A few hours ago, the heavily redacted 500 page executive summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, a.k.a. “The Torture Report”, came out.
Here are just a few things I’ve learned from it.
In November, 2002, a man named Gul Rahman, who was totally innocent of any crime so far as we can tell, was being systematically tortured by the CIA at a top secret site named COBALT in an unnamed foreign country. It was felt that he was being “uncooperative”, probably because it is hard to even convincingly lie about having information when you were arrested for no reason and have no basis on which to spin a story. To make him “more cooperative”, he was shackled naked in his unheated cell 36ºF cell. The next morning, his jailers found his body. He had died in the night of hypothermia.
This is just one of the literally hundreds of horrors to be found in the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s crimes against humanity. It is described on page 54 of a 500 page summary of a 6,000 page report we will never see.
Gul Rahman’s murderers will never be brought to justice. Indeed, the man responsible for this, known in the unredacted portion of the report only as “CIA OFFICER 1”, received a $2,500 spot bonus four months later for his “consistently superior work” [page 55 of the report.]
Page after page after page recounts things like this and far worse. You can go almost anywhere in it and find things that beggar the imagination. Picking at random, for example, page 50 informs us: “One senior interrogator told the CIA OIG that “literally, a detainee could go for days or weeks without anyone looking at him,” and that his team found one detainee who, “‘as far as we could determine,’ had been chained to the wall in a standing position for 17 days.””
Oh, and the full 6000 page report’s creation was hampered by systematic destruction of evidence by the CIA and by their deliberate attempts to infiltrate, disrupt and harm the investigation, almost the least of which were deliberate lies made to Senate investigators, the CIA’s Inspector General, and other authorities. Hell, they even hacked the committee’s computers to try to disrupt their work and spy on them. The Director of the CIA also lied repeatedly to Congress. (See the report.) Who knows what sort of things are recounted in the evidence that was destroyed or never seen?
Anyway, back to our modern oubliette. Gul Rahman was just one of many, another statistic, another “oops” in a series of “oopses”. A man chained to a wall standing up for 17 days? Also an “oops”. We’ve all become so hardened to this that it doesn’t even shock us or surprise us that the State tortured an innocent man and froze him to death and never even considered punishing anyone for it. It no longer shocks us that someone might be chained to a wall standing up for 17 days. It no longer shocks us that a CIA interrogator killed a man he was torturing but was none the less allowed to continue working. It doesn’t shock us that two psychologists with no real qualifications were paid $80m to consult on how to torture people more effectively, not that a lick of useful information appears to have been uncovered, and it doesn’t even shock us that the CIA systematically lied to make it seem like brutal torture was producing intelligence when it came up empty.
Oh, yes. That too. All this sadism, much of which was bizarre, vicious and extemporaneous, yielded nothing. Yes, I’m sure there will be counterclaims, as the CIA has been busy lying about that for years, but the report’s authors, who had all the right clearances, examined all the evidence in detail and found nothing of value was produced — absolutely nothing.
Anyway, this sort of outrage is now just part of the background we live under — pervasive digital espionage, censorship, “extraordinary rendition”, force-feedings at Guantanamo, and all the rest. It is routine, uninteresting, not worth your trouble. Move on. There’s nothing to see here. This is just the way the world is. Nothing will happen even if you get angry, so why waste your time?
O tempora, o mores.
And what, Mr George W. Bush, is there to stop one of your successors declaring you an ‘enemy combatant’ and putting you through some of these procedures?
“Extraordinary Rendition” began under Bill Clinton, not that it excuses ANYONE.
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/rendition701/updates/updates.html
Valerie: and it continues even now.
All this, and asset Forfeiture? You should have a revolution, and break away from Washington DeeCee! Let that city-state stew in its’ own juices, whilst the rest of you can have a federal government that moves from state to state, alphabetically,every year- a conference hall, not a permanent Capitol.
Just an idea…
I’m reserving judgment until I’ve heard what people like Stephen Hawking and Roger Waters have got to say about the matter.
Maybe Stephen hawking is an early victim of rendition! The CIA wanted to know how to make one of those black-hole thingies, and he wouldn’t/couldn’t tell them! His computer is controlled by the CIA, and only lets him ‘say’ what they permit him to say! All is explained….
Yeah Nicholas, the other day I was thinking the other day that we should really have a New York Tobacco Party throw a bunch of loosies into the harbor and start a revolution. But really, what are the chances that whatever government a revolution drawing on today’s intellectual and political climate wouldn’t be far, far worse?
It’s a depressing thought.
I haven’t read the report, but here are some plain facts: this report was produced entirely by the democratic staff of the committee, people who have a very specific political agenda on this topic. The committee did not interview a single one of the interrogators involved. And consider this paragraph from the response from Tenet et al.: “Astonishingly, the staff avoided interviewing any of us who had been involved in establishing or running the program, the first time a supposedly comprehensive Senate Select Committee on Intelligence study has been carried out in this way.”
What the CIA did was certainly horrible, it may even be indefensible even in the context in which it occurred, however it must be said that this report is utterly unreliable and biased in its very foundations. It is a political document not a serious report, it is a media circus not a search for a balanced judgement. For determining the truth it isn’t worth the paper it is written on.
According to Tenet’s response the report contains not one single recommendation. If that is true, can anyone think that it is an attempt to improve the US Intelligence Services? Or does that make it plan that it is simply a hatchet job conducted for political gain?
See the response here:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-interrogations-saved-lives-1418142644
That by no means justifies leaving an innocent man (or for that matter a guilty man) to freeze to death. However, a serious report would take this task seriously, try to understand what went wrong and make recommendations to correct the problems. The CIA needs that report. This is not it.
Fraser Orr writes: “I haven’t read the report, but here are some plain facts” — no, you don’t know the facts, as you have not read the report. The report is online and free for download, you have not the slighted excuse for not checking the content.
Do you wish to dispute the account of Gul Rahman’s death? If not, then please explain how it can possibly be excused. The medical examiner’s finding was unequivocal according to the document, and no one even disputed the facts to begin with.
If you have specific claims to make, make them.
By the way, let me be perfectly blunt: the CIA is documented to have lied on this topic over and over again. I see no reason to find anything they claim on this topic the least bit credible, full stop.
But Perry, you don’t understand: TEAM RED! TEAM BLUE!!!111!!!
No, I don’t understand that attitude either.
One can only imagine what would happen if one of the supporters of torture (er, “enhanced interrogation”) were less than forthcoming in answering questions in a debate, and the opponent enhanced the interrogation by punching them in the gut.
@Perry Metzger
> no, you don’t know the facts, as you have not read the report.
If you think that the fact that the report is generated in a deeply politicized way will not leave the report deeply flawed as a source of truth then I must respectfully disagree with you.
I don’t need to read a 500 page report on the role of black people in British society written by the BNP to know that it isn’t worth reading.
In fact you yourself apparently agree that the provenance of a document is crucial to its value since apparently you, with respect to the CIA you ” see no reason to find anything they claim on this topic the least bit credible, full stop.” Why do you find the odious American political establishment more credible?
Fraser: A report that says the CIA spent $80 million on advice from unqualified dudes and tortured innocent people to death doesn’t need recommendations. The recommendation of “Stop doing that, you idiots!” is inherent in the report. Sometimes, advice is superfluous, and would miss the point entirely.
@Alsadius
> A report that says the CIA spent $80 million on advice from unqualified dudes and tortured innocent people to death doesn’t need recommendations.
Of course it does. It needs recommendations to changes in the structure and culture of the organization that would allow something like that to happen. Any report of this nature, when it is serious, outlines a specific set of recommendations to change the way the organization to make the organization allergic to these outcomes. That is SOP. This report is designed to be a hatchet job. Not to say that the CIA didn’t sharpen the blade. Y’all seem to confuse the statement that the report is an unreliable piece of political theater with some sort of claim that the CIA is blameless. Which isn’t true at all.
tl;dr Yeah, the CIA is probably exceeding it’s warrant and has some sick fucks in it. Yeah, the Progressives are a bunch of sick fucks, and can’t be trusted either.
The problem is that the Democrats have lied *over and over again” about THEIR complicity in this, and the Republicans…Well, they aren’t so much lying about their complicity as suggesting “National Security” was at risk.
There’s really two different fights/problems here:
1) Did the CIA exceed the boundaries of the law here.
2) How much can we trust the people who wrote the document.
Much like the Republican’s && the Media’s (probable) whitewash of Benghazi (http://thefederalist.com/2014/11/24/20-ways-media-completely-misread-congress-weak-sauce-benghazi-report/ and less trusted: http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/12/01/10-major-takeaways-from-the-house-benghazi-report-that-the-media-is-completely-ignoring/) this is a document produced for political reasons.
The last 8 years of the 1990s the Democrats were *all about* the exercise of police and government power, from the Clipper Chip (I’ve always assumed you were the same Perry Metzger as on the Cypherpunks list, right?) to Waco & Ruby Ridge to Elián González and what we know now as “Extraordinary Rendition” the Democrats are *masters* at exercising political power and they LOVE to have the police execute their will. Not so good with Military power, but whatever.
But on the other side, Mr. Metzger is right–the CIA *clearly* could not handle the task it was handed and has some pretty sick fuckers working in it. Over my career I’ve worked with various folks from the DoD and the IC, and they were mostly *normal* people, which is to say they were generally nice (within the normal distribution), polite, of middle intelligence and ability (some more, some less, bell curve), but they, like *most* other people were tribal as fuck.
I’ve been “out in the world”, and frankly there’s a **LOT** of evil people out there on all sides. A significant portion of the reason that Iran and Iraq (and by extension the rest of the ME) is as completely fuxored as it is today is that that goofball Carter wouldn’t tolerate anything less than perfection from the (then) leaders of Iran, so he pulled all foreign aid, which “made” the Shah ramp up his internal police, which lead to bad things, which intensified the (soviet backed) revolution which lead to the further Islamization of Iran.
The CIA should be held to higher standards but there are, in any operation of any significant scale, a certain error percentage. Even really *good* network links drop a packet now and then, and the CIA certainly has to operate under less than ideal conditions, so while it indicates a need (to put it mildly) to tighten up protocols and work on methods to reduce error rates, given the state of the world today, and the state of the enemies of civilization (which, it should be point out, include many of the authors of the document under discussion), it’s falls into that “unfortunate, but I’m not going to get my dander up” category.
I’m sorry for Mr. Gul Rahman, and I’m sorry there is this big ass hole in the NYC skyline, and I’m sorry that the ME is such a festering shit hole (I spent a year in Iraq. Festering Shithole. I’ve got friends who’ve worked all over the ME, and with the exception of Israel, Festering Shithole). But the CIAs political masters told them to go forth and execute and they *DID*.
I’m not horribly opposed to making evil people suffer, but I insist that before they are made to suffer we’re *really* *really* sure that they’re evil. Additionally I’m ok with different rules and procedures when dealing with folks like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who get a little water on their face during questioning. And I absolutely *INSIST* that we be diligent and careful about it. Sloppiness like unintentionally leaving someone hanging on a wall for 17 days is inexcusable.
I’m also horribly opposed to letting the Socialist/Progressive party create a tool like the CIA, let it get out of control (Since the creation if the oversight committees the Ds have been in charge *at least* as much as the Rs, if not more. I count more, but without exact dates it’s hard to be sure) and then, as they usually do when they f*k up, blame the Conservatives.
So as far as 1 is concerned, yes they are probably guilty of both being sloppy *and* being evil, but we can’t know how much because as far as 2 is concerned, if the Progressives told me there was a snow storm in Alaska in December I’d double check.
But I also understand (and I’m not going to have the time to read the whole thing) that some of our allies get called out in this. That was dumb as fuck.
Something about this doesn’t pass the sniff test. Regular garden variety soldiers and criminals will often spill loads of useful information with little or no attempt make to get it out of them. People just can’t help but talk. And yet they are going to say they did not get a single piece of useful information even with every means of persuasion available to them?
Someone is not telling the truth, somewhere.
The CIA can be run by sadists AND the report can be hyped, partisan politics.
Rendition started under Clinton, waterboarding was approved by Pelosi and Feinstein, and rendition continues today.
They’re all implicated – and they’re all maneuvering.
Final thought: why is it apparently worse to waterboard one person in order to presumably save thousands, than to kill 170 children in drone strikes of tribal leaders in Pakistan?
And why is this worse, in turn, than banning GMOs that could save millions of kids from disease and starvation?
All actions have costs. And we’re lousy at assessing those costs.
Remarkable how many people here want to blame the messenger and argue partisan points. The Democrats are the dominant force in American political life, even if they are losing Congress. They are not going to go away soon, get used to them, and face up to it, I say.
The essential fact is that State murder and torture is alive and kicking in the USA. Either you support it or oppose it. If you support it, I shall not be sad if they were to get you next, and frankly you would not deserve not to face it. If there is a tiger in your house, you either destroy it, or get devoured, holding it by the ears is not a viable plan.
Let me at once admit that I have not read, nor am I likely to read this summary report into CIA misdeeds. Doubtless it is a grim tale, but I excuse myself because I have already learnt enough of mankind’s appalling tendency to abuse. However I do want to acknowledge this, there are those, including some in this country today who would kill me and those I care about without a thought for there cause. Quite how you deal with such people without occasionally exceeding rational boundaries of decency I do not really know. What does seems clear is that those perpetrating these deeds on behalf of the State gained much insight into the machinations of those whose intentions were sufficiently malign enough to hijack aircraft and fly them into a building full of thousands of people. This conclusion is not meant to excuse, only to understand some of the motivations that can drive even reasonable authority to what are offensive extremes. Of course there are those here who will feel offended, you might claim I am making excuses or even worse, supporting such acts. Let me remind then that the feeling of moral superiority and outrage, so much common fare in the west, survives because most of us enjoy comparatively safe lives, when you face quite different circumstances the impotence of moral sentiment in the face of unchecked violence becomes clear. This does change attitudes.
Obama is a sanctimoniuos idiot ,if he thinks terrorism can be beaten by handing them a propaganda victory , when will they understand that in order to defeat a fanatical and ruthless enemy it is necessary to be equally ruthless , and remove the rose tinted glasses .
Dick R: Bullshit.
If we stoop to the level of our enemies then we will have nothing left worth defending.
Torture is always wrong and to hell with crap about how nasty our foes are a more crap about “Mistakes were made”. If the CIA needs some report, be it the one they have or “the one they need” to tell them why torture is wrong they are already all scum who need to be executed. A few executions might set them straight.
Torture is an evil we in the West had left behind and anyone involved in bringing in back–let alone actively participating in it needs to be smashed.
Quoth “Mr. Black”: “Something about this doesn’t pass the sniff test. Regular garden variety soldiers and criminals will often spill loads of useful information with little or no attempt make to get it out of them. People just can’t help but talk. And yet they are going to say they did not get a single piece of useful information even with every means of persuasion available to them?
Someone is not telling the truth, somewhere”
Yes, and that someone is the C.I.A.
If you read the report, captured people frequently gave out useful information before they were tortured. The problem is that nothing additional of any use was produced by the beatings, half-drownings, “rectal feedings”, threats of anal rape with broom handles, chaining of detainees in various positions sometimes for weeks, etc. — to the extent that anything more was said, it was often fabricated and intended only to get the torture to stop.
The C.I.A., however, then systematically lied to Congress about the torture being effective. The dates, times and details of these lies are documented in detail in the report. The investigators had access to original records, including things like interrogation recordings, and were aware of the exact dates and conditions under which all information was revealed under interrogation, and the C.I.A. systematically fabricated claims to the effect that torture, rather than ordinary techniques, had produced information.
READ THE REPORT. You have absolutely no excuse, other than a bit of time, not to at least look at the highlights. If you don’t read it, you really have no right to a detailed opinion on it.
I call wishful thinking. And, isn’t execution something “we in the West” have also left behind?
