"On April 3, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted to send the Findings and Conclusions and the Executive Summary of its final Study on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to the President for declassification and subsequent public release"...
EDIT: also the fact that it's stamped "Unclassified" everywhere. If it was stamped as still classified and had been leaked, anyone with a clearance would risk losing it by reading the file.
Wait what?
>>EDIT: also the fact that it's stamped "Unclassified" everywhere. If it was stamped as still classified and had been leaked, anyone with a clearance would risk losing it by reading the file.
So a person with clearance can't read a leaked classified document? I'm confused, more explanation please ;-) This IS sounding vaguely familiar in some way, but I don't get it.
EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. Also, I find it interesting how many people here on HN are up to snuff on security clearance issues and ready to answer this question. 5 informative answers in 30 minutes!
Yeah, a security clearance prohibits viewing anything like this. Even if you have Top Secret you can't look at things that weren't meant for you to read.
> “Additionally, classified information is not automatically declassified simply because of unauthorized disclosure,” Wollman continued.
> “Classified information is prohibited from specific unclassified networks, even if the information has already been published in unclassified media that are available to the general public, such as online news organizations.”
The only people who are restricted from reading classified documents are those who hold government security clearances. Folks who haven't bound themselves to that particular machine cannot be told what they can and cannot read.
If you have a clearance you're expected to follow proper protocols in accessing classified information. Reading something via a leak is not the proper protocol.
Think of it as analogous to being given a "gift" that you know is stolen. Even though you didn't steal it, you know it actually belongs to someone else, so you shouldn't accept it.
To better state my initial point: if you have a clearance, you can only read classified material you're supposed to have access to for your job. If it's leaked but still classified, you can't read it.
> So a person with clearance can't read a leaked classified document? I'm confused, more explanation please ;-) This IS sounding vaguely familiar in some way, but I don't get it.
So just to go into a little more detail...
When a person with a clearance comes across classified information they must possess the proper clearance level along with being read-on to specific caveats (some of which actually cannot be discussed here but let's just say they're part of the markings that specify the classification level of a document).
While some classified folks may or may not be at a level of clearance and read-on to the correct caveats they still cannot mishandle classified information which would include reading or handling classified material in any way outside of a secure office. So even if you're cleared enough to read it you would be mishandling it on the public internet and thus could get your clearance taken. You also MUST report that this occurred as finding out after the fact also puts your clearance at risk.
> So a person with clearance can't read a leaked classified document?
Yup. It's still classified. Otherwise anyone who was caught reading a document they weren't supposed to could just say "my friend gave it to me" or "it was leaked on the internet somewhere".
Today we should be embarrassed. Next week when the news moves on to the next celebrity breakup, and nearly everyone forgets about this, that is the real shame.
(Page 56) Specifically, the interrogation techniques that went unreported in CIA cables included standing sleep deprivation in which a detainee's arms were shackled above his head, nudity, dietary manipulation, exposure to cold temperatures, cold showers, "rough takedowns," and, in at least two instances, the use of mock executions
I am not an American, but I have one specific positive point to say about that: generally the only way to get a country to acknowledge the horror it did is to invade it and trial the leaders (Germany WWII: trial, Iraq against kurds: trial, France Vichy: nothing substantial, France colonial wars: amnesty, USSR: nothing, Yugoslavia: trial, without real invasion). In this instance, nobody is in court (if we ignore Poland), but at least there is some admission.
It is easy to forget that this is just a report and up to this point it hasn't had any real consequences yet. If this will ever lead to anything (be it criminal charges, convictions or change in policy) is still open.
I don't think it will lead to anything, not more than the 11th september 1973, or the whole Operation Condor. There is no balance of powers around the CIA.
Why do they insist on saying 'enhanced interrogation technique' instead of torture? Even when it obviously means torture: "Another senior CIA officer stated that COBALT was itself an enhanced interrogation technique."
When talking about a physical place. That is so blatant word replacement that I find it hard to take it seriously.
>Why do they insist on saying 'enhanced interrogation technique' instead of torture?
Because there is an 'unenhanced interrogation technique' that is almost but not quite torture.
Never forget that beneath the violation of human rights is a desire to destroy. Calling something 'enhanced' is just another way of saying 'we forked you'.
They do this for the same reason that when cops shoot civilians they don't say "Then Officer Smith shot the assailant". They say "Then there was an officer-involved shooting.": To use language as a tool to manipulate the viewpoint of the public.
except, "Officer Smith shot the assailant" is more manipulative of the listener's viewpoint than the actor-neutral phrasing "there was a shooting and Officer Smith was involved"
"...Language can be used politically to deceive and manipulate people, leading to a society in which the people unquestioningly obey their government and mindlessly accept all propaganda as reality. Language becomes a mind-control tool, with the ultimate goal being the destruction of will and imagination." - On George Orwell's 1984.
"While the Office of Legal
Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal conclusion
that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured."
In her introductory letter, Feinstein said it: "...it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured." (page 4)
"You can't be afraid of words that speak the truth. I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language. And American english is loaded with euphemisms. Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets worse with every generation. For some reason it just keeps getting worse."
- George Carlin
George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" covers this subject well.
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."
As a European I think this has deepcultural roots, probably in religion. I'm struck by the way many elecators don't go to the 13th floor, or the 13th in a series of numbered streets is often called something else (eg in SF you have 12th Avenue, Funston Avenue, 14th Avenue...). People prefer to say someone 'passed' (presumably to the afterlife) rather than that they 'died'. And of course there's no swearing on TV - although this only applies to American swear words, it's OK to use words that are considered quite rude in English or Australia.
I have a theory that this is part of the American fondness for TV shows featuring English detectives (Elementary, Forever, Constantine and just about every mystery show on PBS): by speaking the same language but coming from a quite different cultural context, they're able to engage in narrative truth-seeking because of their obliviousness to or disregard for implicit American cultural mores.
One reason to do it is to just set aside the language debate and get on with talking about the actions taken.
So "These things you did are wrong, I don't care what you want to call them or who said they were legal." The legal debate has important implications for lots of people, but the fine details of it aren't very interesting to the moral debate.
Torture is a loaded word that directly implies guilt, where as "enhanced interrogation" is a fairly neutral term. Despite the reports narrative of pointing out all the failures of the CIA in allowing these techniques to be performed, it can't just say "The CIA is a bunch of jackasses who tortured some folks". It needs to be objective to be taken seriously.
> Why do they insist on saying 'enhanced interrogation technique' instead of torture?
"Enhanced interrogation technique" is an uncontroversial, accurate factual description. "Torture" is a conclusion of law applied to the facts that, while there is overwhelming reason to accept that the conclusion is valid for the program as a whole, and many of the specific instances in particular, does not necessarily apply to all of everything that is under the label "enhanced interrogation techniques", and is, in any case, not a legal conclusion that the Committee reached (though the Chair of the Committee, Senator Feinstein, in her introduction to the release, emphatically and directly states as her personal conclusion both that the program involved "torture", and that it involved "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment (both terms being significant in regard to grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (including Common Article 3 of the Conventions, which applies to conflict that is not between states-parties to the convention) [0] and the manner in which grave breaches of the Conventions are incorporation into US criminal law as war crimes under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2441 [1].)
> "Enhanced interrogation technique" is an uncontroversial, accurate factual description.
Such language exists only to obscure the meaning. How exactly do you distinguish an "enhanced" interrogation technique from merely an interrogation technique? Is there any better criterion than saying that an interrogation technique is "enchanced" if it involves torture?
"Torture" isn't just a crime it's also a word that's been around for centuries that is used to describe the kind of things described in the report. People who want to avoid it do so because its a powerful and emotive word. Describing it as "enhanced interrogation techniques" is just a euphemism to make it seem more palatable because everyone agrees "torture" is wrong but who even knows what an "enhanced interrogation technique" is?
That's more conclusory than descriptive of the technique, though certainly the whole report (well, the whole several-hundred-page "executive summary") makes that point.
I don't think there is any advantage to adding the emotional weighting associated with the conclusion that the report leads to into the language describing the individual facts. Its more comfortable, perhaps, to people who didn't need the facts to come to the conclusion that the report demands, but I don't see that as an important feature.
Sure, "comparatively less emotionally loaded way of distinguishing from other interrogation techniques that also does not carry the weight of appearing to be conclusory on a matter of law on which the Committee was very clearly not intending to state a conclusion" would probably be better than "uncontroversial".
"Enhanced interrogation technique" is an uncontroversial, accurate factual description.
I disagree. 'Enhanced' certainly refers to intensification or increase, but also has strongly positive associations. If you experienced two injuries in a row you wouldn't normally say that the second one had 'enhanced your pain experience' - if you did people would assume you were a masochist of some sort. The measure of interrogation is surely in the quality of results it yields; if some technique actually results in a decrease in the quality of intelligence then I'd say it's a degraded interrogation technique.
To the extent that you want a neutral description of an action whose efficacy is unknown, you could say 'aggressive interrogation technique' or 'intensified interrogation technique' or any number of other words. Just because 'enhanced' can be read to mean intensified or increased without necessarily being better does mean it is commonly understood to mean that; when you're choosing terms to describe something to the public - and especially when you're choosing words for their referential rather than explanatory power - that lowest common denominator of meaning is the one that matters.
I appreciate the fine legal distinction that you're drawing here in the context of war crimes and so forth, but I suggest to you that phrases like 'enhanced interrogation technique' are actually part of the problem - deliberate euphemisms chosen primarily for their anodyne qualities.
Are you so obsessed with minutiae of definitions that you are unable to see that both terms describe reprehensible acts performed by people against other people?
The parent is right to be skeptical considering the number of lawyers involved in this mess. Torture is obviously illegal so it has more implications than just "enhanced interrogation".
From the section "The Committee makes the following findings and conclusions:" on page 9 number 10 is interesting "#10: The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques." I have assumed that's the case with many of their operations, are there more public accounts of them doing this?
The idea that policy-makers did not know what was going on is ridiculous. The reality is many did not want to know and where more concerned about the post 9/11 political environment instead of standing up for what was right.
Not all members of the committee deserve your appreciation..
> The 6,000-page report was researched and written by Democratic staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee between 2009 and 2013 after committee Republicans chose not to participate.
Feinstein has chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009. Her job over the past 5 years in this role was supposed to be oversight of these intelligence agencies.
Fact is until this release she has been a staunch defender of the existing intelligence programs and the status quo among NSA, White House, and CIA. She's exactly the type of person you do not want chairing this committee. Unfortunately when Edward Snowden stepped up and did her job for her (without the privilege of legislative immunity), she called it "an act of treason."[1]
In my opinion if the CIA hadn't been caught spying on her committee's computers she wouldn't have released this report at all. It's an act of retribution in my cynical opinion.
That said, props to her for releasing the executive summary[2] of the report.
Local and national news TV programs have been going on for days about how all of our embassies are on "High Alert" in anticipation of violence directed at them/us on the basis of what's in the report. I take that by itself as an admission that the government's conduct has been what should be considered unacceptable, and is probably only "lawful" in the most meaningless sense of the word (if at all).
Rightfully so. People should be upset. We let a sense of urgency take over our moral compass. Which was the completely wrong way to look at this conflict anyway: we had no need to be that urgent given that our resources were (and still are) effectively inexhaustible. We got bad intelligence, we made a lot of enemies, and we lost the moral high ground that the US had worked hard to rebuild after Vietnam. The failure happened at the top: Bush (presumably guided by Cheney and the neo-con "long war" doctrine) chose to ignore decades of intelligence research showing that torture leads to bad intel. Because the failure happened at the top, nobody will pay for it.
Had we done things the right (slow) way, we would have a lot more friends in the region. Because the long, slow way of intelligence gathering involves building trust and developing friendship with people. But the American public doesn't have the patience for long peacekeeping missions like that, and the international community doesn't either.
There are so many layers of secret courts and classified legal opinions that it's hard to say the US has much rule of law anymore. People have lost faith in the legal system much the same as they have lost faith in our legislative system. All that's left is the executive branch, which leaves us dangerously at risk of a dictator taking over if we elect the wrong person, because the other two branches of government are too weak to stop him. I hate to get all tinfoil-hat, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched anymore.
This seems to be thrown around a lot. You hear things like, "if we didn't go into Iraq/Afghanistan, we would have more friends in the region," "if we didn't prop up Mubarak or the Saudis or someone else, we would have more friends in the region," "if we gave more support to the Palestinians, we would have more friends in the region."
I think this is the wrong way to think about our policy. We currently have a set of "friends" in the region; Israel, Saudi, etc. The things we do will always upset a portion of the population, but you will also have some who support those actions (foreign policy has not all been a shambles, which is why we retain regional allies in spite of the things that have happened over the past two decades).
Changing your actions will never guarantee that you will make more friends, because in making some friends we would lose others. By catering to the progressive populations in the Middle East, you isolate the conservative populations, and vice versa. Rapprochement with Iran, as an example, may seem like a fine idea, but the mere prospect has Israel and the Saudis concerned. So changing policy cannot achieve "more friends." What we can do is choose who we want to be friends with carefully, and let that guide our policy.
The friends we've chosen in the region also don't help us. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Israel are particularly well-liked in the region (and that's putting it lightly), but both are seen as US puppets.
Honestly I don't think we really care much anymore what the Saudis think; the regime has fantastic wealth but very little real power beyond holding the purse strings for hyper conservative terror groups. I think eventually the hypocrisy and opulence of the regime will cause the terror groups to throw off their former masters and come after them -- and all credible reports say the Saudi army isn't much more than a facade propped up by a handful of US contractors. We probably wouldn't let them fall to terror groups, but we also aren't really comfortable propping up a regime that is actively funding a proxy war against us.
"The friends we've chosen in the region also don't help us"
The recent OPEC decision declining to reduce production in the face of falling oil prices, thus screwing over Russia hard, means that Saudi Arabia is most certainly a useful US ally.
All allies are useful, even backstabbing frenemies like Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia (or more specifically, the ruling regime in Saudi Arabia) needs us more than we need them these days.
I mean, I realize the prime reason they fund Islamist terror groups is to cause regional instability that drives up the price of Saudi oil...
That's actually a terrible reason to fund armed groups. Al Qaeda's original mission was to replace the Saudi monarchy; there were many attacks in Saudi Arabia after 9/11, they weren't talked about much. So the Saudi monarchy is not interested in helping those kinds of groups.
Armed groups are often funded by wealthy individuals for a variety of reasons (Osama bin Laden being a famous example). Armed groups funded by the Saudi monarchy are in other countries, fighting the regime's enemies by proxy (eg. the Syrian and Iranian governments).
"most of them [CIA personnel] do not know that when the wpost/ny times
quotes 'senior intel official,' it's us... authorized and directed by opa [Office of Public Affairs]."
Of course everyone with half a brain knows this, it's funny 1) CIA personnel don't and 2) the WPost and NYT continue this practice of citing anonymous sources that are in reality public speakers, giving a carefully designed statement.
This is long overdue, and pardon my jade, but there is nothing in here that is at all a surprise. The only news in this release is that the government itself is finally recognizing what civil society has known for years: as soon as you put government and psychologists together, you have trouble.
> Interrogation techniques such as slaps and "wallings" (slamming detainees
against a wall) were used in combination, frequently concurrent with sleep deprivation and nudity. Records do not support CIA representations that the CIA initially used an "an open, non-threatening approach," or that interrogations began with the "least coercive technique possible" and escalated to more coercive techniques only as necessary.
> The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting. Abu Zubaydah, for example, became "completely unresponsive, with bubbles
rising through his open, full mouth." Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving into a "series of near drownings.
> Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their
heads. At least five detainees experienced disturbing hallucinations during prolonged sleep deprivation and, in at least two of those cases, the CIA nonetheless continued the sleep deprivation.
> Contrary to CIA representations to the Department of Justice, the CIA
instructed personnel that the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah would take "precedence" over his medical care, resulting in the deterioration of a bullet wound Abu Zubaydah incurred during his capture.
> CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families— to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to "cut [a detainee's]
mother's throat."
The list goes on.
I have no words. This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud. I can only hope more people read this report. Worse imaginable crimes are committed in the heat of passion or because of madness. Those are scary. What is more scary to me is cold institutionalized, calculated, torture, which is what this is.
Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost. Torture should be like rape. Anyone suggesting debating if rape is acceptable should be slapped on the head and considered an idiot. Torture should be the same in any civilized country. We are not only debating it, we have also done it, we have institutionalized it, and make no mistake, Fox and the like will also be debating its "benefits and how it saved Americans' lives".
Some of these things are clearly off the deep end. But some of them, especially threats, seem like pretty basic/standard interrogation...
There are many techniques, but it seems like we have forgotten it is fundamentally manipulative and abusive. I mean, we are surprised to find that threats are used? What?
I'm not talking about waterboarding or what have you. I guess I'm just puzzled that things like threats & slaps are being rolled in with waterboarding. Maybe threats & slaps are not the most effective method, sure- that doesn't really matter.
It just seems like people are shocked to find fundamentally abusive/manipulative behavior going on at all. Virtually any form of extracting information from an unwilling informant is going to be. Feeding them lies to make them lose hope ("We've captured your co-conspirators") is abusive. Cozying up to them with donuts and backrubs is manipulative. Practically by definition, interrogation on unwilling informants cannot be some friendly, respectful thing.
"Scharff was opposed to physically abusing prisoners to obtain information. Learning on the job, Scharff instead relied upon the Luftwaffe's approved list of techniques, which mostly involved making the interrogator seem as if he is his prisoner's greatest advocate while in captivity."
And this guy was successful as well.
"Scharff's approach has been admiringly cited by top US interrogators, such as Ali Soufan"
Torture has been shown to be a reasonably good (though not always effective) means of getting people to tell torturers things that they think the torturers want to hear -- whatever the tortured person thinks is most likely to lead to the present cessation of the torture.
Its also been shown to be a fairly poor technique, compared to other alternatives, to get accurate, actionable information.
As the Senate report itself notes, this was the conclusion of the CIA's own work on interrogation techniques prior to 9/11, which was disregarded in the aftermath of 9/11.
Basically, the most effective means is to create a rapport with the subject, and if treated with compassion and respect, eventually some will come around to their captor's side and reveal whatever information they have.
People will say anything to get torture to stop. The interrogators will get the information they want, but they will get so much more bad information made up on the spot to stop the suffering, it's impossible to distinguish between actual intel and the subject telling the interrogator what they want to hear.
It gets even worse when the subject doesn't actually know anything useful. Waterboard most people and they will confess to anything they think will make it stop.
Sure, it worked great during the Inquisition. Evidently they killed a lot of Satanists, witches and wizards. It must've worked -- there don't seem to be any around.
> I mean, we are surprised to find that threats are used?
We are, if not surprised, rightfully offended that our government does not obey its own laws, which define and punish torture -- acts "intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control", where "severe physical or mental pain or suffering" is defined as:
---[quote]---
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
---[end quote]--- (18 USC Sec. 2340)
(And its worth noting that this interpretation enshrined into law has often been criticized itself as an attempt to minimize the scope of US limitations on torture and for the government to shirk obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment by limiting the understanding of torture to something much narrower than the international understanding underlying the convention, so that can enhanced the degree to which it is disturbing that having narrowed the definition of torture, the government still isn't serious about combatting it, or even just not actively engaging in it, under the narrowed definition.)
> Lack of heat at the facility likely contributed to the death of a detainee.
Causing the death of a detainee is not a threat. Perhaps negligence which should have consequences for those who were responsible for this person while in their custody.
I wouldn't say that any of these techniques are "basic/standard", and I used to work in the field.
You can get plenty of information out of someone without laying a finger on them.
In my opinion the question is the extent to which it's OK to play with people's psychology through isolation and misinformation, while still giving them 3 hots and a cot. The important thing to note here is that you can still damage people this way if you take it too far; solitary makes people go crazy especially when they're being fed false info about what's going on outside the walls.
Then again, these guys did not get rolled up for signing too loud in church. They have valuable intel in their heads. We're not going to beat it out of them, but how far are we willing to go? Should they get the same rights and protections as suspects in the US judicial system? This is the conversation we should be having in my opinion.
> Then again, these guys did not get rolled up for signing too loud in church. They have valuable intel in their heads.
According to the report, "Of the 119 known detainees, at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard in the September 2001 Memorandum of Notification (MON). These included an
"intellectually challenged" man whose CIA detention was used solely as leverage to get a family
member to provide information, two individuals who were intelligence sources for foreign
liaison services and were former CIA sources, and two individuals whom the CIA assessed to be
connected to al-Qa'ida based solely on information fabricated by a CIA detainee subjected to the
CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.
"Then again, these guys did not get rolled up for signing too loud in church. They have valuable intel in their heads."
Why does terrorism frighten people so much that they're willing to throw away basic principles like "innocent until proven guilty"? Honest question. I see comment after comment after comment in this thread that indicates the commenters are unbelievably frightened of terrorism, to the extent that they're willing to sanction anything, even acts that they admit are otherwise reprehensible, to prevent it. Why are apparently intelligent people so frightened of it?
> Why does terrorism frighten people so much that they're willing to throw away basic principles like "innocent until proven guilty"?
Great question, and one we should always keep in mind. The death toll from terrorism on US soil since 9/11 is indeed very low. That said, the people plotting against us are intelligent and adaptive and wish to do us harm. If they succeed, they might destroy the free society which we've built for ourselves.
Put another way, I'm scared of the physical consequences of a nuclear weapon going off in midtown Manhattan and even more scared of what would happen to our society in the wake of it. You think we'd be having these conversations about which techniques may or may not be torture if there were half a million dead in NYC and the entire tri-state region were irradiated?
Remember the Cold War, when the threat wasn't that someone might figure out a way to smuggle a small weapon into NYC, but that we'd have fifteen minutes' warning before NYC was subject to multiple megaton-class detonations, along with every other major city in the country?
There isn't even any evidence that the threat of nuclear terrorism is credible. Nukes aren't something you pick up at the local Safeway on your way home from the daily jihad. Compare to 30 years ago, where the threat was absolutely, 100% credible. Literally hundreds of missiles ready to go at a moment's notice. One bad decision or bad hangover away from a billion deaths. And yet, we weren't having debates like this then.
That's not to say that the US was all innocent and pure. But at the very least, torture was secretive, hidden, not defended in public as being a worthwhile and justifiable act.
And then combine all that with the simple fact that torture doesn't even work. All it does is make their friends angry. Do you really think that torturing suspected terrorists reduces the chances of a future terrorist nuclear detonation in Manhattan? I don't see how.
Edit: Oh yeah, I forgot to point out that those hundreds of missiles and hundreds of nuclear warheads are still there and still ready to go at a moment's notice and we are still one person's bad decision or bad hangover away from total annihilation. We just manage to pretend it's not there.
