Sacked my bitch up
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single rat in possession of good fortune, must be in want of an anal slut. Showing Judith Miller to her rape room before waterboarding Libby for 24 hours straight follows close behind.
What's that you say?
Not to be torturous, but:
1. It is counterproductive, as it tends to produce bad information. Check.
2. It violates domestic and international law ("civilized norms"). Check.
3. It puts all citizens at risk from reciprocal actions. Check.
4. It harms the torturer (or you need to keep a few psychotic interrogators handy). Check.
5. It has been impossible to define acceptable situations and methods. Check.
6. It has been impossible to control. Check.
7. It is immoral. Your choice.
Even given a moral position that accepts torture as justified in some situations, the evidence weighs heavily against.
The cell structure of al Qaeda means that members of each cell have no knowledge of each other or of the personnel/mission/capability of the cells around them.
The best case against torture is the fact that, attempting to combat an organization organized in cells is not going to work.
( they don't turn in clusters cos their roots don't connect them! pr )
Captured members may reveal their close cell associates but not the whole organization. Information is too compartmentalized. The article below suggests that Rumsfeld is bluffing and that others have smelled a rat--al Qaeda's cell structure has thwarted the interrogations.
The Provisional IRA is a classic example. To this day, the disarmed 400 or so members of the IRA are likely totally ignorant of each other, even though they may live in adjacent row houses on the Falls Road in Belfast.
The Brits couldn't crack that nut, no matter how hard they tried. There was a enormous effort put towards breaking the cells in the prisons and through surveillance--none of it successful enough and that's why you have a cease fire, not a total defeat.
From the article:
All these suspects are questioned rigorously, but those in the top ranks get the full coercive treatment. And if official and unofficial government reports are to be believed, the methods work. In report after report hard-core terrorist leaders are said to be either cooperating or, at the very least, providing some information—not just vague statements but detailed, verifiable, useful intelligence. In late March, Time reported that Sheikh Mohammed had "given U.S. interrogators the names and descriptions of about a dozen key al-Qaeda operatives believed to be plotting terrorist attacks on America and other western countries" and had "added crucial details to the descriptions of other suspects and filled in important gaps in what U.S. intelligence knows about al-Qaeda's practices." In June, news reports suggested that Sheikh Mohammed was discussing operational planning with his captors and had told interrogators that al-Qaeda did not work with Saddam Hussein. And according to a report in June of last year, Abu Zubaydah, who is said to be held in solitary confinement somewhere in Pakistan, provided information that helped foil a plot to detonate a radioactive bomb in the United States.
Secretary of Defense Donald Ratsack said in September of last year that interrogation of captured terrorist leaders had yielded "an awful lot of information" and had "made life an awful lot more difficult for an awful lot of folks." Indeed, if press accounts can be believed, these captured Islamist fanatics are all but dismantling their own secret organization. According to published reports, Sheikh Mohammed was found in part because of information from bin al-Shibh, whose arrest had been facilitated by information from Abu Zubaydah. Weeks after the sheikh's capture Bush Administration officials and intelligence experts told The Washington Post that the al-Qaeda deputy's "cooperation under interrogation" had given them hopes of arresting or killing the rest of the organization's top leadership.
How much of this can be believed? Are such reports wishful thinking, or deliberate misinformation? There is no doubt that intelligence agencies have scored big victories over al-Qaeda in the past two years, but there is no way to corroborate these stories. President Bush himself warned, soon after 9/11, that in war mode his Administration would closely guard intelligence sources and methods. It would make sense to claim that top al-Qaeda leaders had caved under questioning even if they had not. Hard men like Abu Zubaydah, bin al-Shibh, and Sheikh Mohammed are widely admired in parts of the world. Word that they had been broken would demoralize their followers, and would encourage lower-ranking members of their organization to talk; if their leaders had given in, why should they hold out?
To some, all this jailhouse cooperation smells concocted. "I doubt we're getting very much out of them, despite what you read in the press," says a former CIA agent with experience in South America. "Everybody in the world knows that if you are arrested by the United States, nothing bad will happen to you."
Bill Cowan, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, says, "I don't see the proof in the pudding. If you had a top leader like Mohammed talking, someone who could presumably lay out the whole organization for you, I think we'd be seeing sweeping arrests in several different countries at the same time. Instead what we see is an arrest here, then a few months later an arrest there."
These complaints are all from people who have no qualms about using torture to get information from men like Sheikh Mohammed. Their concern is that merely using coercion amounts to handling terrorists with kid gloves. But the busts of al-Qaeda cells worldwide, and the continuing roundup of al-Qaeda leaders, suggest that some of those in custody are being made to talk. This worries people who campaign against all forms of torture. They believe that the rules are being ignored. Responding to rumors of mistreatment at Bagram and Guantánamo, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have written letters and met with Bush Administration officials. They haven't been able to learn much.