Chip writes: “Final thought: why is it apparently worse to waterboard one person in order to presumably save thousands, than to kill 170 children in drone strikes of tribal leaders in Pakistan?”
Answer: Both are evil and unacceptable. Why does it have to be one or the other?
Barry Sheridan writes: “What does seems clear is that those perpetrating these deeds on behalf of the State gained much insight into the machinations of those whose intentions were sufficiently malign enough to hijack aircraft and fly them into a building full of thousands of people.”
No, I’m afraid that isn’t clear at all. The report concludes, unambiguously, that it wasn’t merely that little useful intelligence was gained, no useful intelligence was gained.
If you want to question that conclusion, read the report and tell me what’s wrong with the detailed tables containing examinations of each of the claimed instances of actionable intelligence being gained, which in each case the report reveals not to have been merely a mistake but an obvious fabrication.
Competent propagandists don’t tell you what to think.
They tell you what they think will get you to think the way they want you to think.
I can’t help thinking that this is the sort of thing the Soviets used to do, in fact they were very good at it. Wasn’t that why we were at war with them, albeit a Cold War for 50-years?
So now the enemy of old is gone, we just become exactly like them because we’re still “The Good Guys”?
How does that work?
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t kill the soldiers of ISIS on the battlefield, we certainly should. I’m not saying we shouldn’t kill the children of some ISIS general if we can bomb his house and kill him as well. It is unfortunate, but this is war and in war the women and children of our enemies get caught up in the crossfire. That is life during war and we were no different when it was London or Berlin being bombed.
But time and again it has been shown that the vast majority of information obtained through torture is either lies (literally them telling us whatever it is they think the torturer wishes to hear) or useless.
Last time I looked the CIA was meant to be an intelligence agency, not a torture one.
If the West commits the same outrages as those we are fighting, how can we claim any sort of moral ascendancy, how can we even claim to be civilised if we allow these things to happen.
In dropping to their level of horror, we are become like them, in which case the barbarians have already won.
This would be the “Senate report” that was written for Senate Democrats by the ACLU, an organisation dedicated to the destruction of the United States since the 1920s when it was created by pro Soviet Union collectivists, who decided to falsely “wrap ourselves in the flag” (I quote from a letter that the founder wrote) and pretend to love a country they planned to destroy.
As for the present report how many CIA officers were interviewed by the Senate to make this report?
I believe the correct answer is “none at all”.
No doubt the man in Kent will be gloating over this piece of anti American propaganda and disinformation – but I did not expect to see it being pushed here.
As for torture – the present policy seems to be back to President Clinton era policy.
Hand over the suspect to a third party (for example Egypt) where they can be questioned with no limits at all (forget water boarding – we are back to testicle frying and so on).
Although Mr Obama has a kink of his own – killing Islamists who should really be taken alive. Mr Obama has basically “blinded” American intelligence (which is why ISIS was so successful) because he insists on killing people before they have had information extracted from them. Actually I am not sure they should be killed even after the information extraction process has been completed, as long as they are in state to be a threat ever again, – but more on that later.
He does this because he is against “torture”, or, rather, wants to pose as being “against torture”. If one is not going to extract information from Islamists, either one’s self or via a third party, there is indeed no point in taking them alive. [Perry M. seems to believe the propaganda point that no useful information was extracted – the report is, of course, lying].
So we get drones, drones, and more drones.
Full disclosure – back in the day captured KGB officers were sometimes tortured. Both for information and for other reasons.
For example after it was finally worked out that every MI6 agent sent to the Baltic States had been betrayed, a 100% casualty rate, – the double agent responsible for some of the betrayals was invited to London (supposedly for debriefing) and then tortured till he went insane – then sent back (alive – great care was taken that he would not die) as a message that we were not quite so soft as the KGB assumed.
Islamists do not care about dying – indeed they welcome it.
Perhaps (perhaps) it should be made clear that dying is not the only thing that can happen to them.
On the John McCain tap dance of some years ago (even he may have dropped it now) “if we torture them, they will torture us”.
They will torture us anyway (regardless of what we do) – because they understand that war is not a game.
And this is a war “to the knife”.
By the way I write the above in the full knowledge that Perry M., and so on, will not believe a word for of it – and will continue to cling to the idea that no useful information is gained by force (and on and on).
I doubt there were be any real change of policy till something big happens – for example a nuclear explosion in New York harbour.
Then, and only then, only then will it be remembered that Islamists are not captured in military uniforms and are not subject to the protections of the Geneva Convention.
Till then the blindness of the intelligence agencies (denied vital information) will continue.
In response Paul Marks above and in clarification of my earlier comment.
I absolutely believe that capture enemies should be interrogated and we should not pussy foot around on this. Meaningful interrogation requires patience and if that takes months then fine.
There is however, a line to be drawn between interrogation and torture and I believe that in crossing that line we lose the distinction between us (the good guys) and the enemy.
I have not based my opinions on the effectiveness of torture on this latest report, but on previously declassified information from the UK MOD and British experiences in India, Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus.
I hope that the CIA will relearn the lessons of the past and return to effective means of defeating our enemies rather than just becoming mirror images of them.
None of that amounts to a refutation of the report’s allegations. Indeed, it may be regarded as an implicit acceptance of the allegations, as the response is merely an ad hominem attack. If you can’t dispute the facts, attack the news bearer. If Stalin tells me truthfully that Truman is permitting torture, that does not torture justifiable make.
There is no addressing the point that Gul Rahman was murdered in custody, and that his wholly avoidable death was a crime and there was no reason for him to be tortured or killed in the first place. If he was innocent, how would he stop his torture? By inventing allegations? I recall the Georgian priest interrogated by the NKVD for names of his co-conspirators in an invented anti-Soviet plot, he named every member of his congregation that he had buried in the last 3 years.
Paul Marks, “ Islamists are not captured in military uniforms and are not subject to the protections of the Geneva Convention.”
The question is not whether they are subject to the protections of the Geneva Convention, but whether they are subject to the protections of the law.
And equally whether their interrogators are subject to the law – “the law” in this case being the laws of the United States, which are descended from the laws of England. As Sir Edward Coke said, “there is no law to warrant tortures in this land”.
I find myself unable to believe that no useful information is ever obtained by torture. Agents of the good side in many past wars were told how long they would be expected to hold out against torture – why bother doing that if information so gained were useless to the torturers? “Ticking bomb” and less time-urgent but equally drastic situations where torture would save lives do occur in real life.
… Sometimes. Much more often, torture simply returns us to the routine barbarism from which such fragile constructs as the rule of law have briefly and locally raised humanity.
So I propose the following – not as an innovation but as a reassertion of what should always have been the case – that anyone who carries out torture is subject to the same law as anyone else. No special status for servants of the state. A CIA or MI6 agent is tried the same way as a gangland boss who uses torture to keep his informers in line. If the torturer can show that innocent lives were at stake, then he can ask the jury to nullify as juries have the right to do. Or if the jury refuse, he can go to prison proudly.
Paul Marks writes: “This would be the “Senate report” that was written for Senate Democrats by the ACLU, an organisation dedicated to the destruction of the United States since the 1920s…”
That’s pure ad hominem, as Mr. Ed said above.
I would like to hear your specific explanation, Mr. Marks, for how it is that you justify blending someone’s lunch and shoving it into their rectum, or how you justify chaining a person to a wall for 17 days, or how you justify torturing an innocent mentally retarded man who you know to be innocent to get his relatives to crack, or how you justify chaining a naked man in a 2ºC cell until he dies, or any of the other things the report extracted FROM THE CIA’S OWN FILES. Remember, the allegations here aren’t based on witness accounts or interviewing the tortured or any other such things, they come from the CIA’s documents — the ones they didn’t manage to destroy, that is.
Many commenters above seem to want to get away from the raw revulsion most people feel when we discuss beating people up, holding their heads underwater until they nearly drown, holding them in a coffin sized box for eleven days, depriving people of food for days, forcibly keeping people awake for over seven days, and the other sorts of things that the CIA’s own records claim happened under their gentle care. They don’t want to mention these events, perhaps because when you confront the situation head on by describing them it rapidly becomes obvious that we’re talking about arbitrary sadism and not “enhanced interrogation techniques” or any similar Orwellian obfuscation. It becomes clear, when you bluntly discuss the fact that some of the prisoners suffered what is blandly described as “rectal damage” that we’re not discussing actions that any civilized human being would undertake.
Mr. Marks, what exactly would it take to convince you these events actually happened? If the answer is “there is no evidence that would convince you”, perhaps you have a religious conviction, not a rationally arrived at position.
If you feel all this was justified, I am curious, Mr. Marks, as to whether you, too, would happily have chained an innocent man naked in his cell to die.
By the way, the report was not “written by the ACLU”, as no one at the ACLU has a security clearance — not that this matters. Again, it was written by Senate staff and based on the CIA’s own documentation.
I am also curious, Mr. Marks, whether you feel that such behavior convinces people in countries like Yemen or Afghanistan that the US and UK governments are the good guys, or whether, perhaps, people might get the impression that they are, for want of a better term, evil.
If torture worked, it would still be a recognised legal technique – after all, interogation is still allowed, and that is traumatic, so the fact another traumatic form of information gathering is banned is not because it hurts people, but because it hurts people for no purpose. All of this is well known in intelligence, law-enforcement and more widely. So how comes the CIA managed to ignore this and go with the idea that they should be allowed to break the law for information that they must have known was unreliable at best? What mindset caused this to be acceptable? The only answer I can see is that the defence of the state (the CIA works for the United States of America) clearly justified this in their eyes – which is to say they are doing this for the state. You may be a proud American, but if your definition of proud American involves supporting torture, you are a failure of a human being, as you accept the state can do as it wishes so long as you don’t mind. If you are a proud American because your country has faced up to the issue and made in public – congratulations, that’s what the CIA is meant to be fighting to protect surely.
If it has taken Democrats to stand up and say this is unacceptable, congratulations to them. It turns out they have some good ideas (gosh, shocking – a group of people are not entirely evil just because they have different views to most of us on some things…). Unless there is an actual error in the report, attacking the authors just because you believe some consipiracy theory about them, or because they are a different party, is simply ad hominem nonsense, of the sort that if those seem people used towards us we would regard as malign influence. Democrats can report truth (as can anyone – unless someone starts something with ‘the Bible/Qua’ran says..’ (or mentions Alex Smith or Michael Mann as an authority, without a link, as I suspect that is religious belief as well) it is probably worth finding something to disagree with before disagreeing with it). Republicans can be lying, murdering bastards, corrupted by the state to do evil things. If you truly believe in freedom, then don’t play the game of aligning with parties (which by their nature are collectivist institutions) but address the facts and support those who represent you best in each case.
Natalie Solent writes: “I find myself unable to believe that no useful information is ever obtained by torture.”
The operative term here may be “ever”. “Ever” is a long time. I will only note, however, that the Senate report’s summary, which you are free to download, carefully goes through every case in which the CIA claimed that torture produced useful information in the current instance. In each of those cases, the information either was divulged before torture began, or came from an entirely different source.
I was also surprised. I would have expected that at some point there would have been at least some instance in the current carnival of sadism where something was achieved.
Apparently not, however.
Again, this doesn’t mean that it is never the case that some information might be gained this way, but that must be balanced against all the false information people will make up just to get the pain to stop, the innocents harmed, and frankly the repugnant descent into barbarism that even attempting this implies, against whatever rare nugget might (in theory) appear (presuming it were even recognized to be one).
This is why the CIA’s own internal conclusion for decades was that torture was a worse than useless interrogation technique.
Meanwhile in Brasil, a country in which a military regime practised torture, they are finally looking into the allegations with around 100 individuals in the frame:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-30410741
Well I started reading the report but soon gave up and flip read the rest after it opened with such obvious slights of hand as “there were 39 detainees who were aggressively interrogate and 7 produced no useful info”…which mean that 32 did produce useful information.
Nothing more than hack work.
This report is a purely partisan cover your ass piece of garbage. For those you who dont know how these reports work it is simply this..the whole report in a nutshell is – While the Reps controlled the Senate just terrible things happened and the moment we, the Dems, got control we did some handwaving and the CIA “lied” to us.
The fact that the minority Dems on the committee knew exactly what was going on from the very beginning is totally ignored. Or the fact that after 2009 little or no useful intelligence was collected because instead of theses people of interest being captured and interrogated they are now simply blow up (murdered) by drones alone with by this stage thousands of civilians as collateral damage.
So I’m suppose to get upset that the “torture” cataloged by the report done with a very specific goals and with strong oversight is somehow bad but simply blowing up suspects and anyone who happens to be around them, including women and children, is somehow an improvement.
So I’d put this “Report” up there with the Church Commission Report. The one that created the intelligence failure that allowed 9/11 to happen.
But hey, affluent Dem voters need their regular dose of sanctimonious outrage to feel good. Which this report delivers. Another “outrage” to feed the narrative. And when the next mass atrocity happens due to intelligence not being acted on because of the fall out from this report, it was the other sides fault.
It’s simply not true that torture isn’t an effective way to get information. If you are caught and tortured you will end up telling them what they want to know. Yes, you may also tell them something you think will get the torture to stop but, in that way, interrogation that involves torture is no different from interrogation that does not. Interrogation doesn’t happen in isolation, and there are plenty of established techniques for extracting the signal from the noise. The “torture doesn’t work” meme is just plain wrong, unfortunately.
But, as Mr Ecks alluded to, if we accept torture as a policy we begin to lose the very thing we ought to be defending, which is our humanity and our liberty. I’m not naive about this, I believe it’s possible to construct a hypothetical situation in which torture would be morally justified. (E.g., the classic “madman with a nuclear bomb” scenario.) But that hypothetical situation has not yet arisen in real life, and torture should not be condoned as a policy on the off chance that it might. Torture should not be accepted as policy, period, thereby ensuring that it will only be used in a situation where the interrogators are convinced it’s worth being personally prosecuted.
That’s why it’s so damning (if true) that the report contains no recommendations. Beyond the obvious moral questions, this is an institutional problem that requires institutional solutions. Few if any of these incidents would have happened if the interrogators believed they would be personally held accountable so, if the report is to have any credibility (among more than just the credulous) it needs to recommend institutional steps to ensure that is what interrogators believe. Anything less is just making political hay. However, self-interested partisans will occasionally utter the truth, if by no mechanism other than the million monkeys effect, so it’s important not to get too hung up about the messenger.
Tedd writes: “It’s simply not true that torture isn’t an effective way to get information” — on what basis do you say this, when the CIA’s own internal reports for decades said otherwise, when the report in question says no useful information was recovered, and when there is simply nothing in the literature that supports your assertion?
Yes, certainly, people will start doing anything they possibly can to end the pain and suffering if you start systematically subjecting them to near drowning, shoving broom handles in their asses and shackle them standing up for weeks, but that is distinct from saying they’ll give you reliable, useful information. What you’ll get them to do, according to all the studies that have been done, is tell you what they think you want to hear. They’ll make up things if they have nothing else to tell you to get you to stop.
“That’s why it’s so damning (if true) that the report contains no recommendations” — what possible excuse do you have for not reading for yourself? Is clicking the link at the top that great a barrier? And no, it isn’t true, but you can find that out for yourself.
“jmc” writes: “Well I started reading the report but soon gave up and flip read the rest after it opened with such obvious slights of hand as “there were 39 detainees who were aggressively interrogate and 7 produced no useful info”…which mean that 32 did produce useful information.” — I found no such claim, and that directly contradicts all the summaries in the document. Page number, please.
Perry Metzger
> I was also surprised. I would have expected that at some point there would have been at least some instance in the current carnival of sadism where something was achieved.
