me for this. I wanted to claim comment #200.
Maybe what some have in mind for an ‘alternative method’ would be to appoint Richard Simmons as Terrorist Czar. He might go into nicely decorated cells periodically with a healthy mixture of dry cheerios and candy coated peanuts, sit close, look directly and earnestly and say, ‘Now Mohammed (pause, deep sigh), tell me where the bomb is.’