Torture poll

[cantdog]

Quote:
My country blows schools and churches and hospitals up. I am helping, this moment, with my taxes, to support the apparatus which has this as its purpose.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My country does not do this. Your country might. I am aware that many countries as policy hide their troops in schools and hospitals to protect them from American bombs. It works or they would not do this. That does not happen here but it does in your country. Now that is "shock and awe."

My dear wmrs, the apparatus I refer to is the armed forces of the United States. Shock and Awe demonstrated, as many another operation before it, that armed forces blow shit up, and large-scale attacks blow shit up indiscriminately.

They carpet bombed the Ho Chi Minh trail and much else in that area, they swept through South Carolina and Georgia, they slaughtered villages of natives in the American West, they rototilled small atolls in the Pacific with shell and mortar, they reduced great swaths of Europe to no man's lands of churned mud and the body parts of horses and men, together with brick, mortar, metal and everything else. I already mentioned Dresden, and I could mention hundreds of other places.

You can have your army build levees or do police work, ship goods or print newsletters, but what an army is created to do is to kill people and wreck things. You aren't allowed to do that with most organizations, but the law is still when armies wreak wholesale death and destruction, or air forces, or what have you. The US has a very large armed force indeed with a very great destructive potential. That is its pride and its purpose.

Do me the honor not to deny that an armed force is created and supported in order to kill and destroy. I shall lose all respect for you if you attempt to tell me they build armies to play with butterflies in the fields of Eden.

Truly, you needn't blush for the armies of the world; they know, already, that they are best at killing and ruination. They strive constantly to be better at it than the other fellow's army.

They do these things because the people they are hitting at are the enemy of the day. Wholesale destruction of population centers isn't even a war crime at Nürnberg, because we did as much of it as they did.

 

[wmrs2]

I have removed some of the wilder things you said in the post. I generally don't answer questions with two or more unspoken assumptions in them. I don't even agree with your expressly spoken assumptions.

First, though, Your list of people who use the policy is incoherent and inaccurate. I'm in Amnesty International, and I have written letters to government officials all over the world about human rights issues. Not general statements, such as we make here, but individual cases. "This woman spoke out for investigations of extrajudicial execution, you must release her," and so on. The practice is fairly widespread, but not nearly so much as you imagine. Human rights violations take place worldwide, but torture as a policy is not usual, unless you include repeated and endless beatings and holding in squalor with sleep deprivation.

What really is widespread is isolated instances when soldiers or police holding a line somewhere, say, soldiers who have been fed these scare stories about torture saving lives, undertake it without a policy. The point of the letter then is to urge investigation and prosecution.

More common than torture is simple killing with no charges, no trial. Many times the body is mutilated, but maybe not before death. Again, the letter points to the problem with details and urges particular officials to do their duty and bring those responsible to trial.

More common still is systematic persecutions of particular groups, such as tribe members of a particular tribe or women, gays, journalists, trade unionists, clergy, foreigners, whatever it is. Much of the time these are raids conducted by police or military members, or civilian militias, or just groups of armed yahoos, and the persecution is not being discouraged or investigated.

I gather that you are filled with animus toward relativists, liberals, muslims and terrorists, and you also seem to think all those people are involved in torture, but that doesn't prevent you from defending torture yourself.

I am in no doubt that your morality falls within the Us and Them category, since you lay blame against groups and protest the relative innocence of other groups. What can you imagine your Christ to have meant when he said to turn the other cheek, to forgive seventy times seven times, to love those that hate you, to give him your cloak also?

I am happy that you are a member of Amnesty International. What is your home country as you referred last night to being a supporter of your home country? Do you travel all over the world in support of human rights or are you stationed here in the USA only? Just curious.

The practice is fairly widespread, but not nearly so much as you imagine. You are not saying that the violation of human rights are widespread in the USA are you? The wording of this remark is confusing to me because you also say it is not as much as you imagine.

More common than torture is simple killing with no charges, no trial. Again I assume you are speaking of some other country than the USA since such actions are not common occurrences in the USA.

