Torture memos

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#World_War_II




Isn't she so cute! being all smug and pretending to know stuff!

Why are you being such an ass? I am entitled to my opinion, which by the way, is the same as millions of other Americans. I have learned about this stuff over the past 8 years. I am not an expert, and I don't believe I have ever suggested otherwise.

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by lookout123

We once condemned same sex partnerships too. Things change.

yes, but we usually change for the better, not the other way around. How can we hold ourselves up as the moral beacons we claim to be if we engage in torture?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by sugarpop

I said: King Abdullah of Jordan said yesterday that they had actually been able to turn some members of al Qaeda and got them to work FOR them. They damn sure didn't get them to do that by torturing them.

You have absolutely no evidence to support that claim. Absolutely nothing.

[TGRR]

If you support torture, you're scum.

It really is that simple.

[tw]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

You have absolutely no evidence to support that claim. Absolutely nothing.

But that is always sufficient proof to extremists. It proved global warming does not exist. It proved that "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter". It proved that stem cell research only kills people. It proved we did not have secret prisons. It proved we were not torturing. Then it proved we were torturing because only torture could extract intelligence. It also proved that Saddam and bin Laden conspired to create 11 September. It even proved that Saddam had WMDs. Why do you always forget that last sentence?

Which standard are we using? One routinely found in Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and Fox News reality? One that also justifies lying? Or one that is exists in science, logic, and history?

Why the double standard? Oh. One standard for proof routinely used lies - ie a court case in Dover PA or Terry Schiavo incident.

Reality, the only way to 'turn' someone means no torture. But then six years of torturing John McCain proves that torture works? They even tortured one 'terrorist' 183 times in one month and still could not get the *truth*? Reality: only when 24 (a TV show) becomes proof that torture works. And yes, the tone is fully appropriate because I am using the attitude used by those who advocate torture.

Those who first need facts before knowing have repeatedly defined torture as useless - including the FBI. Those with a long history of knowing only because that is the extremist political agenda are also advocating torture. Coincidence? So we should believe their denials? In the real world, one believes how Jordan and Indonesia turned terrorist - not how wacko extremist Americans say it must have happened.

That is the nature of extremism. First one knows. Later one learns why they should know. How curious. Exact same logic was used to keep torturing someone 183 times in one month until he said what he *knows*.

Maybe Jordan did not really turn those extremists. Does not matter. We know only extremists advocate torture. An only because they are told to believe it using emotion and even a TV show.

Let’s see. Hundreds of facts all show how torture does nothing productive. And yet the same extremists deny it without any proof and with what extremists also routinely do - lie. Simple benchmark. Some are more centrists. Others only believe what they are told to believe. Which ones did Hitler need to come to power? Not an insult. A damning question - also called a lesson from history.

[classicman]

Originally Posted by tw

Which ones did Hitler need to come to power? Not an insult. A damning question - also called a lesson from history.

Which ones did he already have? The conservatives, liberals or socialists?

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by lookout123

We once condemned same sex partnerships too. Things change.

I can't fucking believe you just drew that comparison.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by classicman

Which ones did he already have? The conservatives, liberals or socialists?

The conservatives. They make the best nationalists, and he was busy scrapping with the communists at the time.

[Undertoad]

Sug, post your opinion, but if you post it with that smarmy "Please don't tell me you didn't already know this", make sure you get it exactly right, or we have the right and the responsibility to pwn your ass.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

I doubt la Pop will learn that until she's had her lily-pale ass pwnd a couple times. Her thinking is yet unsophisticated -- and very clone-y. Won't be pleasant, but it may mature her, and her understanding.

