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Guantanamo operated illegally, in what sense?

Guantanamo was not used as an extra-judicial imprisonment/torture facility until George W. Bush.

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"The parallel between the Guantánamo HIV Camp and the current situation is that the United States wanted to have people in a place where they would not have any constitutional rights," says attorney Michael Ratner, who represented the Haitians in 1993 and represents several of the camp's current residents.


http://www.thenation.com/article/legacy-guantánamo

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It's sad that it's a waste of time.

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You're right. Someone should just arrest them already. Seems crazy that a president gets impeached for lying about having an affair and ones that break international law seem to go scott free.

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As far as we know he stopped it. We are still doing renditions, which is essentially outsourcing of torture. If you grab a guy take him off American soil and arrange for someone else to torture him its still the same thing.

Obama is proving that he just echoes what George bush is doing in the war.

He didn't even keep his word on getting the troops out. It doesn't look like they are gettign out anytime soon.

It looks to me like the same old s**t coming out of a different assh**e to me.

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Ummm, yeah, that's politics, I find it silly when people are surprised by all of this.

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If Obama kept his word on Afghanistan the conflict would be over by now. He promised to pull out the troops by last month.....they are still there

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We just went back to the old rendition flight torture method - the only thing that changed are the people doing the torturing.

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Bagram.

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@ultimis

If you don't think waterboarding is torture, you've never been waterboarded. Trust me, it's f**king torture pure and simple.

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The problem is that people don't understand what waterboarding is. They seem to think it's splashing water on someone. They don't understand what happens.

You're held upside down (inclined so that your feet are above your head, not necessarily straight up and down). You have a cloth bag over your head for extra fear. You have water poured over your nose and mouth. Water goes up your nose and quickly hits your brain. As soon as that happens, you have a panic attack that you can't stop. It doesn't take more than a couple of seconds for this to start happening. But you can't do anything about it.

Torture doesn't have to include broken bones, people. Is the "Chinese water torture" torture?

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There was a study done on the media's representation of waterboarding. It compares the representations before the US government admitted it waterboards and afterwards. The results are pretty predictable, but definitely interesting.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/30/media

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I've read a whole book on U.S. waterboarding and similar interogation techniques. And the whole "would you want it done to you" doesn't fly as there are many things I wouldn't want done to me that also don't fall under torture.

Chinese water torture, or Japenese water boarding, or water boarding performed in North Vietnam or by the spanish inquisition are vastly different in how they perform it (each one is different, and you can look them up for yourself).

@vbullinger

What classifies torture is a important determination. If high anxiety or feeling uncomfortable falls under "torture" than putting someone in prison would be torture. I sure the hell wouldn't want to sit in a jail cell.

Other water boarding performed actually drowns the victim. U.S. waterboarding creates the sensation of drowning which is a high for anxiety. The procedure is performed in 10-15 second increments. A medical expert is on hand to make sure no lasting harm is done. Every person performing the interrogation had to have experienced water boarding first hand (similar to cops having to experience tear(spelling) gas in the academy so they know exactly what the sensation is.

Waterboarding was the highest form of interrogation in the U.S. arsenal and was only reserved for suspects that we knew 100% had information on up and coming attacks, and coincidentlly were already responsible for the deaths of many Americans (such as KSM). All special forces during that time under went waterboarding. And later (2009?) a journalist volunteered to under go the procedure. He wimped out after 3-4 seconds. But feeling ashamed that he couldn't handled it longer, he volunteered to go again (trust me, torture you don't volunteer to go a second time, or the first). He lastest longer the second time but still slapped out before 10 seconds.

Please read up on the other forms of water boarding, where they would literally drown the person and bring him back to life. Or the Japanese would pump water into the stomache and jump on the persons stomache to make them puke it back up (they looked like frogs as their stomaches were swollen). Or they would force down a bunch of dry rice, than use water to make the rice expand damaging their internal intestines. These techniques in no way match what the U.S. performed. The sensation of drowing to actually drowning is much different.

"Christopher Hitchens, a writer for Vanity Fair, voluntarily subjected himself to a filmed demonstration of waterboarding in 2008. The video shows Hitchens being led into a room that has a horizontal board waiting for him; he is bound and has a black mask over his face, blindfolding him. A group of men who are highly trained in this tactic, and who also demanded anonymity, carry out the torture. Hitchens is strapped to the board at the chest and feet, face up, and is unable to move. Metal objects are placed in each of his hands, meant to be dropped if he experiences "unbearable stress." Next, the torturers place a towel over Hitchens' face, and proceed to pour water on the towel. Within seconds, Hitchens throws the metal objects to the floor, and the torturers pull the mask from his face, allowing him to breathe." -wiki

I love the bias of that piece. But the water is not "poured" up the nose. Water accumlates on the towel placed over the persons nose, this upside down postion and the water accumlating over the nose creates a sensations of drowning for the person. The person obviously elevates into a high anxiety state during the procedure.

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"What classifies torture is a important determination. If high anxiety or feeling uncomfortable falls under "torture" than putting someone in prison would be torture. I sure the hell wouldn't want to sit in a jail cell."

You keep telling people to read things yet you haven't even read the dictionary:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/torture

"1 a : anguish of body or mind : agony b : something that causes agony or pain"

Sentencing somebody to a cage can certainly be considered torture, the question is whether or not that individual deserves to be tortured in the name of disincentivizing crime. Torture, as a method of information extraction, is completely ignorant of reality.

Those that will spill the beans will do so long before the actually torturing begins and those that will not have nothing to lose.

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@LinuxPerson

There is no agony nor pain. So your definition fails. If you're going with the "anguish of body or mind" than every day life is torture. You would have to be completely absurd to make the statement of high pressure = torture. Any time a person is put in prison and they have to live with the fact that they won't be free for decades; that is torture. Any time a person knows they're going to their death via death penalty, that would be torture. Any time you're forced to do public speaking and you're not comfortable with this; = torture. This would be the most loose definition of torture, and you would be ludicrous to stand by such a definition.

Water-boarding wasn't a method used to directly get information. It was used to break the person down. After long periods of time of being water-boarded you are more willing to cooperate for obvious reasons. High states of anxiety for long periods of time can be straining and exhausting. Eventually they will come around to cooperate. It's not like they put them upside and pour water on the towel and state "GIVE US THE INFORMATION NOW". In every single case the information retrieved with co-related with other intelligence. Read the book "Courting Disaster", which spells out a lot of the intelligence we gathered using harsh interrogation techniques.

"Those that will spill the beans will do so long before the actual torturing begins and those that will not have nothing to lose except their honor. Individuals in the later category aren't going to provide anything but false information or nothing at all."

Except this was completely proven false with KSM. They tried every type of method to get information out of him (if you didn't know he was involved in 9/11 and had a second attack planned for Los Angeles). When they finally got him to cooperate after water boarding they were able to arrest over a dozen terrorists, some of which were already in the process of infiltrating the U.S.

Most of those capture, 90%+, didn't need interrogation due to the innate fear of the CIA black cells they were taken too. They did spill the beans right away. But when you have a mastermind like KSM who was well trained in resisting interrogation, and has key information about up and coming attacks, intensive interrogation is required.

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