Waterboarding

The description comes from someone who has experienced it. I doubt it's incomplete, it just doesn't equate out to what your liberal sources have told you.

Yeah, everyone is entitled to their opinion, huh?

McGentrix wrote:

The description comes from someone who has experienced it. I doubt it's incomplete, it just doesn't equate out to what your liberal sources have told you.

McGentrix wrote:

Yeah, everyone is entitled to their opinion, huh?

Hm. So as long as he describes the technique, he's an authority. His word is to be believed.

But when he says that waterboarding should be regarded as torture, it's just his opinion.

Convenient.

Well, one is a fact, one is an opinion.

What's so convenient about that?

McGentrix wrote:

What's so convenient about that?

It's quite convenient for your argument that waterboarding is a clean procedure - nothing cruel about it - to dismiss the one thing, while holding him up as an authority on the other.

So that's how the liberal mind translates what I said? Or is it the European mind?

I did not say it was a clean procedure, nor did I say it wasn't cruel.

I said water does not go into the lungs because that would kill the person.

If it wasn't cruel, it wouldn't work. Duh.

I know you're trying here, but please, try harder.

I expect we'll soon find that Mike Kiriakou is playing a public relations role here for some party/parties related to the administration. I might be wrong, but the pieces fit this way and they fit very well.

He says:

1) He waterboarded Abu Zubaydah and he says that waterboarding is torture

The former agent, who said he participated in the Abu Zubayda interrogation but not his waterboarding, said the CIA decided to waterboard the al Qaeda operative only after he was "wholly uncooperative" for weeks and refused to answer questions.

These two claims look custom made for immediate and broad media interest. "Look, he's a CIA guy and he did Zubaydah and even he now thinks it is torture". That's the hook.

2) But he then adds two very significant provisos: first, that it is his evolved opinion that waterboarding is 'torture' and second, that it works...the guy talked...the guy gave good information which prevented many attacks.

Think spin. In acknowledging that the torture charge is just his opinion, he opens the door for any and all the claims that personal opinion means squat (another cia guy can say, no it isn't). Remember this isn't a legal issue here but a public relations battle to convince people what legal opinion ought to be, really as a moral issue.

More significantly, he forwards the key PR argument from the administration (and hawks)...torture works. Having tortured people (though of course maybe it isn't really torture) has resulted in prevention of attacks and loss of american lives.

3) to this point, nobody knows who this guy is. He's perfectly typecast for the role...young, handsome, seemingly sincere, well-spoken.

4) he arrives exactly at the same time as the NIE report, a report which does serious damage to administration credibility

I don't think he says he did Abu Zubayda. He says he knew about it -- and seems to know quite a few details about the results of it, but claims he wasn't there.

There is one claim of his I am really questioning and that is that it worked. I thought I recalled reports in the not too distant past that what Zubayda gave us he actually gave to the FBI before the CIA got a hold of him. Off to look for those.

The Bush administration is pushing to take control of the promotions of military lawyers, escalating a conflict over the independence of uniformed attorneys who have repeatedly raised objections to the White House's policies toward prisoners in the war on terrorism.

The administration has proposed a regulation requiring "coordination" with politically appointed Pentagon lawyers before any member of the Judge Advocate General corps - the military's 4,000-member uniformed legal force - can be promoted.

A Pentagon spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the reasoning behind the proposed regulations. But the requirement of coordination - which many former JAGs say would give the administration veto power over any JAG promotion or appointment - is consistent with past administration efforts to impose greater control over the military lawyers.

The former JAG officers say the regulation would end the uniformed lawyers' role as a check-and-balance on presidential power, because politically appointed lawyers could block the promotion of JAGs who they believe would speak up if they think a White House policy is illegal. (emphasis added)

Mr. Mukasey is being judged not on his merits but as a proxy for Mr. Bush. Yet critics of the nomination, while understandably disturbed by Mr. Mukasey's unwillingness to label waterboarding illegal, may be working against the last, best hope to see the rule of law reemerge in this administration.

Virtually every authoritative description of the practice specifies that it works by simulating drowning, not by almost drowning.

The results of your "extensive" study, if you would, Finn.

Some of us find this distinction important in determining whether or not the practice constitutes torture. I understand why for others this distinction is meaningless. I don't agree with them, but I don't find it irrational for someone to have a broader definition of torture than I.



It's as if there are some that want to convince people like me that water-boarding is torture based on our own definition. That it is not only the moral equivalent of attacking a prisoner with red hot pokers, it is also the physiological equivalent as well. We can, of course, debate the former, but the latter, it seems to me, is clearly false.

Many who consider water-boarding torture, consider the use of sleep deprivation and temperature extremes to be torture as well. This certainly can be logically consistent with their definition of torture, but it is not with mine. Again, use of these other techniques could quite possibly kill the prisoner if no controls are employed, but his or her death as a result would neither be intended, nor a likely outcome that is met with total lack of concern.

Inserting red hot pokers up a prisoner's anus, might not actually kill him or her, but it wouldn't be because the torturer cared either way. It would certainly seriously maim and permanently disable the prisoner, and that is so obvious that intent must be implied.

Water-boarding, sleep deprivation and other extreme interrogation techniques are employed precisely because it is unlikely that they will kill or permanently disable the prisoner.

Of course this is immaterial if you subscribe to a broader definition of torture, and when I refer to these definitions I do not contemplate statutory definitions. Immoral and illegal are not synonymous, and so in my consideration of the morality of the practices I'm not particularly concerned with legal definitions.

Of course these practices are extremely unpleasant for the prisoner, and not the equivalent of depriving him or her of television privileges, but the question is not whether the prisoner will experience considerable discomfort, but whether that discomfort is justified. I'm sure sleeping on a concrete slab in a prison cell is very discomforting, but is it torture? Hell, just having to live in a cell is highly discomforting. Is incarceration torture?

These techniques, whether or not we call them torture work, in that they can and have caused otherwise resistant prisoners to provide information that is desired and would not otherwise be obtainable. I would agree with any argument that they should only be used as a last resort and when there is a fair amount of certainty that the prisoner has important information to reveal, but they can work and to insist that they, and, for that matter, less ambiguous practices of tortures, never do is simply an attempt to condition the debate to one's preferences rather than what is factual.

Again, I suppose if one is certain that torture and extreme interrogation practices do not work then there is no reason to fear the possible consequences, and attendant responsibility for prohibiting their use, but
that isn't the case and the moral question is a bit tougher to answer.