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Waterboarding. Is it really that bad?


sharkman

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Today Trump said what many have been thinking for years, that enhanced techniques actually may have value.  When the terrorist you're questioning knows the specifics of the next mass murder jetliner attack and thinks God wants him to kill them all, waterboarding this evil twisted freak until he gives it up is worth it. 

 

Warning, not for the squeamish.


 

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In an interview with ABC News, Trump said "people at the highest level of intelligence" have told him that torture does work, something military experts have refuted. He went on to say, however, that he will listen to what his Cabinet secretaries have to say about the issue.

"When ISIS is doing things that no one has ever heard of, since medieval times, would I feel strongly about waterboarding?" Trump said. "As far as I'm concerned, we have to fight fire with fire."

Trump's argument was that ISIS is beheading people and posting the videos online, but that the United States is "not allowed to do anything."


 

 

Edited by sharkman
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Just now, cybercoma said:

Torture is not effective for gathering intel and putting aside the harm it inflicts on the tortured, it also has "severe, long-term negative consequences on ... perpetrators and communities." The costs are grave, while the information gained from it is quite often faulty. If you care to be enlightened, here's an often cited bit of research on the matter. https://www.cgu.edu/pdffiles/sbos/costanzo_effects_of_interrogation.pdf 

I'd have to look at the way the research was gathered, the goals/mission statement, the persons involved, the reasons they decided to track certain data and not others.  Then find out why people at the highest level of intelligence say that it works.  Does it save lives? 

Is confined detention torture?  Is blowing up a building torture?  If you water board someone and it saves the building and the people in it, isn't that worth it?

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Remember when Sean Hannity said that waterboarding is no big deal, and he offered to get waterboarded for charity and donate the proceeds to injured soldiers? He still hasn't followed through.  Hopefully if Trump is reviving the waterboarding controversy, Trump's Media Buddy will follow through.  I'd certainly donate.

 -k

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Sure...   torture people....   but don't whine about your prisoners being tortured, because now it's perfectly acceptable.   There is no more high horse to stand on....  torture their prisoners?  Well, i guess it's OK to kill your families then...   

The west is better than that, for the most part....  except for America...  and right wingers on this forum...

Edited by The_Squid
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5 hours ago, The_Squid said:

Sure...   torture people....   but don't whine about your prisoners being tortured, because now it's perfectly acceptable.   There is no more high horse to stand on....  torture their prisoners?  Well, i guess it's OK to kill your families then...   

 

Prisoners are already being tortured..and worse.

 

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The west is better than that, for the most part....  except for America...  and right wingers on this forum...

 

...and Canada (Somalia Affair).

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Your link has the same quotes from Trump that mine does, I guess it was just the one interview.  

 

No one has refuted the scenario I outlined.  If a terrorist is detained, and he knows the particulars of an upcoming attack with a jetliner, the CIA or whomever is obligated to try and save the thousands of lives that are at stake.  Waterboarding?  Here's the bucket, have at it.

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Here is a great article chronicling the recent torture history, the lack of enforcement and the fact that torture doesn't produce the results that the right-wing torture fans like to think it does ("alternative facts" again).   

 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/state-sanctioned-torture-in-the-age-of-trump/5570897

 

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What does torture have in common with genocide, slavery and wars of aggression? They are all “jus cogens.” That’s Latin for “higher law” or “compelling law.” This means that under international law, no country can ever pass a law that allows torture. There can be no immunity from criminal liability for violation of a “jus cogens” prohibition.

The United States has always prohibited torture — in our Constitution, laws, executive orders, judicial decisions and treaties. When we ratify a treaty, it becomes part of US law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture,” the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which the US ratified, states unequivocally.

Torture is considered a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, also ratified by the United States. Geneva classifies grave breaches as war crimes.

The US War Crimes Act and 18 USC, sections 818 and 3231, punish torture, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and inhuman, humiliating or degrading treatment.

And the Torture Statute criminalizes the commission, attempt, or conspiracy to commit torture outside the United States.

