Torture revelations

No thread on this? We all knew that it was happening but confirmation of details in a US Senate report of a CIA torture network is significant.

Obama wants to "move on", in contravention of his campaign promises. Fuck that.
Maybe John McCain should have been elected instead - he has gone up in my estimation following his intervention. There's an obligation to prosecute anyone who was involved in this, and by rights that includes people like Dick Cheney, who continues to defend it.

The rule of law is the principle that the state and the powerful people within it are subject to the law, as opposed to law being the tool of the elites which they can arbitrarily violate. Which will it be, America?

What got me last night was someone from the CIA saying "you can't release this stuff, people will use it to show the US in a bad light." Torturing people in the first place does that, numbnuts.

I don't think prosecution will fly -- too many powerful people had a hand in it. But I agree with an NY Times op/ed suggesting a pardon for the people involved. Not because I think they deserve to go clean, but because it would at least establish that the act is viewed by the executive branch as a crime.

How about they get charged and tried before they get pardoned?

Marso did a post on this a couple years ago that is still spot-on. I quote:

If the situation is similar to "there's a bomb in school full of kids, you've got the guy who knows all the information for sure and isn't talking and you've not much time", that's pretty much the time to get the pliers out.

Outside of Hollywood, and maybe 0.001% on real-world intelligence gathering needs, that's not going to happen, so you don't need to torture.

It's not difficult, and any group that pretty much defaults to torture in the first instance probably needs disbanding.

That said, there is a very grey area in methods of information extraction - waterboarding is pretty much agreed as torture, but what about short term sleep deprivation? Hell, playing Britney and Metallica loudly have been used, does that qualify as torture? I really don't know where the line is once you move away from the extremes.

Thumb screws is easy - torture.
Chatting in a cell is easy - not torture.
Being kept awake? At some point it becomes torture.

I've got one question.

Why hummus?

Was it that wierdo on FOX everyone's talking about?

Fox News host on torture report: "America is awesome"

Like, I know right? Why the haters gotta be hatn' an stuff?

No, it was someone official, heard it on NPR.

Details from the report.

• Handcuffed CIA prisoner hanging from bar 22 hours a day for two days. "was wearing a diaper and had no access to toilet facilities".
• At least one office "engaged in Russian roulette with a detainee".
• Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours
• Agent threatened to cut the throat of detainee's mother.
• Ten inmates kept in an underground cell three metres by two metres.
• Rectal rehydration used on 5 detainees.
  
• Detainees left shackled in cells with loud music for days with only a bucket for waste.
• CIA refused to punish an officer who killed a detainee, who died of hypothermia while held partially naked and chained to the floor.
  
• At least 26 held under the program were "determined they should not have been detained".
• The CIA tortured its own informants by mistake.
• CIA lied to Senate about how many had been detained under the program.
• Detainees with broken legs and hands were forced to stand in stress positions for hours.
• Threats were made against a detainees children and to rape the mother of another.

Obama: "As Americans, we owe a profound debt of gratitude to our fellow citizens who serve to keep us safe, among them the dedicated men and women of our intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency."

Cheney: "It was authorised...They deserve a lot of praise. As far as I’m concerned, they ought to be decorated, not criticized...It was the right thing to do, and if I had to do it over again, I would do it."

If it's something you don't like being drilled into you, it's torture.

The dubbahs at Wal-Mart alternated between alterna-crap, and country.
12 hours a day, week after week of that shit made me feel like my soul was being sucked out of me into a black hole in slow motion.

I can only imagine it combined with sleep deprivation.

Now, to people that like shitty music, it was no problem.
But hey, there are people that like to be shat and puked on.

It's easy for the Irish to object when they historically do nothing.

And in the very unlikely event that such a situation actually does occur, between prosecutorial discretion and the nature of jury trials, no one would be convicted of torture so such a situation has no bearing on whether or how broadly torture should be illegal by the letter of the law. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable, but it's undoubtedly true. If we can't convict cops for killing unarmed men and boys without provocation then we're certainly not going to convict torturers who lay reasonable claim to stopping the ticking time-bomb.

