Waterboarding Rocks!

[BeAChooser]

Just curious why all of you *high-minded*, *moral* icons are ignoring the content of my post #903. Is it because you fear what it shows? Is that fear so great that you must avoid it at any cost to your credibility? Why the ability to induce such fear might almost make it torture under the new rules.

 

[A'isha]

Dai Li was an OSS operative. He did employ torture and Commander Miles, the OSS region chief, was on the scene. What does this have to do with whether or not Li's use of torture helped the war effort?

Dai Li, an OSS operative, implemented torture as a method of interrogation. So we have the OSS connection and confirmed accounts of Li's use of torture. That ship of yours is floundering because it has taken on too much of the Egyptian River.

No, Dai Li wasn't an "OSS operative". He was the chief of the Kuomintang's Secret Police, from long before the war with Japan started even for the Chinese, much less the Americans, where he gained a reputation for torturing prisoners. As the head of Chiang Kai-Shek's secret police and its own internal intelligence-gathering apparatus when the war finally started, Dai Li was the one the Americans sent Captain Milton Miles to deal with as part of the joint intelligence gathering operation known as SACO (where each group would perform their own operations, sometimes but not always with some assistance from the other, and share the results).

Dai Li, despite Miles' efforts, not only refused to share a lot of intelligence data that his own men obtained, he would actively work against his supposed OSS allies, and spent more time purging other Chinese groups than fighting the Japanese. Part of the problem Miles and his men had with Dai Li, per your own citation, was that Dai Li's men apparently tortured prisoners, though the Americans only heard "stories".

Dai Li's actions were so counterproductive, in fact, that the head of the OSS himself, William Donovan, declared (again per your own citation) that "no intelligence or operations of any consequence have come out of SACO."

In other words, you fail.

 

[boloboffin]

But the ultimate purpose isn't to cause a very bad person temporary pain and discomfort ... or even bring him to "justice". The purpose is to make that very bad person reveal some information IN A TIMELY MANNER that would save thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lives.

Try as you might to squirm off this hook, this conversation is only revealing that you, for all your talk about "moral people", lack moral clarity. It's only demonstrating that you see no difference in the evil of causing someone temporary pain and discomfort and the evil of standing by and letting thousands of people DIE because you refuse to cause that someone temporary pain and discomfort. And I think you know the untenability of your position which is why you are squirming so vigorously.

You don't have me anywhere except in your little mental liberal-torture chamber mentality. Your wager is as specious and unrealistic as Pascal's, for exactly the same reason. Your evident glee at the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people being blamed on liberals is unseemly. Your bloodthirsty desire to torture is seen throughout this thread.

You are evil, BeAChooser. You are petty and vicious and you don't care who knows it. Your counterparts are planning this country harm with exactly the same reasoning process as you use to plan them harm. You are the problem.

 

[Pardalis]

The purpose is to make that very bad person reveal some information IN A TIMELY MANNER that would save thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lives.

That's the thing, if it took 183 times for KSM to finally open up, then it is not effective when time is short.

 

[Dr Adequate]

Just curious why all of you *high-minded*, *moral* icons are ignoring the content of my post #903. Is it because you fear what it shows? Is that fear so great that you must avoid it at any cost to your credibility? Why the ability to induce such fear might almost make it torture under the new rules.

I answered your post #903 in post #906.

I shall not speculate on why you're pretending that I didn't; I shall merely point out that this makes your ranting about how everyone is "ignoring" post #903 because they "fear what it shows" look ridiculous, stupid, and hypocritical.

 

[Pardalis]

Edited: I see you have edited your mistake, Dr. A.

But anyway, not that I'm defending BAC, but your post 906 wasn't really a response to 903, just a bunch of ad homs.

You could do better, just sayin.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Yep--and I've repeatedly said why the "effectiveness" argument is 1)bogus and 2)irrelevant.

I think BaC is in one of his fantasy hypothetical worlds where we're all trembling in fear at his argumentative prowess.

 

[Cicero]

No, Dai Li wasn't an "OSS operative". He was the chief of the Kuomintang's Secret Police, from long before the war with Japan started even for the Chinese, much less the Americans, where he gained a reputation for torturing prisoners. As the head of Chiang Kai-Shek's secret police and its own internal intelligence-gathering apparatus when the war finally started, Dai Li was the one the Americans sent Captain Milton Miles to deal with as part of the joint intelligence gathering operation known as SACO (where each group would perform their own operations, sometimes but not always with some assistance from the other, and share the results).

