Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

It’s torture

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Josh Marshall makes a good point:

I’m genuinely surprised that he was was surprised that it was that bad. I’m not saying that for effect. Muller really seemed to think it was like getting dunked by your friend in a pool or something. Just factually, everyone who knows anything about this says that it’s horrific and you pretty much instantly feel like you’re drowning and at the edge of death. And it’s a physiological response. So even if you’ve gone through it ten times and know rationally that you don’t die, it doesn’t matter. You’re instantly put back into the mental space of drowning and being at the edge of death.

I must confess that when I see Hannity or the rest of these guys saying it’s no big deal and it’s not torture, I kind of figured they’re playing semantic games and essentially saying ‘I don’t care what we do to evil Muslim terrorist bad guys.’ Hang them from them toes, waterboard them, whatever, who cares? I don’t agree with that. It’s hideous. But I understand it. But here it turns out they’re just completely ignorant, just haven’t been paying attention. Just in the purest factual sense have no idea what they’re talking about.

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  1. On Fox:

       Greta: Is waterboarding torture or enhanced interrogation techniques, what words do we use on this?

       McCain: It’s torture. It’s in violation of the Geneva Conventions of the international agreement on torture treaty…signed during the Reagan administration. It goes all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition. It’s not a new technique and it is certainly torture.

  2. If you want an Islamic terrorist to be spared unendurable pain to allow an act of terrorism to occur and perhaps thousands of innocent Americans to be lost you just make damn sure that it is you and your family and everyone you love that are the first to go—-not nameless faces jumping off the seventyeth story of the World Trade Center.
    You put names, faces, birthdays, weddings, and births to the Americans that you would sacrifice.

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    p>You want Americans to be potentially sacrificed—then YOU step up to the plate and offer you and yours to be the sacrificial lambs.

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    p>Talk is real cheap when you aren’t he one on ground zero.

    • Had we bothered to listen to the intelligence we already had, we could have prevented the 911 tragedy. No torture was required.

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      p>When you advocate torture, you become your “enemy”.

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      p>The fact that civilized society does not torture is what makes us “civilized”. You advocate that we instead be barbarian.

      • Why allow an enemy to set the tone of battle?  If we are no better than the terrorists, why should we give ourselves the moral high ground?  Is the war on terror about who can use terror most effectively?  A large gang war?  What are we?

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        p>Oh! say, does that star spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?  — Francis Scott Key

    • We know where you stand on torture of Islamic terrorists. Do you also approve of torture for:

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      p>(1) Suspected members of the Mafia.

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      p>(2) Suspected members of drug cartels.

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      p>(3) Suspected members of street gangs.

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      p>(4) Convicted murderers (to get information leading to others’ arrests).

      <

      p>I’d also be interested to see if you’re in favor of activities like cutting the hands off thieves to ensure they don’t do it again, but we’ll start with the worst baddies above.

    • This is a fundamentally irresponsible argument because it ignores the fact that torture is not effective. It’s a lazy substitute for effective intelligence work that really might keep us safe. As has been said in a different context, 15 minutes on a waterboard and Dick Cheney will confess to being a front pager on DailyKos.

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      p>This is what someone who actually knows we he’s talking about has to say. Ali Soufan is an actual FBI interrogator who has conducted real interviews of high value targets. Here is his recent testimony to Congress:

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      p>

      From my experience, I strongly believe that it is a mistake to use what has become known as enhanced interrogation techniques, a position shared by professional operatives, including CIA officers who were present at the initial phases of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation. These techniques, from an operational perspective, are slow, ineffective, unreliable and harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaeda.

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      p>Torture is barbaric, sure, but the most compelling reason not to do it is that is weakens us by producing bad information.

      • Torture is very effective.  You just have to understand that its purpose — what it’s effective at — is the extraction not of reliable information but of false confessions.  And as KBusch noted here last month (and many others, like Atrios, Digby and JMM have written about) that’s exactly what it was used for in the runup to the invasion of Iraq.

    • …that police departments across the country have figured out how to extract information without resorting to these tactics?  How is it that some confessions do get thrown out because they were coerced in ways tamer than these, yet our judicial and law enforcement systems are very effective.  You are a sadist who glories in the suffering of others even as the tactics you suggest serve only to recruit more who would do us harm.

    • It’s always good to have solid evidence that despite the stereotype, many American conservatives are not Christians.

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      p>At least, I have to assume you don’t consider yourself a Christian.  It’s been a while since I went to Sunday School, but I don’t think wishing for someone’s family and loved ones to be horribly killed, just because that person disagrees with you politically, was what the whole “love your neighbor as yourself” thing was supposed to mean.

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      p>(On the other hand, I had been under the impression that Jesus would have been opposed to torturing people, too, so maybe I’ve just been misunderstanding the whole Christianity thing all along.)

    • Your concern has an implicit assumption.

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      p>”…to allow an act of terrorism to occur.”

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      p>This assumes that waterbording will somehow prevent acts of terrorism.  This is where you go off the rails.  

  3. This was on Larry King a few weeks back:

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    p>http://thinkprogress.org/2009/…

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    p>KING: What was it like?

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    p>VENTURA: It’s drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you – I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

  4. I would ask him (and others here) if they would like to endure any of the currenly “legal” or “sanctioned” interrogation techniques and decide whether they are torture. My guess is the vast majority of these techniques, including sleep depreivation, would be called torture by anyone who goes through it. If I had solatary confinement I would say it is torture. My question is not whether waterboarding is or isn’t torture. So again, other than changing Mancow’s mind, what does it prove to have someone go through it?

  5. Some of the sleep deprivation we’re hearing about goes far beyond giving detainees a nudge as they nod off. It appears as if much it involves putting them in stress positions. Being forced to stand for long periods can cause one’s ankles to swell twofold.

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    p>This sounds as if it crosses the line from interrogation to torture.

    • Honestly, it’s never been clear to me why we shouldn’t consider “mere” sleep deprivation to be torture, even without “stress positions” (which are themselves certainly torture).

      • It occurs to me that the reason there is still a debate is because these methods do not conjure mental images that the word torture does.  I confess that if I were doing word association and “torture” were mentioned, the images that come to my mind are things like the rack or thumbscrews, methods which obviously inflict extreme physical pain and possibly permanent corporeal damage.  Psycological and emotional damage are more difficult for the average person to observe and understand.  Pooring water on someone’s face may be extremely unpleasant, but not “painful” in the traditional sense.  I admit it was not until I learned more about exactly what it was that I concluded it is indeed torture.

        • That’s the whole point of antiseptic euphemisms like “waterboarding” and “stress positions” — they don’t immediately conjure up images of medieval brutality, so by using them you can try to weasel your way past the revulsion human beings with consciences would otherwise feel at what you’re doing.

    • He lumped sleep deprivation in with waterboarding back in 2006:

      Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) named three measures that he said would no longer be allowed under a provision barring techniques that cause serious mental or physical suffering by U.S. detainees: extreme sleep deprivation, forced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” which simulates drowning. He also said other “extreme measures” would be banned.

      But then, what does he know, eh?

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