New Torture Question

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
41

[quote]dhickey wrote:
GDollars37 wrote:
Here’s an even better question for the torture advocates: does the president have the right to threaten or even torture the children of captured enemy combatants? Because John Yoo, author of the torture memos, maintains that he does. Would love to hear your answers on this, which is a far more valid hypothetical than the “ticking time bomb.”

no.

Captured enemy combatants should be interogated (or tortured if you like) based on best practices sorted by educated professionals. The president, or any politician, should not be weighing in on tactics. Give you best men the mission and let them do their jobs.[/quote]

That’s not the issue. The issue is whether it’s legally permissible. The legal defenders of torture argue it is. I would ask torture defenders whether it is morally permissible. If you’re going to argue that the ends justify the means, then surely mutilating some Yemeni child is worth preventing an attack on an American city with biological weapons?

42

It has something to do with the nature of war.
Do I beleive in the use of torture? hell no. Would I ever torture someone? HAIL TO THE NO.

Torture is evil and barbarous, no doubt, but in war we have to do terrible things. No one wants to do that… only a maniac would want to torture somebody. But that is the nature of war.

War is bad business. If I were fighting in a war and I knew for a fact that this POW knew something that would save the lives of my fellow soldiers or civillians on either side I might just have to do what it takes to get him to tell me. I would beg the guy to just tell me and to not make either of us go through it. I would hate myself later, but yeah I would do it. I wouldn’t humiliate, disfigure or permanently damage them either. And after they told I would tell them how sorry I was.

The simple fact is that in war, the moral high ground is not always the best option. And so I would never ever pass judgement on any soldier who has to do that, nor would I ever say that doing their duty to their country is wrong unless it can be proven that the torture was unnecessary or done on someone who had no intel or if they did the person any permanent damage. But we are dealing with a sickeningly gray area…
Sorry if this makes no sense.

43

[quote]force of one wrote:
It has something to do with the nature of war.
Do I beleive in the use of torture? hell no. Would I ever torture someone? HAIL TO THE NO.

Torture is evil and barbarous, no doubt, but in war we have to do terrible things. No one wants to do that… only a maniac would want to torture somebody. But that is the nature of war.

War is bad business. If I were fighting in a war and I knew for a fact that this POW knew something that would save the lives of my fellow soldiers or civillians on either side I might just have to do what it takes to get him to tell me. I would beg the guy to just tell me and to not make either of us go through it. I would hate myself later, but yeah I would do it. I wouldn’t humiliate, disfigure or permanently damage them either. And after they told I would tell them how sorry I was.

The simple fact is that in war, the moral high ground is not always the best option. And so I would never ever pass judgement on any soldier who has to do that, nor would I ever say that doing their duty to their country is wrong unless it can be proven that the torture was unnecessary or done on someone who had no intel or if they did the person any permanent damage. But we are dealing with a sickeningly gray area…
Sorry if this makes no sense.
[/quote]

Seeing as how it’s so subjective, and there is a possibility that torturing someone is going to give you bad intel or no intel, doesn’t it make sense to not do it though. I mean there is absolutely no way to know if the information you do get is credible. If someone could point me to a statistic that torturing terrorists would give credible info 100% of the time or hell even 80% of the time, then we could at least have a good argument for it’s use on the strict effectiveness of it. But we don’t even have that, in fact we have a lot of statistical data that it doesn’t provide accurate or any intel very often. Wheras treating people with respect HAS shown to have high success rates. Remember, this evil person who you are torturing isn’t all that much different than you or I, they were essentially Brainwashed by thier society and culture and specific figures in thier lives to think and act a certain way. I still feel like you are going to get BETTER intel and save MORE of your soldiers and civilians lives by trying to un-brainwash the person, or at least try to read them and play to thier weaknesses so they slip up and say something they might have otherwise not said.