Planned and carried out in secrecy and universally decried afterwards. When it came to light, the President more or less wanted the CIA's head on a pike. Quite different from ongoing secret-but-not-secret torture with a ton of defenders in the public eye and two Presidents who either defend it or try their best to ignore it.
I feel like they've already done that far more effectively than they probably dreamed. Look at what's happened to the US after 9/11 and tell me we're still adhering to our principles and possess any moral high ground in the world. This report is a pretty obvious indication that the powers that be have given up on following the rules.
They won. They won when the US gave itself the license to enter into a perpetual state of universal war, three days after 9/11.
Look at what the US has done. Really, look at all the things it has done -- the surveillance, the drone strikes, the infiltration of civil protests, the use of military equipment by the police force, the lies to justify the war in Iraq, the lies to justify the torture, the violations of international human rights, the targeted killings of "enemy" US citizens, the re-definition of every single one of these words -- and then tell me how the US has upheld its values against terrorism.
Then look at countries like Iceland where the nation apologizes over a single justified death at the hands of a police officer, or Norway where after a killing spree and bomb attacks the first consideration by government officials is not about how to punish the murderer, but how to guarantee due process for someone evidently guilty of such heinous crimes.
The United States are not the good guys. I'm sorry, but you're not. No matter how much you want it to be true.
You're cherry picking examples. Every country in the world has done horrible things. I'm certainly not excusing the torture the US has committed, but it's not alone in the world.
The intelligent people who support the government actions aren't afraid of specific terrorist acts. They're afraid of what a failure to stop terrorist movements could lead to. I imagine there were a lot of people sitting in the cafes of Rome who said: "I can't believe you think those germanic barbarians could possibly ever pose a threat to us!"
And of course, it doesn't help that the folks who are captured are mostly objectively bad people. There are some people who can muster a lot of moral outrage for the rights of bad people, and there are ones who can't. This isn't a new phenomenon.
That really doesn't answer my question at all. I asked why so many people are terrified of terrorism, and all you tell me is that they're afraid of some nebulous future. Well yes, obviously they're afraid of the potential future, as it would be pretty odd if they were afraid of the past. But why does terrorism get so much emphasis compared to other potential dangers?
Partly it's the immediacy. In the long term, China poses a threat to American hegemony, but they're not actively trying to blow things up at this very moment. The other part is the narrative. Environmental disaster should rank higher in peoples' minds, but people are intrinsically drawn to narratives that involve other people. Terrorists are like comic book villains as far as narrative goes. Not only do they behead people, but they brutally oppress women!
Terrorist groups are nothing like the barbarians that eventually brought down Rome, and I think you know it.
You've spent this entire thread making poor excuses for completely irrational behaviors and trying to justifying sickening, ineffective actions on the part of US personnel.
> Geneva Convention states clearly - either POW status or suspect in the judicial system. There is no 3rd option.
None of the Geneva Conventions actually say this. OTOH, torture is subject to a universal prohibition under international law independently of the status of the tortured person, whether a protected person under the any of the Geneva Conventions, a regular criminal suspect in a domestic court system, or any other status that may or may not exist.
" The passing of sentences must also be pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognised as indispensable by civilised peoples. "
for international:
"It also specifies that when there is any doubt whether a combatant belongs to the categories in article 4, they should be treated as such until their status has been determined by a competent tribunal."
The UN does not impose trade bans. You know why the Secretary General, the UN's leader, is called that? Because he is a secretary for the people who actually have power, the leaders of nation-states.
> You know why the Secretary General, the UN's leader, is called that? Because he is a secretary for the people who actually have power.
Secretary is essentially another word for Minister, and NATO's Secretary-General is its supreme commander in wartime. The UN's leader is called the Secretary General because he is in essence its Prime Minister, not because you get confused between a Secretary and his/her secretaries...
Unless you think General Secretary Joseph Stalin was a powerless functionary, of course.
>NATO's Secretary-General is its supreme commander in wartime
>The UN's leader is called the Secretary General because he is in essence its Prime Minister
Both are wrong and wildly imaginative.
>General Secretary Joseph Stalin
Yes, but there's also a historic reason behind that title. The leader (like Chairman Mao) of the Soviet Union was supposed to be a sort of secretary for the workers. "Soviet" actually means "council"; the "chairman" and "secretary" names are communist propagandaspeak to give the impression that the workers are the ones in charge.
Strictly speaking, the US has veto power in the UN Security Council, which usually has primary responsibility for binding actions on matters of international peace and security, including, inter alia, taking binding action in response to threats to the same such as by grave breaches of international law by a nation-state.
However, its worth noting that -- at US urging in the context of the Korean War -- the UN established a mechanism (under the "Uniting for Peace" resolution [0]) by which the General Assembly can step in when the Security Council is unable to act because of deadlock among the veto powers.
The saving grace is that we have a country that was able to admit that it did this. For me, that's hope that we're still in a position to learn from our wrongs, and that the checks-and-balances are still somewhat in-tact.
As you can see in the examples of China and Japan [0], a national apology can help ease tensions between peoples and countries and not apologizing can exacerbate already strained relations.
Admitting wrong doing and offering solutions to prevent this from ever happening again are the first steps towards rebuilding what is undoubtedly going to be a much damaged world wide reputation.
Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism
The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically,
Let me be perfectly clear when I say this. It shouldn't matter which party started this, ITS WRONG.
Well, in the past they've said that. Mostly now, they seem to be more avoiding commenting on the substance at all, and just saying that its wrong to publish the report.
> Before you get on your Liberal high horse, you might want to check yourself. Extraordinary Rendition began under Clinton
This is not about extraordinary rendition -- which certainly is an extremely disturbing practice, and by all accounts seems to have included instances where prisoners were tortured by other countries with the knowledge and at least tacit consent of the US in violation of US obligations under international law.
This is about systematic torture directly executed by an agency of the United States government, under false pretenses, and while making damaging deceptions about the program to other entities within the US government.
There is certainly an extent to which it fits in with a common pattern with extraordinary rendition, but its not the same thing.
How do you know they didn't read the whole post? In other words, how do you know that you're not being downvoted for refusing to acknowledge the world of difference between black ops as practiced before and after 9/11 (or more precicely, before and after Vice President Dick Cheney said "it's time to take off the gloves")?
That's what we're talking about here: the actual meaning of "gloves off". And no, this was categorically NOT something that started on Clinton's watch. It's started on Bush's watch, specifically at the direction of Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington, using legal justifications drafted by John Yoo.
Bush, not Clinton, got it?
And just so you're clear, this is not a defense of Democrats. After all, nobody has done more to forestall this report than the Democrat Barack Obama. In many ways, he's the worst offender here as it was his administration that elected to protect the people involved instead of punishing them, which serves to normalize something that absolutely should not be normalized. After all, the deepest institutional damage is done not by those who abuse their authority, but by those who allow the abusers to get away with it (see the systematic sexual abuse of children and the problems the Catholic Church caused itself by concealing it for another case in point).
I should add that the Obama Administration's conduct would be slightly less galling if it weren't part of a pattern, but the fact that James Clapper suffered no consequence for lying to Congress about the NSA's constitutional violations means that this is bigger than the CIA. If you get to the root of it, it's really about the goddamn nightmare of a lawless and amoral security state given big budgets and free reign stemming from the insane over-reaction to 9/11 that has since been enshrined in the Patriot Act.
That's the real heart of darkness here. Well, that and the cowering bedwetting chickenshits who don't support the whole "land of the free home of the brave" thing, and would rather hand the country to people like Cheney, Addington, Yoo, etc. and not think twice about the damage they're doing.
And those people? The fear driven chickenshits? Overwhelmingly Republican. It's the FOX News demographic, essentially. (FOX News, not coincidentally, has been a big supporter of torture. Like Cheney, they consider it evidence of "toughness", not idiocy.)
Extraordinary rendition began before Clinton. The rules around it began with Bush I and presidential decision directive 39.[1] The practice began before that.
We haven't apologized, we haven't made restitution, and we sure as heck haven't prosecuted the guilty (as required by the convention against torture). I'm struggling to see any saving grace.
Good point, and we might even be in worse position if action is not taken. If there is lack of outrage, it will send a message up the chain that "this is not that bad, nobody really minded this much, let's use harsher techniques next time".
"Consequentialism (Teleology) argues that the morality of an action is contingent on the action's outcome or result", this particular category includes one of the most famous theories of ethics, utilitarianism.
Your problem with it is valid, however. As far as I've understood from my study of the subject matter, no ethical theory is perfect, not even utilitarianism.
Check out the wiki page for the other categories. Personally I like virtue ethics, keeps me on my toes and critical. I wouldn't recommend it though, I'd prefer if the rest of the world was utilitarian :-P cough
> Real risk for real people has been created. It's not theoretical.
Risk of what?
> Actual innocent people have been placed in danger.
Who?
I'm not attempting to argue the point. I haven't read the report. It just seems a strong statement to make that innocent bystanders (with no connection to torture) have been put at risk (of what?).
I'm curious how legitimate this claim is since to be honest it reads a bit like FUD (that's just how it comes off; but I'm just looking for a rationale).
Yes, you're absolutely right. This report is making me want to kill people in cold blood. It's probably better to keep it secret so nobody finds out about it until it's too late.
I heard on npr radio that the purpose of torture is to intimidate, not extract information. Which makes it all clear.
Incentives for information:
1.) Extract information.
2.) The information should be useful.
Incentives for intimidation:
1.) Information extraction is of no concern.
2.) The torture should be so shocking, and awesome, that George Carlin style many extra syllables need to be added to the word "tor-ture" like when Diane Feinstein says the supersized Orwellian phrase that "tor-ture" has become.
3.) The details of the torture should be made public.
The Kiriakou story is not as straightforward as this thread makes it. You can go to FAS.ORG to see the actual case files.
Kiriakou was charged with using numerous forms of classified information about foreign intelligence operations in order to promote a book, and, in doing so, outing a still-undercover foreign operative involved in the Zubaydah case. That operative had allegedly been under cover for over 20 years.
If you read the filings, you'll also see that Kiriakou claims to have outed the program accidentally --- in other words, that the leak didn't occur because he was deliberately blowing the whistle on the program, but instead by accident (or, as the USG would have it, negligence).
However terribly Zubaydah was treated by the CIA, we should probably remain clear on the fact that he was believed by everyone involved, including Kiriakou, to have been an integral part of the Al Qaeda network.
The case files are not themselves dispositive; I merely comment to suggest that it's harder to judge the Kiriakou case than it immediately seems.
I share the prevailing sentiment that our failure to prosecute CIA employees at all levels for torture is frustrating, and a miscarriage of justice. Though I'm not particularly interested in discussing that on HN.
> However terribly Zubaydah was treated by the CIA, we should probably remain clear on the fact that he was believed by everyone involved, including Kiriakou, to have been an integral part of the Al Qaeda network.
Is that supposed to be a rationalization for his treatment?
No, that's a shitty thing to accuse someone of, and if you read my entire comment you can see I don't believe that.. What's at issue in this subthread is Kiriakou's culpability in exposing intelligence programs for his own personal benefit.
Then I do not get the purpose of that sentence in your post since it reads like "Yes we did shitty stuff to him but remember they thought he was a bad guy at the time."
I'll assume that's because you're unfamiliar with the Kiriakou case, in which Zubaydah plays an important role.
You could sum that case up by saying that Kiriakou is accused of two major harms to the USG: first, outing a 20-year undercover operative, and second, potentially compromising the Zubaydah case. It would be an easy message board rebuttal to say, "well, it turns out Zubaydah was a pawn with virtually no value to the USG or Al Qaeda, so compromising him was not a big deal". But, at the time when Kiriakou was alleged to have leaked secrets to promote his book, nobody believed that about Zubaydah. He was instead believed to have a key operational role in Al Qaeda, and compromising him to promote a book would have been a grave matter.
It is hard to explain the nuance of this case without sounding like I'm taking a side in it. CIA is also accused throughout the Senate report of leaking secrets to polish its own reputation. The only issue I'd have a problem with is the idea that Kiriakou's actions were heroic. By his own stipulations that appears not to be the case.
I'll say this again: I'm may be more ambivalent than most of HN when it comes to surveillance and law enforcement and regulation, but I am not ambivalent about torture or, for that matter, the CIA, or criminal liability for the CIA.
I should have to make that disclaimer, but obviously I do.
I am not in disagreement with your assesment of Kiraikou and I don't see how any of that ties into your original statement
"However terribly Zubaydah was treated by the CIA, we should probably remain clear on the fact that he was believed by everyone involved, including Kiriakou, to have been an integral part of the Al Qaeda network."
which seems totally unrelated to anything you have posted above, which was what make it stand out in the first place.
I cannot see any other way of interpreting it than the way I mentioned in my previous post, could you clarify what you meant by this since I am obviously not getting your meaning?
> The saving grace is that we have a country that was able to admit that it did this.
"The country" doesn't admit that "the country" did this. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence "admits" that the Central Intelligence Agency did this, while at the same time insulating everyone else -- even in the Executive Branch -- from involvement, based on "the CIA was lying to everyone, including the White House, who totally didn't mean for this to happen."
> For me, that's hope that we're still in a position to learn from our wrongs, and that the checks-and-balances are still somewhat in-tact.
Checks and balances aren't admitting after the fact that actions which meet the definition of torture and war crimes in both US domestic law and international law which the US has treaty-based obligations to uphold occurred (while, except for the "personal opinion" of the chair in the introduction, not actually admitting the legal conclusions demanded by those facts), checks-and-balances is actually imposing some accountability on the perpetrators of those crimes.
AFAICT, there are no "checks-and-balances" in evidence yet.
"The country" doesn't admit that "the country" did this."
And there's the problem.
Imagine, if you will, that your son is taken against his will by say, Iran, because your son has ties to someone who threw a grenade that killed an Iranian. Your son is tortured in much the same way the report states.
Do you care which committee didn't do a thing, or who voted for a thing, or lobbied another? You blame the country. The voting public, the non-voting public, their philosophies, culture, politicians, their military. They collectively represent the individuals who did that despicable stuff to your son.
And it's what perpetuates the hate, the wars, the fear.
> Imagine, if you will, that your son is taken against his will by say, Iran, because your son has ties to someone who threw a grenade that killed an Iranian. Your son is tortured in much the same way the report states.
It's much worse than that, we'll just flat out kill you with a drone strike, even if you're an American citizen[1][2].
At least you'll find few people willing to defend Japanese internment in public, and public opinion is such that it's unlikely anything similar would happen again.
Compare to this memo, where you have roughly half of the politically involved population of the country criticizing its release as if the memo itself is somehow reprehensible, and not saying one word about the activities it describes.
In 40 years you'll find the same thing, that whatever is happening 'now' was deplorable, and that whatever is happening 40 years from now is 'freedom'.
From what I understand (from talking to now very old Japanese-American men who were in the camps as young adults) it was unpleasant and caused significant hardship, but not even remotely similar to what's in this report.
It's important to teach about what happened in those camps and to understand why they were wrong. Drawing inappropriate comparisons between those camps and the absolute atrocities in this report isn't helpful.
The difference, of course, is that those in the internment camps were Americans, while most of these guys are terrorists captured on the battlefield. I do think the comparison is inappropriate, but internment was the atrocity, not this.
How do you know all these detainees were "captured on the battlefield"? Because we've been told that? By the same people who said we were not using extraordinary rendition and not using torture?
I'm surprised that you think torture is not an atrocity. The US claims to be "giving the gift of democracy" and "spreading freedom". Ignoring international conventions on the rights of prisoners of war (and do not start the weaselly bullshit about whether these people are POWs or not) doesn't seem to be a good way of liberating a nation.
> How do you know all these detainees were "captured on the battlefield"? By the same people who said we were not using extraordinary rendition and not using torture?
Because if the CIA was just ignoring the rules, they wouldn't be trying to lawyer their way around what's "enhanced interrogation" versus "torture." They'd just be pulling out fingernails.
> Ignoring international conventions on the rights of prisoners of war
You fundamentally misunderstand the rationale behind these conventions. The reason we don't torture the soldiers of civilized nations is because we assume that they will reciprocate when it comes to our soldiers. Stateless militants can't be expected to do that, so the rationale for following those international conventions disappears.
We generally try to uphold high moral standards even if they won't be reciprocated. Many of those conventions provide additional incentive of reciprocation, but that's not the only relevant factor.
So you're saying we shouldn't engage in torture because it's "bad"? It's okay to blow these same people up in the battlefield, but god forbid we throw water on them and put them in a slightly cold room?
Oh come on, be serious: Most of us would much rather prefer to be shot dead or blown up in a split second than being even slightly tortured and locked up indefinitely. If not it must be because we don't know what we are talking about.
I am extremely doubtful about your assertion that most people would rather be shot dead than locked up indefinitely.
You're also making assumptions that people die instantly on the battlefield and in drone attacks. That's not the case. They can (and do) die in slow, lingering, painful ways in such cases.
Throwing water on someone and leaving them in a 59-degree room is worse than shooting them dead? Keeping someone awake until they hallucinate is worse than shooting them dead? Really?
I can imagine torture that's worse than death. I don't think any of the things revealed in the article qualify. Which is precisely what I'm getting at. If you're not a pacifist and you think it's okay to kill people in war, I think you have to go to pretty tortured lengths to say that these enhanced interrogation techniques are unjustifiable in light of that. If you're a pacifist who doesn't think that killing is justifiable in the first place, that's a totally different thing.
Simulated drowning again and again over months and years and never being released (meaning it can happen again anytime) comes across as way worse than being shot dead to many of us, yes.
Also, just being locked up with nothing to do can be painful in itself.
IIRC, Solzhenitsyn notes in one of the early volumes of The Gulag Archipelago that you can kill a guy by tossing him in a room and throwing cold water on him. I don't know what it is about hypothermia that doesn't seem serious until you experience it personally but that must be what's going on here.
Reading Solzhenitsyn in the context of today's news might be worthwhile for people. If people can read all that, note the similarities between the NKVD's tactics and attitude toward the law and the CIA's, and walk away contentedly thinking to themselves "but our guys have good intentions and are a lot more selective!" we are hosed as a country.
What gives you the right to decide that for other people? Objectively having your genitals cut off is much less bad than dying. But I know plenty of men who would rather take a bullet than feel a knife sliding into them. The methods used by the CIA are exactly like this; and that is entirely by design. Why else would you do these things if not to cause massive psychological pain?
Why do you continually focus on the cold room and ignore all the other kinds of torture in this report? It's unconvincing and reflects poorly on your argument.
Oh man, I find your responses to this thread hilariously ironic. A week ago on a thread concerning H1B's and immigration to the US, you refuted someone's claim that America could accommodate almost unlimited migration because this ignored the issues of having these people absorb and internalize the cultural norms that make the US a great place to live and which others places that aren't so great to live lack. You used the example of bribery being a cultural norm in the country your parents emigrated from and one of the things that caused your father to leave.
Well consider me convinced! We definitely need to limit immigration to America otherwise we could end up with large numbers of people whose cultural norms allow them to condone torture and try to make jokes about it! Can you imagine what a cluster fuck this nation would be if the majority view was that repeated anal rape leading to multiple attempts at self-harm was something to be made light of!? No we definitely need to make sure that we only accept a small enough number of immigrants that we can ensure that things like the concept of the rule of law, the right to trial, and the right to not be, you know FUCKING TORTURED, are fully assimilated by them. Gods knows what things would be like if they somehow managed to not internalize these concepts.
You're being disingenuous here. It's like the difference between a police officer shooting an armed criminal on the street (which may be a matter of necessity, though recent examples highlight just how problematic such a standard can be) and beating them up in jail when they're already in a custodial situation and thus present no threat to the public.
It's true that is the scale of awful behavior, the CIA's program would rate something like 3 or 4 out of 10 - other regimes have engaged in things like pulling out people's fingernails, administering electric shocks, actually killing or raping family members rather than simply threatening to do so so, and worse - much worse. It's also true that atrocious actions by the US during the 'war on terror' are less bad than prior atrocities in previous conflicts like Vietnam or the Phillippine-American war of 1899-1902, a largely-forgotten conflict which would be considered genocidal by modern standards (and which is very much worth studying because it has so many similarities to the war on terror - gruesome murders by the rebels, widespread use of waterboarding by the US (then called the 'water cure'), subsequent political fallout and so on).
But even when we look at these things from a purely utilitarian standpoint rather than an idealistic one, the fact is that it our ability to project soft power - that is, to promulgate our values internationally so as to further our interests - is severely impaired by our all-too-apparent willingness to abandon the standards we propound in the areas of human rights and so forth. I'm not too impressed by the authoritarian regime in Cuba, for example, but the fact that we have a mini-Gulag in Guantanamo Bay makes it impossible for the US to criticize that regime in any meaningful fashion - even when it does the same or worse, it can fall back on a Tu quoque argument, and while that's a logical fallacy it's nevertheless a very effective one. On a more serious level, it has severely blunted our ability (along with that of the UK and other coalition countries, albeit to a lesser extent) to put pressure on North Korea over that country's appalling human rights record.
The basic problem for the US is this: we don't necessarily aspire to hegemony, but a de facto hegemony is the best guarantor of our long-term interests. We can't impose that by force, or want to, but we can get close by exercising soft economic and ideological power backed up with the availability of force against those who directly threaten our interests. At times the world is too messy and we'd like to take our ball and go home - let everyone else think what they like, the US land mass and economy is large enough for us to function as an autarky in an unconnected world. But the reality of a global technological world is that oceans no longer serve as impassable moats; disengagement and indifference to the emergence of other hegemonic powers would sooner or later result in disadvantage.
> You're being disingenuous here. It's like the difference between a police officer shooting an armed criminal on the street (which may be a matter of necessity, though recent examples highlight just how problematic such a standard can be) and beating them up in jail when they're already in a custodial situation and thus present no threat to the public.
In war, we justify things a lot more morally ambiguous than a police officer shooting an armed criminal that's an imminent threat. Workers at a munitions factory who are just carting things around? Those folks get killed in war in airstrikes that are totally consistent with international conventions. Is waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed worse than blowing up some sap who just showed up to work on the wrong day? I just find it ridiculous to play that line drawing exercise.
I agree 100% with the rest of your analysis, though. Whatever the moral case may be, we shouldn't engage in enhanced interrogation because it yields low-value or even misleading information at the cost of tremendous political capital.
Is waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed worse than blowing up some sap who just showed up to work on the wrong day?
Yes. Waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is viewed by the vast majority to be morally far much worse than bombing a munitions factory. That is why doing it costs the tremendous political capital.
Now ask the same group if there are ever circumstances where it can be acceptable to bomb an ammunition factory. Can you imagine that even being up for debate?
