Torture may be justified.

[sweetnpetite]

This is a bit old, but I missed it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38894-2004Jun13.html

Coming back up again in regards to recent Gonzales nomination:

http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid=34&in=US&cat=Bush_Administration

 

[cantdog]

I read them in the book by Hersh, seymour Hersh, who's a journalist at the Post.

He gives the context pretty clearly. Lots of people in military intelligence wanted authority to do bad things.

Rummy wanted to, and asked Bush if he thought the Conventions applied to the people they lifted off the streets and out of the houses and got from the Northern Alliance as already captured prisoners. Bush responded with the famous executive order naming them "enemy combatants" or some such, and placing them outside the reach of the Conventions for the purposes of the US Government.

The executive directive is very careful. Their status does not mean they can be tortured or abused. There are more constraints on torture than just the Conventions. International agreements, U.S. law, military law. He said any deviation from the standards of the Conventions with regard to treatment of prisoners would have to be specifically authorized from the President's office.

The Conventions also have standards about repatriation of POWs after hostilities end or in cases of prisoner exchange agreements. The ducking of the conventions may have had as much to do with how long we could keep them. If they were not POWs, though, then we must have been holding them as criminals, in which case we ought to be charging them or something.

He definitely didn't want to have them fall under criminal law conventions, so he invented another category to put them in.

The memos were entirely about torture. The Bybee memo says the limit is in how much pain, and says that cruelty doesn't start until there is pain equivalent to major organ damage or death.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

http://www.exile.ru/2004-June-24/war_nerd.html


While you may or may not agree, it's a pretty enlightening article, imho.

 

[rgraham666]

http://www.exile.ru/2004-June-24/war_nerd.html


While you may or may not agree, it's a pretty enlightening article, imho.

What pasty faced wanker!

I'm sure he's heard the bullets go wheet! passed his ears a hundred times. Eaten grass and dirt as the shells come rumbling in. Inflicted pain and humiliation until the victim pisses themselves.

Although from the looks of him that might be part of his sexual repertoire.

Torture is 'a standard part of Counter Insurgency' he says. He fails to point out that it's an unsuccessful 'standard part of Counter Insurgency'. I can't think of a single case of where torture was used in a successful counter insurgency.

At least the silly bastard was honest about the reasons the U.S. went into Iraq.

And if we're going to torture, well, what's the point? What makes us different and better from them? Maybe we should get together and rule the world since we share so much in common.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

What pasty faced wanker!

I'm sure he's heard the bullets go wheet! passed his ears a hundred times. Eaten grass and dirt as the shells come rumbling in. Inflicted pain and humiliation until the victim pisses themselves.

Although from the looks of him that might be part of his sexual repertoire.

Torture is 'a standard part of Counter Insurgency' he says. He fails to point out that it's an unsuccessful 'standard part of Counter Insurgency'. I can't think of a single case of where torture was used in a successful counter insurgency.

At least the silly bastard was honest about the reasons the U.S. went into Iraq.

And if we're going to torture, well, what's the point? What makes us different and better from them? Maybe we should get together and rule the world since we share so much in common.

Rg, have you ever read first hand accounts of the war in the Pacific? Or seen any of the letters home from the third army after they liberated Buchenwald? Ever read anything by SOG vets from vietnam?

I don't think he is advocating it. I think he is just pointing out it's a fact of fighting a war, any war, but especially an asymetric one.

As I said, you can agree with him or not, but it's an interesting point. And I think he is closer to the truth than he is to being wrong. Just my opinion there.

-Colly

 

[rgraham666]

Yes, yes and yes, Colleen.

I've spent my adult life studying violence in all it's forms from bare handed killing to nuclear strategy.

But torture cannot accomplish anything useful.

So far as getting information goes it's a poor method because the victim will quickly tell you anything to make you stop.

Since you are looking for answers, you aren't going to stop until you get some. If the person knows nothing, they will make something up. Then you can grab more people who know nothing and torture them. And on and on in a never ending chain of pain.

More importantly, is what torture does to it's perpetrators, both the individual and the nation. It is brutal Colleen. Only by becoming brutes can people or nations torture. If they aren't when they start torturing, they will be when they finish.

I don't particularly want to live in a brutal society, Colleen. Do you?

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Yes, yes and yes, Colleen.

I've spent my adult life studying violence in all it's forms from bare handed killing to nuclear strategy.

But torture cannot accomplish anything useful.

So far as getting information goes it's a poor method because the victim will quickly tell you anything to make you stop.

Since you are looking for answers, you aren't going to stop until you get some. If the person knows nothing, they will make something up. Then you can grab more people who know nothing and torture them. And on and on in a never ending chain of pain.