If you had a granite rock with a small crack in it you could try to break the rock open with your hands or a hammer. Granite is very hard though so you could also put a few drops of water in the crack and freeze it and you might be surprised how easily the resulting ice will split the rock. If your job is to split granite rocks and you find out that if you hit 100 of them with a hammer repeatedly you will only break maybe 10 or 20, but if you dip them in water and then freeze them you will break 80 or 90 of them, are you going to hit any of them with a hammer?
(cue someone telling me splitting a rock is in no way shape or form the same as torturing a terrorist scum)

V

44

[quote]Vegita wrote:
Since none of the pro torture people answered this question posed by Orion and myself, let me start a new post where this is the premise specifically we are debating.

If the government or the proponents of torture are only looking to save lives, why are you not arguing for the outlaw of the automobile. There is no basic human right that says anyone is entitled to drive or ride in an automobile. You could save Far more people by outlawing the automobile than you could by torturing any suspected terrorist. over 500,000 people have died in an automobile related accident since 1994.

over 40,000 people in the US each year die as a result of this machine, yet it is not outlawed, you can operate on at 16 years of age, and when mixed with an over the couter drug, Alcohol, is just as deadly as a bullet or a bomb.

So again to re-emphasise, why do you feel it is ok to violate someones basic human rights with an act of evil (torture) in the name of saving a life, when you do not feel it is the right choice to outlaw an automobile which there is no basic human right violated. It would be inconvenient as hell sure, but you could at least sleep at night, and you would do more to saving lives.

V[/quote]

Interesting . . . well, as an avid horseman and agrarian lifestyle proponent - I’m all for the return to Horse power.

What was your point?

45

[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
dhickey wrote:
GDollars37 wrote:
Here’s an even better question for the torture advocates: does the president have the right to threaten or even torture the children of captured enemy combatants? Because John Yoo, author of the torture memos, maintains that he does. Would love to hear your answers on this, which is a far more valid hypothetical than the “ticking time bomb.”

no.

Captured enemy combatants should be interogated (or tortured if you like) based on best practices sorted by educated professionals. The president, or any politician, should not be weighing in on tactics. Give you best men the mission and let them do their jobs.

That’s not the issue. The issue is whether it’s legally permissible. The legal defenders of torture argue it is. I would ask torture defenders whether it is morally permissible. If you’re going to argue that the ends justify the means, then surely mutilating some Yemeni child is worth preventing an attack on an American city with biological weapons?[/quote]

Did you not read the part about enemy combatants. If you don’t want to get “tortured”, don’t try and kill us. Or tell us what you know. Again, is shooting them on the battle field a morally superior option for you? I would chose waterboarding. I have never been waterboarded before, but I am pretty sure death would suck.

As for the legality of certain tactics, I am all ears. I guess I really don’t have anything to add to that discussion.

46

[quote]orion wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote:
Actually thinking there’s a meaningful equivalence between terrorists and the automobile, and trying to argue on that basis is explainable only by serious mental disease.

Why can’t you folk grasp that individuals who:

  1. Take up arms against the United States, but not according to the Geneva Convention or as any sort of uniformed miltary

  2. Engage in terrorist acts or attempts to murder US military personnel (as they are not engaged in legal warfare, what they are doing is murder)

  3. Are not US citizens

are not in a category deserving of all your fucking whining, nor in a category entitled to protections of the US Constitution or Geneva Convention, and frankly you ought to be applauding the United States for not inflicting physical pain or injury on them as vast numbers of countries in the world in fact do?

And again, they fall under the Geneva convention one way or the other and even if that weren�?�´t so it would still have to be determined by a tribunal under the rules of the Geneva Convention. So the US is in violation of that treaty no matter how you spin it.

As anyone interested in facts and not only opinions knows, what the US did to them awaiting those trials is highly “verboten” under yes, the Geneva convention.

The US Supreme court has ruled in Hamdan vs Rumsfeld that those detainees at least fall under article 3 of the 2. Geneva convention which reads as follows:

Art 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following
provisions:

(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) taking of hostages;
(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

Secondly, nobody “falls under the protection of the constitution”. The constitution of the US does not protect US citizens per se but limits the powers of the federal government. In this case not only your legal reasoning is flawed but the very understanding of what a “constitution” actually is.