That's true, and in many cases people who may be contributing to a country's war effort (thus making themselves legitimate targets) are there involuntarily as a result of having been drafted or otherwise pressed into service. Arguably the worst aspect of industrialized war is the inexorable military logic of attacking the enemy's productive rather than military capacity, as a natural extension of cutting an army's lines of supply.
I agree that trying to establish bright-line rules often seems a futile exercise because it's so easy to come up with ethical inconsistencies. I do have a theory about the moral calculus of conflict but it's inchoate and this comment isn't really the place for it. To sketch the outline, though, the severity of a given outcome in a conflict can be mitigated by the degree of risk involved in bringing it about; so while the imposition involved in sleep deprivation or keeping someone cold is mild compared to someone being horribly maimed by a piece of shrapnel, it's the massive prior asymmetry between captor and prisoner that's problematic in the case of torture. Of course, you could argue that this asymmetry is also strong where only one side in a conflict has an air force or where one side is using remote-controlled military assets like drones, whose 'pilots' experience no physical risks whatsoever. This is going to become a huge problem within a few short years with robotic infantry assets - as soon as they're 'good enough' to deploy effectively there will be huge pressure to do so, even if they are just slightly extending forward positions over a short distance.
> Those folks get killed in war in airstrikes that are totally consistent with international conventions.
The deaths caused by the aggressor of a war are not consistent with international conventions, they are, in the words of a judge in at the Nuremberg tribunals, the consequence of the ultimate war crime.
rayiner isn't the one being disingenuous. CIA interrogation techniques are not the equivalent of the police beating up someone in a cell, the purpose is to gain valuable information. It isn't done for revenge or in situations where the stakes are anything less than the life and death of innocent people. Someone who has information on a literal ticking time bomb is the very definition of a threat to the public. So is someone who can reveal information about the plans of a warlord to subjugate a tribal village, or sell people into slavery or provide financial resources to known killers. If US intelligence isn't willing to hurt bad people before they can hurt innocent people, then what the hell is the point of any of it? You've drawn a very false equivalency.
The moral high ground is very valuable real estate indeed, and the US does hurt itself by doing things that reflect poorly in the eyes of the global public. But we're rightfully and pragmatically more concerned about artillery and soldiers occupying plain old fashioned military high ground. We interrogate to prevent people who openly wish us harm from gaining the power to turn their words into deeds. You can always earn cool points by pointing out historical atrocities, but in the end what matters is that we're still here, alive and prospering. Do you honestly believe that if the US government always behaved like perfect angels that N Korea or Cuba would suddenly listen to our moral lectures? That our behavior would somehow inspire them to change the fundamental cultural mores that come from decades of national poverty and the mindset that comes along with it? Because I don't think it will. Human rights violations will still exist even if we behave with moral perfection. Sometimes the best way to stop the bad guys isn't to set a good example, but instead to waterboard someone until he tells you where to send a SEAL team.
For better or worse, the US has the sanctioned role of providing security for the world. If that means we have to strip someone naked and throw them against a wall then so be it. It's unpleasant, but it sure as hell beats the alternatives.
CIA interrogation techniques are not the equivalent of the police beating up someone in a cell, the purpose is to gain valuable information.
Much as police violence in custody has often been defended with the argument that the police were attempting to obtain information that would lead to a conviction.
It isn't done for revenge or in situations where the stakes are anything less than the life and death of innocent people. Someone who has information on a literal ticking time bomb is the very definition of a threat to the public.
Ostensibly, but for one thing there is usually no actual ticking time bomb because we don't live in the universe of 24, and for another if there was a ticking time bomb there'd be no way to protect against misinformation about its location until it was too late.
The TTB argument implicitly assumes that intelligence gained through torture will be correct and actionable, but this isn't backed up by evidence. If the bomb is on West 63rd street and the torture subject directs you to East 47th street, you won't know you've been lied to until you get there and find out there is no bomb. Conversely, what if the person does not actually know what you want to know, like the 26 detainees mentioned in the report who were picked up despite not being suitable targets for interrogation? When they keep saying they don't know where the ticking time bomb is, how do you tell that they're not just holding out on you?
For better or worse, the US has the sanctioned role of providing security for the world.
Hmmm, no. As I outlined above, its in our interests to hold such a position at present. I think you need to think a bit longer about this, because your views on this subject seem rather shallow.
Disagree: For a lot of us (non-Americans at least) we used to think that the reason why why don't do those kinds of things (torture, use chemical weapons etc) was because they were more cruel than necessary.
Also the fact that these conventions were valid for any war the signing country was involved in, not only those against other who signed (correct me if I'm wrong) seems to point in the same direction, no?
Also, downvote brigade: Fine, I totally agree that rayiner was downvoted and flagkilled twice. rayiner deserved that IMO.
However stop downvoting when he or others are providing insights, even if that insight is uncomfortable, OK?
You fundamentally misunderstand the rationale behind the conventions, and particularly the parts of them that apply specifically in conflicts that are not conflicts between state parties (e.g., Common Article 3.)
Anyhow, there is also the Convention Against Torture isn't even related to conflict or POWs, but applies universally, and obliges parties to it (including the US) to prosecute (not merely avoid engaging in) torture, whoever does it, wherever they do it, and in whatever context they do it. Torturers are hostis humani generis, the common enemy of all mankind.
More legal argument. Given that the current US legal system doesn't apparently protect me, a US citizen, from administrative assassination, I'm worried that I can be administratively shipped off for torture.
That is: the actions outlined in this summary of a report, and in other tacit admissions by US elected leaders, go way beyond arguing that the actions are "legal" or "illegal". The actions outlined in the summary speak to a government that does not care about most human beings at all.
All of morality is not contained within the law. Segregation was legal for a while. Apartheid was legal for a while.
It's not a legal argument at all. Go up to a random person on the street (not in San Francisco), and tell them that the rights of people caught fighting against the U.S. in Afghanistan are just as important as those of law-abiding immigrants trying to build a life in the U.S.
To the contrary. I think you have to have a very legalistic dedication to procedural due process to assert that people abroad advocating the violent overthrow of the United States should have the same rights as ordinary accused in the United States.
I have to disagree: the instant that something becomes a privilege, and not a right, is the instant that some administrator can decide that I personally don't deserve that privilege. There goes my personal protection against our police force, and my personal ability to speak my mind.
Beyond that, if it's good policy for US citizens to have freedom of speech, or right to a fair trial, or to not be tortured, then it's good policy for all humans to have those rights.
By asserting the "random person in the street" argument, you're asserting a tyranny of the majority. You should know better. Shame on you.
I never was fond of you, but this confirms that you're truly a vile human. I cannot believe that there is an actual torture apologist on HN.
In your follow-up comment, you rationalize it by saying that they are not worthy of the same treatment as those from civilized nations.
I don't know if you're a sociopath or you harbor a lot of hate and anger, but in either case, I hope you get the help you need before you hurt someone.
I really wish there was a way for to accurately evaluate these statements. I learned about this by age 10 from my mother, it was mentioned multiple times in high school, it is occasionally referenced in conversation online and in person, and comes up on my Fort Minor pandora station about once every 4 hours of playtime. But I live in a liberal social circle that places a high value on learning history.
We'd be less likely to use interrogation methods that went too far if the officer in charge was subjected to the same methods concurrently. Then the officer would be in the correct position to judge what was reasonable and what was not. Like Jubal was talking about on Firefly.
Jubal Early: You oughta be shot. Or stabbed, lose a leg. To be a surgeon, you know? Know what kind of pain you're dealing with. They make psychiatrists get psychoanalyzed before they can get certified, but they don't make a surgeon get cut on. That seem right to you?
It's a step... It's worth something but it's not like there wasn't a ton of resistance to it.
The question on my mind, were their CIA operatives that refused to comply with orders? Take the various police brutality cases, what's lost in the echochamber about it all is that these guys volunteer to be police, nobody is forced to, some of them want to carry guns, that really changes the situation a bit when an unarmed person ends up dead. The CIA has the same problem here, I know there are people in the CIA that "want to kick some terrorist ass." I'd feel better if there were some outspoken CIA operatives who were coming out saying that they refused to take part. If not, it's not just an ugly stain but the whole organization is broken, they have no respect for law..
And if things like this become public without anyone being held accountable -- signalling public approval for the abuses -- that will happen less the next time.
in case of US concentration camps there also was one man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou
he is still in prison, because ratting on your fellow men is against the law
There usually are no 'good cops' either, because doing something in the face of evil marks you as a traitor
> The saving grace is that we have a country that was able to admit that it did this.
Pft. You're not getting off that easy.
The "saving grace" for Germany was going to international trial for the crimes committed, something the US actively refuses to do, AND hanging their heads in collective national shame for the atrocities they allowed happen in their name, scared shitless what a country is capable of when not kept in check by its people, fearing and strongly dismissing anything remotely reeking like nazism, even up to the point of partially giving up their own freedom of speech, ever since. I don't see the US doing anything similar any time soon. "It's our FREEDOMS! We must have our FREEDOMS!"
This. Admitting you did wrong is not enough; you're not really sorry if you don't make sure it can never happen again, if you don't try to make whatever repairs can be made, if you don't make sure the culprits end up in prison.
I hope the US is truly sorry about this, but they will have to show how sorry they are. Words are not enough.
Germany, has gone out of its way to punish the guilty, and to change their national culture, and imprint their new culture with the taboos necessary to ensure those atrocities can never happen again. No country in the history of the world has ever been so sorry as Germany, and their reaction to the shameful things they did deserves admiration and respect.
If the US wants to deserve similar admiration and respect, they have to show it. They have to prove it, by putting all these people behind bars at the very least.
A quote of a quote: "The Baltimore Sun reported that, former Battalion 3-16 member Jose Barrera said he was taught interrogation methods by U.S. instructors in 1983, used this technique: "The first thing we would say is that we know your mother, your younger brother. And better you cooperate, because if you don't, we're going to bring them in and rape them and torture them and kill them."
In summary, not only does the CIA torture, it exports the vast knowledge of torture that it has so that other people (usually horrid regimes) can torture just as effectively.
The USA has a long, disgusting, and utterly unforgiveable history of practicing and teaching torture. The latest "war on terror" was yet another excuse for the endless parade of terrorism which the CIA inflicts on people.
You say that this stuff would make the Gestapo, KGB, and Stasi proud. Of course it would; the CIA is one of their classmates, and always has been.
Do we have figures about how many people have been tortured? Even if 1 is too much for me, many people think in terms of "It's ok because it's a remote risk".
Is that a total number? Because this isn't the whole report, this is just the executive summary. The full (classified) report goes on for over 6,000 pages.
I just checked, that isn't what the report says at all. They say "at least 39" and say that there are at least 17 other people who were tortured without central office even being notified. Also, these numbers are from one CIA program, not all CIA programs. And it specifically does not include people where the interrogators did anything outside guidelines, so the worst atrocities are not counted on this list at all.
This list does not include examples in which CIA inten-ogators were authorized to use the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, but then implemented the techniques in a manner that diverged from the authorization. Examples include Abu Zubair^®^ and, as detailed, KSM, whose intenogators developed methods of applying the waterboard in a manner that differed from how the technique had previously been used and how it had been described to the Department of Justice. This count also excludes additional allegations of the unauthorized use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.
Where's that quote from? I can't find it in the report.
What I did find, on page 101 is this:
"Over the course ofthe CIA program, at least 39 detainees were subjected to one or more of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.CIA records indicate that there were at least 17 CIA detainees who were subjected to one or more CIA enhanced interrogation techniques without CIA Headquarters approval. This count includes detainees who were approved for the use of some techniques, but were subjected to unapproved techniques, as well as detainees for whom interrogators had no approvals to use any of the
techniques"
This passage indicates that those 17 tortured outside the approval process are accounted for. I don't see anything showing there were others outside the 39.
I don't see anything showing there were others outside the 39
Rather than give my honest opinion here, which would no doubt end up in a kindly word by dang, may I just ask you to run a basic boolean check over your posts before hitting 'reply'.
edit - the part you have such difficulty locating is from the exact same section you quoted, just a little further on, page 104.
Your snark aside, "at least 39" doesn't indicate there are more than 39.
Also, the bit you quoted from page 104 is in reference to a list of the 17 tortured without authorization. So it also doesn't indicate there were more than 39 total
It starts with: This list does not include examples in which CIA inten-ogators were authorized to use the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, but then implemented the techniques in a manner that diverged from the authorization.
How can it be referring to the 17 where no authorization was sought, when it specifically states it is talking about authorized interrogations?
And in common meaning, if you say 'at least 39', you are giving a low-end estimate, not a known total.
The list starts on page 101 and is prefaced by this:
"The 17 detainees who were subjected to techniques without the approval of CIA Headquarters were: (...)", and then it lists them by name.
Then there's the part you're quoting, which is quite clearly stating that the list of 17 isn't counting cases where EIT was authorized, but the techniques were not implemented as authorized. This isn't surprising since the list of 17 is of people who weren't authorized for EIT at all.
If they were authorized, they're not listed as being unauthorized, even if the techniques used went beyond the authorization.
It's really very simple if you read the document. There's no question that section you quoted is referring to the list of 17.
I'm in total agreement with your sentiment and those (so far) in this thread. But I want to question the pretext of the interrogations: the assumption that Americans will support any action that keeps America safe, the "safety first" assumption.
While the importance of safety is reflected in bulk of our public discretionary expenditures, Americans have other values. Americans value liberty. Americans value humanity. Many value these above safety (e.g. N.H. state motto). Sadly most people I know choose safety first and close their eyes to the corollaries, which leads us to where we are now.
Even the "safety first" argument, from the summary I read of the report, doesn't hold, since the value of intelligence gained by torture is clearly debatable. So it's both cruel and inefficient.
> At DETENTION SITE COBALT, detainees were often held down, naked, on a tarp on the floor, with the tarp pulled up around them to form a makeshift tub, while cold or refrigerated water was poured on them. Others were hosed down repeatedly while they were shackled naked, in the standing sleep deprivation position. These same detainees were subsequently placed in rooms with temperatures ranging from 59 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
> two detainees that each had a broken foot were also subjected to walling, stress positions, and cramped confinement, despite the note in their interrogation
plans that these specific enhanced interrogation techniques were not requested because of the medical condition of the detainees.
> CIA records indicate that Majid Khan cooperated with the feedings and was permitted to infuse the fluids and nutrients himself. After approximately three weeks, the CIA developed a more aggressive treatment regimen "without unnecessary conversation." Majid Khan was then subjected to involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration, which included two bottles of Ensure. Later that same day, Majid Khan's "lunch tray," consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was "pureed" and rectally infused. Additional sessions of rectal feeding and hydration followed.
edit: And I mean those are just the emotive gut-wrenching things. Skimming the rest of it, it's filled to the brim with the CIA lying about the extent, efficacy and importance of the program. To me, that is the more worrying part. Anyone who's studied basic psychology gets taught Zimbardo and knows what happens when you run an unregulated prison. While disgusting it's not surprising.
But what is really surprising is the extent to which the CIA was willing to lie and obscure the truth even to their superiors.
> These violations included physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder.
> In 2004, Antonio Taguba, a major general in the U.S. Army, wrote in the Taguba Report that a detainee had been sodomized with "a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick."[30] In 2009, Taguba stated that there was photographic evidence of rape having occurred at Abu Ghraib.[31] An Abu Ghraib detainee told investigators that he heard an Iraqi teenage boy screaming, and saw an Army translator having sex with him, while a female soldier took pictures.[32] A witness identified the alleged rapist as an American-Egyptian who worked as a translator. In 2009, he was the subject of a civil court case in the United States.[31] Another photo shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner.[31] Other photos show interrogators sexually assaulting prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube, and a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.
> In other instances of sexual abuse, soldiers were found to have raped female inmates, and senior U.S. officials admitted that rape had taken place at Abu Ghraib.[33][34] Some of the women who had been raped became pregnant, and in some cases, were later killed by their family members in what were thought to be instances of honor killing.[35]
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST the third point, there is a second half to it that shows what he tried to do to him self after being put through that
> Additional sessions of rectal feeding and hydration followed. In addition to his hunger strikes, Majid Klian engaged in acts of self-harm that included attempting to cut his wrist on two occasions, an attempt to chew into his arm at the inner elbow, an attempt to cut a vein in the top of his foot, and an attempt to cut into his skin at the elbow joint using a filed toothbrush.
This man literally tried to chew through his own body, to bleed out, to avoid having his food forcefully shoved up his ass, for no reason whatsoever. He further attempted to kill himself on several occasions to avoid this as well.
That is the cold truth of that statement. This is fucking disgusting, and someone needs to be held accountable.
I don't understand, how can you blame the citizens for this, when they were ignorant, against their will, about this?
When the institution that is performing these acts out-and-out lies about the impact and severity, how can random citizens be held accountable? That honestly makes no sense to me.
At best, the citizens are ignorantly complicit by lack of attention. What did the people do about MK ULTRA? Who was punished? Oh, that's right, the CIA got off with paying their victims off and no-one was held "accountable". The republic has been dead. What's left is just the populace of the most financially successful country, and those people don't want to be told how complacently evil they and their country have become. I've argued with enough people that will reject the truth up until it's completely ill-refutable, the reason being, they like their lifestyle and make-believe country.
>I don't understand, how can you blame the citizens for this, when they were ignorant, against their will, about this?
>When the institution that is performing these acts out-and-out lies about the impact and severity, how can random citizens be held accountable? That honestly makes no sense to me.
because the institutions and individuals doing it know that they will go unpunished once the truth gets discovered. Whenever stuff like this surfaces nobody gets punished and thus the citizens/society give clear approval to the actions that have already been perpetrated and to perpetrate it in the future as long as visibility of convenient "ignorance" is maintained.
Is this a democracy, or isn't it? And yeah, sure, we're all "ignorant" in the sense that we ignore everything that isn't spelled out in black and white, and then posted at eye level in our line of sight.
Yes. We can't just keep whining "come on, guys, you really ought to stop" to our leaders. This is happening in our names, and our hands are dirty. Stopping this is our own responsibility.
A start would be to stop looking to someone else to show you the way. What have you tried?
Working in groups is what makes it so damn easy to discredit, re-brand and dilute movements. Protesting? C'mon, we're way past the useful application of protesting.
The US is legally required by the Geneva Convention Against Torture, signed into US law by Ronald Reagan, to prosecute the torturers and their chain of command.
The new law authorizes the use of military force to
liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied
country being held by the court, which is located in
The Hague. This provision, dubbed the "Hague invasion
clause," has caused a strong reaction from U.S. allies
around the world [...]
This is not entirely correct; the US is not a party to the Rome Statute, true, but it in fact Bill Clinton did sign the Rome Statute, but it was never submitted for ratification, and George W. Bush's administration sent a note purporting to retract the signature (as a means of avoid obligations that attach to signatories to treaties even prior to ratification under the Vienna Convention on Treaties, specifically, the obligation not to work to undermine the treaty's purpose.)
The US has engaged more positively (but without any moves toward ratification or even retracting the purported retraction of its signature) with the ICC under the Obama Administration.
Thanks for providing these details. (I didn't even know that Bill Clinton did actually sign the statute, even though it was effectively retracted (if only via (GWB) sending a note purporting to retract the signature, as I take it.))
You don't have to be signatory to the ICC for torture to be illegal. The ICC is fairly recent. We didn't need the ICC at Nuremberg. We don't need it now. It can be prosecuted within the US justice system, or a new tibunal can be created for it.
The first step is telling your representative(s) that you think torture is bad. They genuinely don't know if you approve of it or not, and they've got the CIA and associated lobby telling them how necessary it is and that if they try to stop it, they're hurting america and in fact they're basically terrorists themselves.
Start by phoning your representative's office. Today. Tomorrow. The day after that. Every day, ask for your representative's statement on CIA torture. Ask why they haven't condemned it more thoroughly; are they in favour of torture? What exactly are they going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again? Really? Just that? That's not enough. What else? Talk to your neighbours, friends, family, colleagues. Ask them to do the same. Send letters. Send eMails. Visit in person. Don't stop.
Given that effecting a change in government policy is what politics is, and that's the aim, what exactly would deal with this situation that isn't politics? You've got a snappy attitude, denigrating the idea of politics; do you have anything that isn't politics, or are you just a smug soundbite?
I'm sure all the previous people who used politics to change things did indeed find it an easy ride. Martin King basically phoned in his efforts, didn't he? And I recall Pankhurst effected her changes with a single stern letter to the London Times.
What other option is there? Revolution? If you can't get enough people together to vote the current crooks out of office, you certainly have no hope of staging a revolution.
In the end, these people need to be prosecuted in order to lock them up. That means the DoJ needs to do its job, but in the corrupt system of the US, it also means that Congress needs to understand the gravity of the situation.
Maybe people don't vote because they are disenchanted with the system they don't believe works as it was supposed to? Where the heck do you get off saying if people aren't capable of the desire to vote, a revolution isn't possible?
Consider for a moment: you can vote for spam or canned tuna.
Do you think people are more likely to take up arms against the government than to vote? You're a fool if you do.
How do you think you can stage a revolution with a minority of the population behind you, while the powers that be are as well-armed and as eager to use violence as they are in the US?
You've got a better chance of voting both parties out of office with a minority vote, and fixing the broken system that people are so disenchanted with.
Your mistake is that you believe that the options they're giving you are the only ones. You can make a third option. If you can get enough people behind you to stage a credible revolution, you can easily get enough people to vote for your third option.
It's totally true that the US electoral system is broken and corrupt and doesn't do justice to the vote of the people, but it's not yet to the point that the vote doesn't matter at all. People do still need to vote, and alternatives to the two ruling parties are still legal. You can take advantage of that to stage a much more peaceful revolution through the ballot box.
Demand also that everybody who has been involved in this in any way be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
And not even just the US law. I'm sure what the Nazis did was totally legal by their own laws, and yet they were still punished. Some crimes supercede local laws.
While I disagree in particular (because it is believed the agents of the US using this torture practices acted in secret) there is an overarching logic that is sound: to the degree a society is democratic is the same degree its citizens are ultimately responsible for the actions of their government officials.
We as a country allow whistle-blowers to be called traitors, imprisoned, character assassinated, assassinated and exiled from our country. The only people that don't or didn't know are those that wished to continue living the 'American dream' in denial.
The only way to avoid being responsible for this, is to take the responsibility you have: to condemn this, and demand justice. Pay reparations to the victims of these sadists (preferably out of the pockets of the culprits, but out of the US treasury if necessary), and put the culprits behind bars.
Anyone not doing that, is guilty of condoning this crime, and ensuring that it can and will happen again in the future.
