Waterboarding

Whatever the method used, Tico, there is no doubt that it specifically induces mental terror which is the equivalent of torture.

See parados' post here:

http://www.able2know.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=3022197#3022197

You didn't substantively address his post, but dodged by claiming that we are talking about waterboarding and not torture. But, definably, waterboarding is torture and there exists precedent for prosecuting both US soldiers and foreign soldiers who engaged in it.

Getting caught up in the little details (does the water enter the mouth?) ...

... is ridiculous and nothing but a way to attempt from addressing the real point.

Ticomaya wrote:

Diest TKO wrote:

So tico are you claiming that the distinction offered between "torture" and "enhanced interogation techniques" is valid? Sopprt that argument with some sort of fact please.

Sounds like a pink pistol to me. Cute, but ultimately it does the same thing.

T
K
O

Straw man.

Coward.

T
K
O

parados wrote:

I am curious if the fear of immediate death isn't severe mental pain and suffering could anyone that supports water boarding tell me what they think would be severe mental pain and suffering as defined by the convention on torture?

Torture: Perpetrated by non-Americans


Enhanced interrogation techniques: Perpetrated by Americans (and their outsourced torturers,as in Syria and Egypt etc.?)


Torture cannot be perpetrated by Americans.


That is the only "logic" I can read from the posts of people such as Ticomaya and other American torture apologists.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Whatever the method used, Tico, there is no doubt that it specifically induces mental terror which is the equivalent of torture.

See parados' post here:

http://www.able2know.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=3022197#3022197

You didn't substantively address his post, but dodged by claiming that we are talking about waterboarding and not torture. But, definably, waterboarding is torture and there exists precedent for prosecuting both US soldiers and foreign soldiers who engaged in it.

I was seeking to pin him down on exactly what he was talking about. I dodged nothing, as evidenced by the remainder of my post to him: " Do you have any citations to laws proscribing the specific CIA "enhanced interrogation technique" of waterboarding, parados?" That's not a "dodge," but a rather direct question, to which I expected either an "yes" or "no" response.

Quote:

Getting caught up in the little details (does the water enter the mouth?) ...

You think the distinction between whether water is actually being poured into the nose and mouth, or not, is a "little detail"? I don't.

And additionally, several posters (including the poster I was responding to) have cited to historical precedence for prosecuting persons for "waterboarding" ... and in those specific historical instances -- based upon what I've read -- water was poured into the nose and mouth. I think it's a credible distinction, whether that is what we're talking about the CIA doing, and it's certainly important.

Quote:

... is ridiculous and nothing but a way to attempt from addressing the real point.

Well what is the "real" point? I thought the "real" point was to determine if "waterboarding" is legal or not. The questions I posed were specifically designed to further along that discussion. Simply parroting "of course it's illegal" doesn't cut it. Nor does simply stating "definably, waterboarding is torture," without "defining" exactly what you are referring to when you use the term "waterboarding" -- hence my question about the definition.

If Congress has not passed a law specifically proscribing "waterboarding" -- however that activity is to be defined by Congress -- then it seems safe to assume it is not that important an issue for them. Or perhaps they don't want to specifically outlaw that technique.

engineer wrote:

Ticomaya wrote:

The distinction being parsed is as to waterboarding as opposed to torture. Do you have any citations to laws proscribing the specific CIA "enhanced interrogation technique" of waterboarding, parados?

Or were you just addressing the "torture" portion of Finn's comment?

The US has court martialed it's own soldiers for water boarding as early as 1898. We convicted Japanese soldiers of it after WWII and there have even been cases of US law enforcement officials convicted for it. Here's a nice summary link. The US has for over 100 years considered waterboarding to be torture.

The description I've read of the "specific CIA 'enhanced interrogation technique' of waterboarding" differs from the description in that article, engineer. Do we know whether water is actually being poured into nose and mouth? -- which is not the description that's been advertised.

Can anyone show me the law that says waterboarding -- of whatever form -- is illegal?

