GGniner Wrote:OUGwave Wrote:I agree that you have your own pragmatic definition. Its pragmatic because it allows you to selectively pick and choose incidence of torture to suit your view of US interests and enable you to continue in the fantasy that the US does no wrong. But if you want to talk about a council being ineffective, it is ineffective because everyone holds your view, which is "abuses are unacceptable when someone else does it, but my countries abuses are special circumstances
its pragmatic because its realistic and not suicidal like yours, which includes a moral relativism prism in which all "abuses" are "equal" on top of a naive view of power and world history. One in which ignores labeling tactics as interrogation and instead using "torture" in a broad spectrum to apply to many things, including those that basic Military training entail.
All abuses are not "equal"... but waterboarding is torture, and torture is ineffective at producing intel and morally wrong. And my point was, it is a human rights violation.
Trust me, the things that they do in the secret prisons of the countries you decried for being on the UNHCRH, don't get much worse than waterboarding. Again, this was the preferred form of torture that Pol Pot used. When Hollywood wanted to show North Korean torture in one of the recent James Bond movies, they showed waterboarding.
In yours and Dick Cheney's opinion, this is a perfectly legitimate interrogation technique. I think that says all we need to know.
And to characterize it as part of basic military training? Read the article I linked to. The Navy Seals don't even practice it anymore because it was hurting morale. Not that you would know a damned thing about basic military training. For you wars are something other people's kids fight for your ideology.
Quote:Quote:Why don't you check out the FIRST definition of torture that is listed, rather than bolding the second. Anguish of mind. Its also the definition favored by the Geneva Conventions, which we would clearly in violation of if not for Bush's legal jiujitsu in which Guantanamo is not part of the United States nor part of Cuba (somehow an international wormhole, perhaps?) and that prisoners are neither criminals with the rights appropriate therein or prisoners of war with rights entitled therein. They are somehow neither, the type of new-speak loophole that allows us to think we are doing nothing wrong here.
sigh, the Geneva conventions do not apply to state-less actors. Even if they did it would not make it gospel. I wish they were considered State Actors though, it would make prosecuting the rest of the WOT much easier assigning states to them. Until those states show their faces to the public we are forced with what we have.
And here you've lost the human rights discussion. The states that torture regime opponents have justifications for doing that too. Thats why the concept of human rights exists -- they are rights which EVERYONE is entitled to. Rights which cannot be violated. It is never acceptable to torture someone -- it demeans the torturer as well as the tortured.
This is the essence of the argument of my first post in this thread. You don't believe in human rights. You don't believe that there are some things which simply should not happen. You have no problem with torture -- you're just arguing over when its acceptable. You're not too different from the Saudis and Syrians and Egyptians in that regard -- they also argue that the people in their torture chambers are threats to the security of the state. Much like ours, they get no trial before hand to determine whether or not its the case.
And don't lecture me on the Geneva Convention. Its true that it applies to state actors in a broad sense, but there is no other set of guidelines which can apply because Bush says we're in a "war" -- if they are non-state actors, they should be prosecuted under civilian law. If not, then its an international conflict and should be handled under the geneva conventions. What you are trying to do is create a niche area where no laws apply, and nothing constrains abuse -- if you weren't going to abuse these guys, why would you need to do that?
Quote:But keep taking the words from our enemies who will lie to purposely mislead you to get you doing what you are doing here. Stalin had a term this.....
Seriously dude, get over yourself. You take a big fat dump on everything this country is supposed to stand for, make us legally no different from Libya or Saudi Arabia in how we are allowed to treat detainees, and somehow I am the useful idiot? If anyone is doing the terrorists' work for them, its you. You say they are fighting to take away our freedoms, and then you advocate for unilaterally discarding all of the rules we have to check government abuses.
Thats the real funny thing, is that you start off this thread complaining about how the UN Human Rights commission is an ineffective joke, and then you finish by essentially justifying one of the most barbaric torture practices invented. These are words you'd just as easily see from a Saudi Prince or a Pakistani military officer.
Anyone else reading this thread can already see the irony there. I'm sorry if you can't but I'd never expect you to.
Quote:Quote:Waterboarding isn't torture? No different than holding your breath under water? Would you like me to waterboard you? Would you like it if you were a soldier captured behind enemy lines and being waterboarded? Because we are now in no position to protest when other countries do THIS to our troops:
reading your post is torture enough, under my definition. That said, for crying out loud the US military training includes waterboarding for many of its branches! Especially the navy seals, is this "torture"????? Think about that for a minute.
I've seen it and of course I don't wont to go through it, but then I'm not planning on getting involved with trying to kill americans and commit acts of Jihad on our soil.
Again, the SEALS no longer practice waterboarding.
You saying that you don't want to go through it but you won't have to because your not a terrorist misses the point of human rights entirely.
You are justifying human rights abuses. Just admit it. You don't believe in
human rights. You believe in
human priviliges My first post in this thread was correct.
Quote:Quote:I would never wish waterboarding on anyone. But beyond that it is simply not an effective technique for interrogation, because there is no way of producing intel from it. The subject will tell you anything to get you to stop, including making things up -- so you have no way of evaluating the information you are getting and assigning credibility to it, which is the definition of intelligence. Typically it will give you false intel, at best it will give you ambiguous intel.
This is simply not true, its rare actually but of course doesn't conform to your un-reality based views. Just ask Khalid Sheik Mohammed, as reported at ABC by Brian Ross, water boarding helped make Khaled Sheikh Mohammed give up info that foiled a plot against the Library Tower in L.A.
So who is the real "human rights" advocate, the US forces that foiled this plot and saved lives or the absolutist on the matter that say no way to waterboarding under any circumstances? Analysis really isn't that hard......and that is just one of many real world examples of US lives being saved since you can't grasp a TV analogy.
Read the article in the American Conservative I linked to. The "ticking time bomb" scenario doesn't exist in real life. Its a figment of television imagination. This scenario has never, ever existed in any documented form.
About Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, most of what waterboarding yielded in his case is not true. You think that it foiled in attack? Al-Qaeda or any other group is not going to follow through on any attack once somebody with knowledge of that attack has been captured or arrested. It is capturing these guys that scuttles the attacks, not torturing them.
Mohammed masterminded 9/11. Now, thanks to our torturing him, we can no longer put him in a Federal Court to account for those crimes. He'll never face a civilian jury, he'll never face his victim's families. That's a travesty of justice for the people of NY.
Quote:Quote:None of these conflicts were fought over human rights -- and in most cases, such as Reagan in the cold war, and the Korean War, involved as many violations as they prevented. It doesn't mean military intervention is the best way to solve such problems. It can be an effective tool, in some cases. But outright invasion, regime change, and occupation has a poor record.
Are you capable of analysis? What did the end result produce in regards to "human rights". Does the Eastern Block or south Korea have more or less "human rights" today compared to pre-conflict? Had the USSR or North Korea won, what would be the state of "human rights" in these areas today? I mean the jury isn't even out on this.....its amazing how you just completely sidestep WW2, the ultimate example.
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The Eastern Bloc was using the same waterboarding techniques that you are justifying our use of in this thread.
That is the irony of it all.
Wars can help human rights situations, of course. I'm not a pacifist. I am just saying that we cannot and will not go start wars wherever there are human rights abuses -- and we are even in less of a position to do so now that we have announced to the world that we find waterboarding an acceptable treatment of people in captivity.
But it is not an either/or choice between fighting wars and accepting human rights abuses. Reprehensible regimes were ended in Chile and South Africa and Georgia and many other cases without firing a shot.