More common than torture is simple killing with no charges, no trial. I plainly told you my morality was based on our national pledge of "one nation under God."

What can you imagine your Christ to have meant when he said to turn the other cheek, to forgive seventy times seven times, to love those that hate you, to give him your cloak also? You do not appear to be qualified to interpret the New Testament. You must take that scripture in light of other scriptures that say we are to render unto Cesare the things that are Cesare's and unto God the things that are God's. Military service is something we render to the government as service unto God. When I fight for my country, I also do the highly moral thing and it is highly moral to slay terrorist that your country supports as you referred to last night. By the way, why did you edit those remarks out of your post from last night?

What would Christ do? I really don't know for sure but what He said he was going to do was to bring to judgment every person for their deeds whether these deeds be good or evil. He also said that those who did evil would be cast into hell. If that is the measure of his turning his checks then there is a lot of us who better change our ways, don't you think?

 

[amicus]

Cantdog...you are so full of shit your eyes gotta be brown.

The United States Military exists to defend the nation and defend the rights and property of its' citizens.

The United States fought alongside its' Allies in the first and second world wars and never colonized a single country, even though we occupied, at one time or another most of Europe and Asia.

There were two surrogate wars in Korea and Vietnam wherein International Communism was contained and a third world war, nuclear this time, was averted.

The United States has military bases in over a hundred nations to help them, 'defend' their sovereignty against outside invasion.

Perhaps you can dismiss the Arab/Israeli conflict and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait as internal middle east problems but the worlds supply of petroleum is exported from that area and it must be defended and has been by a coalition of about 40 free nations.

Take your Hippy assed anti war, anti American shit somewhere else.

Amicus

 

[shereads]

Many of the instances of torture, aka "prisoner abuse," documented at Abu Ghraib fell into that grey area between rape and mind-rape. Cheney/Rumsfeld unofficially decided that the term torture would only apply to actions that might result in organ failure or death. (A definition that would exclude actual rape - yet they expressed shock and outrage when the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced.)

It's significant that the people who green-lighted these "enhanced interrogation technques" went to great lengths to distance themselves, obscure their involvement, and assure that the nastiest violations took place outside US borders, often carried out by foreign nationals under CIA supervision. As if having other people do our dirty work would keep us clean.

In my own mind, modern-day torture isn't defined by the type or degree of pain inflicted, but by the degree of shame and secrecy involved.

Beyond the moral issue, the question of efficacy applies even to absurdist examples. We know that information collected by means of physical torture is unreliable; should we expect better info from someone who's been subjected to repeated top-volume playings of "Gypsies Tramps & Thieves"?

 

[cantdog]

I am happy that you are a member of Amnesty International. What is your home country as you referred last night to being a supporter of your home country? Do you travel all over the world in support of human rights or are you stationed here in the USA only? Just curious.

The practice is fairly widespread, but not nearly so much as you imagine. You are not saying that the violation of human rights are widespread in the USA are you? The wording of this remark is confusing to me because you also say it is not as much as you imagine.

More common than torture is simple killing with no charges, no trial. Again I assume you are speaking of some other country than the USA since such actions are not common occurrences in the USA.

More common than torture is simple killing with no charges, no trial. I plainly told you my morality was based on our national pledge of "one nation under God."

What can you imagine your Christ to have meant when he said to turn the other cheek, to forgive seventy times seven times, to love those that hate you, to give him your cloak also? You do not appear to be qualified to interpret the New Testament. You must take that scripture in light of other scriptures that say we are to render unto Cesare the things that are Cesare's and unto God the things that are God's. Military service is something we render to the government as service unto God. When I fight for my country, I also do the highly moral thing and it is highly moral to slay terrorist that your country supports as you referred to last night. By the way, why did you edit those remarks out of your post from last night?

What would Christ do? I really don't know for sure but what He said he was going to do was to bring to judgment every person for their deeds whether these deeds be good or evil. He also said that those who did evil would be cast into hell. If that is the measure of his turning his checks then there is a lot of us who better change our ways, don't you think?