If not, why do you suppose Congress has not passed such a law?

It's a dodge, b/c it doesn't matter if water is poured in the mouth and nose or not (though I strongly suspect that in order to have any effect whatsoever, it is). If it induces mental terror, imminent fear of death, then it is torture. It is no different then a mock execution, which is clearly torture.

Congress hasn't passed a law specifically banning jamming hot rebar up peoples' asses; is that torture?

When we are quite sure of the mental effects of it (and you should read up on people who have actually been through it, who to a man describe it as torture) being torturous, the physical details are unimportant.

The 'real point' is why you think it's okay to torture people for information.

Except it allows for reasonable people to debate the issue, and for a nominee for Attorney General to refuse to commit that it's torture. And the debate could be easily quelled by Congressional action. I would think you would be a little more strident in your demand that Congress take action, given the national debate on the matter.

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

You made virtually this same post before. Here was my response from before.

Yes I did, and I expect I will again. Consistency is a virtue.

engineer wrote:

I have clearly stated my position that torture, including waterboarding, is never acceptable. I've invited others to do the same, but only you have stepped forward and stated your position, in this case that water boarding is not torture. I disagree since the US has defined it as torture for over a century, but I respect your opinion and applaud your willingness to state that. Many here avoid making that declaration.

I believe that if you approve of these techniques, you will torture thousands of mostly innocent people to get little of use, you will lose the cooperation of millions of people who would otherwise be sympathetic to your cause and you would provide propaganda material to our enemies that would allow them to recruit and become a bigger threat to us than they are today. That is the price you pay up front to keep torture in your arsenal against the very slim chance that torture could prevent a catastrophe. I believe we are paying that price today and that it has hurt our efforts against terrorism rather than help them.

I also disagree that those who disapprove of torture "accept some measure of a burden uniquely theirs". This is the logic of the bully and the criminal. "If you don't do as I say, it is your fault that I am bad!" Sorry, I disagree. The US bears no fault for 9/11. We have certainly pursued policies that were not favorable to certain groups or regions, but the crime of 9/11 is the full responsibility of those who planned and executed it. It wasn't the FBI's or CIA's fault, not local police, not airlines, just the terrorists. Likewise, any blame for future attacks fall upon those who commit them rather than those who call for humane treatment of prisoners.

I feel certain that I responded to your reasoned post, but don't want to again. Perhaps you can provide a link to that prior thread.

While I do feel that this position is morally superior to those who feel that the ends justify the means with respect to torture, it also comes from a long term view of the impact of our actions. If your son or daughter is falsely hauled in based on a tip from a neighbor and tortured, my thought is that you would not say "Oh well, he or she took one for the betterment of man-kind and it was an innocent mistake." I think you would instead say "I hate the US, will do everything in my power to fight against their interests, will never trust their motives or citizens and will train all future generations to have the same beliefs." I believe we will see tangible costs to our torture policy for the rest of my lifetime. I haven't seen any evidence of a benefit to match that cost.

You are absolutely right that I would not accept the torture of one of my children based on a false tip from a neighbor, but then I would not accept the torture of anyone based on the tip (true or false) of a neighbor. I am not endorsing anything approaching the routine use of torture. I am arguing that in an instance when there is very reasonable certainty that a person has information that will save the life or lives of innocents and he or she refuses to reveal that information, that extreme interrogation methods and even torture may be justified. I fully acknowledge that even if used in only the most extreme situations, there is no absolute certainty that an innocent will not be tortured.

Society is forever weighing the rights and well being of individuals against those of the whole. Should someone in New York City come down with Ebola, we can be fairly certain that, if identified, The State will isolate that person and deprive them of a good number of their rights. It's hard to take seriously anyone who would argue for allowing the infected person to walk free within the City.

There is no hope whatsoever that any law will be perfectly executed. Do we do away with laws because innocents are sometimes unjustly accused and punished?