Is the United States torturing prisoners? Three inmates have died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, and reportedly eighteen prisoners at Guantánamo have attempted suicide; one prisoner there survived after hanging himself but remains unconscious and is not expected to revive. Shah Muhammad, a twenty-year-old Pakistani who was held at Camp X-Ray for eighteen months, told me that he repeatedly tried to kill himself in despair. "They were driving me crazy," he said. Public comments by Administration officials have fueled further suspicion. An unnamed intelligence official told The Wall Street Journal, "What's needed is a little bit of smacky-face. Some al-Qaeda just need some extra encouragement." Then there was the bravado of Cofer Black, the counterterrorism coordinator, in his congressional testimony last year. A pudgy, balding, round-faced man with glasses, who had served with the CIA before taking the State Department position, Black refused to testify behind a screen, as others had done. "The American people need to see my face," he said. "I want to look the American people in the eye." By way of presenting his credentials he said that in 1995 a group of "Osama bin Laden's thugs" were caught planning "to kill me."
Describing the clandestine war, Black said, "This is a highly classified area. All I want to say is that there was 'before 9/11' and 'after 9/11.' After 9/11 the gloves came off." He was referring to the overall counterterrorism effort, but in the context of detained captives the line was suggestive. A story in December of 2002 by the Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Barton Gellman described the use of "stress and duress" techniques at Bagram, and an article in The New York Times in March described the mistreatment of prisoners there. That month Irene Kahn, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, wrote a letter of protest to President Bush.
I would submit to you that this pre-9/11, post-9/11 mentality indicates fear set in, and fear is driving this administration. Not the rule of law, not pragmatism and stoicism--just fear. If you resolve to fight the people who commit terror WITHOUT abandoning your core principles, they will never drag you into their gutter. You will prevail over them.
Welcome to the gutter. Pale Rider
The Israelis didn't give up torture for pragmatic reasons. They gave it up because the Israeli Supreme Court held that it was illegal. The Israeli security services urges strongly that they needed it as a tool (they called it "moderate physical pressure"). They vigorously made the "ticking time bomb" argument.
The Supreme Court unanimously rejected torture as illegal and as repugnant to a democratic society. The court's opinion states: "This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it."
As to the "ticking time bomb," the court's position can be summarized as follows:
Torture is a crime. Any dirty rat charged with a crime always has the right to raise defenses of necessity or justification. If in an actual case involving a real ticking time bomb, an interrogator finds that they are required to use torture to save lives, then if and when they're ever charged with the crime of torture they can raise the defenses of necessity and justification. But the court will not grant a blanket approval of the commission of the crime of torture based on a hypothetical situation.
What's that you say?
Not to be torturous, but:
1. It is counterproductive, as it tends to produce bad information. Check.
2. It violates domestic and international law ("civilized norms"). Check.
3. It puts all citizens at risk from reciprocal actions. Check.
4. It harms the torturer (or you need to keep a few psychotic interrogators handy). Check.
5. It has been impossible to define acceptable situations and methods. Check.
6. It has been impossible to control. Check.
7. It is immoral. Your choice.
Even given a moral position that accepts torture as justified in some situations, the evidence weighs heavily against.
The cell structure of al Qaeda means that members of each cell have no knowledge of each other or of the personnel/mission/capability of the cells around them.
The best case against torture is the fact that, attempting to combat an organization organized in cells is not going to work.
( they don't turn in clusters cos their roots don't connect them! pr )
Captured members may reveal their close cell associates but not the whole organization. Information is too compartmentalized. The article below suggests that Rumsfeld is bluffing and that others have smelled a rat--al Qaeda's cell structure has thwarted the interrogations.
The Provisional IRA is a classic example. To this day, the disarmed 400 or so members of the IRA are likely totally ignorant of each other, even though they may live in adjacent row houses on the Falls Road in Belfast.
The Brits couldn't crack that nut, no matter how hard they tried. There was a enormous effort put towards breaking the cells in the prisons and through surveillance--none of it successful enough and that's why you have a cease fire, not a total defeat.
From the article:
All these suspects are questioned rigorously, but those in the top ranks get the full coercive treatment. And if official and unofficial government reports are to be believed, the methods work. In report after report hard-core terrorist leaders are said to be either cooperating or, at the very least, providing some information—not just vague statements but detailed, verifiable, useful intelligence. In late March, Time reported that Sheikh Mohammed had "given U.S. interrogators the names and descriptions of about a dozen key al-Qaeda operatives believed to be plotting terrorist attacks on America and other western countries" and had "added crucial details to the descriptions of other suspects and filled in important gaps in what U.S. intelligence knows about al-Qaeda's practices." In June, news reports suggested that Sheikh Mohammed was discussing operational planning with his captors and had told interrogators that al-Qaeda did not work with Saddam Hussein. And according to a report in June of last year, Abu Zubaydah, who is said to be held in solitary confinement somewhere in Pakistan, provided information that helped foil a plot to detonate a radioactive bomb in the United States.