The root of the problem didn't start at the voting booth, "Oh I'll check yes to torture those terrorist", or "I'm going to write my Congressmen telling them to torture some folks". In fact Congress voted to outlaaw waterboarding: http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/14/us-security-usa-wa... (although it was vetoed by President Bush). This report will help to further clamp down on brutal interrogation techniques. It will push Congress and President Obama to resolve the issue. The CIA, in fact mislead any type of oversight over the torture programs. So instead of jumping to "we're all blame" conclusions, why don't you blame the people in charge that secured the funding for these officers to do it?
The root of the problem is that the state is a monopoly on violence. What is a "citizen" supposed to do? Vote for the red master or the blue master next time? It makes no difference.
The best thing a "citizen" can do is recognize the state is foundationally unethical and has no legitimate political authority and never did. [1] Once we leave behind the mysticism of state authority, perhaps we can find better ways to organize society in ways that are ethically sound.
How is that going to help you? Going rogue on your own is not going to get these people in prison, or prevent that it will happen again.
You need people on your side. You need a majority of Americans on your side. And once you've got that, you can vote the politicians out of office, elect some better ones, and finally see justice done. And maybe before that, you can use the threat of this happening to get the current crop of politicians to finally care about justice.
You say that, but your dismissive attitude to the solution sounds like you're doing the exact opposite. Do you really honestly think you can solve the problem on your own?
It's not only your government, it's also the staff working at the military/industrial complex. It's also other governments and their staff who have been pribed/coerced to help them with their plan.
2. There is abundant proof that the US engaged in a deliberate, not occasional, policy of torture, whitewashed as "enhanced interrogation techniques".
3. There is so far no proof that other western nations have recently had a policy of deliberate torture, except for the sad cases where the US creatively outsourced some of its torture needs to Poland and perhaps a few other eastern european countries.
Where was I excusing anyone? I am merely stating, it would be ignorant to assume that other western countries are not doing the same and the same investigation into the possibility is warranted.
Other Western nations facilitated capture and detention, they are helped get people to the CIA. So you are seriously telling me that they didn't suspect? Really???
Look, the EU is willing to drag planes from the sky to support the US in getting Snowden, so you think they don't know what the CIA was doing? Really???
These tortures were only happening in Poland, just like the Holocaust was merely happening in Poland. I hope that this is what you mean by 'creatively' - i.e. just changing the place, not the people.
in reality, everything is excused when it is against the enemy. but even then, the problem here is that 1) most things were done just out of sadism. for no real benefit. US tax payers pretty much paid for a BSDM dungeon for some sick CIA operatives. 2) several cases caught lawful citizens and great pains were taken to make it look like nothing happened.
"The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing"
We knew - we knew - that detainees were being tortured. We didn't know how many; nor for how long; nor the exact methods; but we did know that it was happening.
We (congress) knew more than vague generalities. According to Jose Rodriguez[1], administration and congressional leaders knew, approved, and were kept briefed throughout.
I dunno, 59 degrees seems quite chilly if you've just been stripped naked and soaked with ice cold water. Note no mention is made of whether the detainees were dried or clothed first either.
And abducted, held without trial, tortured, waterboard, anal raped, threatened, beaten againast a wall, and other things besides. A lot of them while also being totally inoccent (and in any way, without trial).
What exactly have you suffered besides a comfy middle class existance that gives you the moral superiority to laugh at that?
Would you also laugh at jews in Dr. Mengele's cold exposure experiments being "a little chilly"?
Keeping in mind that we disagree as to how many, if any, of the detainees were "totally innocent" (as opposed to procedurally innocent), are you really going to compare our treatment of terrorists to the Germans' treatment of jewish civilians?
>Keeping in mind that we disagree as to how many, if any, of the detainees were "totally innocent" (as opposed to procedurally innocent), are you really going to compare our treatment of terrorists to the Germans' treatment of jewish civilians?
Absolutely. Abduction, held without trial, dehumanizing conditions, torture, etc.
Does your outrage about the jewish civilians only begin at the point were they burned them too?
Second, there are three levels of evil here, even if you disagree about "how many were totally innocent".
1) Some of them being totally innocent without dispute (for example those that were even released as such - in one case I read about after 7 years (!), and others for which they admitted they knew it for the start but used them as leverage, etc).
2) Even for the guilty, there should be no inprisoment without due process and fair trial.
3) Even for proven guilty, there should be no torture.
I don't consider anyone who does not agree on (2) and (3), basic tennets of human rights in the civilized world, anything more progressed than a KKK member lynching blacks back in the day...
Just take two hours of your day. Strip naked, have someone throw a bucket of cold water over you, and then stand on a letter-size piece of paper for two hours in a room that is 15C
Is there a name for the argumentative tactic of singling out the weakest thing a person said, then exaggerating it into a straw man and arguing against it, while ignoring everything else? Whatever it's called, you're not fooling anybody.
I'm not morally outraged at all, - I've told people to go and think twice what they would do if terrorists blew up their kids in a schoolbus. Same goes for outrage about "terrorists": What would I have done if my country was invaded? Hopefully hid in the mountains trying to snipe as many of the invaders as possible, just like my granddad did when the Germans came.
Why? Because people are so quick to judge without even trying once to see why the others are doing what they do.
I just think it is a bad idea to poke fun at it. There are times for funny remarks on serious stuff. I think you'll find that this is not it.
I'd be pretty happy if HN could muster the same uniform moral outrage about rape jokes involving non-terrorists (e.g. gamergate) as it has shown in response to my comment about terrorists being cold. But I guess my priorities are out of whack.
There's a big difference between a bunch of gamers on the internet making rape threats between/during halo sessions, and members of the .gov/.mil torturing people in black sites...though there are plenty of people on both sides of the gamergate nonsense who'd love to draw a parallel in their level of supposed persecution.
First of all, not all are terrorists, including by the torturers' own admission.
Second, the idea that terrorists (especially as arbitrarily defined, without trial and due process, for years on end) should be tortured is still problematic.
Third, yes they are out of whack. The decent human priorities would be to have the same sympathies for all victims, and the same demand for human rights to be applied in both cases.
To the contrary, you're not going to get much mileage in court attacking someone's weakest argument. On the internet, however, mocking someone's weakest argument is fair game.
I don't buy it. You've repeatedly brought up that one item to the exclusion of all the others in contexts that use it as part of an actual argument. Unless your entire participation in this thread is just an elaborate and vast attempt to mock people?
If you search my post history, you can see I mentioned the cold room three times, besides the original mention.
One was in a hyperbolic rhetorical context, to exaggerate the distinction with killing someone, which we consider acceptable in war:
> So you're saying we shouldn't engage in torture because it's "bad"? It's okay to blow these same people up in the battlefield, but god forbid we throw water on them and put them in a slightly cold room?
One was self-referential:
> I'd be pretty happy if HN could muster the same uniform moral outrage about rape jokes involving non-terrorists (e.g. gamergate) as it has shown in response to my comment about terrorists being cold.
One was in response to 'reitanqild saying: "Most of us would much rather prefer to be shot dead or blown up in a split second than being even slightly tortured and locked up indefinitely."
> Throwing water on someone and leaving them in a 59-degree room is worse than shooting them dead? Keeping someone awake until they hallucinate is worse than shooting them dead? Really?
The cold room and the sleep deprivation were in response to the "slightly tortured" part of that comment.
At no point did I ever try to make the argument that "what the CIA did wasn't so bad because they just put people in cold rooms." I actually have no interest in trying to convince anyone that what the CIA did wasn't bad. This is not an issue that people are going to approach rationally. It's about gut-feelings--either you have a visceral reaction to these interrogation techniques or you don't.
You said elsewhere: "I don't think torture is ever justified, under any circumstances. No exceptions."
Well I strongly disagree. If it would actually save innocent lives,[1] I'd have absolutely no qualms about any number of Al Qaeda terrorists being tortured. It's an unspeakably evil organization, promulgating ideologies that are at their best barbaric and backward. I think even the people that are receptive to their message and associate themselves with the organization, even if they do nothing more, are morally culpable.
And I imagine polls will show about half the country or more agreeing with me: http://mic.com/articles/106084/two-charts-show-why-the-cia-s.... Now of course the majority of people can be on the wrong side of history, but I don't think this is one of those situations.
[1] I've noted elsewhere that I don't think the techniques are effective and that we shouldn't be engaging in them for that reason.
With how many posts you've deleted or had killed, I can't really search your history at this point.
Anyway, if you you have no interest in trying to convince people, why are you here discussing this? You're certainly giving every appearance of trying to convince people. You're putting forth arguments that look like they're intended to be convincing.
In another comment, you mentioned environmental disaster as something that should rank higher. Do you also endorse the use of torture on unrepentant polluters, climate change skeptics, and the like? Or is terrorism somehow special in your eyes?
And I couldn't care less how many people agree with you. I can't understand why you would even bring that up.
I could ask you the same question. Do you think you're going to convince people who think terrorism is an existential threat that torture is not acceptable, no exceptions? I doubt it. Rather, you're here to express your sentiment on the subject. I'm just expressing mine.
Anyway, at no point did I ever say we should torture anyone. In fact I said exactly the opposite in response to 'angibrowl. But at the end of the day I have better places to use my limited moral outrage than on how Khalid Sheik Mohammad was treated.
To be honest, what really kept me participating in this thread is the comparison to Japanese and Jewish persecution. I just can't understand the point of view of people who focus on the action alone, to the exclusion of who is the target of the action. I think it matters that these guys are scumbags.
I am here to convince people. I don't think the chances are good, but I give it a shot. I think that the massive fear of terrorism is the worst consequence of 9/11 in this country, and that it has caused us to damage ourselves far more than the terrorists themselves could ever hope to accomplish. I try to do my bit to roll back that opinion when the occasion arises.
There's a thin line between "this guy is a scumbag because he's part of al Qaeda" and "this guy is a scumbag because he's a Republican." This is why we have due process. Or rather, why we're supposed to have it, even though we've given up on it for al Qaeda, or for people we think are related.
> On the internet, however, mocking someone's weakest argument is fair game
Not on Hacker News it isn't. We want people to apply the Principle of Charity and respond to the strongest reasonable interpretation of what each other is saying [1]. Alternatively,
A comment in reply to another comment should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side. [2]
It increasingly seems to me that we should add these principles to the site guidelines, though they're arguably derivable from them.
It's true that when people seem (and/or are) hopelessly wrong and misguided, and no one else seems (and/or is) respecting these principles, there's a great temptation to say "fuck it" and let loose with snark. But that needs to be resisted. The community depends on you and other established users to set good examples. Otherwise how can we tell new users that they can't do the same—or rather, do worse, since these things always get worse?
As a mild disagreement, I would worry that over-enforcement of this principle would squelch out all humor. While humor may not quite be in the spirit of colleagues, or politics, it is certainly within the spirit of friendship. I am not sure about the right line to draw, but I do think that a truly friendly community is one that doesn't take itself too seriously.
Isn't humor obviously within the spirit of colleagues? It certainly has been, any place where I've had colleagues.
There's a kind of caricaturing wit that could be called uncharitable, but only if it's meant to distort, in which case the humor is a means to something else and it's the something else that's the problem.
> Is there a name for the argumentative tactic of singling out the weakest thing a person said, then exaggerating it into a straw man and arguing against it, while ignoring everything else?
I've seen this rhetorical strategy before and I don't know if it has an "official" name, but I like the term "weak man" (in contrast to "straw man"). Straw man means inventing a weak position for your opponent and then attacking that; Weak man means deliberately selecting your opponent's weakest argument and ignoring the rest. It would be kind of like if atheists' entire argument boiled down to "Look how dumb the Westboro Baptist Church people are."
In one case, CIA abducted a mentally handicapped man who they knew to be innocent[0], for the sole purpose of recording and sending video tapes of him crying and in distress to his family members to use "as leverage"[1][2].
* I would never support the use of these techniques against soldiers of a legitimate state or other criminal actors.
* The perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks to me represent a completely different sort of threat than has ever been encountered - which legitimized the use of torture (though to be honest, the sorts of techniques outlined in the report don't really sound like what I would classify as "torture"; i.e., the infliction of unbearable pain with no expectation of actionable information being extracted.)
* If the techniques were in fact of no value (which the CIA disputes) then I would of course not support their continued use. I don't support the infliction of 'needless' pain or suffering. If they were providing useful information then I have no ethical or moral problem with them.
What is different about the 9/11 attacks that legitimizes the use of torture, when you would not support it against soldiers or other criminals?
Do keep in mind that 9/11 doesn't even register on the atrocity scale when compared to what's been done by "soldiers of a legitimate state." If you would endorse torture to prevent another 9/11, why wouldn't you also endorse torture to prevent, say, another Hiroshima?
> What is different about the 9/11 attacks that legitimizes the use of torture, when you would not support it against soldiers or other criminals?
They had demonstrated the practice of mass killings of innocent civilians and expressed the desire to continue to do so.
> If you would endorse torture to prevent another 9/11, why wouldn't you also endorse torture to prevent, say, another Hiroshima?
Well, setting aside the moral equivalency of 9/11 to Hiroshima, I suppose if there was reason to believe there was a nuclear threat and there was access to someone for whom it was legitimately believed could provide details which would prevent it, employing torture would be morally and ethically justified.
Again, that to me is the crux also. If it is not effective than there is no justification. If it is, which the CIA claims it was, then I have no ethical problem with it in this limited situation
The CIA is completely biased here. They have every reason to claim that torture is effective purely to defend their past actions. Their stated opinion on it means absolutely nothing, in that you'd expect them to say exactly that either way.
Mass killings of innocent civilians are commonly carried out by "soldiers of a legitimate state."
OK, so nuclear attacks by soldiers justify it. How about conventional strategic bombing? Invasions? Exactly where and why do you draw the line, if you're not drawing it where you previously said?
> They had demonstrated the practice of mass killings of innocent civilians and expressed the desire to continue to do so.
That hardly makes them unique, or even different than previous enemies the US has faced, and dealt with detainees from, and studied the effects of interrogation, and concluded that torture is ineffective.
And, as the Senate report notes, every single one of the CIA claims that this torture was effective misrepresented the facts, either of whether information gained through torture had not independently been gained through other means, or whether the information gained was gained through the torture at all (often claiming information gained from a detainee before "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used was gained through those techniques, which is only plausible if the techniques are so effective that they send shockwaves back in time), or by simply misrepresenting the existence of threats that were supposedly disrupted when no real threat existed.
If you start bending on this, you become the thing you hate. Take the moral high-ground or slide down the mountain. Good luck finding a comfortable place somewhere before you are below the person you hate.
I think that in many ways this becomes the old Moral Absolutism versus Moral Relativism problem.
You can have a moral absolutist who says, "Harming another human is wrong, therefore we will not torture under any case." (A different absolutist might be more utilitarian in arguing for torture of one to save many, but you get the point- an absolutist has a position and a rigid interpretation of that position, and sticks with it)
You can have a moral relativist who says, "Harming another human is wrong. We cannot torture someone to collect information, but we cannot avoid collecting that information because if we avoid collecting that information it will lead to someone else harming more humans."
Two sides to the same moral problem. I tend to agree with the relativist view of the problem rather than the absolutist view; the relativist in this case is informed by the consequences of both action and inaction whereas the absolutist in this case only cares about the consequences of action. The solution? Absolutism will provide a solution because something is either right or wrong. So absolutism is easy, attractive. Relativism provides no clear solution, which is why many people prefer to reason in moral absolutist terms.
This has also been stated by many interrogation professionals, so it's not like it's just uninformed civilians running around saying "torture doesn't work, so don't use it"
Certainly, I accept your objection on practical grounds, but cannot quite accept the objection on moral grounds.
If something doesn't work, then don't do it. Hiroshima was an extreme example of that. By August the political establishment in Japan was split, with consensus moving rapidly to peace out of the war because by mid 1945 the industrial centers of Osaka and Tokyo were ruined by fire bombings. It just so happens that at the same time the government is moving to surrender, we use two bombs to vaporize more people.
"We need to use these bombs to end the war sooner." A fine argument to the intentionalist, regardless of outcome, but the consequentialist will have a problem with it because the atomic bombings did not lead to an early conclusion of the war, the fire bombings did.
The problem with that kind of reasoning is that it assigns a quantitative value to life. I don't think you can subject human life to this kind of mathematical reasoning: we'll sacrifice two lives to save three, or twenty to save five hundred. This kind of calculation is utilitarian economics, not ethics. Ethical reasoning tells us that certain categories of action are intrinsically wrong, regardless of context, and that whatever immediate benefit accrues from them, they will taint and corrupt the individual and the society that perpetrates them. Torture indisputably falls within this category.
We went on to foreign soil, and abducted the prisoners in question. It's not like we found them sneaking across our borders with bombs... We have a legal declaration of war on "terror" ... all enemy combatants in such a declaration are POW, regardless of their status in a standing army.
I have a fairly flexible moral code as far as even torture is concerned... this goes beyond what I would consider appropriate in any sense of the word.
Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost.
It was, and I think his point is borne out in the fact that numerous films and TV shows have depicted torture that would formerly have been the preserve of pure villains to tools available to heroic protagonists in sufficiently urgent circumstances. Never do you see the efficacy of it questioned, or the deleterious effects on the administrator explored, or the scenario where it is erroneously applied to an innocent or where an intelligence asset is lost as a result. Deliberately or not, the fictional depiction of torture over the last decade or so has been almust uniformly ideological.
Fox and the like will also be debating its "benefits and how it saved Americans' lives"
the top headline on Fox news this morning was quoting some blowhard politician calling the release of the report 'unconscionable.' strange moral calculus in which the publication of a document is considered a more egregious offense than torturing people.
I've heard this theory. It's not really consistent with the fact that "24" was a torture-fest from the first season, aired before the enhanced interrogation stuff really got going. I was in college at the time, and we loved the show. You don't need much "purposeful desensitizing" to convince a bunch of 20-something guys it's okay to torture terrorists.
As far as 24 goes, it didn't air until after the Sept 11 attacks, but it went into production 6 months before, and was first conceived of sometime in 2000. While a few 9-11 truther types would have it that this was part of a long-planned propaganda campaign, I don't believe that - 'two-fisted cop who doesn't go by the book' is a decades-old trope. I do think that the experience of terrorism helped to build the audience for the show and make it a huge hit, though, when it might have seemed absurdly overblown if it had screened a year earlier.
I was thinking more about how there were a whole stack of movies exploring different aspects of torture in great detail, typically with unpleasant dilemmas, eg the Saw franchise, Hostel etc. etc.. Now I don't think these are exclusively a response to American policy either - the opst-2000 cultural context also included things like Al-Qaeda terrorists decapitating Daniel Pearl and uploading the videos to Youtube and so forth.
I've assumed this theory prima facie for a while. Further examples are movies glorifying war (Homefront, Lone Survivor). As coldtea mentions, it could be considered a form of moving the Overton window.
As 'angibrowl points out, the movie trope of the good guy that isn't constrained by procedural rules is very old.[1] The 1980's action movie catalogue is full of it. Moving the Overton window doesn't even make sense in this context. Moving it from where? We're talking about a country full of people that vociferously supported bombing harmless Vietnamese villages off the map. Aside from maybe the folks who grew up in the 1990's, who weren't exposed to any real global conflict, I'd be surprised if the current generation wasn't the least receptive in American history to questionable methods of warfare.
[1] You see it a lot in crime dramas from the 1980's, where things like the 4th amendment are portrayed as just letting criminals off on "technicalities."
The current trend traces at least as far back as DIRTY HARRY (1971). "Dirty Harry" was a common reference to extra-procedural cops for a couple decades.
Perhaps it's 'keeping the window propped up' (over to where it was moved long ago). The long history isn't exclusive to the idea that these shows and movies are a form of propaganda, or desensitization.
Moved when? Name one generation that you think was less accepting of questionable conduct in warfare.
The long history suggests that the shows and movies are a symptom of cultural attitudes, rather than a cause. For example, consider all the media in the 1980's portraying criminal procedural protections as "technicalities." I think it was in response to the fact that, after 1960, crime per capita tripled before incarceration per capita started going up. As I said about 24--in the aftermath of 9/11, the torture-fest was just capitalizing on the anger people felt. On my college campus in 2002 there was a lot of talk about nuking the middle east and things like that, which is quite contrary to what the government was saying.
My little sister just got into with me on facebook about how it is perfectly ok to torture our enemies.
That's just the last straw for me. I would never have someone in my life, family or not, who would think raping people is acceptable. This is even worse. Even our enemies shouldn't be raped/tortured.
I'm gonna say yes - not killing them in cold blood execution style but in the sense of them being a valid target. If you're in a position to torture/rape someone, you've already neutralized them as a threat by capturing them. Shooting or bombing someone is not necessarily OK, but while the person is at liberty they could in theory be about to shoot your or engineer some other sort of attack - the operation to assassinate Admiral Yamamoto in WW2 being a good example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vengeance
On the other hand, torture isn't something that people do because they feel they have to, but rather because they can. Since all the accumulated evidence to points to it being a poor way to to gather intelligence information, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it's just way of being vindictive or sadistic instead, something that we find deplorable in other contexts. I think it's considered deplorable because such feelings are quite common but the majority of us make the effort not to act upon them.
the human race so far narrowed it down to 2 possibilities - judicial proceedings or war following the rules of Geneva Conventions. Every other form of violence is a crime, with torture and killings being the crimes against humanity, prosecutable by any government and without statute of limitations.
These torture victims weren't even allowed to kill themselves. At least one tried to gnaw through his own veins just to end it all. Yes, this kind of torture is worse than murder. To the victim, but also for the perpetrator, because it's done in cold blood for a prolonged time. You have to have a truly sick mind to be able to do this and continue doing this. The people doing this do not belong out on the street, and they certainly should not be holding any kind of authority.
Huge 24 fan here (watched all seasons), I loved the show but that doesn't mean I support torture. I always found the following things ridiculous (and pretty unrealistic):
1) The ridiculous urgency of it, where they're running against the clock to "stop the bomb" or something like that. These kinds of scenarios are highly unlikely in real life, IMHO.
2) That Jack Bauer always got away with all the things he did. AFAIK, he did not spend even a single second inside a US prison (although he did come pretty close a few times).
I always looked at the show as fiction (like a superhero show), not something to be emulated in real life. I really hope most of its viewers looked at it the same way.
I know lots of people who love Game of Thrones but it's a bit silly to think that there's a deliberate attempt to normalize incest or feudalism. It's just a TV show people happen to live.
Game of Thrones also has dragons and ice-zombies. 24 purports to be something that - while far-fetched - "could happen". I don't think you can say that about Game of Thrones. Also, in GoT you get a pretty good idea of the downsides of incest and feudalism, on the off chance the viewer wasn't already aware - whereas in 24 torture is presented as a wonderful thing in certain (or all) circumstances.
I do not believe that it was done on purpose, I think it's in some way a reflection of general morals and ideas of dealing with terrorism floating around in the US society at that time, shortly after 9/11.