Your Us/Them morality twists things so that they make sense to you. As I patiently explained, though, I do not agree that any group can righteously go forth to slay enemies. Any group. You are saying baldly that your morality allows for that, even in the face of the words of Christ about loving your enemy.

My position requires no twisting of those sentiments. He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? The scripture you tell me to beware of, wmrs, is the Sermon on the Mount. I always suspect a Christian who doesn't go along with the sermon on the mount. Call me finicky, but I like to figure, if someone says she is a Christian, that the Sermon is central to her understanding.

As to the love your neighbor thing, Christ's enemies believed that one every bit as much. See the bit in the tenth chapter of Luke's gospel. The lawyer says to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself, and Jesus tells him, "Dead on, brother; do this, and live for ever." It's all the Law and the Prophets, he says at another juncture. The sermon on the mount goes on at great length about it. There is no inconsistency that needs to be explained, here.

I am thankful, though, to be free of that book, since it seems to lead to madness.

 

[Dragonlipz]

My dear wmrs, the apparatus I refer to is the armed forces of the United States. Shock and Awe demonstrated, as many another operation before it, that armed forces blow shit up, and large-scale attacks blow shit up indiscriminately.

They carpet bombed the Ho Chi Minh trail and much else in that area, they swept through South Carolina and Georgia, they slaughtered villages of natives in the American West, they rototilled small atolls in the Pacific with shell and mortar, they reduced great swaths of Europe to no man's lands of churned mud and the body parts of horses and men, together with brick, mortar, metal and everything else. I already mentioned Dresden, and I could mention hundreds of other places.

You can have your army build levees or do police work, ship goods or print newsletters, but what an army is created to do is to kill people and wreck things. You aren't allowed to do that with most organizations, but the law is still when armies wreak wholesale death and destruction, or air forces, or what have you. The US has a very large armed force indeed with a very great destructive potential. That is its pride and its purpose.

Do me the honor not to deny that an armed force is created and supported in order to kill and destroy. I shall lose all respect for you if you attempt to tell me they build armies to play with butterflies in the fields of Eden.

Truly, you needn't blush for the armies of the world; they know, already, that they are best at killing and ruination. They strive constantly to be better at it than the other fellow's army.

They do these things because the people they are hitting at are the enemy of the day. Wholesale destruction of population centers isn't even a war crime at Nürnberg, because we did as much of it as they did.

Dude,
Your asinine rhetoric has forced me to not only side with but to echo Amicus and wrms and their general sentiments:
Spare me the 'holier than thou' revisionist bullshit.
As a combat veteran of the Viet Nam conflict, I submit to you that there wasn't enough carpet bombing along the Ho Chi Minh trail. We were there to do a job and that job was to fight the North Vietnamese regulars and irregulars invading South Viet Nam. Much destruction was visited on the land and people of that country but in truth, much more mayhem could have been delivered by the forces of this country. We actually showed great restraint in dealing with the enemy forces.
The atolls that were 'rototilled' were part of a strategy that ultimately dealt with an evil as deadly as any posed by the Al Quaeda today. The inhabitants of those atolls and those our forces freed from Japanese domination throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans thanked us profusely as a matter of fact.
The point is (I am a combat veteran so I've earned the right to speak to this with some measure of credibility) war is a filthy, ugly enterprise with little that is honorable about it's execution. There is honor in war but not in any quantity that mitigates the horror and depravity that it inflicts on the willing and unwilling participants.
For myself, I'm damned glad that the Allies won the second world war. You should be too. There'd be no Amnesty International if they had.

 

[shereads]

He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

God knows, there's precious little of that going on.

 

[cantdog]

I am happy that you are a member of Amnesty International. What is your home country as you referred last night to being a supporter of your home country? Do you travel all over the world in support of human rights or are you stationed here in the USA only? Just curious.

The practice is fairly widespread, but not nearly so much as you imagine. You are not saying that the violation of human rights are widespread in the USA are you? The wording of this remark is confusing to me because you also say it is not as much as you imagine.

