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Merged Senate Report on CIA Torture Program

Armitage72 said:
Bingo.
It's telling that the present day, non-flashback version of Oliver, who is willing to use torture, is a broken, emotionally damaged wreck with PTSD.
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And is, somewhat, shown the errors of his ways by Berry, by appealing to his better nature.
 
Monketey Ghost said:
Seriously. That guy and his buddies spent their time plotting to kill complete strangers- just blow them up and maim them, to further their twisted ideology.
I really don't care how roughly they treated him or any of his friends.
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It's like a court of law. You need to be sure you are not torturing innocent people who can give you nothing and you need to remember as someone said recently, elite units are tortured by endurance tests, to see if they are up to the job. On top of that a UK expert on interrogation said that if you know what's coming it's never as effective as being in the dark, with regards to attempted torture.

These guys are psychopaths who can be tripped up by their egos and that is what good interrogators do. That George Bush didn't know this is because George Bush doesn't know anything useful and should never have made president, let alone twice. His actions have helped ruin Americas reputation inside (New Orleans) and outside the country (flawed foreign policy: Afghanistan 'might' have had a valid reason for being invaded but Iraq didn't and the whole area is now destabilized because of it. Also if The CIA funded these groups as they did Osama Bin Laden, then American foreign policy shot itself in the foot again).

We haven't been able to stop them killing hostages or villagers who resist them (or simply don't fit in with their beliefs). We can only do this by being there and even then nothing is perfect: Special forces failed in their rescue attempts unfortunately and even when successful in getting the right place, hostages can accidentally get killed by them or by the insurgents. Nothing is perfect and only immature fantasists believe it is. That's the sad fact.
 
sunmaster14 said:
I can only offer logic and can only appeal to introspection and experience. There's no data to go on. If you actually do a search for effectiveness of torture, all you find are unsupported assertions from so-called experts who are suffering from wishful thinking. It would certainly be very convenient for professional interrogators if it were true that torture never worked.
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So you are acknowledging that in a situation where lives are on the line (the "ticking time bomb" scenario), you would place your bets on a method that has never been demonstrated to work? Why not use a ouija board?

I think your priorities need to be reevaluated.
 
dudalb said:
Torture is simply not a reliable way to informations, It's stupid as well as wrong.

But the Wannasee Protocols comparasion is way over the top.
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Perhaps so. But in reference to WWII this point is one I find interesting: apparently, terrorists like Al-Qaeda and their ilk are worse than Nazis and the SS. Why? Because during WWII the U.S. and U.K. didn't as a matter of course use torture against their Nazi and SS prisoners. In spite of being involved in a war to the death against the Reich.

Indeed, the story came out earlier this year how British intelligence treated some high value German prisoners very well, putting them up in a posh house. Only the estate had numerous microphones secreted about the place to record the prisoners who felt at ease as a result of being treated so well. Useful intelligence was gained from these efforts.
 
anglolawyer said:
Oh, don't worry about him. I'm not a superior Brit. Far from it. The UK occupies a cosy position somewhere up inside America's warm and protective anus. When America farts we get covered in **** but it's worth it because it allows us to 'punch above our weight', get invited to important meetings and cling to myths of former greatness. Let the lies continue. People are still buying.
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Rolfe said:
Jings. And those of us who wanted out of this, wanted to sever ourselves from that ethos, were sneered at and derided.

Back to the occasional lurking now.

Rolfe.
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I represent that. :(
 
dudalb said:
Torture is simply not a reliable way to informations, It's stupid as well as wrong.

But the Wannasee Protocols comparasion is way over the top.

Not sure how much damage this report will do. I think it just confirms what everybody already knew.
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As part of my study of human psychology I read Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Israel The Banality of Evil.

The purpose of my comparison has to do with the Banality of Evil part. Arendt was wrong about Eichman, the man was malignant and had bragged about his crimes. However, she hit the nail on the head when it came to many of the Bureaucrats of the time.

I implore you to watch the move Conspiracy. Many of those who carried out the atrocities were not sociopaths. They were not otherwise mass murders. If you understand what happened at the Wannasee conference and you consider the banality of evil, I think you can see why the comparison is apt.

How is it that ostensible civil people, people like me, can defend atrocity?

When I watched the movie Conspiracy, I recalled that I had started a thread on torture, I was able to see myself at that table, an otherwise moral and decent human being with no arrest record and a sincere desire for the flourishing of humanity. I'm appalled at human degradation and suffering. Yet I found it with in me to justify inhumanity. I argued in favor of torture. That's a an empirical fact. I cannot look at the men at the conference and declare that it was because of some bizarre twist of fate that resulted in only sociopaths standing between Hitler and his goal to efficiently and systematically destroy an entire race of people. It was not sociopaths but civilized people who acquiesced to the atrocity. People like you and me.
 
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epepke said:
Laws of human decency don't seem to have been enforced very well, otherwise, it wouldn't have been necessary to write the report in the first place.

Still, your statement fits well within moral outrage, which is one of the main ways of doing things. The other, of course is looking at facts. This is the basic Hume split of "is" versus "ought."

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Snipped to save space.
Well, it's certain that the niceties of proper execution of hostilities were tossed out along with any pride that could emerge from the honorable annihilation of our enemies.

I'm not sure I followed your line of reasoning, but I don't think I am outraged as much by the actual torture techniques implemented by the Bush inspired group as I am by the neglect of certain principles which mark progress in civilization beyond barbarism. If I have any outrage, it's mainly over the hypocrisy and being lied to repeatedly by a president in time of national crisis.