Imagine you are the director of such a show that is about some hero that prevents terrorism. What would you make that hero do to prevent a second 9/11 to capture the audience.
Edit: What I can imagine is that 24 inspired some US officials.
Maybe, but I don't think it was done actively. I remember when I was still at a certain military institution and the Dean was periodically pulling in all of the cadets in small groups during "Dean's hour", a period immediately following lunch, to remind us that torture is something that flies in the face of everything we were about to stand for, especially as we were about to graduate and head off to Iraq/Afghanistan. He even tried to get the folks running 24 to quit showing it so prominently [1]. I think it was really just about making money - torture has shock value just like anything else that pushes the established boundaries of violence for television. So I don't think there's some broader conspiracy, I think the people running Fox are really just assholes and capitalized on people's fears.
There's something to be said for the post-9/11 zeitgeist that it gonna take us a really, really long time to get over. We see it in super hero movies (if I have to watch Manhattan get pulverized one more time...) and in a more evolved and complex form with Homeland. I think it'll be years before we come to terms with how we've responded as a society and with what we've done.
Criminals are apparently considered unworthy of civil rights. Just witness how many people justify the recent high-profile police killings by pointing out that one victim had previously robbed a convenience store and another one was selling cigarettes on the black market. In many people's minds, "selling illegal cigarettes" equates to "OK to kill in the street." Given that, it's no wonder that prison conditions aren't scrutinized.
> Just witness how many people justify the recent high-profile police killings by pointing out that one victim had previously robbed a convenience store and another one was selling cigarettes on the black market
I haven't seen many people use Brown's robbing the convenience store (and assaulting the shopkeeper) to justify his shooting. It's his attacking the officer and trying to take the officer's gun that is typically used as justification.
The convenience store was relevant before the forensic evidence was available, because at the time we had to choose between two stories, neither of which made much sense:
1. Cop with no prior evidence of problems flips out for no apparent reason and blows away a young man who he had stopped for jaywalking, or
2. Young man who was kind, gentle, non-violent and never harmed anyone flips out for no apparent reason and attacks a cop who is just trying to tell him to walk on the sidewalk.
Both of these require someone to be acting way out of known character. Add in the convenience store, and we know that Brown was already acting way out of character that day, just moments before the shooting, which tips the probabilities way in favor of #2.
Now that the forensic evidence is available and backs #2, there are two questions that we should be asking.
1. Why was Brown acting so out of character that day?
Or were we seeing the "real" Brown that day, and the character he presented to family, teachers, clergy, etc., was a front? If so, then we should be finding out how he fooled them, so that in the future teachers and clergy can do a better job of recognizing such people and intervening.
2. Why did Officer Wilson allow himself to get into a position where Brown could attack him and go for his gun?
Character doesn't really interest me. People can be extremely inconsistent. It's to the point where it's a standard joke that the neighbors of serial killers describe them as being nice people. So I personally see no inconsistency with either the supposed nice kid going bonkers or the supposed good cop turning murderous.
To me, the interesting questions are your second one plus the question of why the officer started shooting instead of leaving the scene, potentially returning with backup, since he was still in his car.
The second half of your statement is untrue. Google "prison rape reduction act" - this has resulted in a significant improvement as reported both through scientific surveys and anecdotal accounts.
> I have no words. This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud.
Godwin's Law? As far as I know there were no mass machine-gunnings, people hanged with piano wire or actually any people tortured to death. A lot of the techniques listed are pretty much what the US (and UK) army use on their own troops as part of escape and evasion training.
On November --, 2002, adetainee who had been held
partially nude and chained to a concrete floor died from suspected hypothermia at the facility. [camp COBALT]
Let's not forget, not all the detainees were terrorists.
US promoted a reward program in middle east asking locals to turn in anyone with ties to terrorists. All they had to do was tell a name to US military, and collect reward for every name.
Many locals turned in thousands of innocent people just to collect a reward. These people were immediately arrested and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay without any investigation. US did not even require any probably cause, evidence or investigation to detain and torture these people.
If CIA tortured George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in this way, I am sure they would confess to being an accomplice along with Osama Bin Laden in 9/11 attack.
Unfortunately, this US "war on terror" has created tens of thousands of more terrorists all over the world. It haven't made the US or World any safer, it has created a even bigger monster.
The actual thread of terrorism is so minute, that it's not worth worrying about. However, the fact that a 'war on terror' exists is what is desired (by the various parties that stand to gain with such a war). ANd it's not even just one group or org - it's a whole bunch of them, each individually acting in a self-interested way. The end result is the military industrial complex, all the federal money and various other parties, all pushing in the same direction because it benefits them.
The only real way to get around this problem is balance of power - more people need to be richer, so that on average, nobody can push their agenda better than anyone else.
What is your source? Both because I have always heard about the "rewards program" and am interested in reading more, and because wherever you got the information that thousands of people were ever sent to Guantanamo Bay is simply wrong [1]. I see a trend of people rehashing things about Guantanamo Bay that they've heard somewhere else and just putting it out there. It doesn't help the progressive agenda of understanding GTMO and closing it, because the information is just plain wrong.
I saw this in a documentary (I guess it was PBS or BBC). It also had testimonies of innocent people who were detained & tortured for 5+ years, then released by US.
your link says this: "Bounties paid by Bush Administration to anyone who would hand over a possible terror suspect: $3,000 to $25,000" and references http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8049868/ns/world_news
A program similar to this was employed in Vietnam war , however after thousands were assassinated and killed by said,South Vietnam and the program having had diminishing returns the program was halted, they believe many innocents were turned in due to localized revenge minded regional authorities.
at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard
...
included an "intellectually challenged" man whose CIA detention was
used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information
> Torture should be like rape. Anyone suggesting debating if rape is acceptable should be slapped on the head and considered an idiot.
How do you know we haven't used rape as torture? We've already walked up to that line, with medically unnecssary anal rehydration acknowledged as a form of control.
So, we are debating the appropriateness of rape. And yes, that sickens me.
>Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost.<
Like most of what Zizek says, this doesn't survive even the slightest scrutiny. Not that I want to be seen as "pro-torture", but to dismiss it categorically, as Zizek does, is to fail to grapple with the more general ethical conundrum of collateral damage.
Harris discusses this quite effectively[0]. Basically boiling it down to (paraphrasing) "If you're against torture then you should be against any action that results in collateral damage."
As much as I loathe the immorality and idiocy of these programs, there is no reason to lose all historical perspective.
> This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud.
A big difference is that those groups tortured and killed many of their own subjects for their political dissidence. In this case, the CIA tortured (albeit counterproductively) to protect its citizens, and there was a free press to uncover and help stop these programs for the most part.
> Reading them, it is easy to forget the context in which the program began - not that the context should serve as an excuse, but rather as a warning for the future.
Too bad this only covers the CIA and not the military. I was a 97E (interrogator) in the Army during both Bush administrations, who was lucky to never be deployed. I bet the military also has lots and lots of sins that need to be uncovered.
An incredibly thoughtful and non provoking introduction to the document from Dianne Feinstein. This is a good thing and anything that can help America step back from her actions in future and take pause rather than extreme and counter productive measures is a good thing.
I hope some day that just like the well tested evidence that torture doesn't work it'll be shown that mass surveillance also gives next to nothing that targeted data gathering wouldn't.
Just to play devils advocate, so please don't take this personally...
There are varying levels of culpability that we all share right. It's difficult to see that we are all part of the problem if we aren't engaged in trying to change it. Your statement suggests that the American government operate in a vacuum and certainly every day people aren't engaged it does seem more and more that they can do as they wish.
> Moreover, CIA officers told U.S. ambassadors not to discuss the CIA program with State Department officials, preventing the ambassadors from seeking guidance on the policy implications of establishing CIA detention facilities in the countries in which they served. (#8)
I was not aware the CIA could order an ambassador from seeking the guidance of its superiors...
The documents were likely classified in such a manner that the ambassador would have need-to-know clearance to read it but not the folks they wished to consult with.
I was under the impression that in the War of 1812, USA was the agressor. Wikipedia seems to also support this view. Is that not correct, or do americans just have their own differing viewpoint?
It's rarely that simple, and I'm not sure what Wikipedia article you're reading. Impressment - kidnapping of American sailors into British naval service - was a pretty big issue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_War_of_1812
I didn't mean to comment on whether the war was justified or not, but simply that it was USA that attacked (and so the war doesn't quite qualify as an attack against America).
Can you really not make a distinction between cold shower and televised beheading/castration. I agree there is something very wrong with this country if that is the case. I've spent enough Karma today.
"Cold shower" is a joke of an understatement. These men were kept awake for over 7 days at a time, subjected to sustained waterboarding, slapped and thrown around, left to suffer with festering bullet wounds, etc etc. All that while being told that their families were going to be raped, tortured, and killed.
I know if I was personally subjected to those things I might not be so averse to having my head cut off.
I ask you the same thing I asked Rayiner above: try it for yourself.
Take a letter size piece of paper and put it on the floor. Strip naked. Have a "cold shower", then stand on that piece of paper for just two hours.
Bonus points if you manage to stay standing with a wet cloth bag on your head. Extra points if you manage this after having been on reduced calories and no sleep for 48 hours.
In your case nothing happens if you step off the paper.
I don't know that you should really suggest this. I've had hypothermia, it is quite unpleasant. And you don't know the state of his health, a myriad of bad things could happen.
Fellow parents, how do you teach or plan to teach your kids about this? I was discussing this with my son last night, but I really couldn't explain to him the prejudice and fear that people use to justify these types of acts, or the "otherness" that the perpetrators try to construct around the victims in the media. It's just not something he's experienced yet. There's no way to put it into context.
That's because there wasn't any prejudice or fear that warranted this, ever. IIRC, in Dick Cheney's autobiography, he states that he was a driving force behind pushing the intelligence community to torture their detainees. And he states that he did so "because if we started torturing people, no one would call the republican party weak on terrorism." He didn't have to go that extra mile.
That was it, that was the justification. Once reports and pictures started coming out, the Murdoch press ran stories that "enhanced investigation techniques" were responsible for foiling various terror threats, despite official proclamations and studies at the time saying otherwise. And then the press claimed it was a partisan issue, because that's what they always do, without any regard to what the issue actually was.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that in my personal opinion, the only story to be heard here is that in the real world, evil is defined as actions actions taken in self-interest that harm others (Dick Cheney's actions in this story, as well as the people who obeyed those directives). That while the press made it seem like 50% of people were pro-torture, the press never, never, accurately shows the actual viewpoints of the people, not to mention how morally bankrupt and unreliable this shows the national press to be. And one last point about how many people were convinced by news reports that since these things were only being used against bad people, it was okay, and how that should be a lesson to others and the future... and how many times this has happened this exact same way in the past.
And he states that he did so "because if we started torturing people, no one would call the republican party weak on terrorism." He didn't have to go that extra mile.
I'm only joking, but wouldn't seeing a SAW movie with them and explaining that this kind of violence is perceived as justified against certain groups suffice?
Are you familiar with Jane Elliott's "Blue eyes/brown eyes" experiment? It's a good kind of ultra-lite introduction to racism/discrimination if you've literally never come across the concept before. (Comes up a lot in Holocaust curriculum.)
Though I wonder if small children aren't closer to understanding this than most of us. They're such a jumble of implicit biases at the best of times... You know that thing you're so scared of, that only comes out when you turn off the lights? Some adults grow up and stop being scared, and some adults don't.
Elliott's experiment is one of the most impressive teaching methods I've ever seen. This is such a good way of introducing kids to discrimination and hatred, how easily it spreads, and how it affects people.
The interviews with the people that had Elliott's lesson much later when they were adults is notable - the lesson stuck with people, in life-affecting ways.
I was just wondering about this in relation to those who were advocating for not releasing the report at all. I fail to see any difference between this stance and telling a child to not admit their guilt of wrong doing because they will have to actually suffer the consequences of their actions.
Depends how old the kid is. If he's four then all you can say is that some grown-ups were really mean to each other when they shouldn't have been. If he's a bit older, maybe you can relate it to some other questionable behavior, like why do criminals commit crimes instead of being good, or conversely why do we bother going through a trial before throwing bad people in prison or shooting them. There's a psychological theory that violence often results from the psychological distress encountered when the real does not confirm with the imaginary, but the very length of this thread shows that these things are difficult to process for adults, never mind children.
Dianne Feinstein deserves enormous credit. Fox News and Republicans are bashing her and by extension her party as traitorous as we speak. The argument that this report should be kept in secret because it endangers Americans' lives is abominable. As an American living abroad, I'm happy to see this released.
Still, I wonder about some of the side-effects of this. Instead of arresting and interrogating terrorists we kill them with drones as its less messy.
> Still, I wonder about some of the side-effects of this. Instead of arresting and interrogating terrorists we kill them with drones as its less messy.
We were killing plenty of people in the War on Terror while the detentions and torture were going on (heck, the torture was sold in part on the basis that it was helping us find and kill people that needed killing in that war.) And some of those tortured also died as a result.
Torture and killing aren't mutually exclusive alternatives.
>> Instead of arresting and interrogating terrorists we kill them with drones as its less messy.
Less messy, less dirty, less dirty hands etc etc. Yeah right. I wonder how the drone operators sleep at night after a "successful" hit at e.g. a wedding ceromony etc.
It was her job in the first place to keep this from happening. The fact that this report even needed to happen is a result of her committee's inability to provide the oversight that they are tasked with.
on it. That's crossed out and UNCLASSIFIED is inserted, but what's that black box covering up? Is it another level of secret access so secret we can't know the name?
On the basis of googling "top secret noforn filetype:pdf", it seems that the convention is for the redacted text to be some kind of source classification (eg. "SI" for Signals Intelligence or "COMINT" for Communication Interception.
I have no idea what it would be in the case of this report, but my guess would be that it was redacted to avoid ambiguity given that "Unclassified" is stamped next to it, rather than because the classification is itself secret.
The classification is not secret, but the intelligence sources themselves likely remain classified, including the identification of the kind of sources supporting the information in the now-declassified executive summary.
Even vague descriptions of intelligence sources are often treated as more sensitive than the information derived from those sources.
It's likely this was classified top secret and SCI (sensitive compartmentalized information). SCI compartments are classified, which is probably what was blacked out. Otherwise, it may indicate a classified partner knowledge sharing program that is classified.
Sort of. Conventionally, it's the cover name of the information compartment. If we knew what that was, since we now know what it refers to because that's unclassified, it wouldn't provide an effective cover anymore.
Of course, that's still a bit silly. The CIA insisted they redact even the initials of the countries involved. Ridiculous. Well, country R is Romania, country P is Poland. There are two others, I think Country J may well be Jordan.
I think I would probably be completely OK with this report being leaked in its unredacted form, including names: I sadly doubt there's any other way justice will ever be done and these people will answer for their crimes against humanity.
The Committee makes the following findings and conclusions:
#1: The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.
#2: The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
#3: The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
#4: The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.
#5: The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation techniques.
#6: The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
#7: The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
#8: The CIA’s operation and management of the program complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other Executive Branch agencies.
#9: The CIA impeded oversight of the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.
#10: The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
#11: The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
#12: The CIA’s management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the program’s duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.
#13: Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.
#14: CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA Headquarters.
#15: The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention. The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.
#16: The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.
#17: The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious and significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systemic and individual management failures.
#18: The CIA marginalized and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticism, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
#19: The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorized press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns.
#20: The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States’ standing in the world, and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs.
576 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] thread"On April 3, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted to send the Findings and Conclusions and the Executive Summary of its final Study on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to the President for declassification and subsequent public release"...
EDIT: also the fact that it's stamped "Unclassified" everywhere. If it was stamped as still classified and had been leaked, anyone with a clearance would risk losing it by reading the file.
So a person with clearance can't read a leaked classified document? I'm confused, more explanation please ;-) This IS sounding vaguely familiar in some way, but I don't get it.
EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. Also, I find it interesting how many people here on HN are up to snuff on security clearance issues and ready to answer this question. 5 informative answers in 30 minutes!
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/01/us-military-blo...
> “Additionally, classified information is not automatically declassified simply because of unauthorized disclosure,” Wollman continued.
> “Classified information is prohibited from specific unclassified networks, even if the information has already been published in unclassified media that are available to the general public, such as online news organizations.”
Think of it as analogous to being given a "gift" that you know is stolen. Even though you didn't steal it, you know it actually belongs to someone else, so you shouldn't accept it.
If it's re-classified as Unclassified, you're allowed to read it, as it's no longer classified material.
To better state my initial point: if you have a clearance, you can only read classified material you're supposed to have access to for your job. If it's leaked but still classified, you can't read it.
If it's declassified, then you can read it.
So just to go into a little more detail...
When a person with a clearance comes across classified information they must possess the proper clearance level along with being read-on to specific caveats (some of which actually cannot be discussed here but let's just say they're part of the markings that specify the classification level of a document).
While some classified folks may or may not be at a level of clearance and read-on to the correct caveats they still cannot mishandle classified information which would include reading or handling classified material in any way outside of a secure office. So even if you're cleared enough to read it you would be mishandling it on the public internet and thus could get your clearance taken. You also MUST report that this occurred as finding out after the fact also puts your clearance at risk.
Yup. It's still classified. Otherwise anyone who was caught reading a document they weren't supposed to could just say "my friend gave it to me" or "it was leaked on the internet somewhere".
Or send in a team of assassins when you want to be extra sure that nobody can survive to a right to trial.
Mock executions...
When talking about a physical place. That is so blatant word replacement that I find it hard to take it seriously.
Because there is an 'unenhanced interrogation technique' that is almost but not quite torture.
Never forget that beneath the violation of human rights is a desire to destroy. Calling something 'enhanced' is just another way of saying 'we forked you'.
They do this for the same reason that when cops shoot civilians they don't say "Then Officer Smith shot the assailant". They say "Then there was an officer-involved shooting.": To use language as a tool to manipulate the viewpoint of the public.
[1] - http://www.berkes.ca/archive/berkes_1984_language.html
"While the Office of Legal Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured."
Here's an amusing and insightful video of Carlin dissecting the language behind Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
The U.S. military seems particularly prone to this habit of using euphemisms to mask reality.
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."
Full Essay: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
I have a theory that this is part of the American fondness for TV shows featuring English detectives (Elementary, Forever, Constantine and just about every mystery show on PBS): by speaking the same language but coming from a quite different cultural context, they're able to engage in narrative truth-seeking because of their obliviousness to or disregard for implicit American cultural mores.
So "These things you did are wrong, I don't care what you want to call them or who said they were legal." The legal debate has important implications for lots of people, but the fine details of it aren't very interesting to the moral debate.
"Enhanced interrogation technique" is an uncontroversial, accurate factual description. "Torture" is a conclusion of law applied to the facts that, while there is overwhelming reason to accept that the conclusion is valid for the program as a whole, and many of the specific instances in particular, does not necessarily apply to all of everything that is under the label "enhanced interrogation techniques", and is, in any case, not a legal conclusion that the Committee reached (though the Chair of the Committee, Senator Feinstein, in her introduction to the release, emphatically and directly states as her personal conclusion both that the program involved "torture", and that it involved "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment (both terms being significant in regard to grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (including Common Article 3 of the Conventions, which applies to conflict that is not between states-parties to the convention) [0] and the manner in which grave breaches of the Conventions are incorporation into US criminal law as war crimes under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2441 [1].)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#Grave_breach...
[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2441
Such language exists only to obscure the meaning. How exactly do you distinguish an "enhanced" interrogation technique from merely an interrogation technique? Is there any better criterion than saying that an interrogation technique is "enchanced" if it involves torture?
Orwell has a nice essay about this: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
UPDATED: I can't reference Orwell and start sentences with "In my opinion..." :)
Yes, in terms of intensity.
> How about ‘Damaging interrogation technique’?
That's more conclusory than descriptive of the technique, though certainly the whole report (well, the whole several-hundred-page "executive summary") makes that point.
I don't think there is any advantage to adding the emotional weighting associated with the conclusion that the report leads to into the language describing the individual facts. Its more comfortable, perhaps, to people who didn't need the facts to come to the conclusion that the report demands, but I don't see that as an important feature.
I disagree. 'Enhanced' certainly refers to intensification or increase, but also has strongly positive associations. If you experienced two injuries in a row you wouldn't normally say that the second one had 'enhanced your pain experience' - if you did people would assume you were a masochist of some sort. The measure of interrogation is surely in the quality of results it yields; if some technique actually results in a decrease in the quality of intelligence then I'd say it's a degraded interrogation technique.
To the extent that you want a neutral description of an action whose efficacy is unknown, you could say 'aggressive interrogation technique' or 'intensified interrogation technique' or any number of other words. Just because 'enhanced' can be read to mean intensified or increased without necessarily being better does mean it is commonly understood to mean that; when you're choosing terms to describe something to the public - and especially when you're choosing words for their referential rather than explanatory power - that lowest common denominator of meaning is the one that matters.
I appreciate the fine legal distinction that you're drawing here in the context of war crimes and so forth, but I suggest to you that phrases like 'enhanced interrogation technique' are actually part of the problem - deliberate euphemisms chosen primarily for their anodyne qualities.
Are you so obsessed with minutiae of definitions that you are unable to see that both terms describe reprehensible acts performed by people against other people?
I hate this bullshit language. Just use the real word: Torture.
The idea that policy-makers did not know what was going on is ridiculous. The reality is many did not want to know and where more concerned about the post 9/11 political environment instead of standing up for what was right.
> The 6,000-page report was researched and written by Democratic staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee between 2009 and 2013 after committee Republicans chose not to participate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/us/politics/q-and-a-about-...
Fact is until this release she has been a staunch defender of the existing intelligence programs and the status quo among NSA, White House, and CIA. She's exactly the type of person you do not want chairing this committee. Unfortunately when Edward Snowden stepped up and did her job for her (without the privilege of legislative immunity), she called it "an act of treason."[1]
In my opinion if the CIA hadn't been caught spying on her committee's computers she wouldn't have released this report at all. It's an act of retribution in my cynical opinion.
That said, props to her for releasing the executive summary[2] of the report.
[1]: http://thehill.com/policy/defense/304573-sen-feinstein-snowd... [2]: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/02/x-things-keep-...
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/09/live-coverage-...
"Given the authors – Committee Democrats along with (...) Susan Collins (R)"
Had we done things the right (slow) way, we would have a lot more friends in the region. Because the long, slow way of intelligence gathering involves building trust and developing friendship with people. But the American public doesn't have the patience for long peacekeeping missions like that, and the international community doesn't either.