Secretary of Defense Donald Ratsack said in September of last year that interrogation of captured terrorist leaders had yielded "an awful lot of information" and had "made life an awful lot more difficult for an awful lot of folks." Indeed, if press accounts can be believed, these captured Islamist fanatics are all but dismantling their own secret organization. According to published reports, Sheikh Mohammed was found in part because of information from bin al-Shibh, whose arrest had been facilitated by information from Abu Zubaydah. Weeks after the sheikh's capture Bush Administration officials and intelligence experts told The Washington Post that the al-Qaeda deputy's "cooperation under interrogation" had given them hopes of arresting or killing the rest of the organization's top leadership.
How much of this can be believed? Are such reports wishful thinking, or deliberate misinformation? There is no doubt that intelligence agencies have scored big victories over al-Qaeda in the past two years, but there is no way to corroborate these stories. President Bush himself warned, soon after 9/11, that in war mode his Administration would closely guard intelligence sources and methods. It would make sense to claim that top al-Qaeda leaders had caved under questioning even if they had not. Hard men like Abu Zubaydah, bin al-Shibh, and Sheikh Mohammed are widely admired in parts of the world. Word that they had been broken would demoralize their followers, and would encourage lower-ranking members of their organization to talk; if their leaders had given in, why should they hold out?
To some, all this jailhouse cooperation smells concocted. "I doubt we're getting very much out of them, despite what you read in the press," says a former CIA agent with experience in South America. "Everybody in the world knows that if you are arrested by the United States, nothing bad will happen to you."
Bill Cowan, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, says, "I don't see the proof in the pudding. If you had a top leader like Mohammed talking, someone who could presumably lay out the whole organization for you, I think we'd be seeing sweeping arrests in several different countries at the same time. Instead what we see is an arrest here, then a few months later an arrest there."
These complaints are all from people who have no qualms about using torture to get information from men like Sheikh Mohammed. Their concern is that merely using coercion amounts to handling terrorists with kid gloves. But the busts of al-Qaeda cells worldwide, and the continuing roundup of al-Qaeda leaders, suggest that some of those in custody are being made to talk. This worries people who campaign against all forms of torture. They believe that the rules are being ignored. Responding to rumors of mistreatment at Bagram and Guantánamo, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have written letters and met with Bush Administration officials. They haven't been able to learn much.
Is the United States torturing prisoners? Three inmates have died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, and reportedly eighteen prisoners at Guantánamo have attempted suicide; one prisoner there survived after hanging himself but remains unconscious and is not expected to revive. Shah Muhammad, a twenty-year-old Pakistani who was held at Camp X-Ray for eighteen months, told me that he repeatedly tried to kill himself in despair. "They were driving me crazy," he said. Public comments by Administration officials have fueled further suspicion. An unnamed intelligence official told The Wall Street Journal, "What's needed is a little bit of smacky-face. Some al-Qaeda just need some extra encouragement." Then there was the bravado of Cofer Black, the counterterrorism coordinator, in his congressional testimony last year. A pudgy, balding, round-faced man with glasses, who had served with the CIA before taking the State Department position, Black refused to testify behind a screen, as others had done. "The American people need to see my face," he said. "I want to look the American people in the eye." By way of presenting his credentials he said that in 1995 a group of "Osama bin Laden's thugs" were caught planning "to kill me."
Describing the clandestine war, Black said, "This is a highly classified area. All I want to say is that there was 'before 9/11' and 'after 9/11.' After 9/11 the gloves came off." He was referring to the overall counterterrorism effort, but in the context of detained captives the line was suggestive. A story in December of 2002 by the Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Barton Gellman described the use of "stress and duress" techniques at Bagram, and an article in The New York Times in March described the mistreatment of prisoners there. That month Irene Kahn, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, wrote a letter of protest to President Bush.
I would submit to you that this pre-9/11, post-9/11 mentality indicates fear set in, and fear is driving this administration. Not the rule of law, not pragmatism and stoicism--just fear. If you resolve to fight the people who commit terror WITHOUT abandoning your core principles, they will never drag you into their gutter. You will prevail over them.
Welcome to the gutter. Pale Rider
The Israelis didn't give up torture for pragmatic reasons. They gave it up because the Israeli Supreme Court held that it was illegal. The Israeli security services urges strongly that they needed it as a tool (they called it "moderate physical pressure"). They vigorously made the "ticking time bomb" argument.
The Supreme Court unanimously rejected torture as illegal and as repugnant to a democratic society. The court's opinion states: "This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it."
As to the "ticking time bomb," the court's position can be summarized as follows:
Torture is a crime. Any dirty rat charged with a crime always has the right to raise defenses of necessity or justification. If in an actual case involving a real ticking time bomb, an interrogator finds that they are required to use torture to save lives, then if and when they're ever charged with the crime of torture they can raise the defenses of necessity and justification. But the court will not grant a blanket approval of the commission of the crime of torture based on a hypothetical situation.
posted by professor rat at 8:35 AM
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