Seriously.

[/quote]

What part of the constition limit tactics used in war?

47

[quote]PB-Crawl wrote:
na clearly countries where hoards of well armed people drive around the country enforcing laws deemed good by the majority are functioning better than our criminal checks and balances.[/quote]

When are you emigrating?

48

Other than the moral factor, torture should be avoided simply because it’s not a good way of gathering good intelligence.

Torture anyone long enough and he’ll tell you anything you wish to hear, just to make it stop. You then have to recheck whatever he told you to make sure it’s not complete fabrication. And if you have the means to double check the intel in the first place, conventional interrogation should be plenty enough to get whatever info there is to get.

The one thing torture is good at is keeping populations afraid and cowed. That’s why every tinpot dictator and despot use it lavishly on their own people. It keeps them in line. Torture is not an intelligence gathering tool, it’s a terror tool.

There’s a problem with a country who self-titles itself “a shinig beacon of liberty and freedom” and then uses the basest, most vile tools available - even when those tools are known not to produce reliable results - to reach its ends.

49

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Nor panties on head as torture.[/quote]

???

Someone had a good time last night.

50

[quote]Makavali wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote:
Nor panties on head as torture.

???

Someone had a good time last night.[/quote]

He’s talking about something that, while not torture, is stupid and demeaning. Done to detainees at Bagram, Guantanamo and elsewhere.

51

[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
Makavali wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote:
Nor panties on head as torture.

???

Someone had a good time last night.

He’s talking about something that, while not torture, is stupid and demeaning. Done to detainees at Bagram, Guantanamo and elsewhere.[/quote]

Has anyone ever broken and spilled their guts after being panty-headed?

52

[quote]dhickey wrote:
orion wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote:
Actually thinking there’s a meaningful equivalence between terrorists and the automobile, and trying to argue on that basis is explainable only by serious mental disease.

Why can’t you folk grasp that individuals who:

  1. Take up arms against the United States, but not according to the Geneva Convention or as any sort of uniformed miltary

  2. Engage in terrorist acts or attempts to murder US military personnel (as they are not engaged in legal warfare, what they are doing is murder)

  3. Are not US citizens

are not in a category deserving of all your fucking whining, nor in a category entitled to protections of the US Constitution or Geneva Convention, and frankly you ought to be applauding the United States for not inflicting physical pain or injury on them as vast numbers of countries in the world in fact do?

And again, they fall under the Geneva convention one way or the other and even if that weren�??�?�´t so it would still have to be determined by a tribunal under the rules of the Geneva Convention. So the US is in violation of that treaty no matter how you spin it.

As anyone interested in facts and not only opinions knows, what the US did to them awaiting those trials is highly “verboten” under yes, the Geneva convention.

The US Supreme court has ruled in Hamdan vs Rumsfeld that those detainees at least fall under article 3 of the 2. Geneva convention which reads as follows:

Art 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following
provisions:

(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) taking of hostages;
(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

Secondly, nobody “falls under the protection of the constitution”. The constitution of the US does not protect US citizens per se but limits the powers of the federal government. In this case not only your legal reasoning is flawed but the very understanding of what a “constitution” actually is.

Seriously.

What part of the constition limit tactics used in war?[/quote]

According to your constitution that is not even a war.

53

[quote]pookie wrote:
GDollars37 wrote:
Makavali wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote:
Nor panties on head as torture.

???

Someone had a good time last night.

He’s talking about something that, while not torture, is stupid and demeaning. Done to detainees at Bagram, Guantanamo and elsewhere.

Has anyone ever broken and spilled their guts after being panty-headed?
[/quote]

They were going to put bugs on a guy who was afraid of them. I’m sure it would work in the right case. Some people are afraid of kitties and other weird stuff. while frightening to them, i think it’s silly. I alos think just because it scares the crap out of them, it’s not torture.