You’d be right to be It is a ridiculous claim. This surprise might even lead you to question whether it is true. Tenet, in the link I posted before, goes through some of the various places that water boarding did lead to information that was extremely important to prevent many bad things, or so he claims anyway. So you have two partisan reports with diametrically opposite conclusions on the same events. It seems entirely unreasonable to revile one entirely and swallow the other hook line and sinker.
This senate report was based on six million pages of evidence, filtered down to a six thousand page report, further filtered down to a 500 page public report. If you think there is no opportunity to deeply distort the results in there, I would again, respectfully disagree.
Perry, I can see you are genuinely incensed by this business, a laudable attitude for what is sordid. This however ought not to blind you to the fact that the reports authors will have taken a large step into the unknown in deciding that no useful intelligence was ever gleaned by the use of persuasive methods we find abhorrent. I feel it true in general that getting useful information out of someone who does not want to give it is best achieved by skilful patient questioning. The breaking down of someone over time, if time there be to make use of. In spite of this approach there are always those resistant to such techniques, at least initially, this might then tempt interrogators to utilise less pleasant methods if the circumstances cry out for quicker results. The products of this ugliness may well have had little to deliver in the positive sense, I reckon for example, that I would say anything if being tortured, which would make any so called intelligence suspect, although you cannot say that for sure when the unendurable prompts revelations that can be combined with information all ready to hand from other sources.
Irrespective of the belief that the use of torture is criminal Perry, as I feel it is, western societies must face up the fact that its way of life is under threat from those unwilling to live up to the responsibilities demanded of its citizens. This means some who live in America, Europe and elsewhere. People who want the material benefits and privileged protections while actively working to corrupt the foundations of its laws and social mores. This low level war, and war it is, must be fought off, this will require some unpleasant actions from time to time, though hopefully not this sort of thing. As it stands most are comfortable when this takes place far from home and without our knowledge, we are inclined to be less forgiving when it strikes as it did on 911, an action incidentally celebrated across the Middle East.
You urged me to read the report and get back to you. As I advanced right away there is no willingness to do so. There is nothing I can get from reading more about man’s inhumanity to man. I am getting older, I have had plenty of chances to observe how ghastly men and women can be. I have made use of it and no longer wish to add to that reservoir of understanding. Take it steady!
Fraser Orr writes: “Tenet, in the link I posted before, goes through some of the various places that water boarding did lead to information that was extremely important to prevent many bad things, or so he claims anyway” — the Senate report discusses, in great detail, each claim made of waterboarding yielding information. In each case, it shows that, based on the CIA’s own internal documents, the claims were fabricated. This is not based on witness recollections, it is based on the CIA’s own records. It is simply a matter of record.
We are well aware in recent years of the DCIA and DNSA lying before congress, for example in testimony about electronic surveillance programs. There is little or no reason to believe their accounts, and every reason to believe that the internal documents taken against the CIA’s will — the very same ones the DCIA claimed to be relying on in his testimony — were accurate. Do you have concrete evidence to offer against this?
Most to the point, there are pages of timelines in the Senate report. Can you tell me one instance where you believe a claim is not credible?
Barry Sheridan writes: “Perry, I can see you are genuinely incensed by this business, a laudable attitude for what is sordid. This however ought not to blind you to the fact that the reports authors will have taken a large step into the unknown in deciding that no useful intelligence was ever gleaned by the use of persuasive methods we find abhorrent” — how do you know? You have explicitly refused to read the actual document. You therefore have no basis for this opinion whatsoever. I don’t understand how you therefore profess not merely an opinion but a strong one about the plausibility of the contents.
By the way, let me reiterate: the reason I encourage all to look at the report for themselves is so that you do not have to take my word or the word of any politically motivated actor for what the contents of the document are. You can look at it for yourself, decide whether you find it credible for yourself. That goes especially to the extensive documentation of CIA lies to Congress about the effectiveness of the tortures they subjected people to.
@Perry Metzger
“For example, according to CIA records, seven of the 39 CIA detainees known to have been
subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques produced no intelligence while in CIA
custody.*
Page 2 Report – second paragraph, section #1, Page 9 of the 525 page PDF doc..
As I said the full report is a partisan hack job and the “summary” which the news media is reporting are pure Dem Party talking points…
The evidence in the full report does not support the shrill outrage of the media reporting.
To me torture is what the IRA does while “interrogating” people. You should read some of the details of the fifty odd people they tortured to death. They could teach ISIS a thing of two.
jmc: Indeed, that sentence is there, and you have indeed completely inaccurately represented what it means.
You claim it means that the others therefore produced useful intelligence, which it clearly does not — it means that for the seven cases where they could check out of these 39 instances, no intelligence was produced, not that intelligence was produced in the other instances or in any of the other 100+ individuals who were tortured.
I cannot see how anyone could fail to understand this from context if they had actually bothered to read the thing.
I encourage all to read the report itself and to see how utterly inaccurate “jmc”‘s characterization of this particular sentence is.
Perry, Your getting carried away by according as Gospel a few hundred page summary of thousands and thousands of pages of information collated and filtered by a political elite short on credibility. Your being naïve! Do you seriously think the people who run government are so stupid as to destroy one of the organisations that serves to protect them. They might disregard you and me, but when it comes to them it is their safety that comes first, so they will release what serves. But serves whom is the question?
@Perry Metzger
> In each case, it shows that, based on the CIA’s own internal documents, the claims were fabricated. This is not based on witness recollections, it is based on the CIA’s own records. It is simply a matter of record.
That is almost true, but not quite. What is true is that the report contains less than one tenth of one percent of the documents filtered through a highly partisan filter. So it is not a matter of record, it is a matter of carefully selected, politically filtered record, which is not the same thing at all.
@Perry Metzger
I know teaching standards in the US are not the same as the UK when it comes to parsing / comprehension of sentences written in the English language, and after thirty years in the US I am very familiar with the often mangled sentences of American English produced by Ivy League types (who write these reports) but my reading of that particular sentence is that 39 people were interrogated and 7 failed to produce any actionable intelligence.
Any possible ambiguity of meaning is purely in the eye of the beholder. Looks pretty straight forward to me giving the tone and style of the rest of the document. Pretty standard style in my experience.
I am outraged by this. Perry is 100% right. If we descend to the level of ISIS/AQ et al then we have not even let the barbarians into the camp. We have become the barbarians. I am disgusted. I am disgusted both by the torture and the attempt at covering it. We are better than this. If we are not we don’t deserve to win.
Terrbile things have to be done in war but there are limits and these were transgressed.
@NickM
> If we descend to the level of ISIS/AQ et al then we have not even let the barbarians into the camp. We have become the barbarians.
I respect your outrage Nick, but saying things like this doesn’t help at all. Even if you take at face value all the accusations against the CIA, and I do not, then we are still nothing even vaguely approaching the all out evil of ISIS. The very fact we are having this discussion indicates that that is true.
The CIA program was specifically purposed with getting information on future massacres. Perhaps you think that that was too high a price to pay. I respect your views on this matter, I am sure that they went too far. However ISIS commit genocide, killing whole villages just because they don’t accept the same religion. Cutting babies in half in front of their mothers, raping schools full of prepubescent girls, hanging and maiming people for the most trivial of religious transgressions.
Call the CIA evil if you like, but there are different degrees of evil, and in face of such an enemy we have to walk right up to the line, and surely we step across occasionally. We can argue about where the line should be, it is why the word “torture” is being tortured, parsed to the minutest degree to determine what we will and will not do. But don’t think for a minute that there are not degrees of evil, and the CIA are pikers at evil compared the ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Fraser Orr: May I ask a question: Would you be content to be detained and tortured by the CIA or others and to have no means to seek any judicial relief or redress against your torturers?
After all, what if the torturers mistakenly but genuinely believe that you have information?
I wish technology and drugs had improved sufficiently to draw out the truth from such enemy personnel without resorting to torture, which is indeed crude and often useless (well, 7 out of 46 times).
Mr. Ed: Fraser Orr, Barry Sheridan and “jmc” all claim to be in possession of special information on this matter, and in some cases, in possession of this information even without having read the report in question. The source of their information is mysterious, and could indicate a high level leak at the CIA, which might, might, endanger us all. We can’t really prove otherwise, after all. Can any of these gentlemen absolutely prove to us right now that they are not a danger to our society? No, they cannot.
Clearly, there is only one way for us to learn the actual truth, and that is to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” on them until they reveal their source of information. Sure, they may make claims without such techniques about where they’ve learned it, but how can we know for sure they’re being cooperative without getting them out to COBALT and checking?
I understand it might be a bit of a sacrifice, and there is the possibility that they are innocent, and even that they might die during “enhanced interrogation”, but the good of society is at stake, and besides, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. There’s a war on, you know.
Perry, You sugggest:
I’ve just read all the comments and you seem to be reading a lot into what they’ve said at a level that isn’t really suggested by them.
They appear to be reasonably suggesting that the report cannot be treated as a normal report because its production is inherently flawed.
If the report is designed to deliberately mislead then reading such a report would not make the reader aware of how flawed the report was. Therefore to call them out for not reading it without finding out whether the production of the report is flawed is a major error on anyone’s part.
The report’s “raison d’etre” needs to be examined before any validity to anything in the report can be determined. Reading it does not validate it one way or another.
OK, so we now know what doesn’t work. So, what does work? How should the state respond to Islamism?
Extra “gee” included for free 🙂
Patrick, if the report is designed to mislead then we cannot know anything from the report – neither whether anything works nor whether it doesn’t. This makes the report dangerous to take at face value, any action taken based on a report that’s maliciously designed would be naive at best and horrific at worst.
This report is really a bit of a nightmare for anyone interested in actual truth as until such time as appropriate confirmation or dismissal of the data in the report is obtained the report will only be used as a political club to hammer political nails in.
Without further reports apropos to this one – we accept any information from this report as truthful at our peril.
“Hmm” writes: “They appear to be reasonably suggesting that the report cannot be treated as a normal report because its production is inherently flawed.”
There is no evidence of any flaws in the production. What we have are a bunch of self-interested people who committed crimes against humanity that would have gotten them hung at Nuremberg spinning for dear life, and we have a bunch of people who indeed believe their lies if only they are made large enough, just as Josef Goebbels informed us would work.
When you can show me one fact in the report that you feel you can reasonable dispute based on documented evidence, let me know.
The report is, after all, available on a link you can click at the top of this post. You are in a perfect position to go over the content and explain exactly what you think is flawed.
It is possible, of course, that you feel that the spin of the report was all wrong, and that there’s nothing wrong with chaining an innocent man naked in a cell near the freezing point of water until he dies. Please let us know if that’s the case as well.
Well Islamism isn’t the problem, people are. Either people motivated by Islamism or State employees/ managers with an urge to subsidise vile conduct and proscribe means of self-defence or even adverse comment.
But that’s the thing Perry, how can we even be sure there was a naked man in a cell for 17 days?
We can’t be sure of any single thing about this report because of who created the report, how they went about creating the report, and what they were intending the report to accomplish.
Not one iota of this report can be considered truthful until there is verification in some respect from an alternative source.
It’s a complete bitch because useful information on this would tell us what where interrogation can be improved and where it is failing. Because it is conceived and created by parties with an agenda this report actually buggers that process up!
@Perry Metzger
> When you can show me one fact in the report that you feel you can reasonable dispute based on documented evidence, let me know.
I already posted a link in which the contents of the report are disputed at length. It is written by people who have vastly more familiarity with both the report and the classified data underlying the report, and so are better informed than either you or I could possibly be.
If your response is “the writers of that response are unreliable, biased reporters”, I would agree, but that really is rather the whole point, isn’t it?
FWIW: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/12/09/torture-cia-senate-intelligence-report-911-column/20088647/
I should mention that the author is not only a Democrat and a former Senator, but won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam.
Thank you Paul Marks for some actual reason rather than hysteria.
People who think “being told you’re going to be killed” is somehow torture should be ignored; you’ve reached lala land at that point. (i.e. one of the only reasonable interrogation methods we have left after taking out torture and “torture”) and are not a creature of reason.
I’m fine with non-torture (such as water boarding or imprisonment); torture seems morally wrong and counter productive, though it would be justice. A HOST of so called innocent terrorists are not actually innocent but released due to lack of evidence, if you understand the context you know that isn’t a “eh so he was innocent then, blah blah did you even write that!?” statement, it merely means people who the military etc know are guilty would not be found guilty in a court of [civilian] law (which has nothing to do with their innocence or guilt). The business of war is a world apart from the civilian spaces. You either appreciate this or delude yourself in thinking war gives you perfect Sherlock like conditions. Then again, we know perfectly well who is in charge of organised crime etc but have no evidence to convict them. Bingo.
That being said the CIA do not seem consistently competent and it is certainly possible that those “innocents” killed by the CIA were indeed innocent, which is a serious problem, a serious accident. In addition, some the more dubious techniques are only successful under certain conditions and one may find it dubious that the CIA are competent enough to know when it is appropriate. Sometimes you have a terrorist and there are no options, you’ll get no intel out of him, nothing will give you guaranteed results so you have to bite the bullet and imprison him (while actively attempting to deprogram him from his faith, which the CIA et al don’t bother to do for reasons I have no fraking idea). Sometimes the only win is you’ve got put the terrorist in jail (though then, it would have been better to have killed him in battle).
None the less the methodology of the report leaves a LOT to be desired, much like a UN global warming report. If the methodology is poisoned then what real value has any of the content? It’s essentially random words and best, at worse outright deception. The truth value is impossible to determine (in the positive, that is).
Perry, if sarcasm acts as a salve to your outrage so beit. However I cannot identify any real claim of special insight along the lines you suggest. What has been offered is the thought that this report is not necessarily unimpeachable. Documentation offered by governments rarely is. Your contentions are based on the belief that in fact the whole thing as written is beyond reproach. On what evidence? Because you say so. Have you then examined every supporting document. No you have not. They are not available and even if they were how do any of us know what the real truth is in every case. Broadly speaking we are all on the same side Perry, it is just that some us recognise that doubt exists. It always exist in such cases. Look at the assassination of JFK. Endless investigations and books have probed this event. Many offer different conclusions. That’s the way it is all the time. Your not a fool, you know it as well. You can have the last word. Do not waste by some crass comment. Everyone who comments here deserves better, even an older guy like me.
@Mr Ed
> Would you be content to be detained and tortured by the CIA… After all, what if the torturers mistakenly but genuinely believe that you have information?
No I would not. Neither would I be content to be subject to any form of injustice. But shit happens, especially in the chaos of war, and especially in the chaos of this kind of war. And that is why we need honest, non partisan reporting on this things, so that in the cool and calm environment of reflection, we can put systems in place to prevent abuse. It is a damn shame we didn’t get that. Turning such an important matter into the plaything of odious politicians is that absolute last thing we need in response to these events.
@PfP, I wish I was as articulate as Kerrey in the link you mentioned because he captured very well my reaction to the report.
Patrick Crozier: “How should the state respond to Islamism?”
Suggestion 1: How about using due process against people who are accused of crimes? The problem is not “Islamism” per se, it is criminal acts.
Suggestion 2: How about not stoking it up. As Ron Paul pointed out over seven years ago, there is such a thing as blowback.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD7dnFDdwu0
When I lived in the Middle East 40 years ago, Islamism was not much more powerful a political force in the Arab world than libertarianism is today in Glasgow. Suicide attacks by Middle Eastern Muslims were very rare. Terrorist attacks by Middle Easterners against western targets were not unknown, but the perpetrators were not motivated by Islam; they were motivated by Arab nationalism.
Anti-Americanism in the Arab world in those days was not very different in motivation from Anti-Americanism in Latin America. It was motivated by nationalists fed up with American interventionist foreign policy. And you know something? It still is. Underneath all this stuff about Islam, the motivation for terrorism today is really the foreign policy of America and her allies.
Without decades of western intervention in the Middle East, it is highly unlikely that ISIS et al would exist today. And the invasion of Iraq, drone attacks, and torture, are all just stoking up the resentment.