More common than torture is simple killing with no charges, no trial. Again I assume you are speaking of some other country than the USA since such actions are not common occurrences in the USA.

More common than torture is simple killing with no charges, no trial. I plainly told you my morality was based on our national pledge of "one nation under God."

What can you imagine your Christ to have meant when he said to turn the other cheek, to forgive seventy times seven times, to love those that hate you, to give him your cloak also? You do not appear to be qualified to interpret the New Testament. You must take that scripture in light of other scriptures that say we are to render unto Cesare the things that are Cesare's and unto God the things that are God's. Military service is something we render to the government as service unto God. When I fight for my country, I also do the highly moral thing and it is highly moral to slay terrorist that your country supports as you referred to last night. By the way, why did you edit those remarks out of your post from last night?

What would Christ do? I really don't know for sure but what He said he was going to do was to bring to judgment every person for their deeds whether these deeds be good or evil. He also said that those who did evil would be cast into hell. If that is the measure of his turning his checks then there is a lot of us who better change our ways, don't you think?

About the other concerns you have. I live in Maine, which, like Hawai'i, is in the United States. My family arrived here well before the Revolutionary War; none of us came through Ellis Island, since we were already here by that era.

Writing letters for Amnesty, we wrote only to other countries' officials. It is very risky to criticize one's own officials, sometimes, about things of this kind. Americans did not write Amnesty letters to American officials. We were careful to address them in the proper form but we were firm that justice needed to be done, and why.

Most importantly, the letters they got from other countries carried to them the message that everyone knew.

Everybody in the whole world knows what you've been doing, and we know who to complain to, and we have names, times, and places. That was the message. What the message did was subtle. It removed any idea that what was going on was a secret, for one thing, because we had the skinny. More than that, more than removing secrecy, we removed impunity. People all over the world are watching. "If you didn't do this, you are responsible for prosecuting it or ending it," the messages were saying. If they didn't act, they were just as guilty as the ones who did the deed in the first place.

Secrecy-- gone. Impunity-- gone. And all it was? A simple letter. Then another and another. And time after time, they would release these people. It shouldn't have worked, but it did, because without impunity, all that stuff stops.

I listed the statements I did about human rights violations because you were so badly informed about it. I was not, usually, referring to the United States, although we are not blameless people. I write to my own officialdom, too.

What I am trying to do is to make the United States stop using torture and kidnapping as policies against suspected enemies. We began doing it recently on a wider scale and it has to stop. It is very important, as i learned in writing my letters for Amnesty, that impunity be removed. These torturers don't need, necessarily, to endure massive terms in jail or face death rows, but I think it's very important they be brought to trial, and very, very publicly.

I want everyone who sees the tube or the headlines to know the names and the faces of the people who tortured other people, knowing it was against the law. I want their name to be known to their children, that their mom was a torturer. To their grandmother, their civilian employer, their bank teller, their barber, and people all over the country.

 

[wmrs2]

My dear wmrs, the apparatus I refer to is the armed forces of the United States. Shock and Awe demonstrated, as many another operation before it, that armed forces blow shit up, and large-scale attacks blow shit up indiscriminately.

They carpet bombed the Ho Chi Minh trail and much else in that area, they swept through South Carolina and Georgia, they slaughtered villages of natives in the American West, they rototilled small atolls in the Pacific with shell and mortar, they reduced great swaths of Europe to no man's lands of churned mud and the body parts of horses and men, together with brick, mortar, metal and everything else. I already mentioned Dresden, and I could mention hundreds of other places.

You can have your army build levees or do police work, ship goods or print newsletters, but what an army is created to do is to kill people and wreck things. You aren't allowed to do that with most organizations, but the law is still when armies wreak wholesale death and destruction, or air forces, or what have you. The US has a very large armed force indeed with a very great destructive potential. That is its pride and its purpose.