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Experts agree that torture does not work to get reliable information. A 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College found that traditional, rapport-building interrogation techniques are extremely effective even with the most hardened detainees, but coercive tactics create resistance and resentment.

Interrogators concur that torture is not efficacious to glean intelligence. Glenn L. Carle, who supervised the 2002 interrogation of a high-level detainee for the CIA, told The New York Times that coercive techniques “didn’t provide useful, meaningful, trustworthy information.”

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In late 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a 499-page executive summary of its 6,700 page classified torture report, which says several detainees were waterboarded. One detainee in CIA custody was tortured on the waterboard 183 times; another was waterboarded 83 times.

The summary states that the CIA used “rectal feeding” without medical necessity on prisoners. A mixture of pureed hummus, pasta and sauce, nuts and raisins was forced into the rectum of one detainee. “Rectal rehydration” was also utilized to establish the interrogator’s “total control over the detainee.”

Other “enhanced interrogation techniques” documented in the summary included being slammed into walls, hung from the ceiling, kept in total darkness, deprived of sleep — sometimes with forced standing — for up to seven and one-half days, forced to stand on broken limbs for hours on end, threatened with mock execution, confined in a coffin-like box for 11 days, bathed in ice water, dressed in diapers. One detainee “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”

The summary contains example after example of why “the use of the CIA’s interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation.” It says: “Multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence… on critical intelligence issues including the terrorist threats which the CIA identified as its highest priorities.” Yet the CIA had continually lied that the techniques “saved lives.”

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Yet Obama has consistently refused to hold the officials who authorized torture during the Bush administration legally accountable, despite his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Gen. Barry McCaffrey noted, “We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA.” Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who directed the Abu Ghraib investigation, wrote, “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the [Bush] administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

The answer to Taguba’s question is a resounding “no.”

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Edited by The_Squid
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17 minutes ago, sharkman said:

Quoting biased sources that have political agendas really doesn't add to the discussion, but thanks for trying, Squid.

The author criticized Bush for torture and scathingly ripped Obama for not upholding his oath of office and the law.   I think this person is coming at it from a very balanced viewpoint arguing points of actual law.

You, on the other hand, have no references or evidence supporting your position...  it seems to be "screw the law...  screw results...  torturing Muslims who we think are terrorists feels good and I saw it work on the show 24."

 

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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.  ...

 

 

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" When the terrorist you're questioning knows the specifics of the next mass murder jetliner attack "

1. Will not work, because terror leaders have learned not to tell anyone but key people the details of the attacks.  For instance, many of the 9/11 bombers did not know where, what, how or exactly when they were going to do what they did, they were just told they were on a suicide mission and to do as they were told.  This also means that if they get caught, they can not rat out the rest of their team, they also do not even know the names of the people they are carrying out terror attacks with, some of the came from different nations.  Historically what has happened was terrorist A would tell his family he is going to bomb point d tomorrow, and then his wife, sister, sibling, uncle, aunt would go rat him out to police to tryto save his life.  Thus torture is not useful.

2.  Evidence shows that terrorist make up lies under torture to try to stop the torture.  What happens when police suspect their is a bomb in new york city, and the terror person caught is tortured and says it is in the brooklyn bridge or city hall, when it is actually on the subway?  You see in such a terror situation where attack is imminent, false information from a terror suspect could actually slow down police response time because they are all looking for a bomb in the wrong place!

3.  Like any program, this will get used against American civilians.

4.  Who gets to designated who is a terrorist in an imminent situation, what are the appeals procedures and safeguards?

5.  How far does this torture go, waterboarding, choking, slapping, electro shock to the genetials, toe nail pulling, chinese water torture, rape, sodomization with a stick?

6.  What about the international agreements signed against torture?

7. How would you even know if the suspected terrorist knows the specific of the next mass murder attack?  Such a scenario seems highly implausible. How could police know that the terrorist is about to attack or has knowledge of the terror attack but yet doesn't have the information to stop the terror attack?  And if they do have that information, then why do they need to torture?

 

The whole scenario is fantastical and so unlikely that it need not be considered seriously.

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