Perry, you’re wrong.
Five times in your original post, you say that these things don’t shock us.
Well, they shock me. I don’t know why, but I still retain the capacity to be shocked by such things being done by employees of the US Federal government.
This ‘report’ is meant to give Obama political cover and Islamist enemies of America aid and comfort, nothing more than that. Absolutely no reason to release it, except when you consider how Democrats feel about the US. Meanwhile, of course, Obama is releasing the worst of the worst from Gitmo, caring more about a pr win than the likelihood that they return to a battlefield to kill Americans. Absolutely absurd.
we have no problem with killing terrorists, but pouring water on their faces? ZOMG111 TORTURE!!!.
Way back when, supposedly only three al-qaeda bosses were to be waterboarded, and that was as far as it (torture) was supposed to go. If that had been all I would have been OK with it. The rendition and secret jails business predates 9/11 and should a) never have happened, b) been stopped soon after the end of the Clinton admin. But no. Once you start and stay in the road to hell, well, you’re likely to end up there.
As to the trustworthiness of the report, yes, it’s in question, but who doubts that at least some evil was done by the CIA or the govts to which it rendered prisoners?
I don’t even mind Guantanamo prisoners having less than a civilian U.S. persons’s due process rights, but there ought to be a trustworthy modicum of process for documenting the circumstances in which a prisoner was caught, a modicum of process for determining their fate (e.g., how many years they should be held), and a modicum of access by the public to ensure all of that.
Evil actions from our side in a war against a decidedly evil enemy… can be ignored with some safety. Let’s soare ourselves the litany of Allied horrors in WWII: in context they were, if not as nothing, then forgettable and some even forgivable. But rendition predated the naught’s wars! What’s up with that? Part of the problem is that the enemy here is amorphous and ill-defined, and that’s their choice. I don’t know how to deal with that. Dirty tricks will be played when the enemy insists, even though they corrupt us.
I wish to point out that sources have degrees of credibility, or discreditability. Paul Marks is not engaging in an ad hominem argument (which is a “logical fallacy”) but rather pointing out the high degree of skepticism which anyone interested in facts as opposed to smearing and “gotcha!’s” ought to bring to the reading of sources known to be discreditable.
Quoted portions of the thing sound to me very like John Kerry’s infamous lies in his testimony against the American forces in Viet Nam — such as “in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Khan,” so forth.
I also think it interesting that Mr. Metzger’s remarks attacking Paul commence with his smearing of Paul’s first paragraph (after which Paul) moves on to analysis and so forth. As for the rest of the comment, it’s made on the basis that every word of importance is true. But the question is, What if it’s not?
J.G. and Natalie have their own good points, and I don’t read either of them as an attack on Paul.
“Suggestion 1: How about using due process against people who are accused of crimes? The problem is not “Islamism” per se, it is criminal acts.
Suggestion 2: How about not stoking it up. As Ron Paul pointed out over seven years ago, there is such a thing as blowback.”
What if it doesn’t work?
Meat is hung, human beings are hanged.
And some men are well-hung. Your point is…?
Fraser Orr
You are decidedly equivocal anout your position. The last thing we need is for State torture and murder to go unchecked. Fraser if you would not be content should ‘shit happen’, presumably you would support habeas corpus for anyone detained by the State? Or would you be allowed it but not others?
Am I th only person round here who calls “Vietnam” “Vietnam”?
Organization with many Nazi sympathizers and crooks (such as Nazi scumbag Alan Dulles) as its alumni, with a a long and disgraceful history of torture, rape, drug smuggling, and colossal theft from the US taxpayer via an unconstitutional secret budget, motivated more by enriching itself by leeching off the US taxpayer like a fat, putrid parasite, while simultaneously profiting from sex slavery and drug smuggling, as well as deliberately funding and fostering Islamic extremism (which oh so conveniently leads to more taxpayer money being funneled to the CIA), bribing journalists to spread bullshit (abroad and in the US), sucking the dick of banana companies like a cheap whore, cocking up wherever it goes, then demanding more taxpayer money to fuck even more things up.
Always hungry for more powers, always wanting to make itself ever bigger, always hungry for more of your money, the CIA is an ever-expanding fat coke addled whore that always gets its way, thanks to the spineless, corrupt politicians who toe its line out of fear and out of corruption. Like a spoilt child, it throws its toys out of the pram when it does not get its way, attempting to smear and frighten anyone who dares to question it’s ever expanding control of everything.
Patrick,
“Suggestion 1: How about using due process against people who are accused of crimes? The problem is not “Islamism” per se, it is criminal acts.
Suggestion 2: How about not stoking it up. As Ron Paul pointed out over seven years ago, there is such a thing as blowback.”
What if it doesn’t work?
Well, suggestion 2 (non-interventionism) has not been tried. However, the track record of interventionism since it began in earnest about 60 years ago seems to indicate that it is, in many ways, counter productive.
Suggestion 1 (using due process against terrorists) is like using due process against criminals. Using due process against criminals does not eliminate crime, and using due process against terrorist criminals does not eliminate terrorism.
There was, of course, much debate in the 1970s and 1980s about exactly how the British government should proceed against terrorist criminals associated with Irish paramilitary organisations. There were no easy answers. One of the problems was that a substantial proportion of the population of Northern Ireland had more sympathy with the terrorists than with the government’s security forces. I think that most thoughtful commentators would say that whatever its faults, due process was the best option for dealing with terrorism in Northern Ireland during the troubles.
Sorry, but I don’t trust studies. Most people I know – including myself – think that if they were to be subjected to torture, they would supply the demanded info sooner or later (provided they have it in the first place). Of course this is purely anecdotal, and maybe Perry and people he knows think or feel otherwise, but no is claiming that torture always works, only that it works some times.
Whether any of that serves to justify torture is a separate matter.
Of course. But, as opposed to the politicians who put together the report? Or any other politicians, for that matter?
Which is not to say that many – too many, if I had to guess – of the things in the report are likely true. That is not the point, though: the point is that there is a good chance that not all of it is true, which is the opposite of what Perry seems to be thinking.
Having read through the comments, I find myself having repeated some points already made and better put – apologies.
But also, I find myself struggling to understand the point of the post: is it that torture is a horrible thing, or that states (all states, including our own) do horrible things – or that either is surprising news to anyone past puberty? Or is it that torture is more horrible than killing – be it targeted or collateral? Lastly, is an alternative being offered to any of that?
Addendum: On NPR’s morning news show in the US a few minutes ago, the program examined in depth one specific claim made by the CIA in recent days (as a rebuttal to the Senate report) — in this case, that a west coast follow-up to the 9/11 attacks was thwarted through information gained by torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
It was revealed during the course of the examination that the key conspirators in that plot were arrested a full year before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was, leading to the question of how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s torture could possibly have yielded information that led to arrests that took place almost 13 months before. This timeline is not under dispute, by the way — it is based entirely on the public information on when the arrests of all involved (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) took place.
For reference, KSM was arrested on March 1, 2003. The West Coast/LA plot was scheduled for 2002, and the conspirators were arrested in February of 2002.
This story is not new, by the way. It is gone over in detail with a timeline in the Senate report. You don’t have to believe me. You can read it yourself in the Senate report, which is available for download with a single click. You can read the NPR transcripts when they become available later today — go to npr.org and look through the Thursday morning “Morning Edition” story transcripts. You can even listen to CIA shills lying boldly on a national news program about something that could not possibly be true absent the existence of time travel. Hell, another CIA shill re-stated this false claim in an op ed piece in the Washington Post mere days ago.
The CIA lies, and lies boldly. Many at the CIA realize that they are liable for long prison sentences under US and international law if the public actually were to come to understand the extent of what they did and they were somehow brought to justice for their crimes against humanity. They have a long record of lying, they have every motive to lie, and the lies even in this instance are well documented.
However, as Goebbels said, long long ago, if you only make the lie bold enough, many people will believe it no matter how ridiculous it might be. It appears, from the contents of this thread, that he was completely correct.
Alisa writes: “But also, I find myself struggling to understand the point of the post: is it that torture is a horrible thing, or that states (all states, including our own) do horrible things – or that either is surprising news to anyone past puberty? Or is it that torture is more horrible than killing – be it targeted or collateral? Lastly, is an alternative being offered to any of that?”
Clearly, Alisa, you’re right. There is no alternative to barbarism. I bad no positive program to offer, which is the defect in my position — it isn’t possible to simply stop torturing people, even innocent people, for no good reason and to no effect. How silly of me.
You also ask what my point might be. After all, as you note, there couldn’t possibly be one. How stupid of me to believe that there is some reason we should care about state sponsored brutality or documentation of it.
Your arguments have completely changed my opinion. Henceforth, I shall advocate entirely for the torture based society, not because of course torture is particularly good, but because it is literally impossible for us to stop without having some alternative to offer. As you have told us, everyone “past puberty” “knows” that the State commits brutal atrocities (which somehow, simultaneously, many people in this thread deny happened!) and as I have nothing to offer as an alternative (other than, you know, just not torturing people), why, how could I do otherwise but to adopt your position?
Indeed, I shall now undertake to decide if I should become a Nazi or a Stalinist, as clearly torture is just a fact of life, and I should like to make sure, in emulating those in this thread who alternate between denying there was torture, claiming torture actually works, and claiming there is no actual point to discussing the topic, that I do the job right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZR2k5c_198
Perry, I made no arguments, I asked you a question. Not that I expected an honest answer. I did expect loads of empty sarcasm, and got it, yet again. Oh well.
Alisa writes: ” I did expect loads of empty sarcasm, and got it, yet again” — Oh, but the sarcasm wasn’t empty.
You requested an “alternative” to the policy of arbitrary and capricious sadistic torture (sometimes unto death) of persons not even reliably known to have done anything at all. I would have thought that anyone “past puberty” (your words) would be able to work out the “alternative” on their own.
None the less, you demanded an “alternative” policy, so I owned up to my complete and utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
What “alternative” do I offer to shackling innocent men naked to walls in freezing cold rooms to die? Why, none, none at all.
I have no “constructive” suggestion, no system of judicially supervised anal broomstick insertions, no warrants to be issued for breaking men’s fingers or crushing their testicles in vices, no long term plan for figuring out exactly when we should be sticking lit cigarettes in human eyes.
I am the sort of moron who would propose leaving society entirely defenseless, armed only with jails and courts and the sort of ordinary investigators that were relied upon for the decades before 2001.
How dreadfully naïve of me, not to understand that the only way to preserve a civilized society is to abandon it completely, and wallow in the filth of man’s basest instincts.
Seriously Perry, I often do wonder why you even bother to open your posts to comments.
Alisa: “Seriously Perry, I often do wonder why you even bother to open your posts to comments” — You need wonder no longer.
I post my claims in public in a place where others may attack my position so that third parties can assess for themselves whether that position can be successfully defended against attempts to rebut it.
Oh, but you still have not enlightened us as to what exactly your position is – other than ‘torture is horrible’. Yes, it is horrible. Now what? Or, if that is it, please say so, so I can indeed stop wondering.
Otherwise you are doing no great service to the serious discussion on the very serious issue of torture. That, because when third parties do read your post and your reactions to comments here, they are not likely to change their own positions, whatever those may have been. Say, if someone thought that torture is swell, they are not likely to change their minds just because you think it is not – because you have not shown them why it is not so. Or, if someone thought that torture is horrible, but unavoidable (as some have argued here), you have not shown them how it may be avoided, with the purpose it is supposedly serving, served by some other means. And, if someone thought the exact same thing you happen to think (which I still am not sure as to exactly what it may be) – well, you preached to some choir or another.
And, I have not even touched on the matter of credulity in thinking that the CIA are the only side of the linked report capable of lying – others covered it here extensively, and you utterly failed to address their points even remotely convincingly.
But hey, your platform – I’m just here to attack…what was it again?
“All Muslims are innocent. It’s those dirty Jews and Christians. Torturing or arresting Muslims is racist”.
Signed
Nancy Pelosi
Harry Reid
President Obama
Alisa: “Oh, but you still have not enlightened us as to what exactly your position is”
oculos habentes non videtis et aures habentes non auditis nec recordamini
“John Galt III” writes: “All Muslims are innocent. It’s those dirty Jews and Christians. Torturing or arresting Muslims is racist”.
Apparently this attempt at sarcasm is meant to convince us that kidnapping an innocent man, torturing him, and then chaining him naked inside a 2ºC cell until he dies from the cold is justified.
I’m unclear on the exact nature of the argument being forwarded. Perhaps it is that since others commit horrific crimes that serve no purpose we must also commit horrific crimes that serve no purpose. Perhaps the argument is that since others are barbaric monsters, it is best for our society to also descend into barbarism.
However, I would not want to put words into others’ mouths. I await Mr. “Galt”‘s explanation.
Gul Rahman was uncooperative in interrogation, so the C.I.A. left him in his cold cell overnight to make him more so, but the next day he was very uncooperative indeed!
The overt logic of this account appears to be that they did not expect him to die; it occurred through (a) their poor judgement, or (b) it being a most surprising outcome. (The recent case of the unhealthily obese New York man who died resisting arrest for selling ‘loosies’ is slightly analogous: the police intended to arrest him for breaking a law none on this blog will praise, but they were doubtless honestly very surprised that he died; as some bloggers have commented, never support a law if you will not risk someone dying through its enforcement.)
If (a) is valid and the C.I.A. operative was not censured for losing a presumed-of-value informant, that suggests a slovenly culture of practical oversight, never mind moral oversight. If (b) is the case, the intent, and rational expectation, of the C.I.A. was to leave him shivering in his cell overnight and resume interrogation in the morning when he would be sleep-deprived, unhappy and apprehensive of another such night. My knowledge of many accounts of NKVD interrogation techniques suggests that people, even if naked, do not normally die in just-above-freezing cells in a single night, which suggests (b), but if the shackling was of a very extreme kind, making it all but impossible for him to shiver vigorously, then (a) becomes a possibility. (And I defer to anyone with greater medical or interrogational knowledge.) I think it worth forming a theory of what happened, what was intended to happen, and how unexpectable the difference was.
‘Torture’ usually conjures up some picture of screaming incessantly in agony. ‘Sadism’ suggests causing and enjoying such a scene. Knowing that a man is shivering, even shivering violently, in a cell, is probably of little interest to a true sadist. Many things that do not fit these definitions of ‘torture’ and ‘sadism’ are still very bad. It can be needful to condemn evils that are still lesser than other evils. I would not like to be interrogated by that C.I.A. officer, but I find repeated assertions that the C.I.A. is full of sadists unhelpful in understanding this particular incident.
So far my contribution is just towards getting a clear picture of this event. A more general remark about the post and thread follow.
This thread has assertions that all these C.I.A. activities produced no useful result, and others questioning that. As Libertarians, we understand how things that appear useful – even are useful, at starting – can have perverse outcomes. To say that _systemic_ torture gives no useful result, indeed very much less than no useful result, is a very reasonable idea. To say that the C.I.A. _never_ gained benefit from even one instance (which is what PerryM appears to be saying) is surprising. It might be true nevertheless. Perhaps the C.I.A. is very inept. Perhaps the very fact that they don’t do lots of things that the NKVD or Islamic State would do puts them in a dismal half-way house of being cruel, but not cruel enough to profit from it. But at first glance, it should be surprising. PerryM’s lack of surprise inclines me to those who say he’s reading the report with less caution than is wise.
Centuries ago, a key difference between England and almost all other states was that in England, the common law forbade torture; it could be used only by royal prerogative. (As a UK resident, I’m happy to assure PerryM that these days her majesty is not given to invoking this privilege in the UK. 🙂 What we, as opposed to the C.I.A., do abroad I’m less well informed about.) Conversely, the old Chinese legal code, in which confession was essential to conviction even if evidence of guilt was great, and torture the means to assure confession, is well known to have had horrible and perverse effects: the innocent, overwhelmed with unanticipated terror, would sometimes confess; the guilty, prepared and knowing that silence would save them whatever the evidence, could endure much. The different histories of these two nations are good examples of the evil of systemic torture, and the good of its absence.