Do me the honor not to deny that an armed force is created and supported in order to kill and destroy. I shall lose all respect for you if you attempt to tell me they build armies to play with butterflies in the fields of Eden.

Truly, you needn't blush for the armies of the world; they know, already, that they are best at killing and ruination. They strive constantly to be better at it than the other fellow's army.

They do these things because the people they are hitting at are the enemy of the day. Wholesale destruction of population centers isn't even a war crime at Nürnberg, because we did as much of it as they did.

The USA was not a great nation overnight. We had to work at it and we made many mistakes especially in the area of human rights but I am proud of our progress. There was a time in my life that I was not allowed to eat with white people or use the same bathrooms as white people. That was unfair but today we have a black man as president. I am so proud of the progress of my country, although I am one of many black people who did not vote for Obama. I felt safe and accepted enough that I voted for another white man.

The USA has not gone back on human rights and it has not increased torture at the same rate the rest of the world has. Our army has increasingly been used to stop terrorism or do you think that other peoples are not presently sponsoring terrorism. You did admit last night that your country did sponsor terrorism and that you supported your country; you did edit that portion to exclude those remarks. You must have noticed that those remarks were those of an extreme nature and very violent and I may add, very un-American and very dangerous to American security.

I already mentioned Dresden, and I could mention hundreds of other places.
Yes you could mention other places in our proud history but not even knowing what country is your country, from your own testimony that your country supports terrorism, it is fact that your country's history has 1,000,000's of more examples of such violations of human rights. That being the case and since you are not willing to tell us where your country is, why should we be alarmed at your condemnation of our ethics and morality?
The US has a very large armed force indeed with a very great destructive potential. That is its pride and its purpose.
Yes, you are correct again. But if we did not have a strong army you have made it clear that your country would destroy my country. You do not want to see our country weak in order to stop terrorism in the world, you want your country to be the power in the world. Again, I repeat you have already made this clear with your announcement that you supported your country's terrorism. No, we are not going to accept your moral advice although you are welcome to offer it.

 

[wmrs2]

God knows, there's precious little of that going on.

You are very wrong here too. There is very much of that going on and it is being promoted by Christians and to a large extent of conservatives. Liberal do not even pay their taxes or give hardly anything to charity. That has been proven many times so you should not criticize our failure to live up to the Bible definition of righteous until your lack of faith does something for the world.

 

[cloudy]

Y'all please don't quote the troll. Thanks.

http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n124/phyde1987/ignoranttrash.jpg

 

[wmrs2]

About the other concerns you have. I live in Maine, which, like Hawai'i, is in the United States. My family arrived here well before the Revolutionary War; none of us came through Ellis Island, since we were already here by that era.

Writing letters for Amnesty, we wrote only to other countries' officials. It is very risky to criticize one's own officials, sometimes, about things of this kind. Americans did not write Amnesty letters to American officials. We were careful to address them in the proper form but we were firm that justice needed to be done, and why.

Most importantly, the letters they got from other countries carried to them the message that everyone knew.

Everybody in the whole world knows what you've been doing, and we know who to complain to, and we have names, times, and places. That was the message. What the message did was subtle. It removed any idea that what was going on was a secret, for one thing, because we had the skinny. More than that, more than removing secrecy, we removed impunity. People all over the world are watching. "If you didn't do this, you are responsible for prosecuting it or ending it," the messages were saying. If they didn't act, they were just as guilty as the ones who did the deed in the first place.

Secrecy-- gone. Impunity-- gone. And all it was? A simple letter. Then another and another. And time after time, they would release these people. It shouldn't have worked, but it did, because without impunity, all that stuff stops.

I listed the statements I did about human rights violations because you were so badly informed about it. I was not, usually, referring to the United States, although we are not blameless people. I write to my own officialdom, too.

What I am trying to do is to make the United States stop using torture and kidnapping as policies against suspected enemies. We began doing it recently on a wider scale and it has to stop. It is very important, as i learned in writing my letters for Amnesty, that impunity be removed. These torturers don't need, necessarily, to endure massive terms in jail or face death rows, but I think it's very important they be brought to trial, and very, very publicly.

