Terror Report Released

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
101

[quote]angry chicken wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]angry chicken wrote:

[quote]Facepalm_Death wrote:

[quote]NorCal916 wrote:
So when we waterboard, we lose our “Moral Authority”.

When we kill civilians with drones, we don’t.

Do I have that right?[/quote]

Killing civilians with drones can be a genuine accident or misjudgment. Torture never is
[/quote]

“Collateral damage” is KNOWN FACT with drone strikes. Those orders are made with full knowledge that innocent people are likely to die. [/quote]

Depending on where a conflict takes place, collateral damage may always be a known fact anyway. Fighting with any conventional weapons at all in the streets of a city is likely to kill civilians.
[/quote]War is war. People die. I get it. Humans have historically and continue on in present time to use the pretext of “saving lives” as an excuse to horrible, unthinkable things to other humans. From dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the drone strikes going on right now, I would say it’s a pretty fair statement that the USA doesn’t really give a fuck about collateral damage… They may spin up a nice PR campaign, but at the end of the day, it’s still WAR.[quote]
Torture is always deliberate.
[/quote]And dropping a bomb, firing a missile and pulling the trigger on a rifle is always deliberate as well. It’s an unfortunate (for the person being tortured) part of war. Here’s an idea: don’t try to kill American citizens or associate yourself with people conspiring to kill American citizens and we will try not to torture you. How does that sound?[quote]

Where do you draw the line between torture and advanced interrogation?

[/quote]Permanent damage/disfigurement? I don’t know - everyone has a different pain threshold and different fears that can be exploited. I’d say that question is very subjective.[quote]

How do you establish rapport with detainees that already hate you as a matter of religious policy?
[/quote]If someone hates me as a matter of religious policy, I’d probably not waste my time in even trying to establish a rapport. I’d use the fact that they are fanatically religious against them and exploit that weakness. I’m afraid I’m not very sophisticated when it comes to that kind of thing. Especially when it comes to fucking terrorists who either tried, is planning to try or has succeeded in killing my fellow Americans. I’d probably just start off with a pair of pliers and work my way to the bottom of the tool box. But hey, no one has ever accused me of being subtle. I’d show the muther fucker what his left nut tasted like.[quote]

honest questions
[/quote]

And before you all start calling me an asshole, I have a friend that I used to do mortgage with who is a veteran. He was captured and held for a while before he was rescued. They went to work on HIS ball sack… No bullshit.

I believe it was Kipling who wrote:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Just roll on your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your Gawd like a soldier…[/quote]

I’m not interested in calling anyone an asshole and i get that these rules get broken by both sides. But still, its a war crime/human rights violation and is not comparable to casualties in war (even if they are civilians).

I say that even knowing full well that we firebombed the shit out of residential areas in Japan and Germany in WW2

102

[quote]Bismark wrote:

[quote]jjackkrash wrote:

[quote]MaximusB wrote:
For those who think our methods are “torture,” ISIS just beheaded 4 Christian children for not renouncing Jesus and join Islam.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/12/islamic-state-terrorists-behead-4-christian-kids/[/quote]

I like to judge the standards of our leaders by the standards of civilized people, not the standards of barbarians. That’s my personal preference, anyway. [/quote]

Absolutely. Even advocates of so called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (myself included) should be honest enough to admit what it amounts to - torture.[/quote]

There are degrees of “torture”. I recently heard an interview with a highly decorated US World War II/Korean War veteran who had been tortured by the Gestapo talking about it. He refuses to accept that water boarding is torture because you know the interrogator isn’t going to kill you. As well as being severely beaten and having his back broken by a rifle butt, this guy was forced to endure “mock executions” where they tell you you’ve been sentenced to death then they march you out to the firing post, tie you up and blindfold you, call out ready, aim and on fire the firing squad shoots in the air and misses you. These mock executions were very effective and were used widely by the Germans and the Soviets. Often people would be shot so you never know if it’s for real or not so they can do it several times with each prisoner.

Anyway, this vet said that water boarding is nothing because there’s no fear of excruciating pain or disfigurement and no fear of death. And that a highly committed individual wouldn’t have any trouble withstanding such an ordeal. I also agree with Bismarck that it takes significant physical courage to carry out a suicide attack. One poster got riled up by this, I assume because he thought saying it takes physical courage somehow minimises the malevolence or something. It doesn’t. But a suicide attacker is someone who has committed themselves completely to violent death. That takes an inner strength to overcome the primal fear of pain and death. This is the “inner struggle” or “greater holy war” that the jihadists speak about; the internal struggle with the self. The self must submit absolutely to the objective metaphysical system and what it entails. The “little holy war” is the act of violence. Islamic tradition holds that the violent acts of jihad are the means by which one proves that the “greater holy war” with the self has been won.

I got a bit sidetracked there explaining the metaphysics of jihad but my point is there are degrees of torture and you can call water boarding torture if you like but it must be remembered that it’s far away on the scale of the kinds of things that have traditionally been considered torture and are still considered torture in much of the world. Keeping these facts in mind:

  1. Water boarding, sleep deprivation, so called “stress positions”* and other methods that were used by the CIA are extremely low on the scale as far as torture is concerned.

  2. The people subjected to it were not US citizens

And

  1. The people subjected to it were scum of the earth - people involved in training children to be suicide bombers and launching mass casualty indiscriminate attacks on civilians

Given the above, I have absolutely no qualms at all about using torture. And if I heard about a specific case where real torture was employed(breaking bones, gouging eyes out etc), so long as the guy turned out to be someone who was involved in mass casualty, indiscriminate attacks on civilians, then I wouldn’t give a shit what they did to him. They could leave him alone with Hannibal Lector or Buffalo Bill for all I care. Although ideally the CIA should do everything as a black operation so we don’t have to legislate torture and create legal precedent. The CIA needs far more leeway to operate clandestinely as an autonomous organ of the executive branch to bypass Congress for security reasons.

  • The Gestapo would laugh at what the CIA call “stress positions” in their no-longer-secret training manuals on interrogation techniques. When the Gestapo talked about “stress positions” they usually meant “strappado” or something similarly horrendous.

Strappado was employed routinely on prisoners before they even began the interrogation. They called it “softening them up”. The victim usually has their ligaments completely torn. Many of the defendants at Judge Roland Freisler’s Nazi show trials appeared with their arms in slings or plasters from strappado injuries. That’s the likely cause of Sophie Scholl’s “broken arm” between her arrest and trial.

Edited