For myself, I agree most with Natalie. If I understand her comment, she supports a very restrained form of prerogative: you go before a judge and jury and argue that your wholly exceptional case justified your actions, and you take your mild or severe punishment if they partly or wholly disagree.
Truth is the daughter of time. Whether we should read this report with caution, or instead with bitter complaints that the half was not told unto us, may emerge. (For sure, more comment and more reports will emerge.) Waiting is helped by the sad reflection that there’s not a great deal we personally can do about it till the next election, and only a very constrained choice then.
Niall Kilmartin, who apparently has not read the Senate report on CIA torture (see below), says some things that I agree with, and some that I disagree with. I have little time right now to go over his comments in depth, though I wish I did.
There is, however, one assertion in particular he makes that I wish to discuss:
Actually, I think you’re completely and utterly wrong there. Had you read the report, you would understand why.
According to the CIA’s own documentation, as described in the Senate report, the CIA had a great deal of difficulty staffing their torture chambers. Many people simply did not have the stomach for what happened — they complained vigorously to their superiors that the entire thing was repugnant, and when that failed, they quit. The report sites some agents literally breaking down in tears — that really is in the report.
So, who ultimately managed to remain on the job?
The CIA, as with most good bureaucracies, kept excellent records, though it later destroyed many of them to keep them out of the hands of investigators. However, the personnel records are largely available. Most of those who stuck with their jobs doing things like beating people up and chaining them for weeks in a standing position had serious histories of domestic violence, problems with uncontrolled temper, and other similar “issues”. You needn’t believe me — it is in the report.
At one point, we are told, for example:
See the document itself for a fuller description. (One highly redacted footnote refers to “CIA OFFICER 2″‘s “anger management problems”.)
I think it is not a stretch to say that the evidence presented to us by the report seems to indicates that normal human beings were too disgusted to participate in this depraved travesty, and that left behind a different group, which is to say, those who remained were not normal. Those who agreed to behave this way were, by and large, violent sociopaths — and again, this is based on the CIA’s own internal documentation.
Calling them “sadists” does not seem like some sort of poetic license on my part. Although it is not a clinical diagnosis, it seems like merely the literal truth as a layman would understand it.
Feel free to read the report for yourself. It is available. It has its limitations and clearly is a product of the people who drafted it and the conditions under which they worked, but it is a rare glimpse into organizational depravity.
If I might be so bold, one would imagine that libertarians, who understand quite clearly that power corrupts and that those who would seek it out are generally the sorts of personalities who are least to be trusted with its possession, might also understand how a natural filtering process might leave only people who enjoyed inflicting suffering in charge of doing so. The report brings us confirmation of a result we might have expected anyway.
Kidnapping an innocent man, torturing him, and then chaining him naked inside a 2ºC cell until he dies from the cold is not justified but shredding him with bullets or roasting him alive with firebombs is?
If my choices were rendition, torture, and rectal feeding versus a drone strike, I’d choose the trifecta.
Having said that, I agree that torture, like blowing up weddings and denying medication to infants, is a bad thing. We may decide that it’s just something we don’t do, like using hollow point bullets.
But that choice is almost an aesthetic one, and is based upon how we choose to see ourselves more than anything else. We shouldn’t pretend that torture is somehow objectively more awful than what we do in “ordinary” warfare.
(And to clarify, I agree that regular interrogations are usually more effective if well done and the time is available.)
I think I tend to agree with Natalie as well.
Niall, I see a material difference between torture aimed at obtaining real useful information, and that aimed at obtaining a confession.
“Staghounds” writes: “Kidnapping an innocent man, torturing him, and then chaining him naked inside a 2ºC cell until he dies from the cold is not justified but shredding him with bullets or roasting him alive with firebombs is?”
No. That’s not justified either. As it happens, it is possible for more than one thing to be evil at once. Indeed, there are a myriad of evil things. Merely pointing out that one thing is evil in no way implies that other things are not evil as well. In fact, even claiming that one side of a dispute is behaving in an evil manner does not imply that the other side is not also behaving in an evil manner.
For info purposes:
Here’s a link which describes itself in its own blurb as follows:
…
Mr Ed
> You are decidedly equivocal anout your position.
Not at all. I have chosen to avoid stating my thoughts on the CIA program because doing so fogs the issue I am raising, specifically that the report is partisan and unreliable. This is an issue irrespective of the degree to which you agree or disagree with the CIA’s actions.
> The last thing we need is for State torture and murder to go unchecked. Fraser if you would not be content should ‘shit happen’, presumably you would support habeas corpus for anyone detained by the State?
Yes, I would absolutely support Habeus Corpus. I will say this about the whole matter, I find it extremely disturbing that the whole thing took place in secret, with secret courts, and secret rooms in secret places.
If, as some would advocate, the expediency of he times demanded interrogation techniques that we would never otherwise countenance, if it was believed they were lawful and morally justified, why would they have to be done under cover of darkness, and in a cloak of secrecy? Are we to think that were the US to say publicly that they were water boarding terrorists that that would change in any way the views or plans of our enemies? And if it turned the stomachs of our friends let us make the case to them for the moral justifiability of it, assuming we believed it to be justifiable and legal.
So yes, at the very least habeus corpus.
Hmm: Yes, the CIA’s propaganda site, paid for with taxpayer money, is an excellent source of fake stories about the torture program, most of which are discussed in detail in the Senate report’s tables discussing such lies in depth.
For example, see the story about the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed providing vital information to the arrests of the plotters of foiled Los Angeles building attack. Of course, those arrests were performed over a year before KSM’s own capture, so using information from him to catch them was an amazing feat of time travel for the CIA’s operatives.
All the other stories they tell appear to involve similar issues. See the tables in the Senate report, which anyone can download. You can verify their claims in most cases from open news sources — dates and other facts are frequently now public record.
What’s even better is that even after the CIA has admitted in public and on the air on national news stories that particular claims were “misstated”, they often re-appear a few months later in some new interview given by a CIA mouthpiece. Recycling is, I suppose, environmentally conscious.
Of course, one should recall that there might be a motive for all of this. People facing serious criminal charges for violating US and international law on torture have a strong incentive to lie about their own actions.
As I’ve said repeatedly, Joseph Goebbels preached that if only you make the lie big enough, people will believe it. In this case, the lie is a whopper.
Perry, are you trolling yourself?
I am sorry, but I have to ask because your reaction to this report appears to note the first time you’ve realised that state security agencies use lies, subterfuge, nefarious conduct and misdirection. Is that for real because – ta da! – That is the whole point of them!
The CIA (or any other national security agency for that matter) are designed not to be publicly honest. They would be of no use if they were.
The onus to ensure they abide by the rules of their countries and don’t run amok is down to the politicians who have oversight of their departments. This report destroys that oversight by attacking the agency using a propagandised report as a way to engender even greater anti-CIA external propaganda.
The report is useless for promoting honest oversight of the CIA because its use of lies destroys its credibility.
What reply do the CIA have to such a report? Why surprise surprise they too speak out with their own “propaganda”.
You rightfully call it propaganda. Which it is.. PROPAGANDA – EXACTLY LIKE THE REPORT! Which itself is propaganda to the n’th degree.
Why, when you understand that the CIA use propaganda and deride them for it- are you so determined to accept (and force everyone else to accept), at face value, the propaganda of the politicians who created this propagandised report to damage the CIA?
To anyone outside looking in – your logic, in its inability to fairly analyse both sides of the issue, appears either naively faulty or determinedly biased.
Either way, you end up trolling yourself – making yourself continuously justify regurgitated faulty logic for why everyone should condemn the CIA but not condemn (or even question) the lies of the very report which told you that the CIA lied .. hahaha … Aye, if only everyone would ignore all facts and logic and just listen to you. Good luck with that 🙂
The fact is, sometimes ‘rough men’ do rough things. It defeats their function for us to be too nice about them.
…too nice about that.
For all those who are defending the CIA’s torture program, It is a shame to find that on a libertarian site, its worth remembering that during the course of WWII, Britain and the Allies as far as I know never resorted to the torture of german POWs. In war there is a need to go beyond the civil rights rules of protecting defendents etc. of normal criminal investigation and interrogation. Captured airmen for example in 1940 had much operational intelligence that would be useful to the RAF and lives were at stake. However no german aircrew was ever subjected to waterboarding. A torture method much used by the gestapo. On the contrary recently captured aircrew were kept in a very pleasant facility. There interrogations were conducted by nice polite chaps who treated them decently. What the airmen didn’t know was that the entire place was wired for sound and that they were covertly being filmed during their interrogations. It did not take their interrogators long to learn their tells when they were lying, dissembling or evading lines of inquiry and of course each subject’s interrogation could be cross referenced against those of other prisoners. Much of value was obtained this way. Getting under someones guard is a much more effective way of obtaining information. That is why some coppers begin interviewing a suspect by offering them a smoke. The ones that begin with a phone book to the side of your head are just getting their jollies and are out instill fear through intimedation. I haven’t read the report, ever since I read that they had OBN’s driver banged up in Gitmo for forever and a day the war on terror lost any shred of credibility as far as I’m concerned.They had no evidence he had done anything other than drive OBN around.
“PersonFromPorlock”: George Orwell never said any such thing. The earliest attribution is about 20 years ago from one Richard Grenier.
It is also not the sort of thing George Orwell would have said, and if he had ever said such a thing, as the author of polemics against torture and dehumanization, he would have vigorously attacked you for so mischaracterizing his position and implying that he somehow would have supported taking innocent men into custody and torturing them to death.
Your substantive claim is equally based on false premises: the report makes it absolutely clear that no one was made safer by these actions, and the evidence it provides is compelling and difficult to refute.
Here, “PersonFromPorlock”, have a real George Orwell quote. It comes from a scene in a book you might want to read called “1984” which features horrific torture. Perhaps you are unaware of this, but Orwell does not present such tortures to claim that they are necessary for the safety of the population. Have a taste of what he thinks of the sort who torture others — these are the words he puts into the mouth of one of his torturers.
Indeed, Orwell is most appropriate, “PersonFromPorlock”. When I read the Senate report, when I read of a mentally retarded man being tortured just so his screams can be played to his relatives, when I see you and the other people who make excuses for the basest forms of human barbarity, this comes to mind:
For all the posturing by the Dems, at least one good thing came out of this report: a need to have closer oversight of the CIA, more checks and balances. There’s a bureaucratic cost to these procedures, of course, but I think it’s unavoidable.
@Perry Metzger
> “PersonFromPorlock”: George Orwell never said any such thing.
Irrespective of who said it, do you question whether it is true? Certainly we sleep in our beds peacefully because rough men are willing to do violence to keep us safe. Orwell, along with I suspect everyone commenting here, have grave concerns about how to keep that violence legitimate and that is an discussion that needs to be had over and over and over again. And when we have finished the discussion, we need to start it again from the beginning.
But unless we seek anarchy, we must at least accept minarchy. And if so there is little doubt that state will have to hire some rough men. We must certainly be concerned that we keep them on a leash, but we need them nonetheless, simply because there are other rough men who would do us harm, rip us from our peaceful beds and take all that we had, our property, our freedom and perhaps our lives, and we need our rough men to deal with them.
They might be bastards, but at least they are our bastards.
That isn’t to say that the CIA didn’t get off the leash, plainly they did, but we still need them, and we need them enough that what we need is non partisan reporting, and serious recommendations from serious people. Our senate committee has lamentably given us neither.
Fraser Orr writes: “Irrespective of who said it, do you question whether it is true?” — in context, I most certainly do deny it, yes.
There is no question that violence is sometimes needed to stop violence. I am a gun rights advocate, and I have no trouble with people using violence to defend themselves.
We do not, however, make the world safer by brutally torturing people, and certainly we do not by brutally torturing mentally retarded men so we can play their cries to their relatives.
The implication of the quotation as used in the context of this discussion was that somehow torture is distasteful but needed to protect our safety. It is certainly distasteful, but it makes us less safe. It encourages a society in which rules are thrown away at a whim, for example, which means the risk that you or I will be unjustly harmed by the State goes up. It encourages people in foreign countries to view our governments as brutal and evil, which makes it more likely (not less) that they will attack us. It does not provide additional intelligence of any value, and certainly not reliably so — the CIA itself claimed that for sixty years, and this report documents in astonishing detail that at least in the current instance, the CIA’s old position was correct.
Lastly, there is the not inconsiderable problem that it is just plain immoral. Perhaps to others morals are things to be dispensed with at a moment’s notice, but not to me. When we do that, when we eliminate all that is good about our society in the name of defending it, we eliminate the whole reason it is worth defending.
It is explained at length to everyone who receives a security clearance of secret or higher that they will talk if tortured. Secrecy is maintained by not allowing people to fall into the hands of torturers, not by counting on them not to talk. Once someone is captured by a known torturer, it is assumed that everything that person knows is now known to the torturer, a lesson learned from long experience. It’s simply a fact, and I’m frankly surprised that so many people can’t see that the “torture doesn’t work” meme is merely an attempt to create a consequentialist argument against torture where one would otherwise be more difficult.
Naturally, as with all interrogation, the signal to noise ratio may be poor, and resisting interrogation is about worsening that ratio as much as possible, whether torture is involved or not. Since this applies to interrogation without torture as much as to interrogation with torture it’s not relevant to the issue of torture, per se.
It would be a mistake for someone to interpret my real-world attitude regarding torture as acceptance of the practice.
Thanks to Hmm for the link to a web-site set up by former CIA members who counter the claims being made in the SSCI report. It sheds a rather different light on events, demolishing much of what is being directed at the CIA. Glad to see my doubts about what this was about have some roots in reality.
Torture is beyond the pale. It doesn’t tend to work and is essentially wrong anyway. I have a very vivid imagination. Oh yes! I am a computer hardware engineer. I can think of things you people would not believe and I have the tools to do them. But like the Dr I never would. I solve problems by thinking. Yes, I can be that arrogant. Torture is an intellectual fail. I stick with the motto of my Alma Mater: Sapientia Urbs Conditur.
That’s a clear position at least- torture is always and forever so “just plain immoral” that we will not permit it.
I’m still not clear on why torture- waterboarding, say- is morally worse than the mutilating and killing we expect our soldiers and sailors to do.
It now appears, at any rate. as though the Senate report may be no more trustworthy than the Rolling Stone rape exposé. Let us contain our indignation until the matter becomes clearer.
I’m chiming in a bit late, bacause I’m slowly suffering burnout on this topic. I just wanted to say: I find the number of torture apologists, both here and elsewhere, absolutely staggering.
It doesn’t matter that the report is politically motivated. Even before this report, there was ample evidence from other sources that the US tortures its prisoners. The report has just refreshed our memories. Torture is wrong, and any country that uses torture for any purpose is barbaric and immoral. As one poster wrote above: if you lower yourself to this level, there is nothing in your country left to save.
Of course, the ultimate proof that this report is just a political hack job is the lack of consequences. Individuals working for the US government violated both domestic law and international laws (laws to which the US is a signatory). There can be no excuse for this behavior. As such, everyone with concrete knowledge of this program should be prosecuted and convicted, from the former President all the way down to the janitor cleaning the cells. If the US won’t prosecute these psychopaths, then I sincerely hope that someone brings the case before the International Criminal Court.
Hmmm… I always suspected one reason why the libertarian movement always seems stuck in neutral is the ‘holier than thou’ attitude that some posters here have staked out. There will always be specific circumstances where the only option left is torture or actions that run counter to ‘pure’ libertarianism.