I want everyone who sees the tube or the headlines to know the names and the faces of the people who tortured other people, knowing it was against the law. I want their name to be known to their children, that their mom was a torturer. To their grandmother, their civilian employer, their bank teller, their barber, and people all over the country.

What is your country, brother? Mine is the USA and you live here but since you say your county supports terrorism and you support your country, I want to know who your county is. The people of Maine also wants to know who your country is.

If you spread the word about terrorist in apportion to where terrorism is most prominent then you would not have enough paper left to write letters to the USA. How many letters have you written to your country condemning their terrorist actions? I say none or they would have already hung you and killed every member of your family. That is the way your country operates and you have yet to deny this.

I say again, why should we pay any attention to what you think about the morality of torture when you openly say that you support the terrorist acts of your country? What I want to make famous is the name of every terrorist in the world, in the USA, and in Maine.

 

[slyc_willie]

Y'all please don't quote the troll. Thanks.

http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n124/phyde1987/ignoranttrash.jpg

Okay, but it's fun watching it run around in confused circles like a chihuahua chasing it's tail.

 

[Belegon]

wmrs2 has made it to my list now as well.

deluded is a dramatic understatement.

 

[wmrs2]

uups! How did that get posted here?

wmrs2

 

[wmrs2]

wmrs2 has made it to my list now as well.

deluded is a dramatic understatement.

Belegon, what is your interest in this discussion? Are you concerned about my comments on terrorism? Do you think my remarks are off line about the security of the USA? Do you have the nerve to express your views on the USA and terrorism or do you just want to say I am deluded too? Come on, out with it! Speak against our country. We want to hear it.

 

[Pure]

some material on what constitutes torture according to US law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_and_the_United_States

Wiki on US and torture
Military field manuals

Main article: U.S. Army Field Manuals

In late 2006, the military issued updated field manuals on intelligence collection (FM 2-22.3. Human Intelligence Collector Operations, September 2006) and counterinsurgency (FM 3-24. Counterinsurgency, December 2006). Both manuals reiterated that "no person in the custody or under the control of DOD, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, in accordance with and as defined in US law."[9] Specific techniques described as prohibited in the intelligence collection manual include:

Forcing the detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner.
Placing hoods or sacks over the head of a detainee; using duct tape over the eyes.
Applying beatings, electric shock, burns, or other forms of physical pain.
Waterboarding
Using military working dogs.
Inducing hypothermia or heat injury.
Conducting mock executions.
Depriving the detainee of necessary food, water, or medical care.[10]

=====
CIA Manuals on coercive interrogation

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/index.htm#hre
==
http://web.archive.org/web/20060615214021/http://www.parascope.com/articles/0397/kubark06.htm

The profound moral objection to applying duress past the point of irreversible psychological damage has been stated

===
Four Bush administration memos released by Obama. These argue for the licitness of various techniques named below. Some, I, pure, agree are not torture. Waterboarding, however, generally is considered so. But the point to notice are the types of arguments and criteria used.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/16/torture-memos-bush-administration



first: August 1, 2002, Memo of Bybee to Rizzo

"Section 2340 defines torture as the infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering. We will consider physical pain and mental pain serparately. See 18 USC at 2340(1). With respect to physical pain, we previously concluded that 'severe pain' within the meaning of
Section 2340 is pain that is difficult for the individual to endure and is of an intensity akin to the pain accompanying serious physical injury....... we have noted that examples of acts infliction severe pain that typify torture are, among other things, severe beating with weapons such as clubs, and the burning of prisoners. |See id. at 24. We conclude that none of the proposed tenchniques inflicts such pain.
[Discussion of the 'facial hold', stress positions, wall standings, confinement boxes, sleep deprivation, facial slap, slamming against an artificial wall.]

