U.S. Politics: Feelings Trump Facts

[James Arryn]

3 minutes ago, LongRider said:

So, the torture of the Abu Ghraib prisoners by the Bush administration is justified because years later Obama used drones.  Plus, torture was renamed 'enhanced interrogation' so as to make it acceptable to the rubes.  That logic is thornier than a blackberry bush. 

Here's the thing; the thinking you're seeing is how America always forgives itself. America doesn't torture...the other party does. And America doesn't bomb civilians. That, too, is the other party. Rinse blood, wash, repeat. And this can go on indefinitely. So, for example, Dubya's overwhelming national support for an illegal invasion isn't an American action which suggests America needs to revisit it's ideology, it's a GOP thing...or it was the lies, except it really wasn't, and the rest of the world overwhelmingly saw them as lies at the time. Because the truth was very much there to see. If you looked. Or if you look back.

 

But people don't, because it's much easier to say it wasn't an American issue, it was a Republican issue, rinse, repeat. And because of that kind of thinking, we're going to keep seeing the same kinds of actions followed by 4-8 year self-absolutions.

 

 

[LongRider]

I saw the lies, I protested the war.  Big deal, protests and knowing that lies were told did nothing to stop the war.  Protests weren't covered by the press and Dubya even stopped pixs of coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq from being shown.  Even knowing this I have no magic wand to change the past or the future, the best I can hope for is to inform the present and future and vote for the best.  There are more people of conscious in the US than I think you think there are.

 

[Commodore]

7 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

And as far as I know, the United States military as traditionally prosecuted individuals doing water boarding, both are own soldiers and foreign soldiers. It has been traditionally considered torture.

Here is what Mitchell says in his book about waterboarding use in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training for military members (I'm transcribing from my paper copy).

Quote

As senior SERE psychologists, Bruce Jessen and I had spent several years trying to get the Nave SERE School to abandon its use of waterboarding not because it didn't work but because we thought it was too effective. One hundred percent of the warfighters exposed to it in training capitulated even if it cost them their jobs. In my view, waterboarding students did the enemy's job for them. The point of resistance training is to teach students that they can protect secrets, but my personal experience interviewing POWs and warfighters who had been waterboarded at the Nave SERE School was that after waterboarding they didn't believe they could protect secrets anymore. 

Waterboarding isn't used on soldiers not because it's torture, but because it cannot be resisted (you can't train anyone to resist it). 

Here is what Mitchell says in his book about waterboarding Abu Zubaydah

Quote

 

In that first session, Abu Zubaydah was so panicked that we didn't think he would provide reliable information on the waterboard. We weren't expecting him to. The program was not designed to extract information while EITs were being administered. It wasn't pour water, demand a confession, pour water, ask a leading question. That was not how it worked. We weren't looking for a false confession and had to avoid asking him leading questions because we did not want him making up what he thought we wanted to hear. 

The waterboard induces fear and panic. It is scary and uncomfortable, but not painful. I know because I was waterboarded in July 2002 during practice and preparations for using the waterboard as one of the EITs.

 

After Zubaydah started spilling his guts, Mitchell had to convince CIA headquarters that EITs were no longer needed on him. 

Quote

We waterboarded Abu Zubaydah with [CIA HQ officials] in the cell, unmasked and on camera. It was ugly and hard to do. After it was over, we washed Abu Zubaydah with warm water, cleaned him up, and told him we never wanted to do that again. He cried and promised to work for the ICA. Everyone, even those observing, was tearful. 

Like I said, it's an interesting read. 

[OldGimletEye]

Just now, James Arryn said:

And America doesn't bomb civilians.

I'm pretty sure, we didn't drop Flowers and Candy on Berlin, Tokyo, and Hanoi.

Not everyone here is a dumb ass.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Commodore said:

EIT is a technical term, but you can call it whatever you want

that we drone strike terrorists and kill their entire families but we can't pour water on KSM to stop future attacks is logically incoherent 

So, when you say "pour water on" do you mean like you would pour water over the head of a child in the bath... or something else?  If it's not the former perhaps saying "pour water on" is a bit too general a term to fully convey what is happening when Mr. Mitchell was "pouring water on" detainees?

[mormont]

10 minutes ago, Commodore said:

Here is what Mitchell says in his book about waterboarding use in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training for military members (I'm transcribing from my paper copy).

None of this refutes the claim that waterboarding has traditionally been considered torture. At best, it suggests that one person, the author, personally doesn't consider it torture (and even that is an inference from his statement about whether it's painful). On the flip side, the author clearly considers it highly traumatic, and that is arguably a better indicator of whether something is torture than whether it causes physical pain.

[Commodore]

37 minutes ago, LongRider said:

So, the torture of the Abu Ghraib prisoners by the Bush administration is justified because years later Obama used drones.  Plus, torture was renamed 'enhanced interrogation' so as to make it acceptable to the rubes.  That logic is thornier than a blackberry bush. 

This is a bad example, what happened at Abu Ghraib was not interrogation, it was just guards tormenting prisoners. And it was outed by the military itself when they found out (Rumsfeld even offered his resignation over it, despite having no knowledge of it). 