Yes, if I or a loved one were unjustly punished or tortured I would have a different perspective on the subject. That goes without saying and to raise it is hardly a rhetorical coup de grace, anymore that would be my insistence that your formulate your opinion on the subject through the perspective of someone whose innocent loved one was certain to die if a prisoner did not reveal information he or she was holding.

Add to the list of canards the argument that the use of torture will necessarily create hordes of violent enemies where none might otherwise have existed.

Again, I am not advocating the wholesale and casual use of torture. I am advocating that in certain extreme situations it is acceptable. These situations are not going to number anywhere near enough to produce hordes of violent enemies

Since it doesn't seem possible to quantify the the sort of vague tangible consequence you believe will flow from highly select use of torture it is impossible to measure them against possible benefits.

We do have specific examples where extreme interrogation methods (which I do not even acknowledge constitute torture) have worked to cause known and highly dangerous enemies to reveal information they would have otherwise withheld. We do not know for certain that this information resulted in the direct interference with executed plots to harm innocents, but we do know that it led to the containment or deaths of people who had killed innocents in the past and swore to kill them in the future.

What specific examples do we have of entirely innocent people who turned to bloody handed terrorism because they had been very roughly treated by Americans?

Islamists have been quite intent upon murdering innocents long before the issue of torture ever arose. For the extremely numerous muslims throughout the world who, on September 12 2001, considered bin Laden a hero and 9-11 a righteous act of retribution, the use of torture by America played no role in the formulation of their positions.

Just because individual people on this board may result to torture does not mean that the government should endorse torture.

People are fickle and only act with their own desires and intentions in mind.

The government should be resolute and acting on behalf of the entire nation.

Torturing suspects who we can be reasonably certain have information that will save innocent Americans is acting on behalf of the entire nation.


I hope that I would have the resolve to NOT torture someone that was holding my wife/child, even if it meant their death. To engage in that sort of behavior would bring me down to a sub-human level that I would not want to crawl back from even if it meant the death of a loved one.

Fair enough, but I doubt you would have such a resolve and I see no problem if you did not.

I'm not sure why you believe your loved ones should be sacrificed to prevent you from engaging in a practice that you, at this safe and isolated moment, believe to be sub-human. If you chose not to torture someone for the knowledge of an antidote to the poision he gave you, your resolve might not make any more sense, but at least it would only hurt you.

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

parados wrote:

Quote:

The problem I tend to have with the opponents of waterboarding and torture is that they come at their position through a certain sense of moral superiority.

It could just be that opponents of torture have a certain sense of legal superiority. After all it IS against the law.

Could be, but we all know that's not the case.

1. The International Convention against Torture bans torture.
http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html
2. The US is a party to that treaty. It was ratified in 1994.
3. International treaties that the US have entered into have the force of law in the US. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/article02/10.html

I know of no precedent that allows you to claim torture is NOT against the law in the US. In fact when the US ratified the treaty, they said the following... "Torture is illegal within the United States and is illegal if practised by American military personnel anywhere at any time."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_Against_Torture

Please present your case that "torture" is not illegal if you have any case at all.

Uh, what country are you living in? Here in America, we did pass a bill which prohibits waterboarding - the McCain amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.

It's one reason I consider McCain a viable option, though I am Liberal and he is not - he doesn't lie down with many of the Dogs in the Republican party who actively seek to torture and don't give a damn about treaties and laws banning it.

I would like a torture supporter here to outline the scenario, in which we can have reasonable certainty that a certain prisoner will have the information that will save American lives. How nebulous is this information? How imminent does the plot have to be? How sure do you have to be?

I think that as time goes on, you will see that the detainees in question did not in fact give up information about specific plots, or anything that we were reasonably certain about. Unless you are willing to say, 'well, we know that bad guys will know the bad guy plans, so it's okay to torture in search of open-ended information.' Is this correct?