Dai Li, despite Miles' efforts, not only refused to share a lot of intelligence data that his own men obtained, he would actively work against his supposed OSS allies, and spent more time purging other Chinese groups than fighting the Japanese. Part of the problem Miles and his men had with Dai Li, per your own citation, was that Dai Li's men apparently tortured prisoners, though the Americans only heard "stories".

Dai Li's actions were so counterproductive, in fact, that the head of the OSS himself, William Donovan, declared (again per your own citation) that "no intelligence or operations of any consequence have come out of SACO."

In other words, you fail.

Dai was placed as head of Sino-American intelligence activities. He worked with the OSS, ergo, he is an OSS operative. Whether Donovan didn't like what some OSS operatives were doing is beside the point. In WWII, like it or not, there were occasions when Americans did work and support Allied forces that engaged in torture.

I never made the argument that such tactics were successful. That is your straw man.

 

[Dr Adequate]

if you could save 100,000 people? sigh.....why not make it a million? How about 10 million.

A million? But why stop there?

That's the great thing about hypothetical situations. They don't have to be plausible.

Really? When I ask why the other side in this war doesn't respect the rule outlawing torture and you respond that they are unAmerican and ask if that's what I aspire to be, aren't you accusing me of promoting the same tactics that al-Qaeda uses ... i.e., drawing a moral equivalence between what I recommend (temporary pain and discomfort to elicit information in cases where thousands of lives are at stake in a time urgent situation) and al-Qaeda's undeniably horrific treatment of prisoners? In which case, aren't you suggesting there is a moral equivalence between the two?

How long is "soon", NL? Could that mean a day from now?

And don't the consequences of an attack matter? Isn't there a difference between an attack that kills a dozen and one that kills ten thousand? Or do you see them as equivalent too?

So in essense you too are saying that you would never inflict some temporary pain on someone to save a hundred thousand lives.

By the way, YOU haven't proven that there is a conventional interrogation technique that will elicit information, much less break someone, in a couple hours ... which remains my hypothetical scenario whether you like it or not. IF you have only a couple of hours, and the choice is between inflicting pain and discomfort in hopes of learning something that you believe someone knows that would save hundreds of thousands of lives, would you choose to inflict that pain or throw up your hands and let the hundreds of thousands die?

But I'm not suggesting we can stop all terrorism by this method. Only some of the terrorists who hope to use WMD to kill tens or even millions of Americans.

I have no reason to believe the government wants or needs to torture me. I'm not a terrorist trying to kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, tens of millions ...

Here you go folks. Yet another (likely liberal) member of JREF who would let the human race be murdered by the billions ...

We have people in this thread who are saying they wouldn't hurt one apparently guilty person to learn some information that might save the lives of every single human being on the planet.

Heck, if you don't agree with BeAChooser, he could fantasize about how this will lead to the death of every sentient being in the universe. And you'd look pretty stupid then, wouldn't you?

 

[Dr Adequate]

But anyway, not that I'm defending BAC, but your post 906 wasn't really a response to 903, just a bunch of ad homs.

You could do better, just sayin.

And I did: I'd already answered that same point, such as it was, in post #625. He did not write a single word in reply or rebuttal to my post, and then dragged out the same crappy argument all over again in post #903.

I wonder why he ignored post #625. Was it because he "fears what it shows"?

 

[Doctor Evil]

Got any rock to confess yet?

 

[Upchurch]

Dai Li was an OSS operative. He did employ torture and Commander Miles, the OSS region chief, was on the scene. What does this have to do with whether or not Li's use of torture helped the war effort?

Dai Li, the Chinese national and member of the Chinese secret police, was a member of the OSS?

Seriously? This is what you are going with in order to prove that the US used torture in WWII as a matter of policy? The man wasn't even an American, let alone an "OSS operative". He cooperated with the Americans, but was not under their command.

I know you don't want to look like you bought into some BS, but if this is what you have, you bought into some BS.

 

[Pardalis]

Quite right, Dr. A.

This thread is growing so fast, it's hard to keep up, let's put those two posts side by side:

Here is an interesting fact that bears on this discussion.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDE5YTNmZTg5OWUyOTlkMGUxOTk3OGMxY2I4ZDQ4YWQ=



Guess I and the few other defending waterboarding on this thread aren't alone.

