Waterboarding..Interrogation or Torture?(video)

[2bighorn]

Nice jab on the home schooling, took a few days before I went back & read that last part.   I'd say that there was also a lesson in honesty in that.  I suppose I could have lied about my position on it, to make sure that I always have your approval... but I didn't.

It's O'club.
Anyways, I admire your honesty, and since we are at that and I know you're Christian, how does it fit with your religion (the torture)?

One thing that does bother me is our governments white glove stance on torture.  They're willing to send prisoners to countries which authorize torture & essentially have other countries do our dirty work... while they say "oh, no... we don't approve."  If the government stands in approval of torture, they need to own up to that instead of doing it in secret through other countries/governments whose stance is widely known already.  That kind of double-talk is awful.  And if our government can't take the heat of the astounding disapproval that follows their admission of torture approval, then they need not do it.

Just recently, somebody said (on one of those talk shows, I think it was about Obama and McCain's flip flops), that hypocrisy is necessary for today's politicians in order to do their jobs. I disagree, but that's what they are preaching.

[Yeager]

Quote from: myelo
Moral issues can be debated on logical terms. I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that to happen here, but in principle it can be done.

Everybody can breath now.

breathing....something we can logically agree on 

[BGBMAW]

maybe we should just start beheading with dull knife and burning the bodies..then drag them around town

Lets go total war


I mean..we would not want our enemies to do anything as bad as "waterboarding" ..right? 

Thats our problem right now..we are a limp wristed society..well our leaders are...

If we step up..we can end this now...Its going to kill a lot more people.   But the war machine gets money..and you limp wristed liberals help then by dragging this thing on....We are fighting with one hand tied back...


Bring back the fire bombing b-29s...Can we MOAB the next Rally with the ak toting 5th century dirty beards?  Crush destroy kill....By All Means Necessary


END THIS

[texasmom]

It's O'club.
Anyways, I admire your honesty, and since we are at that and I know you're Christian, how does it fit with your religion (the torture)?

It doesn't fit, really.  Or if it does, I haven't discovered how.  There's a few different types of torture (I'm assuming, I haven't studied it, so this is just my assumption):  Out of a sick-minded wish to impose pain/suffering, with no outcome other than your satisfaction that pain/suffering was imposed.  That, I am totally against. 

But another kind of torture [on various levels]: if you are, for instance, 'scare' someone into giving information.  The slippery slope with torture is: who gets to determine which folks get tortured & which don't? And who gets to determine which levels of torture are acceptable. 

The authority behind those imposing the torture are allowing it to gain the means to their end. But who gets to determine if the authority is sound?  Who gets to determine if the authority is working to a good purpose, or an evil purpose?  There's really nobody who can determine that 100% except God.   

So, the jist of it is that I definitely approve of torture.  I do think highly enough of our country to believe that any torture we allow is with a good intent to secure the safety of our citizens.  That belief of mine could well be changed if it appears that the leaders of our nation are working toward evil.  But again, who gets to determine what's a 'good' purpose and what's an 'evil' purpose?  I know it's not me.

*edit* As for torture that I could inflict on someone. I would personally torture anyone, without hesitation, if it was a matter of my family's safety.  Whether torture is right/wrong, I'd take jail/death/whatever to ensure their safety.  And I'd probably make it more painful than the other neighbor nations currently impose, to make sure it was resolved quickly rather than over a long period of time.

Just recently, somebody said (on one of those talk shows, I think it was about Obama and McCain's flip flops), that hypocrisy is necessary for today's politicians in order to do their jobs. I disagree, but that's what they are preaching.

I disagree as well.  I think that it is their dishonesty which makes them a politician.  An honest citizen in a position of voted authority could just as well do a bang-up job without being a politician.  Haven't seen many of those around in the last few decades.

[BnZ]

So, the jist of it is that I definitely approve of torture.  I do think highly enough of our country to believe that any torture we allow is with a good intent to secure the safety of our citizens.  That belief of mine could well be changed if it appears that the leaders of our nation are working toward evil. 