More importantly, is what torture does to it's perpetrators, both the individual and the nation. It is brutal Colleen. Only by becoming brutes can people or nations torture. If they aren't when they start torturing, they will be when they finish.

I don't particularly want to live in a brutal society, Colleen. Do you?

War is a brutal endeavor Rg. I think it would be foolishly blinkered if we tried to deny that torture of the first kind he describes dosen't happen pretty regularly. I know for a fact it does.

Torture of the second kind, the institutionalized kind, that which is obviously sanctioned from above and isn't an expression of fear, anger and pain is a different story. It is this second kind, the kind that I felt was aplicable to the thread, as the opinions Mr. Gonzolazes gave, seem tailor made to allow such torture.

I was not advocating torture, or even advocating his particular take on it. I posted the article because the CIA handbook mandated torture of the kind he describes seems to fit hand and glove with the opinions Mr. Gonzolazes rendered as white house council.

If I gave the impression I was an advocate of torture or simply accepted it as a part of war, I apologize. It just seemed pertinent to me that the kind of torture he is describing in the second part so closely fits the counsel's opinions as to seem he had that kind of thing in mind when he rendered it.

-Colly

 

[rgraham666]

Sorry Colleen. Got my dander up a bit. As a died in the wool heretic, I find torture a particularly scary action.

I know war is brutal. I remember especially a memoir by a U.S. Army captain where he had German prisoners shot. They were snipers who had stayed behind and done a lot of damage before they gave themselves up. I've often wondered what I would have done in his place.

Anyhow, as I said, so far as I know torture has never been a successful part of an anti-insurgency campaign. All it really does is polarize the people you are trying to help.

And I still thank that war nerd guy is a pasty faced wanker.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Sorry Colleen. Got my dander up a bit. As a died in the wool heretic, I find torture a particularly scary action.

I know war is brutal. I remember especially a memoir by a U.S. Army captain where he had German prisoners shot. They were snipers who had stayed behind and done a lot of damage before they gave themselves up. I've often wondered what I would have done in his place.

Anyhow, as I said, so far as I know torture has never been a successful part of an anti-insurgency campaign. All it really does is polarize the people you are trying to help.

And I still thank that war nerd guy is a pasty faced wanker.

I rather enjoy him. I have yet to determine if he is being satirical or not. His calls to the right wing nut jobs are constantly interspavced with sniping at U.S. policy and policy makers. In one he goes off on how Bush is a chickenshit, was a chickenshit for his own war and is a chickenshit now. Hard to tell if he is out landovering landover or is serious.

 

[cantdog]

some fun with torture

 

[cantdog]

And we're paying

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

My first instinct, when given something which affects me in any important way, is that I want to check the facts and the reporter handling those facts.

Since there are no real facts here, only opinion and interpretation, I checked back for previous stories. When the Washington Post publishes a story, you can go by the record (for good and bad) of the Washington Post. When an independent journalist, like Gwynne Dyer publishes an article, you can judge by at least five years of on-line stories on his website.

So I looked for Gary Brecher previous work. This article was published by the Exile a “Moscow-based alternative newspaper. He has sixty-one articles archived on-line under the title War Nerd. In fact, you can email him at war_nerd@exile.ru.

Here is a (linked) excerpt from the first article from that archive, entitled: Meet The War Nerd from April 21, 2002.

I'm a war nerd. A backseat sergeant. I know what I am. All I have to do is look down at the keyboard and there's my hairy white gut slopping over it, and there's crumbs between the keys from the fake homemade soft'n'chewy big cookies in the vending machine downstairs. I mean they made me pay for the last keyboard because I spilled Diet Coke all over it. Diet Coke, the most fattening drink in the world. Every web pig in the world is swimming in it, farting off the side of the swivel chair, aroma-free carbonation farts, or at least you hope they are.

So I'm unhealthy. No shit, Sigmund. I live in Fresno which is a death sentence already, and I do about fifteen hours a day at this desk. 6 or 7 hours entering civilian numbers for the paycheck and the rest surfing the war news. I like war. So do you or you wouldn't still be reading. So shut up or leave.

Anyway, war-wise it's been a pretty good year. Let's start with the WTC. Technically that wasn't an act of war, and also it happened last year, but you have to mention it because it was just so beautiful. Come on, be honest, it was beautiful.

It was like a two-course dessert. First there was the towers falling down in slo-mo, over and over. Which was really, really beautiful. Don't tell me you didn't watch them fall about a million times in a row. That was the first time an office building ever got beautiful in the history of the world.

And secondly it was like permission to work out on whoever did it. Total permission. Total complete permission to do anything you want to them, like a movie that starts with the hero getting his farm burnt down or somebody killing his family. You just lean back and relax with a little grin and inhale those Milk Duds, because now comes the good part, 90 straight minutes of revenge.