But more important ... for all those who claim there is no evidence that enhanced interrogation techniques work ... read this from the same link:



I think the above demolishes the claims of those on this thread that there is no evidence that waterboarding (or the other procedures they are whining about) have worked. Either that statement is true, or all of the above bolded facts are untrue and the quoted people must be liars. And the couple FBI agents that posters on this thread cited are the only ones telling the truth. I don't think the latter likely, but in any case, only Obama can prove it either way.

If the FBI agents and Obama's minions are right, then Obama should release the documents and supporting information and prove it so that we can know that all the people named in the above article lied and punish them according (for the good of the country). I can think of no good reason why he wouldn't.

But if Obama won't release the information, the only logical conclusion we can reach is that the above piece is accurate and and releasing the information would destroy the reputation of Obama's minions and those couple FBI agents they've paraded in front of us (who would then have to have been LYING about what transpired). If Obama won't release the information to find out either way who is right, the only logical explanation is because doing so would prove that Obama has dismantled a program that saved many American lives and he's still Stuck on Stupid.

I can form many hypotheses.

One is that he is, quite properly, seeking legal advice on what can and cannot be released.

One is that there are national security issues. Even if the waterboarding elicited no new information not already acquired by other techniques, it might have elicited the same information again. How else would one prove the inefficacy of waterboarding, except to say stuff along the lines of: "We tortured such-and-such a terrorist, who told us such-and-such a thing, which we already knew because such-and-such an informant had already told us"? Which reveals what we learned, which, as you point out, we might wish to keep secret. At the very least the documents would all have to be vetted for security implications.

Another, related to that, is the precedent it can set: if the results of waterboarding can be revealed, then why not those of other interrogations?

One is that he wants to retain good relations with the CIA. He has already announced, rightly in my opinion, that he will not prosecute any government agent for acting on good faith on advice provided by the justice department. You say that he would embarrass the Bush administration by releasing the information; would he not also embarrass the CIA? Well, Bush is gone, but he has to live with the CIA.

And one is that he might conceive that releasing the information would embarrass America by showing up the savagery of the methods that its agents employed. Perhaps he puts his country above the prospect of embarrassing Bush, something that would achieve nothing for him nor his country.

In short, there are many conceivable aims that he might have for caution and delay over this issue that he might rank higher than the prospect of visiting the swiftest possible humiliation on a man who is already regarded with scorn and who has no chance of ever again serving as President. There are other conceivable motives in politics than petty spite, and if you do not understand this, I daresay Obama does.

 

[A'isha]

Dai was placed as head of Sino-American intelligence activities. He worked with the OSS, ergo, he is an OSS operative.

No, he was the head of a pre-existing secret police and intelligence organization that the OSS was ostensibly allied with, but did not direct or control. He did not work for the OSS, nor did he take orders from the OSS. He was no more an OSS operative than Lavrenti Beria was. Less of one, actually, since Dai Li actively foiled a number of OSS operations during the war.

Whether Donovan didn't like what some OSS operatives were doing is beside the point. In WWII, like it or not, there were occasions when Americans did work and support Allied forces that engaged in torture.

I'm sure there were. However, that's not the claim that you made that we're asking you to support. You know, where you said:

There recollections are their recollections. But they do not speak for the OSS agents who didn't pull out a chess board when interrogating their captives. It has nothing to do with me agreeing or disagreeing with them.

What did these mythical OSS agents do when they directly interrogated their captives (not what any allied intelligence agencies that actually worked against the OSS did to their own captured agents, what the OSS men did themselves to captured agents) that stands at odds with the non-torturey techniques used by the previously-quoted American wartime intelligence agents? And what evidence do you have for what they did?

I never made the argument that such tactics were successful. That is your straw man.

So, then you're in this thread defending torture techniques that you don't even think work?

That's...interesting.

 

[Cicero]

Dai Li, the Chinese national and member of the Chinese secret police, was a member of the OSS?

Seriously? This is what you are going with in order to prove that the US used torture in WWII as a matter of policy? The man wasn't even an American, let alone an "OSS operative". He cooperated with the Americans, but was not under their command.

I know you don't want to look like you bought into some BS, but if this is what you have, you bought into some BS.

Why do you avoid mention of Dai's title as head of Sino-American intelligence activities? An OSS operative is anyone who works with, not necessarily for, the OSS in any operation against the enemy. Many OSS operatives were not Americans. I never said torture was a matter of U.S. policy in WWII. Where did you get that bilge from? The whole point of the Office of Strategic Services was that they used unorthodox methods to obtain information. They did not operate under the sames guidelines of Naval Intelligence or G2.