Every day, I want that fucker a little more dead.

See, I tend to run off the worldview of "try not to do shit I'd rather not have done to me", which as a personal philosophy is great, but from a social perspective is pretty useless - may as well have nations run by Officer Barbrady.

Pretty sure there are a lot of murderers who hate having to spend their days locked up, so going off your definition we're pretty much okay with state sponsored torture so long as it's "good" torture.

So there has to be more to it than that, otherwise it's less "torture, bad" and more something of a sliding scale of "meh" to "oh noes" to "wtf?".

One of the nordic countries, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, lets their prisoners play XBox, and jam on guitars, and cook their own meals in a fully stocked kitchen.
There's less resentment, and way less violence.
Putting people in a dungeon is just an act of petty vengeance that fails at a practical level.
It blows back.
You piss people off, and when they get out, they're more violent, and they learn new tricks of the trade from other criminals.
The experiment has failed.

Surely the taxpayer will enjoy paying for such treatment.

I don't see anyone rushing to invent the phantom zone from Superman 1-2 to put criminals into.
Gotta go with what works, not what feels good.

From Facebook.

Okay, that was probably a bad example of what I was trying to get across - although on a tangent, the Nordic nations do tend to have a lower crime rate in general, but are also socially different from many western ones, so I wonder how much of the criminals disposition after imprisonment comes from prison treatment and how much comes from the society they live in. Would be interesting to see some kind of prison swap as an experiment.

My point is that there are oodles of things we have to do we don't like, but we don't qualify that as torture, so we're back to the sliding scale.

Can all the tea partiers roll up to the court and say "mah taxes be tor-chure" like some character from Fletch Lives? I don't think so, so we can't go off the "I don't like it, ergo it's torture" can we?

If loud bad music isn't torture.....why use it?

It's annoying? This is my entire point - there is an icky grey area, one I'm sure @Ancalagon will know more on with psy-ops stuff, where you use annoyance to get results.

At what point does it come torture though? It can't be "always" otherwise at least half the planet would be waiting for their day in court.

Ah...if only.
If only Limp Bizkit and Insane Clown Posse could be brought up on charges.

In the case of loud music, that's pretty easy to answer: it's an annoyance when it's used to startle a prisoner. It's torture when it's used to prevent a prisoner from being able to think or sleep.

And you know what? Gratuitous annoyance of prisoners should be illegal even if it isn't torture. You can even make it illegal under the same law, with penalties determined by the severity of the infraction.

Whether right or wrong, no current or former President of the United States or Vice President of the United States will ever see the inside of a jail cell for any reason. That's not politics, it's reality.

To the best of my knowledge, only two Heads of State have been convicted by an international tribunal in the last 200 years. One was Karl Donitz, the Head of State for Nazi Germany at the end of WW2 and Charles Taylor of Liberia. So, a defeated enemy and a tin-pot dictator. Not exactly in the same league as the President and Vice President of the United States.

The answer to the question is obvious, and don't think that too many other nations would behave differently. Quite a few EU nations knew what was up with the CIA "black" flights, and they rarely, if ever, blocked the planes from their air spaces or prevented them from landing and refueling (assuming they weren't involved in the torture themselves).

The best we can hope for, and I don't think that we'll see it, is a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" like they had in South Africa after Apartheid ended. But you can expect another report to be started in January when the Republicans take control of the Senate. They'll no doubt try to white wash the whole thing. The only question is, will it wind up as being as honest as the most recent Benghazi report that the Republicans released?

I look at torture like I look at the death penalty. Sounds awesome in theory, but the government and bureaucracy is just gonna fuck up the implementation, so it's better if we don't allow it.

I'm more of a fix it don't end it person.

Some things simply cannot be fixed.

Agreed, except for the awesome part. Neither is awesome in practice or theory, but yes, the government will somehow make it even worse.