There are so many layers of secret courts and classified legal opinions that it's hard to say the US has much rule of law anymore. People have lost faith in the legal system much the same as they have lost faith in our legislative system. All that's left is the executive branch, which leaves us dangerously at risk of a dictator taking over if we elect the wrong person, because the other two branches of government are too weak to stop him. I hate to get all tinfoil-hat, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched anymore.
This seems to be thrown around a lot. You hear things like, "if we didn't go into Iraq/Afghanistan, we would have more friends in the region," "if we didn't prop up Mubarak or the Saudis or someone else, we would have more friends in the region," "if we gave more support to the Palestinians, we would have more friends in the region."
I think this is the wrong way to think about our policy. We currently have a set of "friends" in the region; Israel, Saudi, etc. The things we do will always upset a portion of the population, but you will also have some who support those actions (foreign policy has not all been a shambles, which is why we retain regional allies in spite of the things that have happened over the past two decades).
Changing your actions will never guarantee that you will make more friends, because in making some friends we would lose others. By catering to the progressive populations in the Middle East, you isolate the conservative populations, and vice versa. Rapprochement with Iran, as an example, may seem like a fine idea, but the mere prospect has Israel and the Saudis concerned. So changing policy cannot achieve "more friends." What we can do is choose who we want to be friends with carefully, and let that guide our policy.
Honestly I don't think we really care much anymore what the Saudis think; the regime has fantastic wealth but very little real power beyond holding the purse strings for hyper conservative terror groups. I think eventually the hypocrisy and opulence of the regime will cause the terror groups to throw off their former masters and come after them -- and all credible reports say the Saudi army isn't much more than a facade propped up by a handful of US contractors. We probably wouldn't let them fall to terror groups, but we also aren't really comfortable propping up a regime that is actively funding a proxy war against us.
The recent OPEC decision declining to reduce production in the face of falling oil prices, thus screwing over Russia hard, means that Saudi Arabia is most certainly a useful US ally.
I mean, I realize the prime reason they fund Islamist terror groups is to cause regional instability that drives up the price of Saudi oil...
Armed groups are often funded by wealthy individuals for a variety of reasons (Osama bin Laden being a famous example). Armed groups funded by the Saudi monarchy are in other countries, fighting the regime's enemies by proxy (eg. the Syrian and Iranian governments).
"most of them [CIA personnel] do not know that when the wpost/ny times quotes 'senior intel official,' it's us... authorized and directed by opa [Office of Public Affairs]."
Of course everyone with half a brain knows this, it's funny 1) CIA personnel don't and 2) the WPost and NYT continue this practice of citing anonymous sources that are in reality public speakers, giving a carefully designed statement.
> The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting. Abu Zubaydah, for example, became "completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth." Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving into a "series of near drownings.
> Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads. At least five detainees experienced disturbing hallucinations during prolonged sleep deprivation and, in at least two of those cases, the CIA nonetheless continued the sleep deprivation.
> Contrary to CIA representations to the Department of Justice, the CIA instructed personnel that the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah would take "precedence" over his medical care, resulting in the deterioration of a bullet wound Abu Zubaydah incurred during his capture.
> CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families— to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to "cut [a detainee's] mother's throat."
The list goes on.
I have no words. This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud. I can only hope more people read this report. Worse imaginable crimes are committed in the heat of passion or because of madness. Those are scary. What is more scary to me is cold institutionalized, calculated, torture, which is what this is.
Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost. Torture should be like rape. Anyone suggesting debating if rape is acceptable should be slapped on the head and considered an idiot. Torture should be the same in any civilized country. We are not only debating it, we have also done it, we have institutionalized it, and make no mistake, Fox and the like will also be debating its "benefits and how it saved Americans' lives".
There are many techniques, but it seems like we have forgotten it is fundamentally manipulative and abusive. I mean, we are surprised to find that threats are used? What?
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/an_fbi_interrogator_on_the_...
It just seems like people are shocked to find fundamentally abusive/manipulative behavior going on at all. Virtually any form of extracting information from an unwilling informant is going to be. Feeding them lies to make them lose hope ("We've captured your co-conspirators") is abusive. Cozying up to them with donuts and backrubs is manipulative. Practically by definition, interrogation on unwilling informants cannot be some friendly, respectful thing.
"Scharff was opposed to physically abusing prisoners to obtain information. Learning on the job, Scharff instead relied upon the Luftwaffe's approved list of techniques, which mostly involved making the interrogator seem as if he is his prisoner's greatest advocate while in captivity."
And this guy was successful as well.
"Scharff's approach has been admiringly cited by top US interrogators, such as Ali Soufan"
Anyway, that's really counter-intuitive. I mean, I guess I could deal with pain, but losing body parts, skin or eyes? I would talk pretty fast.
Its also been shown to be a fairly poor technique, compared to other alternatives, to get accurate, actionable information.
As the Senate report itself notes, this was the conclusion of the CIA's own work on interrogation techniques prior to 9/11, which was disregarded in the aftermath of 9/11.
Which frankly makes me think they believe it does. The easy political win is to say it doesn't, and they aren't taking it.
https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/542382617711370240
"Obama official: White House won’t take sides between CIA, which says interrogations worked, and Senate, which says they didn’t."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff
http://www.k-state.edu/actr/2010/12/20/suspect-interrogation...
It gets even worse when the subject doesn't actually know anything useful. Waterboard most people and they will confess to anything they think will make it stop.
http://nymag.com/news/crimelaw/68715/
We are, if not surprised, rightfully offended that our government does not obey its own laws, which define and punish torture -- acts "intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control", where "severe physical or mental pain or suffering" is defined as:
---[quote]---
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
---[end quote]--- (18 USC Sec. 2340)
(And its worth noting that this interpretation enshrined into law has often been criticized itself as an attempt to minimize the scope of US limitations on torture and for the government to shirk obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment by limiting the understanding of torture to something much narrower than the international understanding underlying the convention, so that can enhanced the degree to which it is disturbing that having narrowed the definition of torture, the government still isn't serious about combatting it, or even just not actively engaging in it, under the narrowed definition.)
Causing the death of a detainee is not a threat. Perhaps negligence which should have consequences for those who were responsible for this person while in their custody.
You can get plenty of information out of someone without laying a finger on them.
In my opinion the question is the extent to which it's OK to play with people's psychology through isolation and misinformation, while still giving them 3 hots and a cot. The important thing to note here is that you can still damage people this way if you take it too far; solitary makes people go crazy especially when they're being fed false info about what's going on outside the walls.
Then again, these guys did not get rolled up for signing too loud in church. They have valuable intel in their heads. We're not going to beat it out of them, but how far are we willing to go? Should they get the same rights and protections as suspects in the US judicial system? This is the conversation we should be having in my opinion.
According to the report, "Of the 119 known detainees, at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard in the September 2001 Memorandum of Notification (MON). These included an "intellectually challenged" man whose CIA detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information, two individuals who were intelligence sources for foreign liaison services and were former CIA sources, and two individuals whom the CIA assessed to be connected to al-Qa'ida based solely on information fabricated by a CIA detainee subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.
Why does terrorism frighten people so much that they're willing to throw away basic principles like "innocent until proven guilty"? Honest question. I see comment after comment after comment in this thread that indicates the commenters are unbelievably frightened of terrorism, to the extent that they're willing to sanction anything, even acts that they admit are otherwise reprehensible, to prevent it. Why are apparently intelligent people so frightened of it?
The condemnation of torture seems to be far more widespread here.
Great question, and one we should always keep in mind. The death toll from terrorism on US soil since 9/11 is indeed very low. That said, the people plotting against us are intelligent and adaptive and wish to do us harm. If they succeed, they might destroy the free society which we've built for ourselves.
Put another way, I'm scared of the physical consequences of a nuclear weapon going off in midtown Manhattan and even more scared of what would happen to our society in the wake of it. You think we'd be having these conversations about which techniques may or may not be torture if there were half a million dead in NYC and the entire tri-state region were irradiated?
There isn't even any evidence that the threat of nuclear terrorism is credible. Nukes aren't something you pick up at the local Safeway on your way home from the daily jihad. Compare to 30 years ago, where the threat was absolutely, 100% credible. Literally hundreds of missiles ready to go at a moment's notice. One bad decision or bad hangover away from a billion deaths. And yet, we weren't having debates like this then.
That's not to say that the US was all innocent and pure. But at the very least, torture was secretive, hidden, not defended in public as being a worthwhile and justifiable act.
And then combine all that with the simple fact that torture doesn't even work. All it does is make their friends angry. Do you really think that torturing suspected terrorists reduces the chances of a future terrorist nuclear detonation in Manhattan? I don't see how.
Edit: Oh yeah, I forgot to point out that those hundreds of missiles and hundreds of nuclear warheads are still there and still ready to go at a moment's notice and we are still one person's bad decision or bad hangover away from total annihilation. We just manage to pretend it's not there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion
Look at what the US has done. Really, look at all the things it has done -- the surveillance, the drone strikes, the infiltration of civil protests, the use of military equipment by the police force, the lies to justify the war in Iraq, the lies to justify the torture, the violations of international human rights, the targeted killings of "enemy" US citizens, the re-definition of every single one of these words -- and then tell me how the US has upheld its values against terrorism.
Then look at countries like Iceland where the nation apologizes over a single justified death at the hands of a police officer, or Norway where after a killing spree and bomb attacks the first consideration by government officials is not about how to punish the murderer, but how to guarantee due process for someone evidently guilty of such heinous crimes.
The United States are not the good guys. I'm sorry, but you're not. No matter how much you want it to be true.
And of course, it doesn't help that the folks who are captured are mostly objectively bad people. There are some people who can muster a lot of moral outrage for the rights of bad people, and there are ones who can't. This isn't a new phenomenon.
You've spent this entire thread making poor excuses for completely irrational behaviors and trying to justifying sickening, ineffective actions on the part of US personnel.
Just stop.
No, I don't know it. Care to explain it to me?
I beg to differ.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2868419/Thrown-roof-...
Can you give examples? Do they work against hardened interogees? Do they involve threats of violence?
Geneva Convention states clearly - either POW status or suspect in the judicial system. There is no 3rd option.
> This is the conversation we should be having in my opinion.
there is no conversation to have. Only charges (of crimes against humanity which torture is) to bring in.
None of the Geneva Conventions actually say this. OTOH, torture is subject to a universal prohibition under international law independently of the status of the tortured person, whether a protected person under the any of the Geneva Conventions, a regular criminal suspect in a domestic court system, or any other status that may or may not exist.
>None of the Geneva Conventions actually say this.
One way or the other it is mentioned in various places through the Conventions. In particular http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Geneva_Convention :
for internal conflict
" The passing of sentences must also be pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognised as indispensable by civilised peoples. "
for international:
"It also specifies that when there is any doubt whether a combatant belongs to the categories in article 4, they should be treated as such until their status has been determined by a competent tribunal."
Secretary is essentially another word for Minister, and NATO's Secretary-General is its supreme commander in wartime. The UN's leader is called the Secretary General because he is in essence its Prime Minister, not because you get confused between a Secretary and his/her secretaries...
Unless you think General Secretary Joseph Stalin was a powerless functionary, of course.
>The UN's leader is called the Secretary General because he is in essence its Prime Minister
Both are wrong and wildly imaginative.
>General Secretary Joseph Stalin
Yes, but there's also a historic reason behind that title. The leader (like Chairman Mao) of the Soviet Union was supposed to be a sort of secretary for the workers. "Soviet" actually means "council"; the "chairman" and "secretary" names are communist propagandaspeak to give the impression that the workers are the ones in charge.
Strictly speaking, the US has veto power in the UN Security Council, which usually has primary responsibility for binding actions on matters of international peace and security, including, inter alia, taking binding action in response to threats to the same such as by grave breaches of international law by a nation-state.
However, its worth noting that -- at US urging in the context of the Korean War -- the UN established a mechanism (under the "Uniting for Peace" resolution [0]) by which the General Assembly can step in when the Security Council is unable to act because of deadlock among the veto powers.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly...
That's setting the bar low.
Saying sorry afterwards doesn't do anything for those wronged. Admission doesn't take away pain, humiliation and fear.
Admitting wrong doing and offering solutions to prevent this from ever happening again are the first steps towards rebuilding what is undoubtedly going to be a much damaged world wide reputation.
Even releasing this report was a step forward.
[0] - http://www.tealeafnation.com/2012/12/has-japan-ever-apologiz...
https://www.aclu.org/national-security/fact-sheet-extraordin...
Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism
The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically,
Let me be perfectly clear when I say this. It shouldn't matter which party started this, ITS WRONG.
Well, in the past they've said that. Mostly now, they seem to be more avoiding commenting on the substance at all, and just saying that its wrong to publish the report.
This is not about extraordinary rendition -- which certainly is an extremely disturbing practice, and by all accounts seems to have included instances where prisoners were tortured by other countries with the knowledge and at least tacit consent of the US in violation of US obligations under international law.
This is about systematic torture directly executed by an agency of the United States government, under false pretenses, and while making damaging deceptions about the program to other entities within the US government.
There is certainly an extent to which it fits in with a common pattern with extraordinary rendition, but its not the same thing.
You must have missed this part of my post:
Let me be perfectly clear when I say this. It shouldn't matter which party started this, ITS WRONG.
Sure glad all the downvoters actually read my ENTIRE post before they started getting trigger happy with their downvotes.
That's what we're talking about here: the actual meaning of "gloves off". And no, this was categorically NOT something that started on Clinton's watch. It's started on Bush's watch, specifically at the direction of Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington, using legal justifications drafted by John Yoo.
Bush, not Clinton, got it?
And just so you're clear, this is not a defense of Democrats. After all, nobody has done more to forestall this report than the Democrat Barack Obama. In many ways, he's the worst offender here as it was his administration that elected to protect the people involved instead of punishing them, which serves to normalize something that absolutely should not be normalized. After all, the deepest institutional damage is done not by those who abuse their authority, but by those who allow the abusers to get away with it (see the systematic sexual abuse of children and the problems the Catholic Church caused itself by concealing it for another case in point).
I should add that the Obama Administration's conduct would be slightly less galling if it weren't part of a pattern, but the fact that James Clapper suffered no consequence for lying to Congress about the NSA's constitutional violations means that this is bigger than the CIA. If you get to the root of it, it's really about the goddamn nightmare of a lawless and amoral security state given big budgets and free reign stemming from the insane over-reaction to 9/11 that has since been enshrined in the Patriot Act.
That's the real heart of darkness here. Well, that and the cowering bedwetting chickenshits who don't support the whole "land of the free home of the brave" thing, and would rather hand the country to people like Cheney, Addington, Yoo, etc. and not think twice about the damage they're doing.
And those people? The fear driven chickenshits? Overwhelmingly Republican. It's the FOX News demographic, essentially. (FOX News, not coincidentally, has been a big supporter of torture. Like Cheney, they consider it evidence of "toughness", not idiocy.)
[1] http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd39.htm
If the report leads to no action, where is the good in releasing it?
Real risk for real people has been created. It's not theoretical. Actual innocent people have been placed in danger.
If there's no good coming from the report, was it worth placing those people in danger?
You can't make moral judgements from a viewpoint that assumes knowledge of the future.
> You can't make moral judgements from a viewpoint that assumes knowledge of the future.
Actually, you can. It's one of the main categories of normative ethics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics#Normative_eth...
"Consequentialism (Teleology) argues that the morality of an action is contingent on the action's outcome or result", this particular category includes one of the most famous theories of ethics, utilitarianism.
Your problem with it is valid, however. As far as I've understood from my study of the subject matter, no ethical theory is perfect, not even utilitarianism.
Check out the wiki page for the other categories. Personally I like virtue ethics, keeps me on my toes and critical. I wouldn't recommend it though, I'd prefer if the rest of the world was utilitarian :-P cough
Risk of what?
> Actual innocent people have been placed in danger.
Who?
I'm not attempting to argue the point. I haven't read the report. It just seems a strong statement to make that innocent bystanders (with no connection to torture) have been put at risk (of what?).
I'm curious how legitimate this claim is since to be honest it reads a bit like FUD (that's just how it comes off; but I'm just looking for a rationale).
People working for the US government overseas. Or just Americans. Or even just westerners in general.
Security is heightened, units are on alert worldwide. The risk is real and serious.
Remember, radical elements killed people over a silly video on youtube. This is much more inflammatory.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/12/09/lv-mcc...
Incentives for information: 1.) Extract information. 2.) The information should be useful.
Incentives for intimidation: 1.) Information extraction is of no concern. 2.) The torture should be so shocking, and awesome, that George Carlin style many extra syllables need to be added to the word "tor-ture" like when Diane Feinstein says the supersized Orwellian phrase that "tor-ture" has become. 3.) The details of the torture should be made public.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou
Kiriakou was charged with using numerous forms of classified information about foreign intelligence operations in order to promote a book, and, in doing so, outing a still-undercover foreign operative involved in the Zubaydah case. That operative had allegedly been under cover for over 20 years.
If you read the filings, you'll also see that Kiriakou claims to have outed the program accidentally --- in other words, that the leak didn't occur because he was deliberately blowing the whistle on the program, but instead by accident (or, as the USG would have it, negligence).
However terribly Zubaydah was treated by the CIA, we should probably remain clear on the fact that he was believed by everyone involved, including Kiriakou, to have been an integral part of the Al Qaeda network.
The case files are not themselves dispositive; I merely comment to suggest that it's harder to judge the Kiriakou case than it immediately seems.
I share the prevailing sentiment that our failure to prosecute CIA employees at all levels for torture is frustrating, and a miscarriage of justice. Though I'm not particularly interested in discussing that on HN.
Is that supposed to be a rationalization for his treatment?
You could sum that case up by saying that Kiriakou is accused of two major harms to the USG: first, outing a 20-year undercover operative, and second, potentially compromising the Zubaydah case. It would be an easy message board rebuttal to say, "well, it turns out Zubaydah was a pawn with virtually no value to the USG or Al Qaeda, so compromising him was not a big deal". But, at the time when Kiriakou was alleged to have leaked secrets to promote his book, nobody believed that about Zubaydah. He was instead believed to have a key operational role in Al Qaeda, and compromising him to promote a book would have been a grave matter.
It is hard to explain the nuance of this case without sounding like I'm taking a side in it. CIA is also accused throughout the Senate report of leaking secrets to polish its own reputation. The only issue I'd have a problem with is the idea that Kiriakou's actions were heroic. By his own stipulations that appears not to be the case.
I'll say this again: I'm may be more ambivalent than most of HN when it comes to surveillance and law enforcement and regulation, but I am not ambivalent about torture or, for that matter, the CIA, or criminal liability for the CIA.
I should have to make that disclaimer, but obviously I do.
"However terribly Zubaydah was treated by the CIA, we should probably remain clear on the fact that he was believed by everyone involved, including Kiriakou, to have been an integral part of the Al Qaeda network."
which seems totally unrelated to anything you have posted above, which was what make it stand out in the first place.
I cannot see any other way of interpreting it than the way I mentioned in my previous post, could you clarify what you meant by this since I am obviously not getting your meaning?
Doesn't seem shocking these days. Can't prosecute the good ol boys club.
[0] - http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/cia-torture-report/doj-stan...
"The country" doesn't admit that "the country" did this. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence "admits" that the Central Intelligence Agency did this, while at the same time insulating everyone else -- even in the Executive Branch -- from involvement, based on "the CIA was lying to everyone, including the White House, who totally didn't mean for this to happen."
> For me, that's hope that we're still in a position to learn from our wrongs, and that the checks-and-balances are still somewhat in-tact.
Checks and balances aren't admitting after the fact that actions which meet the definition of torture and war crimes in both US domestic law and international law which the US has treaty-based obligations to uphold occurred (while, except for the "personal opinion" of the chair in the introduction, not actually admitting the legal conclusions demanded by those facts), checks-and-balances is actually imposing some accountability on the perpetrators of those crimes.
AFAICT, there are no "checks-and-balances" in evidence yet.
And there's the problem.
Imagine, if you will, that your son is taken against his will by say, Iran, because your son has ties to someone who threw a grenade that killed an Iranian. Your son is tortured in much the same way the report states.
Do you care which committee didn't do a thing, or who voted for a thing, or lobbied another? You blame the country. The voting public, the non-voting public, their philosophies, culture, politicians, their military. They collectively represent the individuals who did that despicable stuff to your son.
And it's what perpetuates the hate, the wars, the fear.
It's much worse than that, we'll just flat out kill you with a drone strike, even if you're an American citizen[1][2].
[1]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/23/obama-anwar-al-awla...
[2]UPDATE - found the better article: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/how-team...
Japanese internment is still rarely talked about and in some states rarely taught in schools(!).
Compare to this memo, where you have roughly half of the politically involved population of the country criticizing its release as if the memo itself is somehow reprehensible, and not saying one word about the activities it describes.
It's important to teach about what happened in those camps and to understand why they were wrong. Drawing inappropriate comparisons between those camps and the absolute atrocities in this report isn't helpful.
Nobody did. I said that Americans looked the other way. Nothing more, nothing less.
You're clearly reading more into what I said than what I actually said verbatim.
I'm surprised that you think torture is not an atrocity. The US claims to be "giving the gift of democracy" and "spreading freedom". Ignoring international conventions on the rights of prisoners of war (and do not start the weaselly bullshit about whether these people are POWs or not) doesn't seem to be a good way of liberating a nation.
Because if the CIA was just ignoring the rules, they wouldn't be trying to lawyer their way around what's "enhanced interrogation" versus "torture." They'd just be pulling out fingernails.
> Ignoring international conventions on the rights of prisoners of war
You fundamentally misunderstand the rationale behind these conventions. The reason we don't torture the soldiers of civilized nations is because we assume that they will reciprocate when it comes to our soldiers. Stateless militants can't be expected to do that, so the rationale for following those international conventions disappears.
You're also making assumptions that people die instantly on the battlefield and in drone attacks. That's not the case. They can (and do) die in slow, lingering, painful ways in such cases.
My point is being locked up indefinitely and tortured again and again. Waiting for pain is also painful unless you are very mentally strong.
I can imagine torture that's worse than death. I don't think any of the things revealed in the article qualify. Which is precisely what I'm getting at. If you're not a pacifist and you think it's okay to kill people in war, I think you have to go to pretty tortured lengths to say that these enhanced interrogation techniques are unjustifiable in light of that. If you're a pacifist who doesn't think that killing is justifiable in the first place, that's a totally different thing.
Also, just being locked up with nothing to do can be painful in itself.
Reading Solzhenitsyn in the context of today's news might be worthwhile for people. If people can read all that, note the similarities between the NKVD's tactics and attitude toward the law and the CIA's, and walk away contentedly thinking to themselves "but our guys have good intentions and are a lot more selective!" we are hosed as a country.
I understand the frustration, but please do not violate the site guidelines like this.
The comment would be appropriate and stronger with just the first question.