I use the scale of if I did it to gals on a schoolyard, bugs, and didn’t get tinto trouble, or we do it to our own troops in training, it’s not torture. Cutting off fingers is torture.

Playing to someone’s weakness is not torture.

54

[quote]tom63 wrote:
pookie wrote:
GDollars37 wrote:
Makavali wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote:
Nor panties on head as torture.

???

Someone had a good time last night.

He’s talking about something that, while not torture, is stupid and demeaning. Done to detainees at Bagram, Guantanamo and elsewhere.

Has anyone ever broken and spilled their guts after being panty-headed?

They were going to put bugs on a guy who was afraid of them. I’m sure it would work in the right case. Some people are afraid of kitties and other weird stuff. while frightening to them, i think it’s silly. I alos think just because it scares the crap out of them, it’s not torture.

I use the scale of if I did it to gals on a schoolyard, bugs, and didn’t get tinto trouble, or we do it to our own troops in training, it’s not torture. Cutting off fingers is torture.

Playing to someone’s weakness is not torture.[/quote]

Scaring someone or creeping them out also isn’t the best way to get them to tell you what they do know if it is anything at all. Again, why do something thats innefective. I’m not so much morally against putting bugs on someone, but it just seems pointless and stupid. The fact that it is a tactic used by boys on a schoolyard to scare the girls should give you an idea of why it is not a good tactic.

V

55

I would also like to point out that in order for torture to work, there has to be the threat of death being the final outcome. Id we as a country say publicly that we will only waterboard people, don’t you think they listen to the news?

I mean i’m sure newspapers around the world are gonna put that on the front page. US Says it will waterboard" and then with a little bit of research into what waterboarding is, by now, any person in the world (save bushmen) who get captured by the us and are waterboarded are in no way afraid they are going to die. They know it is a tactic that is used to trick them into thinking they are drowning. hey are not getting fingers cut off, they are not physically harmed.

Therefore the technique loses all it’s punch to begin with. I’m sure maybe it could have worked the first few times you used it on someone before all the news got wind of it, but even then, after you fake drown someone for the 4th or 5th time, don’t you think they are eventually going to catch on that you aren’t going to kill them.

V

56

[quote]
So no wonder your little nerves are all frazzled from terrorists being waterboarded, or having to wear panties on their heads. You just can’t stand that.[/quote]
This is just sad. You are a smart man, but you are completely brainwashed by the US imperialistic agenda. Some are terrorist, some are not. If there is a suspicion they will be taken to prison with no fair trial or anything. How would you feel if Iran invaded your country because of suspected terrorist activity, and you were captured for being a terrorist, but there wasn’t any good evidence for it, only suspicion?

[quote]
Islamic extremists beheading people, that doesn’t bother you. Not worth your criticism. Their blowing up women and children, naaah, that doesn’t earn your criticism. Communists killing people by the tens of millions: nope, instead criticize the US for helping them be driven out of a country they were adding to their list of oppressed peoples.[/quote]
Obviously terrorism is a problem, and there is no justification for killing innocent civilians. However nobody does this better than the United states. After WW2 USA has been one of the worst nations when it comes to this, killing millions of innocent defenseless people. But where is your concern for them? Why can’t you see the atrocities committed by the United states? Which has been far more numerous than that of the terrorists in the middle-east?

Perhaps one day you will learn to look beyond what the state wants you to believe, and start realizing that the biggest most powerful terrorist state is the United states. Do some reading on what you have done to countries in south-america. Do some reading on vietnam. Read some books by Noam Chomsky.

57

[quote]orion wrote:

What part of the constition limit tactics used in war?

According to your constitution that is not even a war.

[/quote]

touche. Ok what part of the constitution limits tactics in a military conflict.