We next consider whether the use of these techniques would inflict severe mental pain or suffering within the meaning of the statute. Section 2340 defines severe mental pain or surrering as 'the prolong mental harm caused by or resulting from ' one of several predicate acts. [18 US Code] 2340(2) Those predicate acts are 1) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or surrering; 2) 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; 3) the threat of imminent death, or 4) the threat that anyone of the preceding acts will be done to another person.

[There is a discussion of waterboarding and the point is conceded that it causes fear of imminent death. But the further criterion is invoked of lasting mental harm, and waterboarding apparently has not done that. Hence it is not torture.]

 

[cantdog]

I read the memos on HuffPost. I ran it by a lawyer, who was dismissive. "Pretty shifty law," was what he said.

I admit, the memos seemed screwy to me, but I am not as sure as he is that it's necessarily bad law, except maybe about the waterboarding, where there is direct precedent (case law: a person was convicted under the anti-torture statute and specifically for waterboarding). Generally, lots of executive branches can interpret the guiding statues to form specific policy. Usually, it seems to me, the policies stand, having sometimes as much effective force as law, until challenged.

He says that the heads of Justice do not get to make things un-illegal that are illegal, and the law itself is clear. I do hope he is right.

 

[shereads]

I want everyone who sees the tube or the headlines to know the names and the faces of the people who tortured other people, knowing it was against the law. I want their name to be known to their children, that their mom was a torturer. To their grandmother, their civilian employer, their bank teller, their barber, and people all over the country.

I want that too. There's precious little comfort in having prosecuted and imprisoned Lindsay Englund and the other low-ranking military personnel who took the fall for Abu Ghraib.

Speaking of Abu Ghraib...just to keep this discussion from being too much in the abstract, I've posted some snapshots. (Remember when Rumsfeld apologized to these victims via teleivision? Surreal.)







http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3508/3461617182_0b05af380b_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3636/3461617162_2ba9ee2600_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3522/3461617184_4d252b54c3_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3499/3460838203_fc2b57f7db_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3570/3460852215_bf8f93e941_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3562/3460852139_6a05f8bcc3_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3643/3461675486_d6eb957533_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3588/3460859741_c1200d964c_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3524/3461617164_375a702811_m.jpg



Goodnight, human race. Goodnight, Dick Cheney.

 

[Samandiriel]

I want that too. There's precious little comfort in having prosecuted and imprisoned Lindsay Englund and the other low-ranking military personnel who took the fall for Abu Ghraib.

Speaking of Abu Ghraib...just to keep this discussion from being too much in the abstract, I've posted some snapshots. (Remember when Rumsfeld apologized to these victims via teleivision? Surreal.)







http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3508/3461617182_0b05af380b_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3636/3461617162_2ba9ee2600_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3522/3461617184_4d252b54c3_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3499/3460838203_fc2b57f7db_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3562/3460852139_6a05f8bcc3_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3643/3461675486_d6eb957533_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3588/3460859741_c1200d964c_o.jpg

Goodnight, world.

Dear God.

 

[cantdog]

wmrs

You should calm down, dear.

I told you, I'm American. One of my Shorey ancestors was at Popham colony, and actually met the Mayflower when she made landfall. I truly cannot imagine what would make you believe I was from somewhere else.

I said I support my country, and I did discuss the extent to which my country has recently undertaken human rights violations. I also see that you do not admit, in your morality, that enemies have any human rights. That does not dissuade me, however, because I have seen that everyone uses the moral compass they see fit to use.

I have always imagined I could at least make comprehensible my stand on something as uncomplicated as this issue is, but for you I cannot. Even when you get something I've said, you lose hold of it later, and the thread hardly two days old!

I have attempted to explain a small number of other things, here, but you have consistently failed to understand. I fear we can have little to say, since what I say doesn't even echo. It just vanishes.

But some of what you now say is right out of nowhere. Discussions of terrorism make me tired, so I can be fairly certain I have not addressed terrorism one way or another on this thread, even though you repeatedly maintain that I said something about it. You accuse. You now seem excited; you gibber. It is not healthy to gibber, and people will lose interest.

 

[shereads]

You now seem excited; you gibber. It is not healthy to gibber, and people will lose interest.