The best war is when you can hate both sides, and that's how it was with the WTC. I cheered those jets.

Gary Brecher may be a bit of shit-disturber, but I agree with rgraham666’s characterization of him as a “pasty faced wanker.”

As my father might have said — “Right on!”

There is no justification for torture.

 

[BlackShanglan]

It does rather make him sound like someone who just gets vicarious thrills from suffering and death. And, as Oscar points out, that is exceedingly unlovely, above all other things.

One implication element of the Bush policy that deeply disturbs me is the fact that they seem to have missed some of the point about the conventions on torture. These, like other conventions of war, are not primarily based on the idea that no one will ever make you angry or bitter enough to want to do them. They are based on theory that none of us want to see *our* troops subjected to it, and the only way to achieve that goal is to for everyone to agree not to do it. They are fools if they think that every new policy they sign into place won't be turned on our own troops, and I wish that they would think about that implication even if they are blind (ironically so, for people who claim to be Christian devotees) to the moral implications of torture.

 

[SeaCat]

One implication element of the Bush policy that deeply disturbs me is the fact that they seem to have missed some of the point about the conventions on torture. These, like other conventions of war, are not primarily based on the idea that no one will ever make you angry or bitter enough to want to do them. They are based on theory that none of us want to see *our* troops subjected to it, and the only way to achieve that goal is to for everyone to agree not to do it.

Black,

This reminds me of a comment I heard about being made during W.W.I
It seems a French Sergeant came across some young American troops sharpening their bayonetes, then notching or serrating the backs of them. (Makes a much nastier wound.) He commented they should throw away those knives and replace them with knives which were not notched because "If the Boch catch you with one of those they will use it on you."

Cat

 

[cantdog]

Well yes, Black, of course. That's the whole point of the Conventions. Lose them, and you expose your own to torture.

But we want to hurt people. So we shortsightedly sidestep the conventions because our enemy isn't a state. This is "supporting the troops."

So, evidently, is cutting their combat pay, reducing their family's living allowance, and so on. Bush "supports the troops" all the time. His stealing their money is bad, but pulling out of the Conventions is a profoundly anti-military act. Sometimes the dems manage to stop him, as in the one he proposed at 3 am, on March 21st, 2003, just four hours into the second Gulf War.

House Republicans voted to cut fourteen billion dollars from wounded veterans' benefits to pay for the tax cuts for the rich.

Democrats stopped them.

cantdog

 

[Boxlicker101]

It does rather make him sound like someone who just gets vicarious thrills from suffering and death. And, as Oscar points out, that is exceedingly unlovely, above all other things.

One implication element of the Bush policy that deeply disturbs me is the fact that they seem to have missed some of the point about the conventions on torture. These, like other conventions of war, are not primarily based on the idea that no one will ever make you angry or bitter enough to want to do them. They are based on theory that none of us want to see *our* troops subjected to it, and the only way to achieve that goal is to for everyone to agree not to do it. They are fools if they think that every new policy they sign into place won't be turned on our own troops, and I wish that they would think about that implication even if they are blind (ironically so, for people who claim to be Christian devotees) to the moral implications of torture.

I don't think they've missed that at all. The American forces have seen how busy Saddam's torturers were and they know how active the Taliban torturers were. Ordinary Iraqi soldiers who were captured were pobably treated humanely, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions but the current enemy, usually referred to as "insurgents" are not genuine soldiers. Some of them might be Iraqi partisans but many of them had never been in Iraq until the last year. Whatever they are, they torture and murder those they capture. In other words, the constraints that you have described mean nothing in this case because Al Qaeda will torture those they capture regardless of how Americans treat their prisoners. Whatever American forces might have done, it is nothing compared to what the Al Qaeda has done to prisoners, many of whom are not combatants. That doesn't make it right but I think we should it in perspective.

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

If you get your lawyers to find a loophole to allow you to torture your enemy’s soldiers, your enemies will get their lawyers to find a loophole to allow them to torture your soldiers.

But when did we decide that we should resort to measures that we have always condemned, for expedience (even if they DID work) or because we found a loophole?

With all the morality going around, have we no ethics?

 

[OldScotlandYard]

pervs, you are all nicked!

 

[BlackShanglan]

pervs, you are all nicked!

Oh, darlin'. Say it again.

 

[Boxlicker101]

pervs, you are all nicked!

Hey, Scotty, is that the only line you know?

 

[BlackShanglan]

Hey, Scotty, is that the only line you know?

BUt damnit ... it's a good line. Come and get me, peeler.

 

[sweetnpetite]

What's 'nicked' mean?

 

[BlackShanglan]

What's 'nicked' mean?

"Caught" or "arrested."