If you feel that way, I hope you will never have to place yourself in a position where you say to the families of dead people, “We didn’t torture the suspects because that lowers us to their level and means there is nothing in our country left to save”.
Staghounds, it seems to me that it arises from the premise of torture being less useful (if at all) than the killing and maiming done in regular combat. As I mentioned above, I am far from certain that is true – but if so, then the premise is legitimate and the logic is consistent.
@Wobbly: It has nothing to do with libertarianism, but everything to do with ethics.
Ethics: Would you murder an innocent child for $10? No? How about to save the life of your own child? If you have deeply held principles, you don’t abandon them when the going gets tough.
Slippery slope: Let’s look at another example entirely: you never pay ransom to kidnappers. Sure, if it’s your child, you want to. But the big picture says: paying ransom will just lead to more kidnappings, so it’s best not to start. It’s the same for torture: justify one incident, and the next is easier. Pretty soon, you’ve tortured dozens of people, held dozens more incommunicado in a military prison for years, started dropping remote-control bombs on haphazardly identified people, and see nothing wrong with any of it.
By the way, the “ticking bomb” scenario is like “Schrödinger’s cat”: an interesting mental exercise, but not terribly realistic.
PersonFromPorlock writes: “It now appears, at any rate. as though the Senate report may be no more trustworthy than the Rolling Stone rape exposé.”
Oh really?
So, tell us exactly what it says that is wrong. Give us an instance. Give us a page in the report that contains an inaccuracy and the evidence (not the assertion of the existence of evidence) that proves that it was indeed wrong.
Or is your claim as accurate a statement as your incorrect attribution of a quotation to George Orwell? (I note, by the way, that you have yet to own up to the fact that you did that.)
Perhaps you believe that simply asserting that inaccuracies exist is sufficient. Sadly, you’ll have to demonstrate they exist. If you do not, I will presume that you have no evidence to present and are merely assisting in the perpetuation of a lie.
The Wobbly Guy writes: “If you feel that way, I hope you will never have to place yourself in a position where you say to the families of dead people, “We didn’t torture the suspects because that lowers us to their level and means there is nothing in our country left to save”.”
A wonderful appeal to emotion, but it doesn’t actually do more than perpetuate the old lies. Lets examine your implicit position.
First, there is the incorrect claim that the torture would have saved someone’s life — and we have no evidence that it would have. Indeed, we have ample evidence from professional interrogators that torture does not work (it does not produce accurate and actionable intelligence), but that far more ordinary interrogation methods do, in fact, work.
Second, there is the casual dismissal of the underlying problem being pointed out. If the US or UK becomes as bad as the Soviet Union or contemporary Iran, why indeed would it be valuable to defend it? We are told over and over in this discussion “the bad guys are immoral murderers and must be stopped”, but what happens when the side you are “on” become immoral murderers? Why then shouldn’t you also be stopped? What are you defending?
Which leads us to problem number three. Why wouldn’t the parents of Gul Rahman feel angry that their son, an innocent man, was tortured to death? How do you say to his family “we tortured your son to death for no reason other than raging incompetence, but trust us, we’re the good people”? Why wouldn’t his relatives, quite rightfully, view you as an evil thug who should be opposed with violence? How do you look in the eye of a parent of Nazar Ali and say “we knew that your mentally retarded son did nothing, but we needed to get a recording of him in agony?”
You see, you presume that the lives of innocents only count if they are people living near you. Even if you wish to remain so callous, the innocent people in foreign countries who we kill also have relatives, and those relatives might decide to kill us if they conclude that we’re a threat to them.
Which leads to problem number four: when your “defensive strategy” recruits people for the enemy, it is not a way of enhancing safety. How do you look in the eye of the parents of a child killed by terrorists motivated by the torture and killing of innocents and say “well, we could have behaved like civilized men, but instead we acted like sadistic animals and so we convinced the men that killed your son to join up with the terrorists”.
Your position, “Wobbly Guy”, is ridiculous, ineffective, and totally immoral.
I now await the stream of commenters who will insist that foreigners somehow do not get motivated to kill us when our governments kill them, even though those same commenters will elsewhere insist our governments must kill the foreigners because they have killed us. (Apparently the wogs don’t work like the rest of us — they don’t care when our governments drone bomb their weddings and aren’t motivated to harm us by pictures of atrocities committed by our governments, because they’re bad, and only good people like Americans and Englishmen get angry about seeing their friends and relatives brutalized.)
I wish to be clear, by the way: I have no problem with hunting down terrorists, arresting them and trying them in open court, as has been done hundreds of times in the past with great success. I do not wish to “turn the other cheek” or any such nonsense.
However, I also think the claim that “some crimes are too horrific to reward the perpetrators with a fair trial” is imbecilic, based in the mistaken belief that we give people trials as some sort of prize for good behavior rather than to assess guilt in the first place.
I think the claim that “sometimes, you have to just let the rough men torture and kill a few people to keep you safe, and if they were innocent, too bad” is ridiculous given that innocent people clearly are no threat to you, but their relatives seeking vengeance almost certainly are.
I think the claim that torture is effective is ridiculous given the decades of evidence from actual interrogators, and that too many commenters in this thread are getting their information from watching old episodes of “24” and other Hollywood trash.
I also think that it is astonishing how thin the veneer of civilization is for many of you, and how willingly you get out the hot iron bar and shove it in someone’s armpit at the least excuse, whether it will do any good for anyone or not.
One seems to learn what people are really like inside in these discussions, and sadly, one learns that most of your fellow human beings are not trustworthy or good — and I refer not to the Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds of the world (who I already knew were terrible people) but rather to all the apologists for torture boiling out of the woodwork.
One need not wonder how so many people went along and actively participated in the atrocities committed in places like Maoist China, or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, or Rwanda during the recent genocide there. The evidence that most people have no principles at all and will simply go along with any horror those in power say is for the good of their country and rationalize it afterwards is right before you.
@bradley13
> Ethics: Would you murder an innocent child for $10? No? How about to save the life of your own child?
What about to save 500, or 50,000 innocent children? All throughout history we have done exactly that and many people think it is ethical in the sense of the least worst of options. We dropped an atomic bomb on two Japanese cities and killed hundreds of thousands, many of them innocent children. However, in doing so we undoubtedly prevented the deaths of many tens of millions of people, including many innocent children, by removing the need for an invasion of the Japanese home islands. Something that would have made the invasion of Okinawa look like a Teddy Bear’s picnic.
During the invasion of Normandy the town of Caen was bombed back into oblivion, an action that undoubtedly killed many innocent children and civilians. However, an action that was necessary to allow the D-Day expedition to take place — an action that liberated Europe from the clutches of a regime of an evil rarely seen in the history of the world. Was the price of a few thousand innocent lives in Caen worth the salvation of the rest of the European Jewish population? Worth the liberation of a hundred million people subject to Nazi slavery?
> Slippery slope: Let’s look at another example entirely: you never pay ransom to kidnappers. Sure, if it’s your child, you want to. But the big picture says: paying ransom will just lead to more kidnappings,
Are you saying we should sacrifice the welfare of a single child for the common good? That doesn’t sound very libertarian to me at all.
> By the way, the “ticking bomb” scenario is like “Schrödinger’s cat”: an interesting mental exercise, but not terribly realistic.
Let’s take a totally theoretical possibility shall we? Imagine terrorists had flown commercial jetliners into three buildings and killed thousands of civilians. Imagine there was another jetliner, non responsive flying over Pennsylvania heading toward Washington DC. You are a fighter pilot scrambled in response to the first three attacks. All indications are that this jetliner, hijacked, and full of innocent people, is going to crash into a building you don’t know, and kill many thousands more people. You are locked and loaded. Can you shoot it down?
I get that that is theory, but a worthy exercise nonetheless. And for the record, I don’t know the answer.
I think it is ironic that you criticize here as unrealistic, when you yourself are promulgating an ethics and morality existing in a vacuum, outside of reality. Ethics and morality are much easier when it is a choice as to whether something is or is not moral or ethical. Morality and ethics are pretty easy when you define the question narrowly, without the messy borders of reality. It is far harder when asked which of a series of realistic options is the most moral or ethical. But those are the actual choices we have to make.
You might say “that is when we have to stick to our principles more carefully”, but no one is talking about abandoning principles, I am talking about how to apply principles when there are no easy choices.
It is Sophie choice, isn’t it? How do your principles apply when both choices are appalling?
Notwithstanding the fact that I mostly, if not entirely agree with his position on the matter at hand as laid out in his last comment: what a dishonest and manipulative exercise in moral self-aggrandizing this post and the consequent comments by Perry Metzger. This is the last time I’m taking the trouble to read any of his posts, let alone to comment on the same. My apologies to others posting and commenting here, but I felt the need to make this opinion known, FWIW.
This discussion certainly has been lively, interesting. If I can dispute one point put forward by some, that there is a willingness by some to excuse the use of torture,. I think not! What I believe is being advanced is recognition that in certain extremes ghastly acts have a degree of rational defence. I appreciate all the arguments that are used , including the slippery slope, loss of the moral high ground and so on. These are entirely rational and are part of the legacy of the enlightment. However few of those who articulated these principles thought they would end up having to deal with fanatics who would fly aircraft into buildings,
The difficulty of applying structured law to people devoid of any feeling towards the rest of humanity is hugely difficult. Providing tangible interlocking evidence that can withstand an aggressive defence is at times insurmountable. So how to protect the wider public against the threats posed by such people, especially if time is short. This is a genuine concern that some here recognise, but others have set their face against.
So then, what do we do? Try to hold onto all that is good about our way of life by applying all the protections we are used to, even to those who mean us harm. Or do we risk another 911 or worse. And should the terrorist succeed in some nightmarish scenario that might have been prevented by more robust methods, how do explain this to survivors. Sorry abouth that, but we can hold our heads up high, for we were moral.
This is what so called defenders of this business recognise. Suggesting they are unworthy does them an injustice. Let us all be clear here, there are no easy answers.
You cannot give up Alisa! The arguments that surround these issues are endless, I have a feel for it,been fighting it for a few decades now. (Alas rarely a winner)
Barry, there are other places where these arguments can and will take place – hopefully including this blog. The issue is indeed too important to go undiscussed – or, conversely, to be used for unrelated purposes as above. I must add that even on this thread I gained no small amount of important insights from commenters capable of a civil discourse – it’s just that I’m no longer willing to participate in a game designed to belittle them every time they fail to say ‘amen’ every single time it is required in the sermon. Bad choir, bad.
Alisa writes: “what a dishonest and manipulative exercise in moral self-aggrandizing this post and the consequent comments by Perry Metzger. This is the last time I’m taking the trouble to read any of his posts,”
The beauty of a free society, which is to say, one in which all things that do not involve the initiation of violence against others are permitted, is that you get to read or boycott whatever you choose, at your pleasure.
How fragile a thing, sadly, such a society is when so many people push constantly for us to discard our principles away at a moments notice to gain the illusion of security.
The very fact that you are free to decide even what to read depends critically on the fact that most people in this thread have not yet succeeded in gaining the upper hand and implementing their views.
I hope, for everyone’s sake, that we continue to live in a world where you are free to call me “dishonest” and “manipulative” and to choose not to read what I write if you do not wish to.
Indeed.
Yes, I see your point. Rather the norm in daily life in some respects I feel, especially with regards to the internet which has a free for all reputation. Thanks for responding, enjoy Christmas if you celebrate it and may 2015 turn out well for us all.
Amen, as it were 🙂
Fraser Orr writes: “We dropped an atomic bomb on two Japanese cities and killed hundreds of thousands, many of them innocent children. However, in doing so we undoubtedly prevented the deaths of many tens of millions of people” — you may believe this, but you should not presume others have no doubts about your claim. I, for example, do not believe it. I’m afraid you will have to present credible evidence that tens of millions of lives were saved, not simply assert it.
I do not doubt that the position is a widely held one — but merely because many people believe something does not make it true.
Barry Sheridan writes: “However few of those who articulated these principles thought they would end up having to deal with fanatics who would fly aircraft into buildings, The difficulty of applying structured law to people devoid of any feeling towards the rest of humanity is hugely difficult. Providing tangible interlocking evidence that can withstand an aggressive defence is at times insurmountable”
Your claim does not appear to withstand the test of comparison against experience.
The World Trade Center was actually bombed twice. In the aftermath of the first bombing, the miscreants were captured, tried, convicted and sent to entirely ordinary prisons, without the least difficulty. Further, there have been literally dozens of of other cases in which foreign terrorists have been captured, tried and convicted in entirely ordinary courts.
We thus have more than sufficient evidence from the real world that the task of trying even criminals with political motives who commit mass killings is not, in fact, insurmountable.
Perry makes a fair point. Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war in the Pacific theater. But at what cost? The winners write the history books, and filled in the assumptions and justifications. What would have happened without the nuclear bombs? Or if they had been dropped on non-civilian targets? In truth, if we disregard the winner’s history books, it is very difficult to know. There were similar atrocities in the European theater, such as Dresden, with similarly shaky justifications.
War is a strange thing: on the one hand, we want it to be civilized (Geneva Conventions, etc.). But war is a fundamentally uncivilized activity – breaking and killing things. Nonetheless, we in the West have the military power to utterly destroy any terrorist threat us. I argue that we have the “luxury” of fighting without losing our ethical principles. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, CIA torture, and now drone attacks – these have, and continue to cost the West far, far more than they ever gained. A cost to our civilization, and a practical cost of making new enemies. Indeed, I would argue the destabilization that has allowed ISIS to come to power can be laid squarely at the feet of the USA and the UK.
“bradley13”: I often argue the situation is much like that of the children’s rhyme about the old woman who swallowed the fly. Each of her subsequent actions seem reasonable by some measure at the time, and yet the overall result is that her position becomes worse at ever step, until finally she expires.
@Perry Metzger
>you may believe this, but you should not presume others have no doubts about your claim. I, for example, do not believe it.
I mentioned the evidence in my original quote. An invasion of a tiny island, Okinawa, cost the lives of something in the order of 100,000 Japanese (not to mention many, many Americans). Okinawa has a population less that 1% of the Japanese home islands and mothers threw their babies off cliffs rather than have them captured by the Americans. I see no reason to believe that a similar casualty rate would come from an invasion of the home islands, in fact, there are plenty of reasons to believe it would be considerably worse for both sides.
That would be the data available to the planners. Retrospectively, we know now that had the invasion taken place it would have been devastated by a huge, unanticipated typhoon that would have ripped through the US fleet at anchor. So, irrespective of the planning, the actuality would have been worse.
> I do not doubt that the position is a widely held one — but merely because many people believe something does not make it true.
That is correct, however, unless you have a definitive moral standard that we can all agree to by which we can say what is and what is not moral, we must look to the evolved standard of morality that our society has created as a determiner. Of course you can believe whatever you want, but if you want to make a case as to the immorality of something, you might want to ensure that your sense of morality matches that of your interlocutors.
To say something is illegal, for example, one must explicitly or implicitly indicate which legal code your are referring to. For example, is it illegal to carry a pistol? In London yes, in Tuscon, AZ, no. So to, if you want to say something is illegal, one must also explicitly or implicitly indicate what code of morality you are referring to. Your personal moral code might be very honorable, but neither I nor the other readers are likely to share it in its entirety.
But now you’re changing the terms of the question. Trying and imprisoning or executing criminals is a completely different thing than the torture question. The torture we’re talking about wasn’t done to punish or deter, it was done to obtain actionable intelligence to improve our ability to win a war by destroying our enemy’s ability to fight.
Whether it’s effective or not is a different question, too. Mr Metzger’s position is that torture is morally sui generis.
I still have the same question- what is the MORAL difference between, say, torturing someone whom we believe knows the location of an enemy communications centre, shooting someone we believe is carrying messages to and from the communications centre, and bombing a town full of people because we believe the communications centre is in it?
