What is Digg?96 Comments
- inactive, on 11/15/2007, -2/+35The Army may not be waterboarding, but that's why we rendition suspects to countries where the CIA can torture in any way they want legally! Now if the CIA says that they don't waterboard, then we might be getting somewhere. But really, there are hundreds of torture techniques & this is just one of them. But besides not caring about Federal & international laws, or human rights, what is crazy is that they ignore the fact that if you torture people they will tell you anything to get you to stop, aka torture doesn't work as an interrogation technique, its highly unreliable. Its been proven for over half a century by plenty of government agencies from many countries. Lastly, by torturing suspects, this means that when our military is captured its ok for them to be tortured too. By approving of torturing them, means approving of torturing us. And if you're suspected of knowing something, then you could be next. And if they're wrong they just have to say "hey, we thought you knew something" & you have no rights & no legal recourse. They've even tortured people for years, & many even to death.
- DannyAndNina, on 11/14/2007, -3/+28Of course it isn't torture: President Bush says we don't torture, and we know we've used waterboarding, ergo waterboarding is not torture!
If only I could use this kind of circular logic in my everyday life... - dudefather, on 11/14/2007, -0/+16of course the elite are freaking out, they are facing an unstoppable army of exclamation marks
- DreKor, on 11/14/2007, -0/+1111!!!!!1!OMGLOLWTF
Revolution or not, punctuation is important. - stevenb, on 11/14/2007, -1/+10We cannot defeat our enemies... when we become them.
- theNazz, on 11/14/2007, -4/+12The CIA is used to do all of the illegal things that the US military or private contractors are not allowed to do... paid for with Afghanistan Heroin and Colombian Cocaine to keep it all off the books.
The perfect loophole for all of the good little fascists. - robberry, on 11/15/2007, -0/+7Oddly enough, that approached worked well for WW II interrogators, as I've pointed out multiple times. WW II interrogators would befriend prisoners, bring them steak dinners, play games with them, stuff that seems like "coddling" even to a liberal like me. And yet, these techniques worked-- they saved Allied lives, and they got convictions for war criminals. And they didn't just work on the rank-and-file German and Japanese soldiers-- even high-ranking officers succumbed to such techniques. Now, I'm not saying we need to be quite so nice as that. But I *am* saying that torture isn't necessary-- we already have humane ways of extracting information, and they've been proven to work.
Besides, you're assuming that torture is actually a reliable means of extracting information. It isn't. A torture victim will say anything to stop the torture. He might tell the truth, but he might also lie. Or he might do both. He might even tell the torturers what he *thinks* is the truth, but is actually a red herring planted in him by his superiors to mislead anybody who interrogates him. Even the torture-lovers concede that information extracted via torture has to be double-checked, so it's not like torture saves us any time or effort anyway. At best, it simply reaffirms what we already know. At worst, it results in false information being given to our troops and our decision makers, which can result in dead American troops. (This, by the way, is why the "ticking time bomb" scenario doesn't actually torture. As I've explained, information extracted under torture must be investigated and verified, so the use of torture will actually slow things down-- precisely what you *don't* want in a ticking time-bomb scenario.)
And *that's* assuming that the torture victim is actually a terrorist. But many (most?) of the prisoners in Gitmo and black sites were neither capture in combat, caught in the act, or tried and convicted. They are there because somebody reported seeing them acting suspiciously, which may include things like standing in a place shortly before or after a bomb went off there, or chatting with a person who was later arrested for terrorism (and who may also be innocent!). Some are arrested as the result of anonymous tips, which may have been placed by reliable informants, but may also have been placed by vengeful neighbors, or by people seeking reward money, or even by real terrorists trying to divert suspicion from themselves.
It goes without saying that torturing an innocent person is a very bad thing. Ignoring the considerable evil inherent in torturing innocents, there's the problem that the innocent torture victim is going to provide whatever information he thinks will sound plausible to his torturers; this information will get passed on to the troops and will eventually interfere with their mission-- it might even result in the death of one or more troops. Furthermore, the innocent victim may also name his "collaborators", who will probably also be innocent, in order to get the torture to stop. This will result in more innocent people being rounded up and tortured, thereby compounding the moral and practical problems.
The bottom line is that when it comes to torture, there is no conflict between virtue and pragmatism. *Both* say that torture is wrong. Not only are you defending a practice that is evil, you are defending a practice that doesn't even work. - robberry, on 11/14/2007, -1/+8"A little water on the head doesn't compare really to slicing off someone's head, taping it, and putting it out on the internets."
And slipping a roofie into a grown woman's drink and then having sex with her while she's unconscious doesn't really compare to molesting an awake and terrified five-year old and then stabbing her repeatedly. But both acts are still rape, and both acts are still evil. You cannot excuse your own immorality simply by saying, "Hey, at least I'm not as bad as those guys!" - lhbaker, on 11/14/2007, -1/+8I don't get your point. Is the story false?