I imagine this thread is all sorts of "fun" for you right now....
Thanks for respecting the guidelines. It matters a lot for established users to set good examples.
Anyway, thanks for your work in keeping the place in line.
Well consider me convinced! We definitely need to limit immigration to America otherwise we could end up with large numbers of people whose cultural norms allow them to condone torture and try to make jokes about it! Can you imagine what a cluster fuck this nation would be if the majority view was that repeated anal rape leading to multiple attempts at self-harm was something to be made light of!? No we definitely need to make sure that we only accept a small enough number of immigrants that we can ensure that things like the concept of the rule of law, the right to trial, and the right to not be, you know FUCKING TORTURED, are fully assimilated by them. Gods knows what things would be like if they somehow managed to not internalize these concepts.
It's true that is the scale of awful behavior, the CIA's program would rate something like 3 or 4 out of 10 - other regimes have engaged in things like pulling out people's fingernails, administering electric shocks, actually killing or raping family members rather than simply threatening to do so so, and worse - much worse. It's also true that atrocious actions by the US during the 'war on terror' are less bad than prior atrocities in previous conflicts like Vietnam or the Phillippine-American war of 1899-1902, a largely-forgotten conflict which would be considered genocidal by modern standards (and which is very much worth studying because it has so many similarities to the war on terror - gruesome murders by the rebels, widespread use of waterboarding by the US (then called the 'water cure'), subsequent political fallout and so on).
But even when we look at these things from a purely utilitarian standpoint rather than an idealistic one, the fact is that it our ability to project soft power - that is, to promulgate our values internationally so as to further our interests - is severely impaired by our all-too-apparent willingness to abandon the standards we propound in the areas of human rights and so forth. I'm not too impressed by the authoritarian regime in Cuba, for example, but the fact that we have a mini-Gulag in Guantanamo Bay makes it impossible for the US to criticize that regime in any meaningful fashion - even when it does the same or worse, it can fall back on a Tu quoque argument, and while that's a logical fallacy it's nevertheless a very effective one. On a more serious level, it has severely blunted our ability (along with that of the UK and other coalition countries, albeit to a lesser extent) to put pressure on North Korea over that country's appalling human rights record.
The basic problem for the US is this: we don't necessarily aspire to hegemony, but a de facto hegemony is the best guarantor of our long-term interests. We can't impose that by force, or want to, but we can get close by exercising soft economic and ideological power backed up with the availability of force against those who directly threaten our interests. At times the world is too messy and we'd like to take our ball and go home - let everyone else think what they like, the US land mass and economy is large enough for us to function as an autarky in an unconnected world. But the reality of a global technological world is that oceans no longer serve as impassable moats; disengagement and indifference to the emergence of other hegemonic powers would sooner or later result in disadvantage.
In war, we justify things a lot more morally ambiguous than a police officer shooting an armed criminal that's an imminent threat. Workers at a munitions factory who are just carting things around? Those folks get killed in war in airstrikes that are totally consistent with international conventions. Is waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed worse than blowing up some sap who just showed up to work on the wrong day? I just find it ridiculous to play that line drawing exercise.
I agree 100% with the rest of your analysis, though. Whatever the moral case may be, we shouldn't engage in enhanced interrogation because it yields low-value or even misleading information at the cost of tremendous political capital.
Yes. Waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is viewed by the vast majority to be morally far much worse than bombing a munitions factory. That is why doing it costs the tremendous political capital.
I agree that trying to establish bright-line rules often seems a futile exercise because it's so easy to come up with ethical inconsistencies. I do have a theory about the moral calculus of conflict but it's inchoate and this comment isn't really the place for it. To sketch the outline, though, the severity of a given outcome in a conflict can be mitigated by the degree of risk involved in bringing it about; so while the imposition involved in sleep deprivation or keeping someone cold is mild compared to someone being horribly maimed by a piece of shrapnel, it's the massive prior asymmetry between captor and prisoner that's problematic in the case of torture. Of course, you could argue that this asymmetry is also strong where only one side in a conflict has an air force or where one side is using remote-controlled military assets like drones, whose 'pilots' experience no physical risks whatsoever. This is going to become a huge problem within a few short years with robotic infantry assets - as soon as they're 'good enough' to deploy effectively there will be huge pressure to do so, even if they are just slightly extending forward positions over a short distance.
The deaths caused by the aggressor of a war are not consistent with international conventions, they are, in the words of a judge in at the Nuremberg tribunals, the consequence of the ultimate war crime.
The moral high ground is very valuable real estate indeed, and the US does hurt itself by doing things that reflect poorly in the eyes of the global public. But we're rightfully and pragmatically more concerned about artillery and soldiers occupying plain old fashioned military high ground. We interrogate to prevent people who openly wish us harm from gaining the power to turn their words into deeds. You can always earn cool points by pointing out historical atrocities, but in the end what matters is that we're still here, alive and prospering. Do you honestly believe that if the US government always behaved like perfect angels that N Korea or Cuba would suddenly listen to our moral lectures? That our behavior would somehow inspire them to change the fundamental cultural mores that come from decades of national poverty and the mindset that comes along with it? Because I don't think it will. Human rights violations will still exist even if we behave with moral perfection. Sometimes the best way to stop the bad guys isn't to set a good example, but instead to waterboard someone until he tells you where to send a SEAL team.
For better or worse, the US has the sanctioned role of providing security for the world. If that means we have to strip someone naked and throw them against a wall then so be it. It's unpleasant, but it sure as hell beats the alternatives.
Much as police violence in custody has often been defended with the argument that the police were attempting to obtain information that would lead to a conviction.
It isn't done for revenge or in situations where the stakes are anything less than the life and death of innocent people. Someone who has information on a literal ticking time bomb is the very definition of a threat to the public.
Ostensibly, but for one thing there is usually no actual ticking time bomb because we don't live in the universe of 24, and for another if there was a ticking time bomb there'd be no way to protect against misinformation about its location until it was too late.
The TTB argument implicitly assumes that intelligence gained through torture will be correct and actionable, but this isn't backed up by evidence. If the bomb is on West 63rd street and the torture subject directs you to East 47th street, you won't know you've been lied to until you get there and find out there is no bomb. Conversely, what if the person does not actually know what you want to know, like the 26 detainees mentioned in the report who were picked up despite not being suitable targets for interrogation? When they keep saying they don't know where the ticking time bomb is, how do you tell that they're not just holding out on you?
For better or worse, the US has the sanctioned role of providing security for the world.
Hmmm, no. As I outlined above, its in our interests to hold such a position at present. I think you need to think a bit longer about this, because your views on this subject seem rather shallow.
Actually, it doesn't, as the CIA admits. So much so that they had to lie about its effectiveness.
Does this surprise you? It shouldn't.
Also the fact that these conventions were valid for any war the signing country was involved in, not only those against other who signed (correct me if I'm wrong) seems to point in the same direction, no?
Also, downvote brigade: Fine, I totally agree that rayiner was downvoted and flagkilled twice. rayiner deserved that IMO.
However stop downvoting when he or others are providing insights, even if that insight is uncomfortable, OK?
Anyhow, there is also the Convention Against Torture isn't even related to conflict or POWs, but applies universally, and obliges parties to it (including the US) to prosecute (not merely avoid engaging in) torture, whoever does it, wherever they do it, and in whatever context they do it. Torturers are hostis humani generis, the common enemy of all mankind.
That is: the actions outlined in this summary of a report, and in other tacit admissions by US elected leaders, go way beyond arguing that the actions are "legal" or "illegal". The actions outlined in the summary speak to a government that does not care about most human beings at all.
All of morality is not contained within the law. Segregation was legal for a while. Apartheid was legal for a while.
To the contrary. I think you have to have a very legalistic dedication to procedural due process to assert that people abroad advocating the violent overthrow of the United States should have the same rights as ordinary accused in the United States.
Beyond that, if it's good policy for US citizens to have freedom of speech, or right to a fair trial, or to not be tortured, then it's good policy for all humans to have those rights.
By asserting the "random person in the street" argument, you're asserting a tyranny of the majority. You should know better. Shame on you.
I never was fond of you, but this confirms that you're truly a vile human. I cannot believe that there is an actual torture apologist on HN.
In your follow-up comment, you rationalize it by saying that they are not worthy of the same treatment as those from civilized nations.
I don't know if you're a sociopath or you harbor a lot of hate and anger, but in either case, I hope you get the help you need before you hurt someone.
I really wish there was a way for to accurately evaluate these statements. I learned about this by age 10 from my mother, it was mentioned multiple times in high school, it is occasionally referenced in conversation online and in person, and comes up on my Fort Minor pandora station about once every 4 hours of playtime. But I live in a liberal social circle that places a high value on learning history.
And even now there will be people who say that this was too much, but a little bit of torture is necessary.
Just look at what people were saying a out water boarding - "it's not really torture".
How many detainees are still held without trial?
Let's put it this way: unless you're not horrified to have such a procedure happen to you, your wife, child, etc, it IS torture.
Jubal Early: You oughta be shot. Or stabbed, lose a leg. To be a surgeon, you know? Know what kind of pain you're dealing with. They make psychiatrists get psychoanalyzed before they can get certified, but they don't make a surgeon get cut on. That seem right to you?
The question on my mind, were their CIA operatives that refused to comply with orders? Take the various police brutality cases, what's lost in the echochamber about it all is that these guys volunteer to be police, nobody is forced to, some of them want to carry guns, that really changes the situation a bit when an unarmed person ends up dead. The CIA has the same problem here, I know there are people in the CIA that "want to kick some terrorist ass." I'd feel better if there were some outspoken CIA operatives who were coming out saying that they refused to take part. If not, it's not just an ugly stain but the whole organization is broken, they have no respect for law..
in case of US concentration camps there also was one man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou he is still in prison, because ratting on your fellow men is against the law
There usually are no 'good cops' either, because doing something in the face of evil marks you as a traitor
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8726344
It's mostly able to admit it because nothing will change, that is: such exposes are inconsequential.
If those kind of reports could change things, they wouldn't happen at all.
This would end with a few questions, some pats in the back, and business as usual.
Pft. You're not getting off that easy.
The "saving grace" for Germany was going to international trial for the crimes committed, something the US actively refuses to do, AND hanging their heads in collective national shame for the atrocities they allowed happen in their name, scared shitless what a country is capable of when not kept in check by its people, fearing and strongly dismissing anything remotely reeking like nazism, even up to the point of partially giving up their own freedom of speech, ever since. I don't see the US doing anything similar any time soon. "It's our FREEDOMS! We must have our FREEDOMS!"
Sorry I'm just really angry and sad.
I hope the US is truly sorry about this, but they will have to show how sorry they are. Words are not enough.
Germany, has gone out of its way to punish the guilty, and to change their national culture, and imprint their new culture with the taboos necessary to ensure those atrocities can never happen again. No country in the history of the world has ever been so sorry as Germany, and their reaction to the shameful things they did deserves admiration and respect.
If the US wants to deserve similar admiration and respect, they have to show it. They have to prove it, by putting all these people behind bars at the very least.
Based on these descriptions of techniques, I suspect that the CIA officers responsible for this have also read the same book.
A quote of a quote: "The Baltimore Sun reported that, former Battalion 3-16 member Jose Barrera said he was taught interrogation methods by U.S. instructors in 1983, used this technique: "The first thing we would say is that we know your mother, your younger brother. And better you cooperate, because if you don't, we're going to bring them in and rape them and torture them and kill them."
In summary, not only does the CIA torture, it exports the vast knowledge of torture that it has so that other people (usually horrid regimes) can torture just as effectively.
The USA has a long, disgusting, and utterly unforgiveable history of practicing and teaching torture. The latest "war on terror" was yet another excuse for the endless parade of terrorism which the CIA inflicts on people.
You say that this stuff would make the Gestapo, KGB, and Stasi proud. Of course it would; the CIA is one of their classmates, and always has been.
This list does not include examples in which CIA inten-ogators were authorized to use the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, but then implemented the techniques in a manner that diverged from the authorization. Examples include Abu Zubair^®^ and, as detailed, KSM, whose intenogators developed methods of applying the waterboard in a manner that differed from how the technique had previously been used and how it had been described to the Department of Justice. This count also excludes additional allegations of the unauthorized use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.
What I did find, on page 101 is this:
"Over the course ofthe CIA program, at least 39 detainees were subjected to one or more of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.CIA records indicate that there were at least 17 CIA detainees who were subjected to one or more CIA enhanced interrogation techniques without CIA Headquarters approval. This count includes detainees who were approved for the use of some techniques, but were subjected to unapproved techniques, as well as detainees for whom interrogators had no approvals to use any of the techniques"
This passage indicates that those 17 tortured outside the approval process are accounted for. I don't see anything showing there were others outside the 39.
I don't see anything showing there were others outside the 39
Rather than give my honest opinion here, which would no doubt end up in a kindly word by dang, may I just ask you to run a basic boolean check over your posts before hitting 'reply'.
edit - the part you have such difficulty locating is from the exact same section you quoted, just a little further on, page 104.
Also, the bit you quoted from page 104 is in reference to a list of the 17 tortured without authorization. So it also doesn't indicate there were more than 39 total
How can it be referring to the 17 where no authorization was sought, when it specifically states it is talking about authorized interrogations?
And in common meaning, if you say 'at least 39', you are giving a low-end estimate, not a known total.
"The 17 detainees who were subjected to techniques without the approval of CIA Headquarters were: (...)", and then it lists them by name.
Then there's the part you're quoting, which is quite clearly stating that the list of 17 isn't counting cases where EIT was authorized, but the techniques were not implemented as authorized. This isn't surprising since the list of 17 is of people who weren't authorized for EIT at all.
If they were authorized, they're not listed as being unauthorized, even if the techniques used went beyond the authorization.
It's really very simple if you read the document. There's no question that section you quoted is referring to the list of 17.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/03/torture-victims-in-el-salvado...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9551.htm
While the importance of safety is reflected in bulk of our public discretionary expenditures, Americans have other values. Americans value liberty. Americans value humanity. Many value these above safety (e.g. N.H. state motto). Sadly most people I know choose safety first and close their eyes to the corollaries, which leads us to where we are now.
It sure does.
> At DETENTION SITE COBALT, detainees were often held down, naked, on a tarp on the floor, with the tarp pulled up around them to form a makeshift tub, while cold or refrigerated water was poured on them. Others were hosed down repeatedly while they were shackled naked, in the standing sleep deprivation position. These same detainees were subsequently placed in rooms with temperatures ranging from 59 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
> two detainees that each had a broken foot were also subjected to walling, stress positions, and cramped confinement, despite the note in their interrogation plans that these specific enhanced interrogation techniques were not requested because of the medical condition of the detainees.
> CIA records indicate that Majid Khan cooperated with the feedings and was permitted to infuse the fluids and nutrients himself. After approximately three weeks, the CIA developed a more aggressive treatment regimen "without unnecessary conversation." Majid Khan was then subjected to involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration, which included two bottles of Ensure. Later that same day, Majid Khan's "lunch tray," consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was "pureed" and rectally infused. Additional sessions of rectal feeding and hydration followed.
edit: And I mean those are just the emotive gut-wrenching things. Skimming the rest of it, it's filled to the brim with the CIA lying about the extent, efficacy and importance of the program. To me, that is the more worrying part. Anyone who's studied basic psychology gets taught Zimbardo and knows what happens when you run an unregulated prison. While disgusting it's not surprising.
But what is really surprising is the extent to which the CIA was willing to lie and obscure the truth even to their superiors.
Fuck the police.
> These violations included physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder.
> In 2004, Antonio Taguba, a major general in the U.S. Army, wrote in the Taguba Report that a detainee had been sodomized with "a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick."[30] In 2009, Taguba stated that there was photographic evidence of rape having occurred at Abu Ghraib.[31] An Abu Ghraib detainee told investigators that he heard an Iraqi teenage boy screaming, and saw an Army translator having sex with him, while a female soldier took pictures.[32] A witness identified the alleged rapist as an American-Egyptian who worked as a translator. In 2009, he was the subject of a civil court case in the United States.[31] Another photo shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner.[31] Other photos show interrogators sexually assaulting prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube, and a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.
> In other instances of sexual abuse, soldiers were found to have raped female inmates, and senior U.S. officials admitted that rape had taken place at Abu Ghraib.[33][34] Some of the women who had been raped became pregnant, and in some cases, were later killed by their family members in what were thought to be instances of honor killing.[35]
> Additional sessions of rectal feeding and hydration followed. In addition to his hunger strikes, Majid Klian engaged in acts of self-harm that included attempting to cut his wrist on two occasions, an attempt to chew into his arm at the inner elbow, an attempt to cut a vein in the top of his foot, and an attempt to cut into his skin at the elbow joint using a filed toothbrush.
Page 115
That is the cold truth of that statement. This is fucking disgusting, and someone needs to be held accountable.
The citizens of the United States need to be held accountable. Sorry, someone has to start looking at the root of the problem.
When the institution that is performing these acts out-and-out lies about the impact and severity, how can random citizens be held accountable? That honestly makes no sense to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner...
>When the institution that is performing these acts out-and-out lies about the impact and severity, how can random citizens be held accountable? That honestly makes no sense to me.
because the institutions and individuals doing it know that they will go unpunished once the truth gets discovered. Whenever stuff like this surfaces nobody gets punished and thus the citizens/society give clear approval to the actions that have already been perpetrated and to perpetrate it in the future as long as visibility of convenient "ignorance" is maintained.
Working in groups is what makes it so damn easy to discredit, re-brand and dilute movements. Protesting? C'mon, we're way past the useful application of protesting.
The US has engaged more positively (but without any moves toward ratification or even retracting the purported retraction of its signature) with the ICC under the Obama Administration.
Start by phoning your representative's office. Today. Tomorrow. The day after that. Every day, ask for your representative's statement on CIA torture. Ask why they haven't condemned it more thoroughly; are they in favour of torture? What exactly are they going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again? Really? Just that? That's not enough. What else? Talk to your neighbours, friends, family, colleagues. Ask them to do the same. Send letters. Send eMails. Visit in person. Don't stop.
I'm sure all the previous people who used politics to change things did indeed find it an easy ride. Martin King basically phoned in his efforts, didn't he? And I recall Pankhurst effected her changes with a single stern letter to the London Times.
this that
you speak of rats.
---
geese. a world of peace
you stumble stammer
pound your fist
an’ i tell you there are no politics
you swear
tell me how much you care
---
you cheat the lunch counter man
out of a pack of cigarettes
an’ i tell you there are no politics
you tell me of goons’
graves. ginks an’ finks
an’ of what you’ve read
---
an’ how things should be
an’ what you’d do if . . .
an i say someone’s been
tamperin’ with your head
you jump
raise your voice
---
an’ gyrate yourself
t’ the tone of principles
your arm is raised
an’ i tell you there are no politics
in the afternoon you run
t’ keep appointments
---
with false lovers
an’ this leaves you
drained by nightfall
you ask me questions
an’ i say that every question
if it’s a truthful question
---
can be answered by askin’ it
you stomp
get mad
i say it’s got nothin’ t’ do with
gertrude stein
you turn your eyes
---
t’ the radio
an’ tell me what a
wasteland exists in television
you rant an’ rave
of poverty
your fingers crawl the walls
---
the screen door leaves black marks
across your nose
your breath remains on
window glass
bullfight posters hang crooked above your head
an’ the phone rings constantly
---
you tell me how much i’ve changed
as if that is all there is t’ say
out of the side of your mouth
while talkin’ on the wires
in a completely different
tone of voice
---
than you had a minute ago
when speakin’ t’ me about something else
i say what’s this about changes?
you say "let’s go get drunk"
light a cigarette
"an’ throw up on the world"
---
you go t’ your closet
mumblin’ about the phoniness of churches
an’ spastic national leaders
i say groovy but
also holy hollowness too
yes hollow holiness
---
an’ that some of my best friends
know people that go t’ church
you blow up
slam doors
say "can’t no one say nothin’ t’ you"
i say "what do You think?"
---
your face laughs
you say "oh yeeeeeaah?"
i’m gonna break up i say
an’ reach for your coat
‘neath piles of paper slogans
i say your house is dirty
---
you say you should talk
your hallway stinks as
we walk through it
your stairs tilt drastically
your railing’s rotted
an’ there’s blood at the
---
bottom of your steps
you say t’ meet bricks with bricks
i say t’ meet bricks with chalk
you tell me monster floor plans
an’ i tell you about a bookie shop
in boston givin’ odds on the presidential
---
race
i’m not gonna bet for a while i say
little children
shoot craps
in the alley garbage pot
you say "nothin’s perfect"
---
an’ i tell you again
there are no
politics
----
Bob Dylan - some other kinds of songs.
In the end, these people need to be prosecuted in order to lock them up. That means the DoJ needs to do its job, but in the corrupt system of the US, it also means that Congress needs to understand the gravity of the situation.
Consider for a moment: you can vote for spam or canned tuna.
Hilarious.
How do you think you can stage a revolution with a minority of the population behind you, while the powers that be are as well-armed and as eager to use violence as they are in the US?
You've got a better chance of voting both parties out of office with a minority vote, and fixing the broken system that people are so disenchanted with.
Your mistake is that you believe that the options they're giving you are the only ones. You can make a third option. If you can get enough people behind you to stage a credible revolution, you can easily get enough people to vote for your third option.
It's totally true that the US electoral system is broken and corrupt and doesn't do justice to the vote of the people, but it's not yet to the point that the vote doesn't matter at all. People do still need to vote, and alternatives to the two ruling parties are still legal. You can take advantage of that to stage a much more peaceful revolution through the ballot box.
And not even just the US law. I'm sure what the Nazis did was totally legal by their own laws, and yet they were still punished. Some crimes supercede local laws.
Anyone not doing that, is guilty of condoning this crime, and ensuring that it can and will happen again in the future.
The root of the problem didn't start at the voting booth, "Oh I'll check yes to torture those terrorist", or "I'm going to write my Congressmen telling them to torture some folks". In fact Congress voted to outlaaw waterboarding: http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/14/us-security-usa-wa... (although it was vetoed by President Bush). This report will help to further clamp down on brutal interrogation techniques. It will push Congress and President Obama to resolve the issue. The CIA, in fact mislead any type of oversight over the torture programs. So instead of jumping to "we're all blame" conclusions, why don't you blame the people in charge that secured the funding for these officers to do it?
The best thing a "citizen" can do is recognize the state is foundationally unethical and has no legitimate political authority and never did. [1] Once we leave behind the mysticism of state authority, perhaps we can find better ways to organize society in ways that are ethically sound.
[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Auth...
You need people on your side. You need a majority of Americans on your side. And once you've got that, you can vote the politicians out of office, elect some better ones, and finally see justice done. And maybe before that, you can use the threat of this happening to get the current crop of politicians to finally care about justice.