 

[A'isha]

Why do you avoid mention of Dai's title as head of Sino-American intelligence activities? An OSS operative is anyone who works with, not necessarily for, the OSS in any operation against the enemy. Many OSS operatives were not Americans. I never said torture was a matter of U.S. policy in WWII. Where did you get that bilge from? The whole point of the Office of Strategic Services was that they used unorthodox methods to obtain information. They did not operate under the sames guidelines of Naval Intelligence or G2.

I see you've gone from "Those wartime interrogators who said they didn't torture prisoners don't speak for all those other wartime OSS men who used the harsher techniques that we've been using today!" to "By 'OSS men' I meant anyone who ever shared information with the OSS even if they weren't American or even part of the OSS and torture wasn't American policy during the war!"

 

[Lonewulf]

Yeah, that's Cicero alright.

 

[Cicero]

No, he was the head of a pre-existing secret police and intelligence organization that the OSS was ostensibly allied with, but did not direct or control. He did not work for the OSS, nor did he take orders from the OSS. He was no more an OSS operative than Lavrenti Beria was. Less of one, actually, since Dai Li actively foiled a number of OSS operations during the war.

The OSS, by the nature of their business, had little control over their operatives. When they recruited captured German soldiers during the war for work behind the German lines, they could hardly control them. Whether Li was more of a hindrance than a help to the OSS does not in any way change the fact that he was an operative of the OSS.

I'm sure there were. However, that's not the claim that you made that we're asking you to support. You know, where you said:

I don't think Li was the chess-playing type. Do you?

What did these mythical OSS agents do when they directly interrogated their captives (not what any allied intelligence agencies that actually worked against the OSS did to their own captured agents, what the OSS men did themselves to captured agents) that stands at odds with the non-torturey techniques used by the previously-quoted American wartime intelligence agents? And what evidence do you have for what they did?

The Washington Post article was about POW interrogators in Fort Hunt, Virginia. They were not OSS operatives working under fire. What evidence do we have that the Fort Hunt didn't torture except their own denials?

So, then you're in this thread defending torture techniques that you don't even think work?


That's...interesting.

Noooo. I merely pointed out the tactics that Di used. I made no such estimation as to their success or failure. You should be quite fit from all your leaping to conclusions.

 

[Cicero]

I see you've gone from "Those wartime interrogators who said they didn't torture prisoners don't speak for all those other wartime OSS men who used the harsher techniques that we've been using today!" to "By 'OSS men' I meant anyone who ever shared information with the OSS even if they weren't American or even part of the OSS and torture wasn't American policy during the war!"

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_608049f1a467ab745.jpg[/qimg]

Your narrow definition of OSS men is your escape clause, not mine. Many OSS operatives were not Americans. I understand you are traumatized by the realization that the U.S. wasn't always using Marquess of Queensberry rules in WWII. That's the nature of war.

 

[A'isha]

The OSS, by the nature of their business, had little control over their operatives. When they recruited captured German soldiers during the war for work behind the German lines, they could hardly control them.

So, what you're saying is that when you wrote of the wartime interrogators who spoke out against torturing prisoners for information that "[their] recollections are their recollections. But they do not speak for the OSS agents who didn't pull out a chess board when interrogating their captives", you were actually referring to the activities of German soldiers behind enemy lines who were feeding information to the Americans?

And this non sequitur matters to what actual American interrogators directly employed by an American organization should do...how, exactly?

Whether Li was more of a hindrance than a help to the OSS does not in any way change the fact that he was an operative of the OSS.

Dai Li was not an operative of the OSS, no matter how you try to twist the definition. Unless you'd like to state here and now that General Donovan was actually an agent of the NKVD because he personally went to Moscow and offered his full cooperation and assistance to Lieutenant General Fitin, Beria's head of External Intelligence.

I don't think Li was the chess-playing type. Do you?

No, he wasn't. And, funnily enough, that's part of the reason Captain Miles and his actual OSS men didn't like Dai Li.

The Washington Post article was about POW interrogators in Fort Hunt, Virginia. They were not OSS operatives working under fire. What evidence do we have that the Fort Hunt didn't torture except their own denials?

You have over three thousand posts at the JREF and you ask a question like that?

No, Cicero...what evidence do we have that they did torture?

Noooo. I merely pointed out the tactics that Di used.

Yes, the tactics that Captain Miles and his OSS men did not participate in, and used as evidence of Dai Li's ineffectiveness and untrustworthiness.