No staghounds, I think that the too questions are in fact closely related. As Fraser points out, moral codes are not uniform throughout the world, but in the most widely accepted moral codes (and legal codes too, for that matter), we don’t just say ‘killing is unacceptable’, but differentiate between different circumstances in which killings may occur – such as: was it in self-defense or not, etc. That was what I mean by ‘useful’: in the sense of being useful towards some end that in itself is considered moral – most often the defense and preservation of innocent lives. That is why we consider some wars more morally justified than others, even though there is virtually no war without unintentional loss of innocent lives. I hope that helps to clarify what I meant.
BTW, I do hope that my last comment at least hints at the fact that morality has no existence outside of reality, the latter constantly presenting us with the need to prioritize our many values according to certain principles (which necessarily implies the usefulness of such principles). That prioritizing is what morality is all about, it has no meaning in an imaginary vacuum artificially populated according to neat scenarios, where the goodies and the baddies are clearly identified and never intermingle, unless for the purpose of clear confrontation.
Perry in this long running thread I see you have consistently decided that everything you say is beyond reproach, while other commentators if they are not on message are subject to your bluster. Not much of a technique is it. While I am not sure you can reason along the lines I have in mind I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and take the issue of fabricating a watertight legal case against those whose intent is malign in the sense we employ against the terrorist to see if it can be as I suggest, often insurmountable.
The prolonged British experience in Northern Ireland exposes the difficulties associated with determined groups who have learnt to keep their machinations secret despite existing within a population, the majority of whom had little liking for what they were doing. Considerable forces were deployed by the British government to combat the threats both in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland as well as elsewhere. While restrained by all this force it often proved impossible to either prevent an atrocity, never mind proceed against those suspected of its cause. There were instances when a pretty good idea of who the culprits were existed, however constructing a credible case to enable prosecution before judge and jury was another matter. Forensic evidence, assuming it existed at all, was frequently insufficient, while persuading witnesses able to withstand hostile public scrutiny in court was next to impossible. You cannot blame these people if they were legitimately frightened for their lives. As for those who infiltrated the terrorist ranks on behalf of the police or military, it was death if they were ever found out and, at the end of their usefulness they faced a government that often less than careful to reward their courage.
Of course this is not the situation in the US. At the moment! Nonetheless the US now harbours, either as citizens, temporary guests, illegal’s or just tourists, many who are well capable of who knows what. Amongst his crowd are those aided by governments openly hostile to the United States, so funding and technical aid to carry some monstrous act is always on tap. How then do you tackle such threats, people lost in the crowd where not even the faintest glimmer of suspicions exists. Do we wait for the atrocity first, then sort out ‘the after the fact’ and prosecute, assuming the culprits can be found (the suicide bomber), or do you look for some other approach. This of course was the result of the first WTC bombing you mentioned. Luckily that was not overly successful compared to what came second time.
Today in a modern technical society not only are there a huge range of options for the savvy terrorist to bring about misery to thousands. These very same people know that if they behave within the law up until the time of any terrorist action they will be fully protected by a host of rights that hampers any investigation. While shrewd detective work and endless vigilance by the various authorities will expose most plots, after all most are amateurish, and here I am sure the CIA/FBI/DOJ etc has achieved just that, it is difficult to exclude every risk. While there is every reason to be wary of government extremes there are occasions when every advantage to protect the wider public has to be taken. Trying to hamstring the various agencies we depend on by applying the legal frame that we utilise to govern a civil social order is not totally proof against the determined terrorist. This comment is not set out here to justify either the singular use or any on-going routine employment of torture, I doubt for a moment that this has ever been considered. But there are occasions when the factor of time gets in the way and hard choices have to be made.
I cannot help but say that you are like many privileged western fantasists, you cannot bring yourself to accept anything that compromises your own high opinion of yourselves. You of course sleep soundly. Yet you do so because others are on watch! So before you go on blindly castigating the CIA try to recognise the truth of your situation. You Perry are lucky that there are people prepared to ensure you go on being able to sleep soundly. Be concerned by all means by this report and what it implies. You are quite right to do so. But do not do so blindly, which is what you have done so far.
Perry Metzger
> trying them in open court, as has been done hundreds of times in the past with great success.
I entirely agree. If, as its advocates claim, the CIA’s actions were legal and justified, why were they done under cloak of darkness?
> that “some crimes are too horrific to reward the perpetrators with a fair trial” is imbecilic,
I agree, but the “rough men” were being rough to get information not confessions. Nonetheless, these men still deserve trials, habeus corpus and other such rights.
> I think the claim that “sometimes, you have to just let the rough men torture and kill a few people to keep you safe, and if they were innocent, too bad”
Who is saying that? Whenever innocent people get caught up with unjust accusations and punishments, it is indeed a travesty of justice, and something that we should do all that we can to both prevent and correct. However, criminal investigation is a blunt instrument and it makes mistakes. This is recognized in Blackstone’s formulation let ten guilty men go free lest one innocent suffer. But why stop at ten? Should we let 100 go free, or 10,000? One can guarantee never to have the state cause the innocent to suffer by simply not having a criminal justice system or engaging in war or war like enemies such as Al Queda. But not doing so has horrible consequences to the same innocent we seek to protect.
But once again this is why the gross politicization of this report and its lack of recommendations is a total disservice to the United States and the world. We need them not only to shock us with the horror of what happened, we need them to give us a balanced view interviewing the accused, and give solid, actionable proposals as to how to fix it and prevent it from happening again.
And I agree with whoever said this: if crimes were committed, where are the indictments?
> I think the claim that torture is effective is ridiculous given the decades of evidence from actual interrogators,
But the claim that torture is not effective is entirely laughable, irrespective of the politically correct stance the CIA might have taken in the past. Let me offer some simple evidence of that fact. We can try to examine these recent events to determine what happened but they are deeply clouded by politics and butt covering and secret classifications of documents.
But we can readily go back in history to examine this question of “does torture get accurate, actionable, timely results.” Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this in England is the torture of Guy Fawkes after he was caught red handed in the basement of the houses of parliament. We have no political agenda attached here, no fog of war or fear of indictment or attempts to gain political points. Most people don’t even really have a side in this age old conflict left over from the Tudors. None of the data is classified, in fact it is well known and studied. And the data is clear, Fawkes originally gave a false name and refused to cooperate, yet under horrendous torture he revealed his true identity and the identity of his co-conspirators. These men were arrested and, along with Fawkes swung from the gallows to half death, and were eviscerated before the crowds. Fawkes’ torture revealed information, accurate, actionable and timely, and did so within a few days.
By no means am I advocating his treatment, however, the narrower point is simply this: torture does produce what we seek. As to whether it did in the case of Al Queda, the Democrat Committee report says one thing, the CIA reportage says exactly the opposite. At best I can see a pinhole’s worth of data to assess who is being truthful, so I really don’t know.
I will say this though, some of the data in the democrat committee report seems very odd, and really smells rather funny. For example, “some senior” CIA analyst said that “one detainee” was left chained to the wall unattended for seventeen days. Which analyst said this? Which detainee? What happened when this violation was reported up the chain? And perhaps most importantly, how can a man be left for 17 days unattended and not be dead? A human can’t survive without hydration for a quarter of that time. So was he in fact attended, just in a manner the “senior analyst” disapproved of? By no means am I justifying treatment of that kind, regardless of whether he was hydrated. But the lack of detail and the nonsensical details make the story sound apocryphal to me. What it sounds like is what you would say if you were cherry picking information from millions of pages to paint the worst possible picture while ignoring a broader context. It contrasts with the detail given concerning Rahman, which I don’t doubt happened much as the report says, and I agree that it is an outrage that needs someone to be held to account.
Alisa, my question wasn’t directed at you but at the torture is always wrong and we should never ever do it because it destroys our very soul posters.
What makes torturing people worse than rending the same people with steel and fire?
It’s an honest question, because if I had to pick I’d prefer the waterboard to the JDAM.
Sorry for interfering then, staghounds – I was trying to explain that position as someone who leans towards it strongly, but not unreservedly.
Putting aside for a moment the question of whether EITs are moral irrespective of their effectiveness, and staying focused on the question as to whether actionable intelligence was produced, a claim contradicted by the democrat committee report and asserted by the CIA reportage, I’d recommend reading this article. The reporters do what most of us don’t have the time to do, really dig in to the report. Of course even the reporter doesn’t have access to 99.9% of the data, but what they do find is very troubling for anyone who honestly wants to assess the quality of the democrat committee report. For example:
For example, with respect to the claim that Jose Padilla was identified in the dirty bomber plot, the report cites a CIA email saying:
“AZ [Zubaydah] never really gave ‘this is the plot’ type of information. He claimed every plot/operation he had knowledge of and/or was working on was only preliminary. (Padilla and the dirty bomb plot was prior to enhanced and he never really gave us actionable intel to get them).”
Which is damning indeed, except that in the rest of the email claims entirely dismissing this are made, saying:
“identification would not have been made without the lead from Abu Zubaydah.”
and “the CIA response also notes that the CIA officer explained in the same email that after Zubaydah had been subjected to EITs, he “became one of our most valuable sources on [sic] information on al Qa’ida players.”’ (Emphasis mine.)
Using this one example can we really trust the report, or is it as I described earlier, a cherry picking of data from six million pages down to 500 pages, selected to make the data seem as damning as possible, devoid of context to advance a political agenda?
That isn’t to excuse some of the terrible things that certainly did happen, but the Democrat Senate committee has evidently used this as a political football, which is not only disgraceful, but a gross disservice to the United States and the world. And as ever, our appalling mainstream press has been complicit in the circus.
See article at:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/tortured-report_821202.html
No apology necessary and no interference at all. Still hoping for an answer to why it’s worse to put a Luftwaffe pilot on the rack than to turn him into a human torch.
@staghounds
> why it’s worse to put a Luftwaffe pilot on the rack than to turn him into a human torch.
I’ve been thinking about this on and off today, and I think the answer comes down to two things: cruelty and control.
On the one hand we consider killing people necessary sometimes, but never consider cruelty necessary. Hunters have a rule that they might need to kill an animal, but allowing it to suffer is considered very bad form. We consider a cruel death much worse than a clean death (compare for example hanging verses hanging drawing and quartering.)
Why are we like that? I think that mostly it comes down to our sympathetic physiology. As you probably know we have structures in our brain designed to allow us to feel the feelings of another called mirror neurons. The evolutionary purpose seems to be to allow a mother to bond with her baby, thus allowing it a better chance at survival. So we remotely feel the feelings of others, and seeing someone suffer causes us to suffer in some small way sympathetically. We have various social mechanisms to allow us to distance ourselves from it, specifically our ability to make people seem like a different species (“damn Japanese animals”, “evil baby killing terrorists”) which allows us to break the mirroring mechanism, however, the point is that we feel the suffering of others over time, whereas a clean death is not to be wished far but less traumatic.
BTW, the history of the world and of egalitarianism runs parallel with the dissolution of the social mechanisms to distance ourselves from others, it breaks down the barriers that prevent the mirroring.
The second thing is control, and the related matter of a fair chance. When the spitfire is in a dog fight with the German they both have a fair chance of winning. However, when the SS takes the fifty escapees from the great escape and guns them down in the field, they have no chance. Again, we have a native sense of fairness, most likely out of a desire to have a fair chance ourselves, and to kill or torture those who are powerless to protect themselves is a gross violation of this sense of fairness.
OK, that is my best shot at an explanation of the difference. Not a well formed theory, but the beginning of one.
That makes sense. Torturing the helpless is horribly unpleasant for a decent person, or even a pretty fouled up person, to do or even think about. We don’t like to think about what we might have done in our name.
And I’d submit that burning up someone, even someone attacking you, is too. Although that somewhat flies out the window during the dogfight.
I’m not talking, though, about the murder of the escaped flyers. I’m stealing the example from above- the Luftwaffe fliers who parachuted to England during 1940, men with actionable intelligence that would save British and allied lives immediately. AFAIK they were never tortured to get that information, but my question remains- had they been, why would it have been morally different to rack a man today whom you would have been praised for roasting alive yesterday?
(I’m not talking about policy decisions, like well if we torture theirs they will torture ours. I’m till trying to get torture is always so wrong that we should never ever do it.)
Is the fact that he’s in our control and helpless more important than the self defence value of his suffering? Is our empathy more powerful than our intellectual ability to make rational decisions?
To provide a different example, many combat soldiers tell of instances where enemy soldiers who were fighting desperately surrendered at the last second, but were killed anyway- “too late, chum”. And we expect that helpless prisoners, or even helpless noncombatants, will be killed if their survival endangers an ongoing mission.
Objectively, the things we try to do to our enemies are far worse physically than any torture. Why is torture MORALLY worse than these other things, ASSUMING we honestly believe the torture will save lives and injure enemy combat capability- just like blowing the legs off the man on the battlefield, or asleep in his barracks, or on the tram to work at the Krupp factory, will?
Mr. Metzger and a couple of the commenters say they know the answer, I’m just asking them to show his work.
The United Kingdom, as policy, adhered to the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Destroying enemy forces not hors de combat necessarily involved a lot of brutal outcomes, but that is what happens in war. I know someone who as a child, was walking down a town street in England as it was strafed by the Luftwaffe. Pure terror tactics, but there you go.
Your statement really strikes me as infantile.
> why would it have been morally different to rack a man today whom you would have been praised for roasting alive yesterday?
That particular moral question isn’t particularly hard. You “roasted him alive” when he was actively engaged in attacking you or the people or things you are protecting; few would question the right to defend oneself. However, when he is on the rack he poses no imminent danger to you, so the moral calculus is quite different.
Some of the other questions you raise are more complicated, but taking down an active shooter is not.
I would point out that if the facts as presented in the report about Gul Rahman were made up out of whole cloth, how would we tell? Seriously, how would we ever know?
The normal check is that you give people who were in charge of these events the chance to attempt to rebut things so that if you’ve been led around by the nose by your sources, you have a chance to correct that before the final report goes out. All of those potential fact checkers seem not to have been interviewed and compartmentalization is such in the IC that it is unlikely that many know of much more than what happened in their own little patch so to refute a lot of lies, you’d not only have to interview a few people on the other side, but a lot of people. None of that work has been done, which makes the report an apple of discord more than a useful tool for formulating future policy, which is what it is supposed to be.
“TMLutas” writes: “I would point out that if the facts as presented in the report about Gul Rahman were made up out of whole cloth, how would we tell? Seriously, how would we ever know?”
We would know it was not made up whole cloth because there were dozens of earlier articles written about him, starting four years ago, featuring information from independent sources.
It is hard to prevent atrocities from leaking forever. Dozens of people came forward to the press over time — torturers who got too disgusted, relatives of the man, other people who were in the oubliette with him.
The problem is that the press was largely ignored. Some people, it seems, would prefer to believe a vast conspiracy made the whole thing up.
As with the denials by Germans of having any idea whatsoever of what was going on all around them during WW-II, it is possible to remain willfully ignorant of evil as long as you like, but it is also something of a a deliberate act to do so.
Note the dates on these:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/36071994/ns/us_news-security/
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/who-killed-gul-rahman
We would also know because the documents used by the report authors to validate the story came from the CIA itself. They destroyed much of the evidence of their crimes, but not all of it.
However, if you wish to believe none of this ever happened, it is impossible to stop you.
We now know the name of “CIA Officer 1”, who was responsible for Gul Rahman’s death.
@Laird
> We now know the name of “CIA Officer 1″, who was responsible for Gul Rahman’s death.
Interesting article, I think it says something about the Democrat committee report that it doesn’t mention (based on my search of the report anyway) this information from the link Laird cited:
“A few years later a limited probe of the torture program by the Department of Justice recommended that Rahman’s death be the subject of a full criminal investigation. Attorney General Eric Holder, who was busy not prosecuting Wall Street firms for collapsing the global economy, eventually closed the case.”