EITs were legally sanctioned and ordered from the very top. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 minutes ago, mormont said:

None of this refutes the claim that waterboarding has traditionally been considered torture. At best, it suggests that one person, the author, personally doesn't consider it torture (and even that is an inference from his statement about whether it's painful). On the flip side, the author clearly considers it highly traumatic, and that is arguably a better indicator of whether something is torture than whether it causes physical pain.

Yup.  Torture is not justifable.

[LongRider]

11 minutes ago, Commodore said:

This is a bad example, what happened at Abu Ghraib was not interrogation, it was just guards tormenting prisoners. And it was outed by the military itself when they found out (Rumsfeld even offered his resignation over it, despite having no knowledge of it). 

EITs were legally sanctioned and ordered from the very top. 

If was fucking torture. 

[Commodore]

9 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So, when you say "pour water on" do you mean like you would pour water over the head of a child in the bath... or something else?  If it's not the former perhaps saying "pour water on" is a bit too general a term to fully convey what is happening when Mr. Mitchell was "pouring water on" detainees?

Here is the description Mitchell provided to the CIA when they asked him for a list of techniques:

Quote

The detainee is bound to a bench with his feet elevated above his head. The detainee's head is immobilized, and an interrogator places a cloth over the detainee's mouth and nose while pouring water onto the cloth in a controlled manner. Airflow is restricted for twenty to forty seconds, and the technique produces the sensation of drowning and suffocation. 

The question of whether inducing panic is torture is an interesting one. Interestingly, Mitchell actually wanted to achieve this effect by pretending to waterboard someone on the other side of a wall to scare the prisoner (without touching a hair on his head), but the CIA lawyers said it would violate torture conventions. 

[LongRider]

3 minutes ago, Commodore said:

Here is the description Mitchell provided to the CIA when they asked him for a list of techniques:

~~~snip~~~~

Defending torture is fucking nauseating and off topic.  Just stop.

[OldGimletEye]

Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Yup.  Torture is not justifable.

You know what was extremely disturbing with regard to the Water Boarding debate? The fact, that the goobers within Trump's support actually cheered it. Got off on it.

And it wasn't like they said,"We have to do this with a heavy heart, because we have no other choice." 

But, they fuckin outright cheered it. That was just disgusting and shameful.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 minutes ago, Commodore said:

Here is the description Mitchell provided to the CIA when they asked him for a list of techniques:

The question of whether inducing panic is torture is an interesting one. Interestingly, Mitchell actually wanted to achieve this effect by pretending to waterboard someone on the other side of a wall to scare the prisoner (without touching a hair on his head), but the CIA lawyers said it would violate torture conventions. 

Is that, or is that not, the same action as rinseing a child in a bathtub?  

Why will you not call it torture?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 minute ago, OldGimletEye said:

You know what was extremely disturbing with regard to the Water Boarding debate? The fact, that the goobers within Trump's support actually cheered it. Got off on it.

And it wasn't like they said,"We have to do this with a heavy heart, because we have no other choice." 

But, they fuckin outright cheered it. That was just disgusting.

It is nauseating.  I agree.

[LongRider]

5 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

You know what was extremely disturbing with regard to the Water Boarding debate? The fact, that the goobers within Trump's support actually cheered it. Got off on it.

And it wasn't like they said,"We have to do this with a heavy heart, because we have no other choice." 

But, they fuckin outright cheered it. That was just disgusting and shameful.

Barf.

[Commodore]

8 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Is that, or is that not, the same action as rinseing a child in a bathtub?  

Why will you not call it torture?

Give it whatever semantic label you want, I'm ok with using it in these instances.

We've used it safely on our own people, and this guy planned the murder of thousands of civilians (and had plans for thousands more). It's not pleasant, but certainly worth it to save those lives. 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

36 minutes ago, Commodore said:

Give it whatever semantic label you want, I'm ok with using it in these instances.

We've used it safely on our own people, and this guy planned the murder of thousands of civilians (and had plans for thousands more). It's not pleasant, but certainly worth it to save those lives. 

 

We've used it to teach them to resist torture.  I still haven't seen you call it torture.  You are making a purely utilitarian argument.  You are deliberately ignoring the moral negatives of using torture.

Since you like utilitarianism what if nationalizing the US health care system would save hundreds of thousands of lives?  Is single payer in the US then justified?  If not, why not?

[Dr. Pepper]

55 minutes ago, LongRider said:

Barf.

It was hard to watch that when it happened.  It's even harder to watch this when I know that millions of sick fucks voted for this thing to be sworn in as president on Jan 20.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Dr. Pepper,

Trump is human.  Much to my frustration, he is human.

[Dr. Pepper]

25 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Dr. Pepper,

Trump is human.  Much to my frustration, he is human.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make?  Like, ok he's a homosapiensapien and I didn't even say he wasn't.  But beings that fall into that category don't always meet the definition of what we might define as being human, they might operate outside of what we understand as humanity.  Trump most certainly falls into this for me, he's not what I understand a human to be.  He's scum, filth, an orange stain, a monster, a thing that has promised to the worst outcomes for many people and a bunch of sick fucks cheered it and voted for it.  

And before you say that those who voted for him may not have been ill or copulating at the time, look up  things like figures of speech or idioms.