It's like trying to root for a tennis player who lobs a grenade at his opponent on the first serve. Sure, it is an effective way to win a game of tennis, but fans must surely take umbrage at this violation of the rules.

The question of whether torture is effective as policy may certainly be debated, but why? To what end? It is far from a debate about what constitutes self defense. Assuming that we could prove the value of torture as a source of information, what should we then do with this knowledge? Should we argue for legal acceptance of these techniques as Bush/Cheney apparently do? Their arguments are currently vacuous since the US participated in the 1988 United Nations Convention against Torture.

Should we reject the consensus that men of honor have decided to abhor the practice and express their outrage when its use is uncovered? Should our government permit torture to occur as long as it is kept secret and is applied only to non citizens, or only to prisoners of war?

Should police then be permitted to use torture? Should public school teachers be versed in these techniques to find out who brought the gun to school? What will the limits be? If a torture victim dies, who is accountable? Do policy makers write laws to absolve future torturers of any prosecutable offense? Whom do we hire as torture experts? Ted Bundy types--or do we train our youth in the art?

Those who advocate for torture need to answer these questions, carefully think through the consequences, and convince a 21st century public that it is the wisest method for achieving our goals.
 
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CIA torture

ETA: Redundant post - I missed this thread in a search and posted a new thread, which has since been merged here. I don't think my intro added anything that hasn't been amply covered
 
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Monketey Ghost said:
The folks you shed a tear for, I never will, and I'll never lose a wink of sleep.

I do feel badly for those in the intelligence community whose jobs have been to drag the information out of the bad guys and have been thanked with the prospect of prosecution and loss of future opportunity in their careers serving their country.
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Well that's what happens when you break the law. As we learned at Nuremberg, just following orders is not a defence. If for no other reason, THIS is why you should oppose torture: to protect the brave men and women of the intelligence services from the indignity of future prosecution and humiliation. It is unacceptable for their superiors to have demanded this of them.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Until you pick up a few innocents and torture them. Then if you are really unlucky pictures leak and you have to punish those who did the torture because of public outcry.

Fortunately only scape goats get punished then.
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I'm not for torture, but innocents get caught up in military conflicts. Suppose we had a top Al Queda official surrounded by his family and a predator drone was nearby? Innocents get killed. It's a fact of war. We killed a heck of a lot of innocent people to bring WW2 to an end.
 
We have lost; we have proven that we are the evil villains that our enemies have claimed we are. :(
 
GlennB said:
"Anything" also includes the possibility that you have the wrong person entirely, guilty of no crime and having no association with criminals.

Could be you, could be me. Personally I'd go with that pesky "due process" business.
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That isn't how you fight wars. We knew, when we bombed Germany's war industries, that many many civilians would get killed. We couldn't (and didn't) let that stop us. Later on, we actually started targeting civilians in a vain effort to break German and Japanese moral.

It's a nasty dirty fight we're in. I don't support torture because I'm morally opposed to it, and I think we can inspire others with our actions. But if we have a high value target, surrounded by civilians, sometimes you have to make the call.

I think people understand that civilians get killed in conflicts, and the U.S. generally tries to minimize that to a great degree. This torture report, though, is devastating to our cause. We were supposed to be the kind of country that didn't do that. Yeah, if you messed with us, we'll mess you up worse (and kill innocents in the process), but we did it the honorable way, with bullets and bombs! Torture was always what the "bad guys" did.
 
Fudbucker said:
I think people understand that civilians get killed in conflicts, and the U.S. generally tries to minimize that to a great degree. This torture report, though, is devastating to our cause. We were supposed to be the kind of country that didn't do that. Yeah, if you messed with us, we'll mess you up worse (and kill innocents in the process), but we did it the honorable way, with bullets and bombs! Torture was always what the "bad guys" did.
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I know it doesn't contribute much to the discussion to say so, but I agree with you here wholeheartedly.
 
Fudbucker said:
That isn't how you fight wars.
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Ironically, justice was served by neither war or torture but rather careful investigation followed by a targeted raid on the Osama compound.

War and torture led to lot of unnecessary pain, suffering and massive financial burden for no real gain, for both the "enemy" and American service men and women alike.

9/11 should have been handled and investigated like the crime that it was, not like the act of war that it wasn't.
 
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Amazing to see the tone of these posts and what it takes to get people to see the mote in their own eye. Now, take it further. What if ISIS, Al Qaeda etc are the good guys? Why not? They aren't *********** around in your country. You are doing so in theirs. You are propping up Israel, a state of dubious legitimacy, and muscling in on the region because of its oil. You destroyed Iraq and owe it reparation and have connived at the destruction of Syria (and would have destroyed it with shock and awe but for a wave of anti-war feeling). Fine, you're down three buildings and a few thousand civilians but that itself followed years of prior involvement and is a drop in the ocean compared to American-led atrocities. When you finally let go of your sense of moral superiority you might be on the road to regaining it.

Get the facts. Prosecute. Get control of your renegade leaders. Fat chance.
 
sunmaster14 said:
Ok, well I don't want to rehash our prior discussion, as illuminating as it was. I'll ask you this, though. If we took a poll of the American public, or even those weenie Europeans :D, what percentage do you think would approve an immediate resort to torture in my hypothetical? And, yes, that's an argumentum ad populum, but in questions of morality, the people do effectively determine the answers.
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The devil in the details:
Can you find someone on your team who is willing to puree lunch and force it up the torturee's backside?
And was that part of the job description when you hired him? Did you go through some of the "other duties as assigned" during the interview?
Did you decide he was a good candidate when he seemed enthusiastic about the puree business?

And do you really want this person covering your backside when things get unpleasant?
 
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