I think that that investigation absolutely should have taken place. But the failure to do so seems to be ignored in the democrat committee report. Call me cynical, but it occurs to me that this might be because it was Obama’s Justice Department who did not pursue it.
“I think that that investigation absolutely should have taken place. But the failure to do so seems to be ignored in the democrat committee report. Call me cynical, but it occurs to me that this might be because it was Obama’s Justice Department who did not pursue it.” — of course. Obama shut down all attempts to meaningfully investigate and prosecute the perpetrators. One might argue about why — my own view is maximally cynical, probably even more cynical than that of most people here.
And, yes, it would have been nice if the Senate Intelligence Committee had discussed this part of the story, but they had every political incentive to halt their investigation well short of that point, much to the nation’s misfortune.
Mr. Orr, that’s what I’m trying to reach, the “more complicated” problem.
No one would say that the Luftwaffe courier carrying the plans for tomorrow’s raid isn’t a valid target because he poses no active threat. Or the Luftwaffe mechanics who will never fire a shot, or the train drivers carrying replacement engines, aren’t legitimate to kill to prevent or weaken future attacks.
I assert our hypothetical Luftwaffe pilot or radio man on the rack also does not pose an active current physical danger.
BUT, getting the information out of his head tonight DOES have a current self defence value- we can jam his radio, bomb his fuel depot, or more easily shoot down his comrades on tomorrow night’s raid.
We don’t stop trying to kill the Luftwaffe man after his bombs are dropped. If we can kill him tonight to stop him bombing tomorrow, why is it immoral to torture him tonight to stop his comrades from bombing tomorrow?
I am clear about the morality of self defence, I’m curious about why torture is worse than killing even assuming the torture has a serious self defence value.
If killing people in self defence is moral, they why is torturing them in self defence, as Mr. Metzger asserts, never moral?
And don’t change it to a tactical discussion of whether torture works, because that’s not my question. What makes torture designed to save lives immoral when killing the same people to save the same lives would not be?
> If killing people in self defence is moral, they why is torturing them in self defence, as Mr. Metzger asserts, never moral?
For the reasons already stated about cruelty and control. I’m not saying it is a convincing argument, however it is the genesis of those moral views. To answer any more deeply requires a shared framework on how to assess morals, one which evidently you and Perry don’t share.
Perhaps you have a gag point beyond which you will not go. For example, with respect to your aforementioned Luftwaffe pilot, you might be OK with torturing him to obtain information, however, how would you feel about chaining him to the wall and torturing one of his children to get him to talk? Is that beyond your gag point? After all, the information obtained might well save the lives of many children on your side.
Would you like me to offer some even more extreme examples of applying psychological pressure?
Take today’s massacre in Pakistan. Gunmen in a school, what if, in a chemistry lab, a technician makes a chlorine/acid bomb and douses an attacker in acid and suffocates him with the gas? A chemical attack, but a moral use of force in my book, for want of better. Whereas systematically doing that hors de combat or with alternatives to hand in combat, I would condemn. I suspect it would have been illegal to have done that in today’s situation.
The RAF in WW2 got lots of intel from captured German pilots by bugging them in their quarters, many translators reportedly German Jewish refugees. Far better than, say, getting dogs to bugger them which has probably happened to someone in US custody in recent years.
A captured Coastal Command airman reportedly told the Germans that they could home in on signals given out by the German Metox radar dectector, thereby disguising the use of centimetric radar. Jerry reportedly used this nugget to instruct U boats to turn off the warning devices, thereby massively aiding air attacks on surfaced U boats.
Well since I’m already trying to burn his child up with bombs…
I think if incinerating cities and their inhabitants (or droning wedding parties) doesn’t trigger the gag reflex, then gagging at torture is a fraud.
They don’t mind torture, they just mind hearing the screams.
staghounds,
Please stop trolling along there, and tell me what you would have done differently to win WW2 if you were the Chief of Staff of the RAF.
I suppose I’m channeling a court case I seem to remember, where former soldiers sued the Army because they had been given something- Atabrine? It caused some of them to go blind. The court dismissed the case, reasoning that if the Army could get you killed without being liable, then blindness was a lesser included risk.
Awful as it sounds, death is the assumed price of war. If my enemies can kill me, I’d assume waterboarding is on the agenda too. And going to war also means willingness to expose your own innocents to risk of death, war against populations being “normal” now.
And it’s an acceptance of being willing to kill, too. Again, if you are willing to bomb a city to win a war, squealing about the rack is just posturing to make yourself feel better.
staghounds, it was UK law until recently, certainly into the 1980s that members of the Armed Forces were effectively disposable at the will of the Crown, and claims for negligence over injury or exposure to toxins were simply barred at law.
You do not seem to have addressed the reasoning behind and the impact of the Hague and Geneva Conventions.
It may well have been a British case that I’m imperfectly recalling.
They don’t matter to my question, because I’m asking why torture is “always wrong”, and why using it means that we are no better than our enemies.
No one has, I think, here said that the wrong of torture is dependent on a treaty prohibiting it. The same treaties prohibit a lot of things we did, using our example, to Germans and Japanese. And the same treaties permit many things that are far worse than torture.
We send our own soldiers to risk far greater harms than being tortured, too.
Mr. Metzger at least says that torture and droning are both wrong.
I’m asking just about the “torture is always wrong” and “it means there is no difference between us and our enemies” people.
Why?
What exactly makes torturing someone worse than killing or maiming him? I submit it’s nothing to do with the target’s feelings, since I suspect they’d prefer the waterboard to the blind ward and Guantanamo to the grave.
“What exactly makes torturing someone worse than killing or maiming him?” — indeed, and why would rape be worse than murder? Surely if one is willing to murder, one should be willing to rape. Doesn’t that mean that rape is a good thing? And surely torture is not always wrong, and neither is slavery. What if you have a pressing need to have your cotton picked? Surely that must count for something. Only an idealist would claim slavery is always useless, it can sometimes be extremely useful!
Finally a response from Mr. Metzger! Leaving aside false analogies*, and the question of whether this particular “program” was effective or not, what makes torture in the context of things as the CIA saw them always wrong?
So wrong that torture is something we should never do when killing doesn’t get the same prohibition?
That is, where the target is someone the laws of war would have permitted the army to kill, who was not killed but by fate or effort delivered alive, and whose mind contains information that it is honestly believed will save lives on our side if immediately obtained?
And yes, I’m bothered by lots of aspects of the report, not least by the indifference of the people in whose name and for whose money these things happened.
* why would rape be worse than murder?
If I had to pick between the two, I wouldn’t agree that it is.
Surely if one is willing to murder, one should be willing to rape.
Not talking about murder, talking about killing in a defensive war.
And surely torture is not always wrong, and neither is slavery.
Of course slavery is not always wrong. We force people to work in lots of circumstance to make restitution for crime is the easiest example.
It is wrong to torture trolls.
Indeed, and it is easy to dismiss someone as a troll when one has no answer to the question asked.
Yes, but one begins to look like a troll if one repeatedly ask questions of others, yet one fails to respond to points others put, for example relating to the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Although, with the length of this thread, that might be forgivable, unlike torture.
@staghounds
> And it’s an acceptance of being willing to kill, too. Again, if you are willing to bomb a city to win a war, squealing about the rack is just posturing to make yourself feel better.
But I have already indicated the difference between the two. The moral distinction is to do with cruelty and control.
However, you haven’t made your position clear, so it is hard to argue against the specifics of your concerns. Are you claiming that both bombing a city is wrong and torturing is wrong, or are you claiming they are both acceptable in some circumstances? You claim they are the moral equivalent, but they are different in significant ways, and what would be a useful point in the discussion with you depends on which side of the aisle you are sitting on.
You have accepted that torturing the guys kids to get him to talk is morally equivalent to bombing their city, which would lead me to believe you oppose both. But your earlier answers seemed to indicate that you think both bombing and torture are appropriate. If so, and you even go so far as to accept torturing kids then I’d like to offer you some more extreme examples to understand how far you will go. If you think them both repugnant, I’d like to offer you some reasons why bombing cities is sometimes the best choice. However, if you sit on the fence, I don’t know what direction to go.
However, again without a shared moral framework to work from it is not really possible to resolve this discussion much as you can’t agree on the meaning of 1 + 1, unless you agree what base the numbers are in. 2 and 10 are both perfectly correct answers absent that agreement.
There is a wonderful clip of the (fictionalised) Sir Thomas More in this clip from A Man for All Seasons, in which Sir Thomas refuses to arrest an alleged spy, and he explains his reasons, the key part starts at 2’11” as the spy leaves, having had a disastrous ‘job interview’.
The same arguments apply to torture as giving the State unlimited right over our lives.
Not that the real Sir Thomas lived up to his screen portrayal mind, nor did he get the benefit of law in the sticky end, but there you go.
Fraser’s comment is very helpful, and so I’ll try to contribute to the discussion some more from my personal POV. I can’t speak for staghounds and his positions or motivations for asking the question, but I do share the need to ask the question myself – the reason being that I really am not sure what I think about the whole matter. Note the think part, as I do know how I feel about it: I do feel that torture is worse than killing, but I find it next to impossible to explain this feeling and to give it a rational basis. And, without dismissing the importance of feelings, rational basis is what I think we need most when talking about issues such as this. So, whether staghounds is a troll or not, I certainly am not one, and I would like to hear from someone who does have such a rational underpinning for his position (namely: ‘unlike killing, torture is always wrong’
@Alisa
> I would like to hear from someone who does have such a rational underpinning for his position (namely: ‘unlike killing, torture is always wrong’
Alisa, I will offer the moral justification for this position, though I will state up front that I do not agree with it entirely.
It rests on two moral axioms, namely that unnecessary cruelty is always wrong, and that one is only responsible for one’s own actions, or those who act as our proxies. Both of these seem to be positions that most people would accept as morally foundational. They also have a very solid evolutionary basis; I described above the mirror neuron structures, this being the reason you feel a certain way about it, irrespective of your rational understanding — you, and all of us, have a structure in our brain, plugged in to the low levels of our subconscious, that makes us mirror the feelings of others, and the feeling of pain and suffering is one we don’t much like.
Putting these together it is plain that I (and when I say we I always mean “my proxies or I”) am responsible for my actions, and causing unnecessary cruelty, irrespective of the consequences to others, is fundamentally wrong. Killing someone is not unnecessarily cruel, assuming you “do the decent thing” and kill them cleanly and quickly. Torturing someone might give me information to prevent someone else being unnecessarily cruel, however, I am only responsible for my own moral actions, not the actions of what someone else might do. This being the “we are better than them” argument.
The word “necessary” is pretty key here. However, at its foundation, it rests on the individual transaction between the torturer and tortured, the mirror neurons engage in that individual transaction, not in some second or third order consequences of it, and so unnecessary should be, by our evolutionary moral principles, be restriction to the boundaries of that individual transaction.
There are some caveats associated with this. Killing someone can have second order effects of cruelty, namely the pain and suffering of their living loved ones. However, we dismiss this as a secondary effect, outside of the individualized transaction. Also, it leads us to limit the methods of killing that we employ. For example, dropping napalm on a village to allow them to slowly burn to death is something that evokes the same gag reaction. We see this in capital punishment where the French chose the guillotine to make execution painless and quick, and the on going outrage about lethal injection executions taking too long or being unnecessarily painful.
As I say I think there are lots of holes in this argument, but I think it is fundamentally the structure of the argument allowing killing but not torture.
Exactly. This is not to say ‘gotcha’, but to say that this is as far as I myself got, and am left stuck with the holes – the holes, it seems, being directly connected to the ‘always’ and the ‘unnecessary’, and to similar parts of the premise itself. Still, I very much do appreciate the effort: it does help the reasoning process, even when short of providing definitive answers.
@Alisa
> even when short of providing definitive answers.
Of course the fundamental problem Alisa is the one I mentioned earlier: the answer to all moral questions depends on what you mean by moral, that is to say the source of your moral standard. I’m not sure anyone here is going to agree on something so fundamental as to where moral values should rightly come from, and until that is agreed the consequences of those moral standards when applied to a specific moral problem will certainly not find a meeting of the minds. All that can really be done is to examine the consequences of a particular moral standard and to see if that consequence indicates an adjustment in the underlying moral standard, which is why I raised with the other guy the question of whether he is OK with torturing a captive’s kids to get valid information.
After all, were we all Aztecs we would not only believe it morally allowable, but a moral imperative to cut out the beating heart of innocents, for them to not do so was immoral.
As to the more general matter of public policy, as to what moral standard should be applied there, I think it is rather a soft science. Mostly it is what society at large thinks moral or not, at some level of certainty beyond pure majoritarianism, but that is a moving and circumstantial thing. Circumstantial being a key word. On September 12th 2001 the number of people who wanted to allow extreme forms of torture was a lot larger than it is today.
Alisa is right where I am on this. I don’t have a position, I’m trying to understand someone else’s.
“Killing someone is not unnecessarily cruel, assuming you “do the decent thing” and kill them cleanly and quickly.”
In what war was being killed quickly and cleanly even a common result?
And I’m not talking about “unnecessary” cruelty. In this case, I’m talking about situations where the torturer honestly believes that the cruelty is necessary to save lives. I’m, again, talking about the statements that no matter whether it is useful or even life saving, torture is always so wrong that we should never do it.
I think I understand what you mean by cruelty and control being why we revolt at torture, but I don’t see they apply to torture any more than they are applicable to, say, sniping, or city bombing.
If you’re putting a bullet in a man’s brain as he sits in a trench, or are scattering high explosive on a tank factory you pretty much control the situation. And I submit that being shot in the head is crueler than torture. And that torture is FAR less cruel than the results of “ordinary” warfare down at the veteran’s hospital.
Maybe I’m stuck on “cruelty”. Is shooting people less cruel than waterboarding them?
Perhaps I’m obtuse, or strange, but wouldn’t YOU rather be waterboarded than spend your life in a wheelchair?
Of course, Fraser – that is a given. The purpose of such discussions as I see it, is not so much to reach the meeting of the minds (it is nice when that happens, but is less than interesting), but to determine or even establish those moral standards – our own as much as those of others. IOW, it is not torture in and of itself that interests me most – as important as it is in the practical sphere – but rather the issue of torture as a means of testing or reexamining, or maybe even readjusting my own moral standards, after having learned about and duly considered those of others.
Alright, Alisa, stop with the channeling… 😉
My nagging suspicion is that there are very few people out there, if any, who can answer this question better than you or I can (not least because the issue of torture is a kind of taboo for discussion). As with most moral questions, most of the time, most of us are guided by our “gut feeling”: if it feels wrong, it must be wrong. That is fine, I guess, in interpersonal relationships as part of civil society: even though I’m one of those annoying types that like to think things to bits and always asks ‘why?’ until people tell me to shut up and stop arguing (the ‘…I’m not arguing, just asking…’ reply doesn’t seem to help for some reason…), the gut-feeling thing does work surprisingly well most of the time. When it does get tricky and very much less than enough, is when it is followed in matters of public policy – i.e. when it no longer is between you and your friends or family or neighbors, but involves things done to people you will never meet, in your name and with your money. This is when we must use reason, and not content ourselves with mere gut feelings.
You’re right about strangers. The farther we get from knowing the people with whom we deal, the easier it gets to treat them like cyphers. And to let ourselves be treated that way, too. Mr. Metzger had one really good point, that these horror events have become mere stories and will only result in talk.
I try to keep sonder going in myself all the time, even though now and then it’s a bit of a challenge.
But even empathy has its limits. There are people walking around who had Ahmed Ressam and Zacarias Moussawi in their hands on September 12- just like there were people holding German fliers the night after Coventry. Under those circumstances, reason and human feelings both say that torture isn’t the slightest problem right now.
They are the people I’m thinking of. If torture is always wrong, what do you tell them? I don’t think “Perry Metzger says so” would convince.