This paragraph does not jive exceptionally well when put side-by-side with this other paragraph:

I disagree as well.  I think that it is their dishonesty which makes them a politician.  An honest citizen in a position of voted authority could just as well do a bang-up job without being a politician.  Haven't seen many of those around in the last few decades.

So you have noticed, as I have, that political systems tend to attract, and in evolutionary terms, select for precisely those individuals whom one doesn't wish to have power. I.E., those who are willing to work very hard, spend alot of money, say and do "whatever it takes" to get political position. Borderline sociopathy isn't just an advantage come election season, it may well be a necessity.

Yet you trust these same individuals implicitly with ever-increasing discretionary powers, trust them to act inhumanely "only" for humane of reasons.

[texasmom]

Indeed, BNZ.   Harsh to try to be optimisic with those appointed over us when they have demonstrated such a capacity for deception.

[mechanic]

hey Txmom! I am for torture for information also. One instant problem i can see with your two definitions of toture lie within the definitions them self. There is no way of completely ensuring that people who enjoy the act of torture do not gain a place in society that pays them money to torture for the second definition. Historicaly the sadists were sought out to be the excecutioner or gaoler.
 Personaly i cant justify why i am for torture in any way that doesnt have a strong counter argument, all i know is that a prisoner being abused does not effects no more than an african child too weak to swat the flies off his face or an old woman whose husband and sons have been excecuted.

 The hypocracy of even having a law grading what abuse qualifies as torture or acceptable is typical of our spieces. No Abuse at all or full on no limits torture, all we do is degrading to ourselves when we think we can impose an acceptable guidline when it comes to inflicting suffering on another lifeform. The world is violent and the utpoian dream is just that, so torture who you must and keep it undercover from the public for goodness sake.

[2bighorn]

Batfink, do you think it's ok if we deny freedom to our citizens because we can't free the whole world? Either freedom for all or none?
Is it hypocritical feeding our children even if we know some others are hungry? You are applying same principle on torture. Do we commit mass suicide now because we are hypocrites?

Besides we're talking about specific cases, which are illegal for a very specific reason.

“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;

and

the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession

[Rich46yo]

Never heard of most of that before you said it. Care to provide sources other than the fire bombing we all know happened?

Heres one such incident. http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauLiberation/SoldiersKilled.html

The Brits were probably the most accomplished at it. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stickems/JosefGalinsky.htm

http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres_axis.html#Germany

ALLIED ATROCITIES

Allied troops, as well as Axis troops, committed terrible atrocities during the war. Some years after the war a mass grave was discovered just west of the city of Nuremberg. In it were the bodies of some 200 SS soldiers. It was not until 1976 that one of the bodies was positively identified. It was the body of SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Kukula, the commander of the 1st Battalion, 38th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment. Autopsies on the other bodies showed that most had been shot at close range, the others beaten to death by the rifle butts of the US Seventh Army GIs. In the village of Eberstetten, 17 German soldiers of the 'Gotz von Berlichingen' Division were shot after they surrendered to US troops.

On April 8, 1945, fourteen members of the 116th Panzer Division were marched through the streets of Budberg to the command post of the US 95th Infantry Division. There, they were lined up and shot. Three were wounded but managed to escape.

On April 13, 1945, tanks of the US 97th or 78th Infantry Division were approaching the village of Spitze about fifteen miles east of Cologne. They came under fire from a 8.8 anti-tank gun which disabled one of the tanks. That night, the village was pounded by tank and artillery fire and at daybreak the US forces entered the village. All the inhabitants, about eighty, were gathered together in front of the church. Included in the eighty were twenty German soldiers, members of an anti-aircraft unit stationed in the village. They were separated from the civilians and marched several hundred yards to a field just outside the village. There, they were lined up and mowed down by machine-gun fire. Next day the US Army ordered the civilians to dig graves and bury the dead. On April 14, 1995, a memorial for the twenty victims was built near the spot.