Cycloptichorn

Since we've convicted people for this offense before, why don't we identify someone who ordered waterboarding, haul them into court and let the court decide if it is different than the waterboarding we've convicted US and foreign citizens of doing before? Congress has not passed laws specifically against breaking people's fingers one at a time until they talk either, but it you do it, you will end up in jail. Congress hopefully will never have to legislate against all the clever ways humans can hurt each other by name.

Uh, what country are you living in? Here in America, we did pass a bill which prohibits waterboarding - the McCain amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.

SO IS WATERBOARDING TORTURE?So here is the question: If we captured a top al Qaeda operative who was certain to have information about what we reasonably believed was an imminent plan to attack midtown Manhattan with a nuclear weapon, would it shock your conscience if an intelligence officer waterboarded that operative in a desperate attempt to thwart the attack and save thousands of lives?

October 31, 2007
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
On torture and executive power, Democrats sing a different tune when the president is … a Democrat.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

The "ticking bomb scenario" represents a narrow exception to what should otherwise be our categorical prohibition against torture. After all, "in the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans," it might be necessary for a president to make "the decision to depart from standard international practices[.]" The president, of course, "must be held accountable" for such a decision; but the president would have to be prepared to make it in such dire circumstances.

Who says so? Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, that's who. The Democrats' coronee-in-waiting made the comments in an interview by the New York Daily News last October.Naturally, at the front of that bandwagon they will find former President Bill Clinton. He, too, weighed in last October, contending that a president has the power to order torture or waterboarding in a dire emergency. As Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz recounted in a New York Sun op-ed, upon being asked whether the president needs "the option of authorizing torture in an extreme case," President Clinton responded (italics are mine):[list]Look, if the president needed an option, there's all sorts of things they can do. Let's take the best case, OK. You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that's the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or water-boarding him or otherwise working him over. If they really believed that that scenario is likely to occur, let them come forward with an alternate proposal. We have a system of laws here where nobody should be above the law, and you don't need blanket advance approval for blanket torture. They can draw a statute much more narrowly, which would permit the president to make a finding in a case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.[/list]This, apparently, is the Democratic standard for clear, unequivocal opposition to torture … as long as you're a Democrat.

. . .

Diest TKO wrote:

Ticomaya wrote:

Diest TKO wrote:

So tico are you claiming that the distinction offered between "torture" and "enhanced interogation techniques" is valid? Sopprt that argument with some sort of fact please.

Sounds like a pink pistol to me. Cute, but ultimately it does the same thing.

T
K
O

Straw man.

Coward.

T
K
O

Punk.

Ticomaya wrote:

Diest TKO wrote:

Ticomaya wrote:

Diest TKO wrote:

So tico are you claiming that the distinction offered between "torture" and "enhanced interogation techniques" is valid? Sopprt that argument with some sort of fact please.

Sounds like a pink pistol to me. Cute, but ultimately it does the same thing.

T
K
O

Straw man.

Coward.

T
K
O

Punk.

I love The Clash, and I do listen to the Romones now and again when I get the urge.

There have been nightmare senarios posted by the terror camp of pro-torture. I just keep wondering:

"Is all fair in war?"

If waterboarding is justifiable simply because of its effective nature, then it's not unique. There exist many methods which simply provide results.

If waterboarding is justifiable simply because of "brief sensation," why the process repeated over and over? Getting stabbed with a needle is brief, getting stabbed with several takes a while.

If waterboarding is justifiable simply because of the of the absense specific language in the laws of our country or the world, prove that it does not qualify as torture under the specific language that does exist. There is not as much ambiguity about the definition as the neocons claim.

If waterboarding is justifiable simply because of semantics; because it is a "enhanced interogation technique," then why don't we use it on domestic crime elements?

If waterboarding is justifiable simply because of being in a "time of war," doesn't that require a measureable sucess of failure to define when that time ends? A "time of war" loses all meaning when it becomes the way we live.

"Is all fair in war?"

I don't believe so, and neither does history.

"By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity -- another man's I mean."
~Mark Twain

Throw away your pink pistol.
Kick the cowards off their towers.
Oy to the punks.