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Originally Posted by ElCapitanAmerica
 That would be my guess, but there are still a lot of grey areas allowed under that definition. For example, you could consider the threat of a long term of "solitary confinement" be a type of psychological torture. I can see others making the argument that it is not.
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| It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. |
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Originally Posted by The Prankster
Which they couldn't tell us any more about, because it was classified. Or something. This was in fact reported on the ABC news website, so it wasn't a complete confabulation. It just sounded really, really, really dubious.
Never heard anything more about this. And now it seems pretty much confirmed as bullshit, as if it needed it. |
CNSNews.com CIA Confirms: Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style Attack on Los Angeles (CNSNews.com) - The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) -- including the use of waterboarding -- caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles. Before he was waterboarded, when KSM was asked about planned attacks on the United States, he ominously told his CIA interrogators, “Soon, you will know.” According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack -- which KSM called the “Second Wave”-- planned “ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.” KSM was the mastermind of the first “hijacked-airliner” attacks on the United States, which struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Northern Virginia on Sept. 11, 2001. After KSM was captured by the United States, he was not initially cooperative with CIA interrogators. Nor was another top al Qaeda leader named Zubaydah. KSM, Zubaydah, and a third terrorist named Nashiri were the only three persons ever subjected to waterboarding by the CIA. (Additional terrorist detainees were subjected to other “enhanced techniques” that included slapping, sleep deprivation, dietary limitations, and temporary confinement to small spaces -- but not to water-boarding.) This was because the CIA imposed very tight restrictions on the use of waterboarding. “The ‘waterboard,’ which is the most intense of the CIA interrogation techniques, is subject to additional limits,” explained the May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo. “It may be used on a High Value Detainee only if the CIA has ‘credible intelligence that a terrorist attack is imminent’; ‘substantial and credible indicators that the subject has actionable intelligence that can prevent, disrupt or deny this attack’; and ‘[o]ther interrogation methods have failed to elicit this information within the perceived time limit for preventing the attack.’” The quotations in this part of the Justice memo were taken from an Aug. 2, 2004 letter that CIA Acting General Counsel John A. Rizzo sent to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Before they were subjected to “enhanced techniques” of interrogation that included waterboarding, KSM and Zubaydah were not only uncooperative but also appeared contemptuous of the will of the American people to defend themselves. “In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including KSM and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques,” says the Justice Department memo. “Both KSM and Zubaydah had ‘expressed their belief that the general US population was ‘weak,’ lacked resilience, and would be unable to ‘do what was necessary’ to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals.’ Indeed, before the CIA used enhanced techniques in its interrogation of KSM, KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, ‘Soon you will know.’” After he was subjected to the “waterboard” technique, KSM became cooperative, providing intelligence that led to the capture of key al Qaeda allies and, eventually, the closing down of an East Asian terrorist cell that had been tasked with carrying out the 9/11-style attack on Los Angeles. |
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Originally Posted by Blueharvester
We had this sort of unlikely "timebomb" scenario a couple years back in Germany:
A young man had abducted the child of wealthy parents and the police commissioner thought it to be necessary to threaten the suspect with torture if he would not give up the location of the boy. When they found the victim, the boy was already long dead and the commissioner had a trial before court for his actions. He admitted doing the wrong thing for the purpose of saving the child. He got a mild fine, no prison sentence. And that's the way you do it: If there is the highly unlikely event of a potential ticking timebomb. Just let the officers in charge of a suspect decide if they want to go OUTSIDE the system to try to get them to talk. But they must face scrutiny and legal consequences for their actions. A court (and with it the public) then can decide if their actions were justified in the heat of the action and only give them a mild sentence or fine. It has to be OUTSIDE the system, or otherwise this shit creeps into every corner of a democracy. |
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Originally Posted by ElCapitanAmerica
The arguments are, are these methods torture?
We can all agree water boarding is, but there are more methods outlined in the memos which are far from water boarding and I'm curious what people think (like exploiting phobias). |
| § 2340. Definitions As used in this chapter— (1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control; (2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from— (A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (B) 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; (C) the threat of imminent death; or (D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; |
| Then the other argument is, what do you do in the "ticking bomb" scenario. |
| What do you use to save hundreds if not thousands of lives while still adhering to your values. |
| Part of the problem is, this scenario did not seem to be the "ticking bomb" one, so that question was never really tested. |
| WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist. Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime. (snip) A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration. "There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity. "The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there." (snip) "There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued. "Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies." Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said. |
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Originally Posted by Andre Dellamorte
Joe Klein posted this: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...ley_96098.html
What I love is that it suggests that the CIA is inherently amoral, and that its amorality is a good thing. DOES NOT COMPUTE. |
| Put yourself in the shoes of the people who were asked to interrogate al- Qaeda prisoners back in 2002. One former officer told me he declined the job, not because he thought the program was wrong, but because he knew it would blow up. "We all knew the political wind would change eventually," he recalled. Other officers who didn't make that cynical but correct calculation are now "broken and bewildered," says the former operative. |
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Originally Posted by David Ignatius
But by Tuesday, Obama was deferring to the attorney general whether to prosecute "those who formulated those legal decisions," whatever that means.