During the Allied assault on Sicily, the largest of the Mediterranean islands, (July, 1943) a dozen unarmed civilians, including some children, were apprehended by US troops after the town of Canicatti surrendered. The civilians were reported to be looting after they had entered a bombed out soap and food factory and were filling buckets with liquid soap that had spilled on the ground. At around 6pm, when an American officer, a lieutenant-colonel, and a group Military Police, accompanied by three interpreters, entered the factory the officer fired a series of shots from his automatic Colt-45 point blank into the crowd. He reloaded and fired again. Eight of the civilians, including an eleven year old girl, died. The officer and soldiers then drove off. Fearing reprisals from the residents of the town, the incident was hushed up for over sixty years. Due to the efforts of Dr. Joseph S. Salemi of New York University, this atrocity was brought to light. The perpetrator of this crime, Lieutenant Colonel McCaffery, died in 1954.

During the fighting in Norway and Finland, the SS Gebirgsdivision 'Nord', was opposing the Russian forces. Very few SS men were taken prisoners by the Red Army, most were shot immediately. A report on Operation No 11 from the Soviet 26th Division states: 'The enemy left approximately 400 dead on the battlefield. Some 80 Germans had surrendered and were executed'.

In the notes found on a Soviet doctor after he was captured, he had written: 'All POW's who belonged to the German Army were executed during the operations near Odessa'.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/1944.html

THE JEWISH BRIGADE

In 1944, the Jewish Brigade, consisting of three infantry battalions and commanded by Brigadier Ernest Benjamin, became part of the British Army fighting in Italy under its own official Zionist flag. After the war, the Brigade carried out many clandestine operations in Europe as secret vengeance squads seeking out former concentration camp guards and SS officers who had gone into hiding when the war ended. Called D.I.N. 'Dahm Y'Israel Nokeam' (The Blood of Israel Will Take Revenge) It hunted down over one hundred ex-SS members in the first two month period of their operation. Their method was straight forward, first apprehend the victim for routine questioning, drive him to a safe location in a wood and there the Brigade identified themselves and then passed out a death sentence. The victim was then immediately strangled or in some cases shot. The spare-time activities of the Brigade was to help other Jews, who survived the concentration camps, to get to Palestine despite the British blockade. When the Brigade received instructions to return to Britain and disband, 130 stayed behind to carry on the work, especially the rehabilitation of thousands of Jewish orphan children. They achieved this by swapping identities with young Jewish persons from the many displaced persons (DPs) camps in Europe. These Jews were then sent to ports in southern France for transportation to Palestine. As one 'double' remarked ' Out of the darkness of the Holocaust we were able to show them the way back to joy and normality'.

KILLED BY THEIR OWN COUNTRYMEN

Twelve French volunteers in the German Waffen SS (33rd SS Grenadier Division 'Charlemagne') who had fought on the Eastern Front were in a hospital in Bavaria when the war ended. They surrendered to French soldiers under the command of General Philippe Leclerc, the liberator of Paris. Accusing them of being traitors to France, Leclerc ordered them shot, their bodies left lying on the ground to be discovered some days later by US troops and buried. Years later their bodies were recovered and reinterred in the local cemetery. Inscribed on a memorial above the graves are the words 'To The Twelve Brave Sons Of France, Prisoners Of The Victors Who Were Executed Without Judgement'.

Just how many German POWs died in Allied camps? For over forty years we have been told that many hundreds of thousands of German soldiers had died in Soviet prison camps while at the same time keeping quiet about the number of prisoners who had died in American, French and British camps. In 1997, around 1.1 million German soldiers were still officially listed as missing. According to the recently opened Soviet archives, which have been proved to be extremely precise and detailed, the Red Army captured 2,389,560 German soldiers. Of these, 423,168 died in captivity. In October, 1951, the West German government stated in the United Nations that 1.1 million soldiers had not returned home. In other words, we were led to believe they had died in Soviet camps. If we subtract the proven number of deaths in Soviet camps from the missing in Germany we arrive at the figure of around 677,000. Where are these men?. They must have been interned by the western Allies, the greatest majority being held in American and French camps where they died in their thousands through deliberate starvation, disease and hard work.