58

[quote]molnes wrote:

So no wonder your little nerves are all frazzled from terrorists being waterboarded, or having to wear panties on their heads. You just can’t stand that.
This is just sad. You are a smart man, but you are completely brainwashed by the US imperialistic agenda. Some are terrorist, some are not. If there is a suspicion they will be taken to prison with no fair trial or anything. How would you feel if Iran invaded your country because of suspected terrorist activity, and you were captured for being a terrorist, but there wasn’t any good evidence for it, only suspicion?
[/quote]
I would say “no fair, it is morrally acceptable to raid my country and bomb us, but you better not waterboard me or I’m telling the UN”. I would then request a trial and laywer in Iran with protection under sharia law. I wonder how that would work out for me?

Oh yeah, you’re going to take a bath on this one. Welcome to the ignor list by the way.

Noam Chomsky…laughing out loud now.

59

[quote]dhickey wrote:
molnes wrote:

So no wonder your little nerves are all frazzled from terrorists being waterboarded, or having to wear panties on their heads. You just can’t stand that.
This is just sad. You are a smart man, but you are completely brainwashed by the US imperialistic agenda. Some are terrorist, some are not. If there is a suspicion they will be taken to prison with no fair trial or anything. How would you feel if Iran invaded your country because of suspected terrorist activity, and you were captured for being a terrorist, but there wasn’t any good evidence for it, only suspicion?

I would say “no fair, it is morrally acceptable to raid my country and bomb us, but you better not waterboard me or I’m telling the UN”. I would then request a trial and laywer in Iran with protection under sharia law. I wonder how that would work out for me?

Obviously terrorism is a problem, and there is no justification for killing innocent civilians. However nobody does this better than the United states. After WW2 USA has been one of the worst nations when it comes to this, killing millions of innocent defenseless people. But where is your concern for them? Why can’t you see the atrocities committed by the United states? Which has been far more numerous than that of the terrorists in the middle-east?

Oh yeah, you’re going to take a bath on this one. Welcome to the ignor list by the way.

Predictable. Perhaps someday there will be a cure for your mental disorder.
Perhaps one day you will learn to look beyond what the state wants you to believe, and start realizing that the biggest most powerful terrorist state is the United states. Do some reading on what you have done to countries in south-america. Do some reading on vietnam. Read some books by Noam Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky…laughing out loud now.[/quote]

Love the pronouncement of the ingnor list, your a complete douchebag. (since i’m already on his ignore list can someone tell him I called him a DB?

Thanks,

V

[edited because I spelled douchebag wrong, what a douchebag I am]

60

[quote]molnes wrote:

So no wonder your little nerves are all frazzled from terrorists being waterboarded, or having to wear panties on their heads. You just can’t stand that.
This is just sad. You are a smart man, but you are completely brainwashed by the US imperialistic agenda. Some are terrorist, some are not. If there is a suspicion they will be taken to prison with no fair trial or anything. How would you feel if Iran invaded your country because of suspected terrorist activity, and you were captured for being a terrorist, but there wasn’t any good evidence for it, only suspicion?

Islamic extremists beheading people, that doesn’t bother you. Not worth your criticism. Their blowing up women and children, naaah, that doesn’t earn your criticism. Communists killing people by the tens of millions: nope, instead criticize the US for helping them be driven out of a country they were adding to their list of oppressed peoples.
Obviously terrorism is a problem, and there is no justification for killing innocent civilians. However nobody does this better than the United states. After WW2 USA has been one of the worst nations when it comes to this, killing millions of innocent defenseless people. But where is your concern for them? Why can’t you see the atrocities committed by the United states? Which has been far more numerous than that of the terrorists in the middle-east?

Predictable. Perhaps someday there will be a cure for your mental disorder.
Perhaps one day you will learn to look beyond what the state wants you to believe, and start realizing that the biggest most powerful terrorist state is the United states. Do some reading on what you have done to countries in south-america. Do some reading on vietnam. Read some books by Noam Chomsky.
[/quote]

WTF Noam Chomsky?!? dude - that’s like reading the National Enquirer to understand sentient life on other planets . . .