- inactive, on 11/14/2007, -1/+8And to the idiots who are taking it as a literal "attack the government/country", I'm referring to a simple refusal of orders.
- LBobRife, on 11/15/2007, -1/+8How valuable is that information? Valuable enough to ruin country A's reputation and allow other countries to torture prisoners coming from country A, under the assumption that their citizens would get no better treatment? Is "information" (dubious in nature as it is) really that important?
- tHePeOPle, on 11/14/2007, -0/+7What exactly about the story was false?
- xtmno3, on 11/14/2007, -1/+8How can we forget what happened? It has been shoved down the throats of the general population of the US nonstop since then. It has been used a catch-all scapegoat since then. I would say it isn't that we have forgotten, but that people no longer feel as though the reaction matches the action.
- inactive, on 11/14/2007, -5/+11Haha, there isn't one single person in the military with balls to do the right thing (turn on this government).
Everyone is quick to give praise and support to troops, but hey, I don't see them addressing the threat to the people coming from Washington. - LBobRife, on 11/14/2007, -0/+6Sometimes the moral high ground is the way to go. I'm wouldn't torture anybody to prevent deaths from any other sources if it were theoretically possible (i.e. disease, accidents, etc), even though plenty more people die from those. I don't agree with torturing to get quasi-information that may or may not prevent some deaths at some point in the future.
- omega6, on 11/15/2007, -0/+5Actually, in WW2 interrogators were known to just play a game of chess and talk to the captives to extract information. A well trained interrogator would be able to pull info by just asking the appropriate questions and treating his captive with respect. The more comfortable someone is the more apt they would be to just give info, especially if they're more comfortable in prison than they were under their leader.
May not work all the time but I'm sure a good percentage, there's always the massively brainwashed people which you just have to maul to death with hungry Llamas. - fearlessfx, on 11/14/2007, -0/+5nice, you should attempt to break 1 million diggs, i hear you get this sweet congratulatory message when you do.
- crweaks23, on 11/14/2007, -0/+5I'm with Lionhart. Please tell me you were kidding. It will help me sleep at night.
- Lionhart, on 11/14/2007, -0/+5...I don't know whether you're being serious or not :(
- DreKor, on 11/14/2007, -0/+5Here's the deal:
If you want to have your ideas taken seriously, you need to express them in a serious manner. You could make all kinds of very valid and important points, but people won't listen to you if you communicate like a 12 year-old who had too much caffeine. - opiniastrous, on 11/14/2007, -1/+5Such decisions are extremely difficult for the military. Whilst it is granted a degree of subordinate sovereignty by society as the profession of arms, ultimately it is responsible to the civilian government. You said you meant "a simple refusal of orders" as opposed to an attack on the government, but a military cannot simply refuse to do something, as that is the point at which a military begins to overthrow the self-imposed bonds on its own power and impede itself on domestic politics. Regardless of what the pro-gun ownership crowd was claiming earlier this week on Digg, the military is not kept in line by private gun ownership. It keeps itself in line according to democratic principles that a liberal officer corps works to ensure is maintained throughout the entire armed forces. When military commanders are given a task that they may see as wrong (in principle or procedure) they tend to work to fix those problems. After all, military culture is very strongly based around accomplishing the mission. That is why senior commanders faced a dilemma during Vietnam - should they have sacrificed their careers and lose any control they had over the war's conduct, or stay and attempt to influence it as best they could? Typically, unless the order given to them is nothing short of blatantly wrong (e.g. a massacre), military officers will attempt to do the best with the situation they have, and complaining is not a big thing in the military. For these reasons they do not refuse their orders in Iraq.
Of course, you also ignore the fact that military personnel have a far different experience of the war to you. Your insight is nothing compared to theirs, and they may well disagree on the ethics of the war (or at least the ethics of their current mission, as opposed to the US government's initial justification). You do not see when they save a life, or cut the number of IEDs from a peak of several hundred a week to 7 per week in a particular area (which is a figure I heard last night). Many commentators (even anti-war commentators) are conceding that recent progress in Iraq has been substantial. Again, this is due in part to the military's 'mission command' culture, in which a task that needs doing is done, and whinging and complaining is unacceptable.
So there you go, you're wrong. - 10001110101, on 11/14/2007, -3/+7But.. But.. But... Jack Bauer tortures people all the time! If Jack does it, it can't be wrong!
- MonsterChaOS, on 11/14/2007, -1/+5You know what, You suck!
~Billy Madison - robberry, on 11/14/2007, -1/+5"It would really be nice if you people would stop crying for the terrorists".