Meanwhile, exerpted:

Yet none of these interrogations were the result of a “rogue” CIA or the mad whims of a “torture presidency.” The relevant Democratic congressional leadership for intelligence — including current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, and former Sen. Bob Graham — were briefed on CIA operations more than once. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” Porter Goss, who chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 1997 to 2004 before becoming CIA director, told the Washington Post. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

As for the slippery-slope caterwauling, the opposite is true. The slope toward more torture and abuse has gone up, not down, and it is today more difficult to climb than ever. According to existing law and Justice Department rulings, the practice has been proscribed for several years now — except, that is, for the thousands of U.S. servicemen who’ve been subjected to it by the U.S. military as part of their training. [Emph. mine]

The current debate over legislation to ban waterboarding in all circumstances stinks of political opportunism. Democrats want to claim that Republicans are “pro-torture” if they vote against the legislation. Others are hoping to advance criminal prosecutions of CIA operatives who used the techniques sparingly and with approval from both the White House and Congress, and from both parties.

From here.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by tw

But that is always sufficient proof to extremists. It proved global warming does not exist.

Hey, tw, has or has not the Arctic ice cap largely expanded (like by about a fifth), not shrunk, in the past two years? That some are saying that somehow this is evidence that global warming marches on tells me the global climate models still have systemic limitations. I'm not putting much faith in these doomsday extrapolations, because I have experience with them. And those various doomsdays were supposed to be ten years ago. Or so.

Originally Posted by tw

It proved that "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter".

To whom? Certainly not to me, and tw thinks I'm the kind of wacko extremist who'd accept it. I can't name anyone of my acquaintance who did.

Originally Posted by tw

It also proved that Saddam and bin Laden conspired to create 11 September. It even proved that Saddam had WMDs.

Tw believes somebody else, somewhere in America, must believe that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. It's a stupid belief the Left has. He is secure in this belief because he's never tested it. Again, I can't name a single American who does think Saddam did it, which would seem to rather test the idea. What a silly idea tw has. And he can't let go of the silly. Well is the Left served.

WMD's? Yeah, it transpires that the assessment that Iraq had a viable WMD capability was an intelligence mistake -- one shared globally among every single intelligence service that concerned itself with Iraqi military strengths. It simply tells us that Iraq had everyone fooled. I think it was mainly for CYA in midlevel Iraqi officialdom. If your dictator tells you to create WMD, you don't tell him you're failing, or you really can't, unless you like getting executed in imaginative ways. So you get really determined about your CYA just to keep breathing. It also transpired that while Saddam didn't have viable WMD up and running, it was not for want of trying, nor for want of burying key apparatus where they hoped arms inspectors wouldn't look, like scientists' backyards. If ever Ba'ath Iraq got the chance, they'd hare right on after their own WMD.

So now, there's no Ba'athist Party left in Iraq.

[classicman]

From the NRO link above

Keeping waterboarding as an interrogation technique is not the slippery slope some say it is.

One was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “the principle architect of the 9/11 attacks” according to the 9/11 Report, and the head of al-Qaeda’s “military committee.” Linked to numerous terror plots, he is believed to have financed the first World Trade Center bombing, helped set up the courier system that resulted in the infamous Bali bombing, and cut off Danny Pearl’s head.

A second was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the head of al-Qaeda operations in the Persian Gulf. He allegedly played a role in the 2000 millennium terror plots and was the mastermind behind the USS Cole attack that killed 17 Americans.

The third was Abu Zubaydah, said to be al-Qaeda’s chief logistics operative and Osama bin Laden’s top man after Ayman al Zawahri. It is believed that Zubaydah essentially ran al-Qaeda’s terror camps and recruitment operations. After he was waterboarded, Zubaydah reportedly offered intelligence officers a treasure trove of critical information. He was waterboarded just six months after the 9/11 attacks and while the anthrax scare was still ongoing.

John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who witnessed the interrogation, told ABC’s Brian Ross: “The threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

He divulged, according to Kiriakou, “al-Qaeda’s leadership structure” and identified high-level terrorists the CIA didn’t know much, if anything, about. It’s been suggested that Zubaydah and al-Nashiri’s confessions in turn led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

[TheMercenary]

There you have it. Now it comes down to what you want to believe.

[Undertoad]

The NRO item is old and sometimes wrong based on what's come out since; for example, Mr Goldberg says the detainees were WB'd for a total of less than five minutes, which doesn't concur at all with the numbers listed in the torture memos.

[classicman]

I saw that too. I wasn't sure whether this was correct or the memo's, so I let it be.