STARVATION AT REMAGEN

After the capture of the Remagen Bridge, the US Army hastily erected around 19 Prisoner of War cages around the bridge-head to hold an estimated one million prisoners. The camps were simply open fields surrounded by concertina wire. Those at the Rhine Meadows were situated at Remagen, Bad Kreuznach, Andernach, Buderich, Rheinbach and Sinzig. The German prisoners were hopeful of good treatment from the GIs but in this they were sadly disappointed. Herded into the open spaces like cattle, some were beaten and mistreated. No tents or toilets were supplied. The camps became huge latrines, a sea of urine from one end to the other. They had to sleep in holes in the ground which they dug with their bare hands. In the Bad Kreuznach cage, 560,000 men were interned in an area that could only comfortably hold 45,000. Denied enough food and water, they were forced to eat the grass under their feet and the camps soon became a sea of mud. After the concentration camps were discovered, their treatment became worse as the GIs vented their rage on the hapless prisoners.



Tourists, cruising down the Rhine today can pick

I could continue but I do want to fly tonight. You egt the picture tho dont you? We were often as brutal as the enemy and have been so in every war we have fought. Thats why its called "war".

[mechanic]

 bighorn, i think if we set certain guidlines for the act of torture someone will break them, some may even enjoy them. No matter even if they outlaw laying a single finger on a captive the governments will still do it to disposible people. It is not the same as 'some people are not free so no one should be'. It is that no matter what laws and equalities we try to enforce human nature will always bend things the way best suited to the objective if not totaly disregard them.
 If a prisoner is being tortured for information we all know that he is getting a bullet at the end. Even if he does not he is screwed up for life, a bullet would be kinder. We are only free if we stick to the rules or dnt get caught but the soldier with a rilfe pointed at your head is as powerfully destructive to the invididual as any force in the natural universe. The soldier is god to the captive and that is not a possition that can be graded in levels of acceptility, it is just wrong. But we are going to do it even if no one ever finds out, so why would i bother being against it?

[2bighorn]

You have to apply that to all laws for all crimes then, which pretty much means anarchy.

[bswin03]

I say waterboard every last one of em'   when they follow the rules so will we.  you think they treat our prisoners humanley?  they use their own place of worship and worse yet their own cicilian population as a shield because THEY KNOW we will will respect unless given no choice.  gloves are off...make an example out of a few...let a few others watch and send em' home to tell their friends...hell use it as  halftime show for the superbowl...they are cowards and wouldnt think twice to treating any one of you to a nice torturing before they cut your head off and send the video to your mother....process of natural selection will wipe the animals off the face of the earth sooner or later..i dont care how big and strong we are and they arent...pick your fights better and you might live longer...we nor isreal have ever imposed our will militarily in that reigin until provoked.  nuff said <S>

[mechanic]

You have to apply that to all laws for all crimes then, which pretty much means anarchy.

This is not really about crimes is it? It's about what level of violence and suffering is acceptable to inflict on prisoners.

[JoeA]

I'm just not comfortable with the idea that this is now SOP.

Waterboarding in the US is currently illegal, at least since 2006. The CIA has used waterboarding only 3 times and not since 2003.  Seems like a bit of a stretch to say waterboarding is SOP. 

Just for the record, I think waterboarding in controlled/very-limited circumstances can be OK and should be legally permitted.

[2bighorn]

Just for the record, I think waterboarding in controlled/very-limited circumstances can be OK and should be legally permitted.

Just about every torture is controlled and what would that limited circumstances be?

This is not really about crimes is it? It's about what level of violence and suffering is acceptable to inflict on prisoners.

All prisoners?