Part of the problem is that we really have no guarantee that *only* terrorists are being waterboarded. Many of the people rotting in Gitmo and elsewhere were neither captured in combat nor tried and convicted of a crime. Sometimes they end up there because they were seen chatting with somebody who later turned out to be a terrorist (or maybe was just arrested for terrorism, which isn't the same thing), or because they were standing in a certain place shortly before or after a bomb went off there, or because they were arrested after the police or military received an anonymous tip (which might be accurate, inaccurate, or a flat-out lie-- in the absence of a trial, there's no way to be certain.) Torture is evil even when used only on the clearly guilty, but it's even more evil when it's used on those who might well be innocent. - xtmno3, on 11/14/2007, -1/+5La tortuga = the turtle in Spanish, FYI.
- LBobRife, on 11/14/2007, -0/+3Well, unless when you read the headline of "Army reiterates waterboarding ban" you realize that this is just the army, and not those other agencies, which are not at all part of the army.
- wishninja, on 11/14/2007, -0/+3We already have laws against torture. How is making more laws these officials will ignore (and the justice department not going to enforce) going to do anything to stop it?
If we followed the constitution these people would have the right to petition a court to enforce the law, too bad we trashed the constitution all of this would not even have come up. I just doesn't seem to be right to try and make a law the government will simply not follow because another law already says they can ignore all of these laws. - Dweller99, on 11/14/2007, -1/+4I heard they ate babies too. As long as we stick to simply eating puppies then we are morally superior!
- JoeDiggsIt, on 11/15/2007, -0/+3Very nice response, I'm actually looking at it from a different way now.
- computergod, on 11/14/2007, -0/+3I guess this means that they no longer need to waterbord at gitmo since they have all the info they need from the POWs there. They also have a great international network of prisons run by other countries that do allow torture they they actively transfer prisoners to. So basically, yes they are still waterboarding (among other things), they just get someone else to do it for them.
- defektiv, on 11/14/2007, -0/+2ah yes.. i remember that thing. what was it called? the geneva conventions? boy don't i miss being a part of that.
- StarlessKnight, on 11/14/2007, -0/+2Mild Rape vs. Murderous Rape, Mild Torture vs. Murderous Torture. How wasn't the analogy relevant besides showing that your "well it's not THAT bad" logic is flawed?
Furthermore, "isn't that justifiable?" No. - BlacklabelSAR, on 11/14/2007, -1/+3I would prefer the literal attack. Oh and Dugg!
- Frei, on 11/14/2007, -1/+3Stop watching 24.
- defektiv, on 11/14/2007, -1/+3your post = neo-con spam. (see how counter-productive this kind of crap is?)
- demonsnake69, on 11/14/2007, -0/+2I wish someone would torture Keifer Sutherland.
- delafere, on 11/15/2007, -0/+1The science is in on torture as an interrogation technique. The tortured will tell you anything, often what you are asking to be told whether it is true or not. Also, when we break treaties and conventions, we weaken and even negate those treaties and conventions --our own soldiers and civilians lose the right not to be tortured, thus endangering our own. And torture degrades us as a people.
So, the rhetorical question you should have asked is, "IF waterboarding one person for a few days can not be in any way relied upon to save thousands of innocent lives AND it soils us as a people AND further destroys our standing in the world community AND endangers our own troops and civilians, THEN is it justifiable or is it just something satisfying to do to really bad people when we can't think of a better idea." - wishninja, on 11/14/2007, -0/+1Do you even know what spam is?
- delafere, on 11/15/2007, -0/+1Cite source. Then quibble about the definition of "combat."
- all13d, on 11/15/2007, -1/+2I don't know why you're being dugg down. You're absolutely correct.
- toxicshok, on 11/14/2007, -0/+1no one has followed the geneva convention since the day it passed.
- inactive, on 11/14/2007, -3/+4And you know this how?
- sotopheavy, on 11/14/2007, -0/+1Somebody drank powerthirst today.
- vertinox, on 11/14/2007, -1/+2Ad hominem any?
- Tuto, on 11/14/2007, -0/+19/11 was used as a scapegoat for the war in Iraq. Maybe you should try smelling those corpses? 3000 is nothing but a drop in a bucket compared to the death count in Iraq.
- freezeout, on 11/14/2007, -1/+2new criteria is much simpler: if our side does it then it's "robust interrogation", if "they" do it it's torture
- khail250, on 11/14/2007, -2/+3It is a step in the right direction from being mindless and saying yes yes yes.
- toxicshok, on 11/14/2007, -0/+1well, good luck with that.
- inactive, on 11/14/2007, -0/+1"President Bush says we don't torture, and we know we've used waterboarding, ergo waterboarding is not torture!"
Such subordination fits only under a dictator. -
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