What is Digg?140 Comments
- CNAIF, on 11/12/2007, -1/+48 The mere fact that there is a debate about whether it is torture or not just shows how far the US has sunk.
- dukeeeey, on 11/14/2007, -5/+45of course waterboarding is torture, that's the whole idea ! The administration just wants to legalise it, so they can get away with doing it to us.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-102520721 ...
"In 1947, the United States prosecuted a Japanese military officer, Yukio Asano, for carrying out a form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian during World War II. Yukio Asano received a sentence of 15 years of hard labor."
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding
Plus ... confessions or getting information under duress is completely pointless. I will gouge your eyes out if you don't give me information ! What are you gonna do ? You are gonna be describing mobile weapons labs .. aluminum tubes used for nukes etc :p - Paroparo, on 11/13/2007, -1/+36The word for waterboarding in many European languages is literally "water torture", so this whole debates seems pretty silly on our side of the Atlantic.
- ubergeek09, on 11/12/2007, -0/+22Of course waterboarding is torture it's a horrendous thing do to someone, it's both physical and psychological torture.
- pintomp3, on 11/12/2007, -1/+19torture is a legitimate interrogation technique in the same way that rape is a legitimate sexual technique.
- Sornos, on 11/12/2007, -0/+17Is this really complicated?
Strip away all the political bunk and look at what you are doing. Is there any doubt that it is torture? - bowens44, on 11/12/2007, -1/+16Of course it's physical torture. It's illegal and it's immoral.
- thebellmaster1x, on 11/12/2007, -0/+14Exactly the kind of attitude that I don't want in my country.
1) Prove that they're terrorists. "If they aren't contesting their arrests, of course they're terrorists!" Oh, wait, they can't anymore.
2) Terrorists or not, they're still human beings, you *****. - ATHEISTinHELL, on 11/12/2007, -0/+14When you have to circumvent the US constitution and the Geneva conventions you have lost the moral high ground. The fact that the senate approved Michael Mukasey as attorney general is horrible. The man wont say if water boarding is torture. Congress has to take them blame too they are nothing but a ***** bunch of pussies. If someone water boarded a CIA agent or one our marines or maybe the president we would not stand for it.
- DephexTwin, on 11/12/2007, -0/+13Yeah, they're all terrorists. After all, if they weren't guilty, we wouldn't be torturing 'em!
Don't forget, just as we can see our enemies as subhuman, they can see us the same way. - banmaster, on 11/12/2007, -0/+13No matter if its physical or mental, its STILL torture!
- emjaymj, on 11/11/2007, -0/+11That's the most ignorant post I've read this week. People will say ANYTHING to get out of torture. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not, they will say whatever they think their torturer wants to hear, making any information derived this way completely unreliable.
- inactive, on 11/12/2007, -0/+11The problem is that not all imprisoned are terrorists. I think you're a coward for wanting to throw due process out the window.
- offspring06, on 11/12/2007, -0/+11Waterboarding is torture.
- thebellmaster1x, on 11/12/2007, -0/+9Torture is never justified.
- pintomp3, on 11/12/2007, -0/+9or how about when we fail to prevent the next 9/11 because we were busy chasing bad intel from the use of torture? scaremongering can go both ways.
- speerross, on 11/12/2007, -1/+9The only country in the western world where people even consider doing ***** like this is the USA
- pintomp3, on 11/12/2007, -0/+8you are a ***** idiot. drowning does not equal dead, drowned equals dead. if i beat the ***** out of, you will confess to anything just to make it stop. you seem to think the people being tortured have been convicted in a court.
- speerross, on 11/12/2007, -0/+7America needs to get some sense drummed in to it. You wern't the first to experience Terrorism, you certainly had the ***** most idiotic reaction to it though.
- cecinestpasvrai, on 11/12/2007, -0/+6Yes. Does anyone remember moral high ground? Anyone? The only ways America as THE giant superpower can get away with war is to remain morally above what they're fighting. There is a reason the world doesn't disagree with what we're doing, and it has to do with the powers we choose to exercise. WE are inflicting terrorism through torture. WE are better than this.
- offspring06, on 11/12/2007, -0/+6How do you know if someone is a terrorist? Whatever happened to due process. This reminds me of the witch hunt where they threw women off of cliffs to see if they were a witch. If they died they were not a witch because a witch could fly away.
- Moxsea, on 11/12/2007, -0/+6Waterboarding is abundantly defined as torture by existing United States law, and has been successfully prosecuted as such, under existing United States law, on previous occasions.The suggestion that water torture should be banned, when it is already banned, is instructive as to how far the United States has become a lawless nation. Moreover, as this nation now overreaches by its unprovoked aggression, pages from history might well now tell the story of its fate, as history shows such rogues pay a final, terrible price. Shall we continue?
- DephexTwin, on 11/12/2007, -1/+7Isn't this "dilemma" much more obvious than we are all acknowledging? To decide if we should be able to do something like waterboarding, all we have to ask is, do we want this to be done to our soldiers? Do we want to give the green light to anyone doing this to Americans? I know I don't.
Whether or not something crosses this line into "torture" is such a subjective thing, and you can get dragged down into meaningless details trying to answer that question... and I guess that is why our government is framing the debate in this way. - chase001, on 11/13/2007, -0/+6Why are we even allowing these Nazis to try to rationalize their inhuman actions? The current Lawless Executive has betrayed everything that was America. To stop terrorists he has become one.
- rojano17, on 11/11/2007, -0/+6No, it's the only country where people debate over it being torture or not...
- emjaymj, on 11/12/2007, -0/+6All torture is ultimately a psychological experience, that's the point. Their body isn't going to give up any information, you have to make them want to. It's not pain that makes these people speak, it's the fear of enduring even more, or dying for that matter, which gets the job done.
Their explanation was a bit simplified. They state that your mind believes it's drowning and then your gag reflex kicks in. This would imply that anybody who is aware that waterboarding only produces the SENSATION of drowning and not really the danger of drowning should be immune to it, but this is not true. Like they said themselves, even CIA members could only last an average of 14 seconds. It produces a very real physiological reaction that is absolutely physical torture and is just as independent of your psyche as the knee-jerk reaction test you get at the doctor's office. - ATHEISTinHELL, on 11/12/2007, -0/+5The problem is we did not need to torture to prevent 9/11. A few of the guys who committed the 9/11 attacks were already on the terror watch list. So it was incompetence that let 9/11 happened. Not the fact we didn't torture for enough information. Maybe if someone who approved the VISAS for these guys paid attention maybe 9/11 would have not happened. On a VISA you are supposed to fill out where are going to live and where are you going to school. One of the terrorist filled in "a school in the west" and that was acceptable. Those few thing on a very long list ***** ups that let 9/11 happen.
- rhodydog, on 11/12/2007, -0/+5Do you think we should start torturing the US military personnel since they also blow up kids and women 'in a blink of an eye'. But then, these kids and women are Arabs so by definition they must be terrorists (You can't beat right-wing logic). People wondered whether 9/11 would change the country, it sure did but not in a way that I ever imagined. It's all very well fighting the terrorists but it is another to start using the methods that the Nazis used. But then when you get down to it, there really isn't much difference between the mentality of an extreme right-winger (or for that matter a left-winger) and the Nazi regime.
- emjaymj, on 11/12/2007, -0/+5Pain is just a sensation too genius.
- robberry, on 11/11/2007, -0/+5That's precisely the point, though. The US considered waterboarding to be just as heinous-- and just as much of a war crime-- as beating, kicking, and burning captives. To them, there was no difference between waterboarding on the one hand, and beating or kicking or burning on the other. Both were viewed as torture, and both were viewed as war crimes. Otherwise they wouldn't have bothered including waterboarding in the list of charges.
- JoHnxXxKIddxXx, on 11/12/2007, -0/+5did anyone else get annoyed by that high pitched sound in this video?
wtf
but water boarding is torture - cadams, on 11/12/2007, -0/+5Bravo. That is an excellent way of putting it.
- speerross, on 11/12/2007, -2/+7"Just answer it! Answer it. You will have the blood of all those people on YOUR hands. Happy?"
Your the ones with the blood of people on your hands, you caused terrorism and are taking no measures to end it. You provoked people with an imperialistic foreign policy and these people have been enabled to attack with US taxpayer money, not to mention your now continuing with the same failed strategy: Espionage, Invasion and funding for groups that fit "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". You want to end Terrorism? Stop being such ***** to the entire ***** world then. - speerross, on 11/12/2007, -0/+5There is more to the world than Terrorists and non-Terrorists. Your Terrorist is anothers Freedom Fighter, and a lot of people are gonna have to fight if they are to be free from the grasp of the USA
- rojano17, on 11/13/2007, -2/+6You represent everything the world hates about america, i shed no tears for dead u.s. troops.
- DarkDx, on 11/12/2007, -1/+5First time I see that video. That is sick
- dukeeeey, on 11/12/2007, -0/+4yeah you know something has gone really wrong when the police go around breaking peoples arms with martial arts weapons
- bitspace, on 11/12/2007, -0/+4Sadly, evidently we are not. Perhaps you are, and I am, and millions of other individuals are, but to the rest of the world the US is not better than this because it appears to them that this is officially sanctioned US policy.
- offspring06, on 11/12/2007, -0/+4The politicians that support waterboarding should try it out to see how it feels. I wonder what they would say after spitting up a bunch of water and gasping for air.
- lhbaker, on 11/12/2007, -0/+4We are a union of monstrous people.
- rhodydog, on 11/12/2007, -0/+4From your comments I suspect you *might* be a terrorist, I therefore think we should torture you just to make sure whether you are or not. Better to be safe than sorry. While we're at it, we should also go through your family one by one, it's likely that where there is one there might be more. Once we do start torturing, you will definitely confess and our fears will be shown to be true, in fact I bet everyone of your family will turn out to be terrorists since they will undoubtedly confess under torture. I think we've got a winning approach here to crime control in general.
- MasterThief117, on 11/12/2007, -0/+4How the ***** is this a debate? How does the government think this is not torture? This is complete *****. What the *****? I hope Bush and Cheney and the rest of the pieces of ***** in our government who came up with the idea of using this "as an interrogation tool" have this get done to them while being brutally raped. This is just sick. It makes me sick. What is wrong with our government? I mean seriously. Why has no one tried to stand up and fight back? All of us here say we will, that we are going to fight back, but they are just words. What can we do? We cant "vote" for people who we think will stop this, it just wont work. What can we do?
- robberry, on 11/12/2007, -0/+4This is a false dilemma. The problem with torture is that not only is it inhumane, it is also an ineffective technique for extracting useful intelligence. Torture victims often lie to get the torturer to stop. Or they confess to their crimes, but also confess to a number of other crimes that they didn't commit in order to appease the torturer. Or they confess to what they *think* is the truth, but is actually a lie told to them by their higher-ups in order to mislead us. And so forth.
Even those who advocate torture admit that they still have to double-check everything the victim says, so it's not like torture is actually saving us any time or effort. At best, torture is superfluous, doing nothing more than confirming what we already knew via other avenues of investigation. At worst, torture puts our troops in danger by diverting important intelligence resources into wild-goose chases, thereby diluting our ability to figure out where and when the enemy will strike next.
And all of that assumes that the prisoners are actually guilty. But as I've pointed out numerous times, many of the prisoners in Gitmo and elsewhere weren't captured in a firefight, nor were they convicted of a crime in a court of law. Many of those in Gitmo were sent there because they were turned in via an anonymous tip (which may or may not have been accurate-- without a trial, there's no way to tell) or because that person was seen standing or talking in a location shortly before or after a bomb went off. Since an innocent person obviously has no useful information to divulge, any torturing of an innocent person will automatically yield useless information that will further exacerbate the problems I describe above. Oh, there's also the tiny problem that torturing innocent people is wrong. (You *do* agree that torturing innocent people is wrong, don't you?)
And of course, there's the long-term consequences of torture. I'm not talking about torture's impact on the victims, I'm talking about the problems that torture creates for *us*. The torturing of prisoners (be they innocent or otherwise) angers the families of the victims, a bad idea in a culture where family honor is everything, and where grudges and blood feuds can last for centuries. This in turn makes the family members ripe recruiting material for al-Qaeda, thereby strengthening our enemy. Torture also benefits al-Qaeda in other ways, such as by providing them with useful propaganda material that cannot be refuted because it is true. Torture also damages the morale of the troops who must inflict the torture, or who assist in torturous interrogations. (Indeed, one Arabic translator, Alyssa Peterson, committed suicide after only two days of working with American torturers.) And torture damages America's ability to recruit reliable allies in times of need, which makes us more vulnerable in the long term.
There is no conflict between moral and practical concerns when it comes to torture-- *both* say that torture is wrong. So not only are you defending a practice that is evil, you are defending a practice that puts America at risk. - AnarchoGoth, on 11/12/2007, -0/+3http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/july-dec07/wate ...
SR. CPO. MALCOLM NANCE (Ret.), Former Naval Instructor: Waterboarding is a terrifying, painful and humiliating tool that leaves no physical scars and which can be repeatedly used as an intimidation tool. Waterboarding has the ability to make the subject answer any question with a truth, a half-truth, or outright lie in order to stop the procedure. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not a simulation of drowning. It is drowning.....
We should clearly differentiate between the question of effectiveness and the question of extracting reliable intelligence information which is actionable. Those are two entirely different things. I can make anyone say anything I want, given a proper team and a proper amount of time on a waterboard, approximately a minute or two minutes.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/law/july-dec07/w ... - bitspace, on 11/11/2007, -0/+3They did. It's called "The United States of America."
- carpespasm, on 11/12/2007, -0/+3Well, at least not the military. That's what armed civilian contractors are for right?
- inactive, on 11/12/2007, -0/+3"We'll see how people feel about torture on the next September 11th, when waterboarding could have got the info before it happens."
Oh yeah, THAT'LL happen, gullible TV viewer. - lhbaker, on 11/12/2007, -0/+3This is exactly why people scare me. They're against torture, unless it's use makes them feel safer.
- bitspace, on 11/12/2007, -0/+3But torture DOES NOT WORK. Can you not see this? Just apply simple basic thinking, if you're able. Even in an extremely simplified example of it:
Captor: Did you steal that money?
Captive: No, I did not.
Captor, with loaded gun to captive's head: Again, I ask, did you steal that money?
Captive: OK, I did, just don't kill me! - rhodydog, on 11/12/2007, -0/+3How about pulling finger nails off one by one but under local anesthetic, make the person watch it happen, sounds like psychological torture to me?
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