You are astonishingly patient with this person, cant.

What always emerges from discussions on topics like this is that the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" is completely over the heads of about half the population. They cannot make a distinction among terrorists, terror suspects, witnesses, detainees, etc. It does not compute.

You meet these people when you are on the jury in a criminal trial. They are the ones who pretend to listen to the evidence until they get behind the closed doors of the jury room, and then blurt out, "The police wouldn't have arrested him if he wasn't guilty of something."

They claim to Love and Defend Freedom, but they despise one of the most essential underpinnings of a free society. Presumption of innocence is the first thing they throw to the hyenas when faced with even the most remote or abstract threat to their own well-being.

 

[wmrs2]

Many of the instances of torture, aka "prisoner abuse," documented at Abu Ghraib fell into that grey area between rape and mind-rape. Cheney/Rumsfeld unofficially decided that the term torture would only apply to actions that might result in organ failure or death. (A definition that would exclude actual rape - yet they expressed shock and outrage when the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced.)

It's significant that the people who green-lighted these "enhanced interrogation technques" went to great lengths to distance themselves, obscure their involvement, and assure that the nastiest violations took place outside US borders, often carried out by foreign nationals under CIA supervision. As if having other people do our dirty work would keep us clean.

In my own mind, modern-day torture isn't defined by the type or degree of pain inflicted, but by the degree of shame and secrecy involved.

Beyond the moral issue, the question of efficacy applies even to absurdist examples. We know that information collected by means of physical torture is unreliable; should we expect better info from someone who's been subjected to repeated top-volume playings of "Gypsies Tramps & Thieves"?

The fact is that you do not know any of this shit you just dumped on this thread. You don't know that anybody distanced themselves from torture. It is only a liberal assumption because you are only able to think the worst of your country. Were you part of the CIA? Did you have an inside agent in the CIA?

You only know what you read on the internet from your liberal associates and what you can Google.

You call torture "by the degree of shame and secrecy involved." What kind of definition is that? If that was true liberal could not be tortured because they have no national shame as they ridicule our country and blame their own country for the world's evils. Can you find nothing good to say about the USA in this debate about torture? How do you know torture is unreliable? Have you ever been tortured?

 

[wmrs2]

I want that too. There's precious little comfort in having prosecuted and imprisoned Lindsay Englund and the other low-ranking military personnel who took the fall for Abu Ghraib.

Speaking of Abu Ghraib...just to keep this discussion from being too much in the abstract, I've posted some snapshots. (Remember when Rumsfeld apologized to these victims via teleivision? Surreal.)







http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3508/3461617182_0b05af380b_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3636/3461617162_2ba9ee2600_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3522/3461617184_4d252b54c3_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3499/3460838203_fc2b57f7db_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3570/3460852215_bf8f93e941_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3562/3460852139_6a05f8bcc3_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3643/3461675486_d6eb957533_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3588/3460859741_c1200d964c_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3524/3461617164_375a702811_m.jpg



Goodnight, human race. Goodnight, Dick Cheney.

Thanks for giving the terrorist something to crow about. If you think things like this will not occur while Obama is president, your head is stuck deep in the sand of delusion. But the terrorist appreciate that you continue to punish your country by bringing this up. It was not Dick Cheney, it was American soldiers who did not follow orders and they were punished. Your judgment is not just, it is not sound (rather depressing), it is not American. Instead of creating enemies for the first black president, let's help him govern the country. that would be the American thing to do.

 

[cantdog]

People are exasperating, lots of them. It brings on cynicism and even despair. I've given up cynicism, so all I can do is keep plugging.

Some of what the mrs says is rhetorical, anyway. Taking her every word literally is funny, but she can tell some of the hawks from handsaws. I think that means she's trolling us a bit, though. And I can be a little oblique, sometimes.

She's painted herself into a rhetorical corner, though, for now. I don't want to discuss torture as methods with a view to drawing a definition line. I'm too imaginative to enjoy that. So I guess the thread is over, for her and for me.