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Originally Posted by Matt M
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html
More in the link. Does anybody really believe that these assholes don't belong in jail? I mean, I'm sympathetic to the notion that pursuing prosecutions runs a serious risk of derailing Obama's agenda. But from a moral standpoint, is there any question that the people who were authorizing this stuff don't deserve to be charged with war crimes? |
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Originally Posted by ElCapitanAmerica
Yeah, saw that earlier, pretty funny.
It's as if for a couple of seconds he had a moment of clarify, like the direct connection to the FOX hive mind experienced some packed loss and he became unplugged for that one moment. Funny watching the non-reaction from the other guys. |
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Originally Posted by Atomic Ross
http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennt...ng_in_02_.html
Apparently Nancy Pelosi was briefed on waterboarding way back in 2002. Huh. |
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Originally Posted by Matt M
That's not really surprising. Lots of senior members of Congress were briefed. But their options for what to do with that info were pretty limited: it was a classified briefing.
This is only "news" (read: getting pushed by Drudge) because it's another flailing attempt to push accountability for these crimes away from where it belongs. |
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Originally Posted by yt
I just have to comment on how strange it is, not really in this forum but elsewhere on the web and certainly among the right wing talkers, how extraordinary it is that so many people are willing to cheerlead for a violent, immoral, criminal and anti-American act because a handful of powerful people put them in that position. Is this the result of 24's popularity? People I encounter on the internets seem so weak-minded to me in using this leap of logic that ties ticking clock scenarios like a child abduction to the craven torture of detainees to get false confessions out of them to help shore up the case for war against Iraq. I have to step outside of the times a bit and just marvel at how this small number of people are able to pull off a reverse of 200+ years of policy and character in America. It's truly Alice in Wonderland.
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Originally Posted by Matt M
And those same people are claiming that Obama is an authoritarian fascist who will turn America into a (I am not making this up) "Banana Republic."
It's mind-boggling. And completely disheartening to see the media pretend that these views deserve to be treated as part of the rational discourse. |
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Originally Posted by ElCapitanAmerica
Yeah, saw that earlier, pretty funny.
It's as if for a couple of seconds he had a moment of clarify, like the direct connection to the FOX hive mind experienced some packed loss and he became unplugged for that one moment. Funny watching the non-reaction from the other guys. |
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Originally Posted by Schwartz
Another fun fact: Waterboarding (or the tortura del agua as they called it, but who knows what that could mean?) was neck-and-neck with the rack as the most popular interrogation method of the Spanish Inquisition.
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Originally Posted by Matt M
And those same people are claiming that Obama is an authoritarian fascist who will turn America into a (I am not making this up) "Banana Republic."
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| The Daily Beast has learned that senior Justice Department lawyers were "incensed" at the Emanuel and Gibbs statements, as one put it—not because they disagreed with Obama’s apparent opposition to an investigation and prosecution, but because the statements violated well-established rules separating political figures in the White House from decisions about active criminal cases. The statements were viewed as a frontal assault on the autonomy and independence of the criminal-justice system. "Emanuel got far ahead of the process and described it in a way that clearly suggested that political judgment was driving the entire process," one senior Justice official told me. "It was depressing and amateurish." |
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Originally Posted by ElCapitanAmerica
What is more disturbing is that it seems "torture" has a lot of support in this country even from people who don't think Obama is a secret communist and actually voted for him. Just had that argument with such a guy last week, it was very surreal.
I don't think it's the fault of 24, but I think yt is onto something here. My friend kept bringing up "ticking bomb" like scenarios, I think more than 24, maybe we've been condition by action movies to accept that as a valid scenario. BTW props to Shepard Smith ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCWN9UWtWkc |
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Originally Posted by Schwartz
Another fun fact: Waterboarding (or the tortura del agua as they called it, but who knows what that could mean?) was neck-and-neck with the rack as the most popular interrogation method of the Spanish Inquisition.
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| Then the other argument is, what do you do in the "ticking bomb" scenario. |
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Originally Posted by yt
Can I ask you something (and I mean no disrespect), I was confronted with a similar (though much less articulate) argument today by someone else on the internets. Was there a discussion somewhere taking this line of reason?
On your point, I'm not a fan of war and can't justify the brutality done by poor young men and women often solely for the gain of rich older people but the difference is that killing is killing and torture is cruel and unusual, inhumane treatment. Killing is an accepted component of the laws of war. Torture is a banned practice from George Washington onward, and into our treaties as part of the UN. |