If you are not interested in someone torturing on your behalf, you need to speak out, and loudly.
It's people. It's people among us.
It's sickening.
2. There is abundant proof that the US engaged in a deliberate, not occasional, policy of torture, whitewashed as "enhanced interrogation techniques".
3. There is so far no proof that other western nations have recently had a policy of deliberate torture, except for the sad cases where the US creatively outsourced some of its torture needs to Poland and perhaps a few other eastern european countries.
Other Western nations facilitated capture and detention, they are helped get people to the CIA. So you are seriously telling me that they didn't suspect? Really???
Look, the EU is willing to drag planes from the sky to support the US in getting Snowden, so you think they don't know what the CIA was doing? Really???
in reality, everything is excused when it is against the enemy. but even then, the problem here is that 1) most things were done just out of sadism. for no real benefit. US tax payers pretty much paid for a BSDM dungeon for some sick CIA operatives. 2) several cases caught lawful citizens and great pains were taken to make it look like nothing happened.
This is meaningless if you get to define any innocent/held-without-charge person as 'enemy'.
The common man is even more detached from the powers that be than previously assumed (which was already low).
We knew - we knew - that detainees were being tortured. We didn't know how many; nor for how long; nor the exact methods; but we did know that it was happening.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/todays-cia-critics-on...
Oh the horror of room temperature.
>Oh my god they were quite chilly
And abducted, held without trial, tortured, waterboard, anal raped, threatened, beaten againast a wall, and other things besides. A lot of them while also being totally inoccent (and in any way, without trial).
What exactly have you suffered besides a comfy middle class existance that gives you the moral superiority to laugh at that?
Would you also laugh at jews in Dr. Mengele's cold exposure experiments being "a little chilly"?
Absolutely. Abduction, held without trial, dehumanizing conditions, torture, etc.
Does your outrage about the jewish civilians only begin at the point were they burned them too?
Second, there are three levels of evil here, even if you disagree about "how many were totally innocent".
1) Some of them being totally innocent without dispute (for example those that were even released as such - in one case I read about after 7 years (!), and others for which they admitted they knew it for the start but used them as leverage, etc).
2) Even for the guilty, there should be no inprisoment without due process and fair trial.
3) Even for proven guilty, there should be no torture.
I don't consider anyone who does not agree on (2) and (3), basic tennets of human rights in the civilized world, anything more progressed than a KKK member lynching blacks back in the day...
Just take two hours of your day. Strip naked, have someone throw a bucket of cold water over you, and then stand on a letter-size piece of paper for two hours in a room that is 15C
(FWIW: You are not the first one I ask about this.)
Why? Because people are so quick to judge without even trying once to see why the others are doing what they do.
I just think it is a bad idea to poke fun at it. There are times for funny remarks on serious stuff. I think you'll find that this is not it.
How about the humor in sentences about raping?
Second, the idea that terrorists (especially as arbitrarily defined, without trial and due process, for years on end) should be tortured is still problematic.
Third, yes they are out of whack. The decent human priorities would be to have the same sympathies for all victims, and the same demand for human rights to be applied in both cases.
One was in a hyperbolic rhetorical context, to exaggerate the distinction with killing someone, which we consider acceptable in war:
> So you're saying we shouldn't engage in torture because it's "bad"? It's okay to blow these same people up in the battlefield, but god forbid we throw water on them and put them in a slightly cold room?
One was self-referential:
> I'd be pretty happy if HN could muster the same uniform moral outrage about rape jokes involving non-terrorists (e.g. gamergate) as it has shown in response to my comment about terrorists being cold.
One was in response to 'reitanqild saying: "Most of us would much rather prefer to be shot dead or blown up in a split second than being even slightly tortured and locked up indefinitely."
> Throwing water on someone and leaving them in a 59-degree room is worse than shooting them dead? Keeping someone awake until they hallucinate is worse than shooting them dead? Really?
The cold room and the sleep deprivation were in response to the "slightly tortured" part of that comment.
At no point did I ever try to make the argument that "what the CIA did wasn't so bad because they just put people in cold rooms." I actually have no interest in trying to convince anyone that what the CIA did wasn't bad. This is not an issue that people are going to approach rationally. It's about gut-feelings--either you have a visceral reaction to these interrogation techniques or you don't.
You said elsewhere: "I don't think torture is ever justified, under any circumstances. No exceptions."
Well I strongly disagree. If it would actually save innocent lives,[1] I'd have absolutely no qualms about any number of Al Qaeda terrorists being tortured. It's an unspeakably evil organization, promulgating ideologies that are at their best barbaric and backward. I think even the people that are receptive to their message and associate themselves with the organization, even if they do nothing more, are morally culpable.
And I imagine polls will show about half the country or more agreeing with me: http://mic.com/articles/106084/two-charts-show-why-the-cia-s.... Now of course the majority of people can be on the wrong side of history, but I don't think this is one of those situations.
[1] I've noted elsewhere that I don't think the techniques are effective and that we shouldn't be engaging in them for that reason.
Anyway, if you you have no interest in trying to convince people, why are you here discussing this? You're certainly giving every appearance of trying to convince people. You're putting forth arguments that look like they're intended to be convincing.
In another comment, you mentioned environmental disaster as something that should rank higher. Do you also endorse the use of torture on unrepentant polluters, climate change skeptics, and the like? Or is terrorism somehow special in your eyes?
And I couldn't care less how many people agree with you. I can't understand why you would even bring that up.
Anyway, at no point did I ever say we should torture anyone. In fact I said exactly the opposite in response to 'angibrowl. But at the end of the day I have better places to use my limited moral outrage than on how Khalid Sheik Mohammad was treated.
To be honest, what really kept me participating in this thread is the comparison to Japanese and Jewish persecution. I just can't understand the point of view of people who focus on the action alone, to the exclusion of who is the target of the action. I think it matters that these guys are scumbags.
Who decides what constitutes "scumbaggery"? You? Me? A random person off the street? A CIA lawyer? The President?
This sounds like a recipe for disaster, frankly. It sounds like a recipe for treating some minorities as non-humans, on a not very formal basis.
There's a thin line between "this guy is a scumbag because he's part of al Qaeda" and "this guy is a scumbag because he's a Republican." This is why we have due process. Or rather, why we're supposed to have it, even though we've given up on it for al Qaeda, or for people we think are related.
Not on Hacker News it isn't. We want people to apply the Principle of Charity and respond to the strongest reasonable interpretation of what each other is saying [1]. Alternatively,
A comment in reply to another comment should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side. [2]
It increasingly seems to me that we should add these principles to the site guidelines, though they're arguably derivable from them.
It's true that when people seem (and/or are) hopelessly wrong and misguided, and no one else seems (and/or is) respecting these principles, there's a great temptation to say "fuck it" and let loose with snark. But that needs to be resisted. The community depends on you and other established users to set good examples. Otherwise how can we tell new users that they can't do the same—or rather, do worse, since these things always get worse?
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761
There's a kind of caricaturing wit that could be called uncharitable, but only if it's meant to distort, in which case the humor is a means to something else and it's the something else that's the problem.
Well, yeah, its called (naturally enough) the straw man fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
[0]: https://twitter.com/Ethan_Heilman/status/542386688329125888/...
[1]: https://twitter.com/Ethan_Heilman/status/542385586313502720/...
[2]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1376...
* The perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks to me represent a completely different sort of threat than has ever been encountered - which legitimized the use of torture (though to be honest, the sorts of techniques outlined in the report don't really sound like what I would classify as "torture"; i.e., the infliction of unbearable pain with no expectation of actionable information being extracted.)
* If the techniques were in fact of no value (which the CIA disputes) then I would of course not support their continued use. I don't support the infliction of 'needless' pain or suffering. If they were providing useful information then I have no ethical or moral problem with them.
Do keep in mind that 9/11 doesn't even register on the atrocity scale when compared to what's been done by "soldiers of a legitimate state." If you would endorse torture to prevent another 9/11, why wouldn't you also endorse torture to prevent, say, another Hiroshima?
They had demonstrated the practice of mass killings of innocent civilians and expressed the desire to continue to do so.
> If you would endorse torture to prevent another 9/11, why wouldn't you also endorse torture to prevent, say, another Hiroshima?
Well, setting aside the moral equivalency of 9/11 to Hiroshima, I suppose if there was reason to believe there was a nuclear threat and there was access to someone for whom it was legitimately believed could provide details which would prevent it, employing torture would be morally and ethically justified.
TORTURE IS NOT EFFECTIVE
This is hardly news, it has been known for a long time. CIA knew it before 9/11
OK, so nuclear attacks by soldiers justify it. How about conventional strategic bombing? Invasions? Exactly where and why do you draw the line, if you're not drawing it where you previously said?
I don't know where I would draw the line, but in the case of Qeada/ISIS, they are well across my personal fuzzy gray line.
That hardly makes them unique, or even different than previous enemies the US has faced, and dealt with detainees from, and studied the effects of interrogation, and concluded that torture is ineffective.
And, as the Senate report notes, every single one of the CIA claims that this torture was effective misrepresented the facts, either of whether information gained through torture had not independently been gained through other means, or whether the information gained was gained through the torture at all (often claiming information gained from a detainee before "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used was gained through those techniques, which is only plausible if the techniques are so effective that they send shockwaves back in time), or by simply misrepresenting the existence of threats that were supposedly disrupted when no real threat existed.
If torture could prevent the mass killing of innocent civilians, do you see any justification in it?
I think that in many ways this becomes the old Moral Absolutism versus Moral Relativism problem.
You can have a moral absolutist who says, "Harming another human is wrong, therefore we will not torture under any case." (A different absolutist might be more utilitarian in arguing for torture of one to save many, but you get the point- an absolutist has a position and a rigid interpretation of that position, and sticks with it)
You can have a moral relativist who says, "Harming another human is wrong. We cannot torture someone to collect information, but we cannot avoid collecting that information because if we avoid collecting that information it will lead to someone else harming more humans."
Two sides to the same moral problem. I tend to agree with the relativist view of the problem rather than the absolutist view; the relativist in this case is informed by the consequences of both action and inaction whereas the absolutist in this case only cares about the consequences of action. The solution? Absolutism will provide a solution because something is either right or wrong. So absolutism is easy, attractive. Relativism provides no clear solution, which is why many people prefer to reason in moral absolutist terms.
I object to torture on moral grounds. I also object to it on practical grounds. It doesn't work.
Since both of those objections point in the same direction, the solution is completely clear.
If something doesn't work, then don't do it. Hiroshima was an extreme example of that. By August the political establishment in Japan was split, with consensus moving rapidly to peace out of the war because by mid 1945 the industrial centers of Osaka and Tokyo were ruined by fire bombings. It just so happens that at the same time the government is moving to surrender, we use two bombs to vaporize more people.
"We need to use these bombs to end the war sooner." A fine argument to the intentionalist, regardless of outcome, but the consequentialist will have a problem with it because the atomic bombings did not lead to an early conclusion of the war, the fire bombings did.
They were so close to surrendering that the US had to drop two atomic bombs on Japan?
I have a fairly flexible moral code as far as even torture is concerned... this goes beyond what I would consider appropriate in any sense of the word.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zllzOrTvXLc
It was, and I think his point is borne out in the fact that numerous films and TV shows have depicted torture that would formerly have been the preserve of pure villains to tools available to heroic protagonists in sufficiently urgent circumstances. Never do you see the efficacy of it questioned, or the deleterious effects on the administrator explored, or the scenario where it is erroneously applied to an innocent or where an intelligence asset is lost as a result. Deliberately or not, the fictional depiction of torture over the last decade or so has been almust uniformly ideological.
Fox and the like will also be debating its "benefits and how it saved Americans' lives"
the top headline on Fox news this morning was quoting some blowhard politician calling the release of the report 'unconscionable.' strange moral calculus in which the publication of a document is considered a more egregious offense than torturing people.
I think that it is quite possible that there is some purposeful desensitization going on.
I was thinking more about how there were a whole stack of movies exploring different aspects of torture in great detail, typically with unpleasant dilemmas, eg the Saw franchise, Hostel etc. etc.. Now I don't think these are exclusively a response to American policy either - the opst-2000 cultural context also included things like Al-Qaeda terrorists decapitating Daniel Pearl and uploading the videos to Youtube and so forth.
[1] You see it a lot in crime dramas from the 1980's, where things like the 4th amendment are portrayed as just letting criminals off on "technicalities."
The long history suggests that the shows and movies are a symptom of cultural attitudes, rather than a cause. For example, consider all the media in the 1980's portraying criminal procedural protections as "technicalities." I think it was in response to the fact that, after 1960, crime per capita tripled before incarceration per capita started going up. As I said about 24--in the aftermath of 9/11, the torture-fest was just capitalizing on the anger people felt. On my college campus in 2002 there was a lot of talk about nuking the middle east and things like that, which is quite contrary to what the government was saying.
Do you remember post 9-11 America? People were angry and afraid.
Jack Bauer tortured because America wanted him too.
That's just the last straw for me. I would never have someone in my life, family or not, who would think raping people is acceptable. This is even worse. Even our enemies shouldn't be raped/tortured.
On the other hand, torture isn't something that people do because they feel they have to, but rather because they can. Since all the accumulated evidence to points to it being a poor way to to gather intelligence information, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it's just way of being vindictive or sadistic instead, something that we find deplorable in other contexts. I think it's considered deplorable because such feelings are quite common but the majority of us make the effort not to act upon them.
the human race so far narrowed it down to 2 possibilities - judicial proceedings or war following the rules of Geneva Conventions. Every other form of violence is a crime, with torture and killings being the crimes against humanity, prosecutable by any government and without statute of limitations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
1) The ridiculous urgency of it, where they're running against the clock to "stop the bomb" or something like that. These kinds of scenarios are highly unlikely in real life, IMHO.
2) That Jack Bauer always got away with all the things he did. AFAIK, he did not spend even a single second inside a US prison (although he did come pretty close a few times).
I always looked at the show as fiction (like a superhero show), not something to be emulated in real life. I really hope most of its viewers looked at it the same way.
Imagine you are the director of such a show that is about some hero that prevents terrorism. What would you make that hero do to prevent a second 9/11 to capture the audience.
Edit: What I can imagine is that 24 inspired some US officials.
There's something to be said for the post-9/11 zeitgeist that it gonna take us a really, really long time to get over. We see it in super hero movies (if I have to watch Manhattan get pulverized one more time...) and in a more evolved and complex form with Homeland. I think it'll be years before we come to terms with how we've responded as a society and with what we've done.
[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9876686
Google cache as 3AM magazine seems to have some troubles at the moment[2]
[1] http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/saying-no-to-jack-bauer-mains...
[2] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.3a...
Meanwhile, jokes about prison rape are socially acceptable & the US government refuses to do much of anything to stop it.
I haven't seen many people use Brown's robbing the convenience store (and assaulting the shopkeeper) to justify his shooting. It's his attacking the officer and trying to take the officer's gun that is typically used as justification.
The convenience store was relevant before the forensic evidence was available, because at the time we had to choose between two stories, neither of which made much sense:
1. Cop with no prior evidence of problems flips out for no apparent reason and blows away a young man who he had stopped for jaywalking, or
2. Young man who was kind, gentle, non-violent and never harmed anyone flips out for no apparent reason and attacks a cop who is just trying to tell him to walk on the sidewalk.
Both of these require someone to be acting way out of known character. Add in the convenience store, and we know that Brown was already acting way out of character that day, just moments before the shooting, which tips the probabilities way in favor of #2.
Now that the forensic evidence is available and backs #2, there are two questions that we should be asking.
1. Why was Brown acting so out of character that day?
Or were we seeing the "real" Brown that day, and the character he presented to family, teachers, clergy, etc., was a front? If so, then we should be finding out how he fooled them, so that in the future teachers and clergy can do a better job of recognizing such people and intervening.
2. Why did Officer Wilson allow himself to get into a position where Brown could attack him and go for his gun?
To me, the interesting questions are your second one plus the question of why the officer started shooting instead of leaving the scene, potentially returning with backup, since he was still in his car.
Godwin's Law? As far as I know there were no mass machine-gunnings, people hanged with piano wire or actually any people tortured to death. A lot of the techniques listed are pretty much what the US (and UK) army use on their own troops as part of escape and evasion training.
On November --, 2002, adetainee who had been held partially nude and chained to a concrete floor died from suspected hypothermia at the facility. [camp COBALT]
US promoted a reward program in middle east asking locals to turn in anyone with ties to terrorists. All they had to do was tell a name to US military, and collect reward for every name.
Many locals turned in thousands of innocent people just to collect a reward. These people were immediately arrested and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay without any investigation. US did not even require any probably cause, evidence or investigation to detain and torture these people.
If CIA tortured George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in this way, I am sure they would confess to being an accomplice along with Osama Bin Laden in 9/11 attack.
Unfortunately, this US "war on terror" has created tens of thousands of more terrorists all over the world. It haven't made the US or World any safer, it has created a even bigger monster.
In this sense, US Gov is the primary cause of and is directly responsible for nearly ALL terrorist acts in the past decades, globally.
The only real way to get around this problem is balance of power - more people need to be richer, so that on average, nobody can push their agenda better than anyone else.
[1] http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/gtmo-by-...
Here are few links about it:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8472804/...
http://www.reprieve.org.uk/publiceducation/2012_08_30_Public...
But A LOT of them were.
How do you know we haven't used rape as torture? We've already walked up to that line, with medically unnecssary anal rehydration acknowledged as a form of control.
So, we are debating the appropriateness of rape. And yes, that sickens me.
https://www.google.com/search?q=cia+$80+million
Like most of what Zizek says, this doesn't survive even the slightest scrutiny. Not that I want to be seen as "pro-torture", but to dismiss it categorically, as Zizek does, is to fail to grapple with the more general ethical conundrum of collateral damage.
Harris discusses this quite effectively[0]. Basically boiling it down to (paraphrasing) "If you're against torture then you should be against any action that results in collateral damage."
[0]http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/why-id-rather-not-speak-a...
> This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud.
A big difference is that those groups tortured and killed many of their own subjects for their political dissidence. In this case, the CIA tortured (albeit counterproductively) to protect its citizens, and there was a free press to uncover and help stop these programs for the most part.
> Reading them, it is easy to forget the context in which the program began - not that the context should serve as an excuse, but rather as a warning for the future.
Well said.
I hope some day that just like the well tested evidence that torture doesn't work it'll be shown that mass surveillance also gives next to nothing that targeted data gathering wouldn't.
"America step back from her actions in future"
To mean:
"America step back from the actions of the US government in future"
?
There are varying levels of culpability that we all share right. It's difficult to see that we are all part of the problem if we aren't engaged in trying to change it. Your statement suggests that the American government operate in a vacuum and certainly every day people aren't engaged it does seem more and more that they can do as they wish.
I'm going to go donate something to http://www.rootstrikers.org/ now.
Reading your reply I can see why. I'm sorry I didn't word it better.
ps: I'm not American.
pps: I believe that American's, like anyone living in a democracy, are ultimately responsible for the actions of their Government.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/press-releases/release-of-tor...
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/09/live-coverage-...
I was not aware the CIA could order an ambassador from seeking the guidance of its superiors...
I know if I was personally subjected to those things I might not be so averse to having my head cut off.
Take a letter size piece of paper and put it on the floor. Strip naked. Have a "cold shower", then stand on that piece of paper for just two hours.
Bonus points if you manage to stay standing with a wet cloth bag on your head. Extra points if you manage this after having been on reduced calories and no sleep for 48 hours.
In your case nothing happens if you step off the paper.
That was it, that was the justification. Once reports and pictures started coming out, the Murdoch press ran stories that "enhanced investigation techniques" were responsible for foiling various terror threats, despite official proclamations and studies at the time saying otherwise. And then the press claimed it was a partisan issue, because that's what they always do, without any regard to what the issue actually was.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that in my personal opinion, the only story to be heard here is that in the real world, evil is defined as actions actions taken in self-interest that harm others (Dick Cheney's actions in this story, as well as the people who obeyed those directives). That while the press made it seem like 50% of people were pro-torture, the press never, never, accurately shows the actual viewpoints of the people, not to mention how morally bankrupt and unreliable this shows the national press to be. And one last point about how many people were convinced by news reports that since these things were only being used against bad people, it was okay, and how that should be a lesson to others and the future... and how many times this has happened this exact same way in the past.
Those quotation marks really demand a citation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQAmdZvKf6M
Though I wonder if small children aren't closer to understanding this than most of us. They're such a jumble of implicit biases at the best of times... You know that thing you're so scared of, that only comes out when you turn off the lights? Some adults grow up and stop being scared, and some adults don't.
The interviews with the people that had Elliott's lesson much later when they were adults is notable - the lesson stuck with people, in life-affecting ways.
Still, I wonder about some of the side-effects of this. Instead of arresting and interrogating terrorists we kill them with drones as its less messy.
C'est la vie :P
We were killing plenty of people in the War on Terror while the detentions and torture were going on (heck, the torture was sold in part on the basis that it was helping us find and kill people that needed killing in that war.) And some of those tortured also died as a result.
Torture and killing aren't mutually exclusive alternatives.
Less messy, less dirty, less dirty hands etc etc. Yeah right. I wonder how the drone operators sleep at night after a "successful" hit at e.g. a wedding ceromony etc.
Drone kills are still plain evil. And illegal.
> TOP SECRET [blackbox] NOFORN
on it. That's crossed out and UNCLASSIFIED is inserted, but what's that black box covering up? Is it another level of secret access so secret we can't know the name?
I have no idea what it would be in the case of this report, but my guess would be that it was redacted to avoid ambiguity given that "Unclassified" is stamped next to it, rather than because the classification is itself secret.
Even vague descriptions of intelligence sources are often treated as more sensitive than the information derived from those sources.
Of course, that's still a bit silly. The CIA insisted they redact even the initials of the countries involved. Ridiculous. Well, country R is Romania, country P is Poland. There are two others, I think Country J may well be Jordan.
I think I would probably be completely OK with this report being leaked in its unredacted form, including names: I sadly doubt there's any other way justice will ever be done and these people will answer for their crimes against humanity.
#1: The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.
#2: The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
#3: The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
#4: The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.
#5: The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation techniques.
#6: The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
#7: The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
#8: The CIA’s operation and management of the program complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other Executive Branch agencies.
#9: The CIA impeded oversight of the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.
#10: The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
#11: The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
#12: The CIA’s management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the program’s duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.
#13: Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.
#14: CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA Headquarters.
#15: The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention. The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.
#16: The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.
#17: The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious and significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systemic and individual management failures.
#18: The CIA marginalized and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticism, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
#19: The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorized press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns.
#20: The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States’ standing in the world, and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs.