Waterboarding Rocks!

[applecorped]

Just a hypothetical here.

Since it's looking like members of congress were well aware of this, including many democrats.

If Obama,Pelosi,Reid etc knew also and did'nt object should they be prosecuted also and Obama impeached?

No. No one should be prosecuted, investigated, selected, detected, injected, infected. Off to the group W bench for all of you.

 

[Texas]

Or maybe it wasn't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#World_War_II



The technique described by Nielsen as having been used on him is waterboarding as practiced by the US, not the "water torture" from your own Wiki link.

Yes he was under a running faucet until he passed out. He would pass out and be revived and this went on for 2 hours. The Legal opinions on US waterboarding limited the time to 1 second to no more than 30seconds and the water was delivered with a sprinkling can NOT an open faucet.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

'm just curious if there's going to be consistency as far as prosecuting all who were aware of it, rep or dem.

OK, then yes, I think anyone who knew but didn't object should be censured or perhaps removed from office (Personally, I think they should be politically ruined.) I'm not sure if there's any actual legal grounds for more than that, though. Knowing but not objecting is really bad, but it's not the same thing as issuing directives or doing the deed.

Also, I don't think members of Congress are in command (or effective command) of the institutions and people involved.

Maybe you could make a case that they are somehow complicit as covered in Article 4 of the C.A.T.

1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.

Their party is irrelevant, if that's what you're after.

I think Obama's order to leave extraordinary rendition in play is much worse though. That practice is clearly a violation of Article 3 of the C.A.T.

 

[A'isha]

Yet Mohammed survived this procedure 183 times.

So? Waterboarding isn't fatal. Merely horrifically traumatic.

What other procedure would have manged to get him to reveal to being the mastermind behind the September 11th attacks,

Waterboarding him didn't allow the US to foil the 9/11 attacks.

the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt to blow up an airliner,

Waterboarding him didn't allow the US to foil Reid's attempt (the passengers of Flight 63 did that).

the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia,

Waterboarding him didn't allow the US (or anyone else) to foil the nightclub bombing.

the 1993 World Trade Center bombing

Waterboarding him didn't allow the US to foil that bombing.

and various foiled attacks.

Like what? The "LA attack" debunked earlier in this thread?

So far, waterboarding Khalid Mohammed is 0 for 5 when it comes to saving American lives from terrorist attacks.

Do you feels sorry for Mohammed?

I take it from your statement that you don't feel sorry for him being subjected an average of six times a day to a torture that one of only twelve survivors out of 17,000 found so horrific and traumatic enough out of all the torments he saw and suffered at the hands of the Kmer Rouge to commemorate in a series of paintings depicting the exact thing Mohammed was forced to undergo.

You should email Vann Nath and tell him just how you feel about waterboarding.

 

[A'isha]

Yes he was under a running faucet until he passed out. He would pass out and be revived and this went on for 2 hours. The Legal opinions on US waterboarding limited the time to 1 second to no more than 30seconds and the water was delivered with a sprinkling can NOT an open faucet.

And you believe that this restriction on the "interrogator's" actions was followed, when a number of other similar restrictions on their were broken?

 

[Cicero]

Irrelevant. It's the same argument as me trying to say there was no other way for me to get money for my much needed surgery except to resort to armed robbery. Even in that situation, armed robbery is a crime.


Also irrelevant.

Again, irrelevant to you. Again, your analogy is invalid. You keep using civil laws to make some silly point that the end does not justify the means in interrogation procedures involving detainees. The CIA were operating under rules nobody challenged until the Congress submitted the Intelligence authorization bill in 2007 that Bush vetoed in 2008.

 

[Texas]

So? Waterboarding isn't fatal. Merely horrifically traumatic.



Waterboarding him didn't allow the US to foil the 9/11 attacks.



Waterboarding him didn't allow the US to foil Reid's attempt (the passengers of Flight 63 did that).



Waterboarding him didn't allow the US (or anyone else) to foil the nightclub bombing.




Waterboarding him didn't allow the US to foil that bombing.



Like what? The "LA attack" debunked earlier in this thread?

So far, waterboarding Khalid Mohammed is 0 for 5 when it comes to saving American lives from terrorist attacks.



I take it from your statement that you don't feel sorry for him being subjected an average of six times a day to a torture that one of only twelve survivors out of 17,000 found so horrific and traumatic enough out of all the torments he saw and suffered at the hands of the Kmer Rouge to commemorate in a series of paintings depicting the exact thing Mohammed was forced to undergo.

You should email Vann Nath and tell him just how you feel about waterboarding.

Then we should have immediately put a bullet in his head when we captured him.

 

[applecorped]

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/08/AR2007120801664.htmll

 

[BeAChooser]

Again, I reject your bogus scenarios

You don't have to keep telling us that, Joe. We know you do. But have learned that you see moral equivalence between non-fatally hurting a single human being and mega-mass murder. You can be the icon of the left's inability to understand morality and evil.

That is the law

I also find it interesting that many who are now sooooooo concerned about upholding "the law" couldn't care less about the law when it came to the crimes committed during the Clinton administration. For the record, Joe, I don't remember your position on Clinton so I'm not accusing you of this ... but there are some on this thread who have staunchly defended BC's administration (at least they played the game of deny deny deny) regarding the many charges of illegality that were pointed his way. And there are also some who were willing to look the other way as Obama's campaign committed funding violations. Like I said, if the precedent is established that going after criminality in past administrations is ok, then perhaps what goes around will come around. I have no doubt that would be a good thing for the country. I've said that for years.

I don't see any language in there that makes an exception for circumstances where you're pretty darn sure you can save lives.

But paraphrasing someone regarding another famous document, I don't think the signatories of the C.A.T. meant it to be a suicide pact. You seem willing to commit suicide rather than inflict a little non-lethal pain.

As several people have said, even if you think it's possible to have such knowledge, I still wouldn't want to leave that judgement to individuals.

But sometimes there isn't time to convene a jury. Somethings events that weren't anticipated by laws occur. Then the buck stops with you ... and your conscience. I guess I'm just trying to see who really does have a conscience on this thread.

 

[Texas]

And you believe that this restriction on the "interrogator's" actions was followed, when a number of other similar restrictions on their were broken?

Talk to Obama about that. He has stated that none of the interrogators will be investigated or prosecuted so he must feel that they all followed the letter of the legal opinions.

 

[Cicero]

I take it from your statement that you don't feel sorry for him being subjected an average of six times a day to a torture that one of only twelve survivors out of 17,000 found so horrific and traumatic enough out of all the torments he saw and suffered at the hands of the Kmer Rouge to commemorate in a series of paintings depicting the exact thing Mohammed was forced to undergo.

You should email Vann Nath and tell him just how you feel about waterboarding.

Oh sure. I bet you were heart broken when American forces left Southeast Asia 1973, and wished they stayed to ensure the Khmer Rouge would not murder 2 million people. Please.

 

[A'isha]

Oh sure. I bet you were heart broken when American forces left Southeast Asia 1973, and wished they stayed to ensure the Khmer Rouge would not murder 3 million people. Please.

You are aware that it was the Communist Vietnamese that invaded Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pot, right? And that after the Khmer Rouge were removed from power, the US refused to allow the UN to seat the new Cambodian government, leaving it in the de facto hands of the Khmer Rouge?

 

[BeAChooser]

1) Even if it's moral in some rare circumstance, once you open the door to that, other people will certainly try to claim their wrong use is justified.

Good. At least you are willing to admit that torture might be moral in some instances. That's progress. But I see you still suffer from the liberal belief that all wrongs and all evils are morally equivalent. We don't have to accept the view of evil people that their torture is justified. And as history has shown, even if you take the high ground, the evil people may still claim their use of torture (and beheading) is justified. As is happening right now in this war.

2) The intelligence you get from torture isn't reliable (people will say what they think you want to hear to make it stop--even innocent people, while the hardened bad guys might be trained to resist torture and feed you bad info).

Not true. There are many historical cases (I pointed the way to some earlier in this thread) where the intelligence gathered by torture was quite reliable and saved many lives. As to training bad guys to resist torture, you'll no doubt help them do that if you foolishly publish the tortures that you dream up to inflict on them ... as Obama's Administration just did. In other cases, no amount of preparation is really going to help. And you forget that the good guys can also react by devising new methods.

3) You can't use evidence gathered by coercion in legitimate courts.

Think like a lawyer. But lawyers don't fight wars. Lawyers aren't going to save us if islamofascist terrorists get a nuclear weapon and hide one in an American city set to explode on the 19th at 10 am. No injunctions, hearings in court, no objections are going to prevent it going off. All that stands in the way of that is going to be some guy on the sharp end of the stick who has to make a decision weighing the value of one person's absence of pain and a hundred thousand REAL lives.

4) You open up your own agents to reprisals and mistreatments.

Again, you seem to be under the delusion that the other side is currently fighting by these gentlemanly rules you established. No, they are laughing at you while they try to acquire WMD to kill you ... infidel.

 

[Cicero]

You are aware that it was the Communist Vietnamese that invaded Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pot, right? And that after the Khmer Rouge were removed from power, the US refused to allow the UN to seat the new Cambodian government, leaving it in the de facto hands of the Khmer Rouge?

What were the Communist Vietnamese doing in 1975, when they controlled the entire country, when Pol Pot executed 2 million Cambodians after the U.S. forces left Southeast Asia in 1973? By 1979, the mass killing was long over. Had the U.S. forces been in Southeast Asia, Pot would not have had his killing fields.

 

[BeAChooser]

Neither was Dilawar.

I haven't advocated the use of torture in an instance like that. The stakes weren't high enough to justify that. But I think there are instances where the stakes are high enough. Nor have I claimed the punishment that was levied out in that case was not deserved or too much. I'm not defending torture in all instances. Don't try to paint me that way. But I do say it's foolish to claim there are no circumstances where the use of torture is justified.

 

[leftysergeant]

You are weaseling out of answering my simply yes/no question. Irregardless of how plausible you may think my scenario is (I could spend all day creating scenarios and no doubt you object to them all), would you apply non-lethal pain to one individual if there were a 1% chance that you could learn the location of the bomb and save hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, ... or would you just sit there claiming moral and legal superiority while those hundreds of thousands perished?

There is a greater chance that Osama bin Laden will come to New York and publicly convert to roman Catholicism than that your Jack Bauer wet dream will ever come true. There are hundreds of times more a possibility that innocent people will die because some jerk thinks as you do when he is in a position to act out.

Torture is justified in some circumstances.

Not in our time/space conmtinuum, regardless what any judge says. The law is clear.

Oh. So you think the President should be the final arbiter of what is moral and immoral?

No. Especially not the dumber-than-a-sack-of--balsa-sledgehammers who just term limited out. He hasn't the mental capacity or the moral fiber.

 

[BeAChooser]

I forgot this one:

5) From the point of view of the people on the ground conducting interrogations: I would hate for the matter to be one of discretion because that means in the heat of the moment I would have to decide whether or not this is one of those rare circumstances where torture is justified and my decision would be subject to review since it is a matter of discretion and judgement.

And yet, that is precisely what truly responsible people will have to do in such times given the way we are going. You can sit back, do nothing and let a hundred thousand people die or you can understand there isn't a moral equivalence between letting a hundred thousand die and hurting one person, and do something.

 

[leftysergeant]

I haven't advocated the use of torture in an instance like that. The stakes weren't high enough to justify that. But I think there are instances where the stakes are high enough.

Like arguing whether Schickelgruber offed six million Jews or three.

This is the sort of thing thast happens when you turn the animals loose to torture people.

 

[BeAChooser]

BeaChooser's trust in Government is heart warming hactually

Actually, I believe I trust government less than you do. That's why I don't want to see Obama grow government to the extent he's proposed. That's why I don't want government taking over every aspect of our daily lives. That's why I'm willing to let the individual's conscience and common sense in extreme situations be the guide for whether to torture and not some sanctimonious and high-minded words written on a paper by a group of government lackeys (some from governments that are truly evil) who are out of touch with the reality of fighting terrorists using WMDs and far removed from the situation.

 

[Texas]

There is a greater chance that Osama bin Laden will come to New York and publicly convert to roman Catholicism than that your Jack Bauer wet dream will ever come true. There are hundreds of times more a possibility that innocent people will die because some jerk thinks as you do when he is in a position to act out.


.

Really? How about if we had captured Atta on Sept. 10th, 2001 along with his martyr video and he told us that "tomorrow" will be very interesting but then he clammed up? That is far from being an absurd hypothetical. What would YOU have done to get him talking?