Torturing for Propaganda Purposes »
Posted By Beau7890 8 months, 2 weeks ago in Political NewsDespite what you've seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.
So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense -- in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a "ticking time bomb" scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks -- in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
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Beau7890
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Progressive8 months, 2 weeks ago
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Report: Bush policies led to prisoner abuses
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_interrogation_memos_... -
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Endoscopy8 months, 2 weeks ago
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"torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions"
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1. This was not torture as defined by our laws.
2. Congress approved of the methods used. (The Democrats seem to have amnesia.)
3. Valuable information was gathered from using these methods on THREE AND ONLY THREE prisoners.
4. Obama refuses to release that information. WHY????
His own staff say this. One of the leaked items was the plan to attack LA and that was thwarted by using that information. I guess that liberals wanted those thousands of people killed instead.
WHY LIBERALS DO YOU WANT TO SEE THAT MUCH BLOOD????????-
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PapaWolf8 months, 2 weeks ago
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Endo,
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Listening to a former CIA agent right now. His words are basically, "Even after we waterboarded, even after ... I'm not going to use the euphemism, even after we TORTURED this guy 1, 2.... 83 times, there was no benefit ...."
McCain, who was waterboarded, says that it's torture.
Read http://www.theworld.org/node/25807
Google waterboarding prosecutions & glance through this.
Get this through your head: WATERBOARDING IS TORTURE.
Not to mention some of the other things in the memos:
- slamming people into walls head first,
- locking a man in a box w/a stinging insect of which he's terrified (read 1984 or watch either of the movies)
- forcing a 1-legged man to stand, arms shackled above his head, for hours & hours, if not days
Give it up, endo. You are wrong & most everyone knows it. WE tortured in the embodiment of Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Bybee, etc.
And until those responsible are punished, we are ALL guilty.
And those of you still, after all that's been revealed, defend these atrocities are as complicit as those who ordered the torture. -
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spkguy8 months, 2 weeks ago
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"This was not torture as defined by our laws."
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Ah...Wrong, that's because the Bush Administration attempted to redefine what constitutes "torture" SEE BYBEE memo.
"2.Congress approved of the methods used."
Only because they where never given this..
"Top officials who approved torture were clueless that waterboarding was prosecuted by the United States in war crime trials after Word War II, and was historically used by despotic regimes such as Pol Pot in Cambodia and the Spanish Inquisition. They didn’t know that SERE program trainers warned that these methods were ineffective. And the former military psychologist who persuaded them to do this never conducted a single interrogation. One former CIA official says it’s “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm.”
"3.Valuable information was gathered from using these methods.
Pure speculation, but more importantly it does not make it right if it violates both US and International LAW.
"A professional analysis would not simply ask: Did they tell us important information? Congress is apparently now preparing to parse the various claims on this score -- and that would be quite valuable.
But the argument that they gave us vital information, which readers can see deployed in the memos just as they were deployed to reassure an uneasy president, is based on a fallacy. The real question is: What is the unique value of these methods? "
For this analysis, the administration had the benefit of past U.S. government treatment of high-value detainees in its own history (especially World War II and Vietnam) and substantial, painful lessons from sympathetic foreign governments. By 2005, the Bush administration also had the benefit of what amounted to a double-blind study it had inadvertently conducted, comparing methods that had evolved in Iraq (different Geneva-based rules, different kinds of teams) and the methods the CIA had developed, with both sets being used to against hardened killers.
Phillip Zelikow -
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djn3nunez38 months, 2 weeks ago
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One of the leaked items was the plan to attack LA and that was thwarted by using that information
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The first reason to be skeptical that this planned attack could have been carried out successfully is that, as I've noted before, attacking buildings by flying planes into them didn't remain a viable al-Qaida strategy even through Sept. 11, 2001. Thanks to cell phones, passengers on United Flight 93 were able to learn that al-Qaida was using planes as missiles and crashed the plane before it could hit its target. There was no way future passengers on any flight would let a terrorist who killed the pilot and took the controls fly wherever he pleased.
What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument), is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.
How could Sheikh Mohammed's water-boarded confession have prevented the Library Tower attack if the Bush administration "broke up" that attack during the previous year? It couldn't, of course. Conceivably the Bush administration, or at least parts of the Bush administration, didn't realize until Sheikh Mohammed confessed under torture that it had already broken up a plot to blow up the Library Tower about which it knew nothing. Stranger things have happened. But the plot was already a dead letter. If foiling the Library Tower plot was the reason to water-board Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then that water-boarding was more than cruel and unjust. It was a waste of water.
http://www.slate.com/id/2216601/
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libsRfunnyComment removed: Hard Banned12 Replies
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Spadecaller8 months, 2 weeks ago
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Tortures greatest defender, Shotgun Dick Cheney, wants the cases exposed where detainees broke down and confessed after water boarding and acts of humiliation broke their wills. He wants us to believe how torture has protected us all. Or maybe he wants us to believe that he is a man of conviction and not a monster.
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If Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld stood trial in Nuremberg after the war for the same conduct, they would be convicted for crimes against humanity. Who is kidding who?-
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Beau78908 months, 2 weeks ago
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Tortures greatest defender, Shotgun Dick Cheney, wants the cases exposed where detainees broke down and confessed after water boarding and acts of humiliation broke their wills. He wants us to believe how torture has protected us all.
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That's because he wants to frame the debate in terms of pragmatism, as do so many of the defenders of our use of torture out here. Their reasoning is, "If it works, use it."
Despite the studies that torture most often produces unreliable information, the entire debate about torture's efficacy is really a red herring. U.S. use of torture emboldens enemies and is the best recruiting tool available to extremists who'd say the U.S. is no better than any other oppressor. And it stands against the American moral framework so many of its defenders are so proud of.
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Spadecaller8 months, 2 weeks ago
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Even if information was obtained by torturing a detainee, are there not still more serious ramifications to our nation?
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The logic that is being promoted here is not necessarily the issue that I believe is really paramount. If we behave like terrorists and we become mirror images of the evil that we denounce, the enemies of our nation have succeeded in their intent to inflict the greatest harm. For people of high moral charters, they would rather perish from the earth than to forfeit their most cherished beliefs. And so, isn't that also true of a real patriot? A nation of high moral character that forfeits its values, its agreements to abide by international law, and its respect for the basic rights of all human beings, is doomed to face some serous consequences.
So what is behind the need to justify torture? I believe it is multi-dimensional. We have a group of thugs from the Bush administration who are afraid that this world and this country will punish them for their crimes against humanity. And during their abuses, they used the "confessions" of torture victims as political propaganda to prove to the voters that they were protecting Americans as nobody else could - certainly not the opposing party.
But the truth was: they were securing the opportunity to exploit war for profit by using fear to manipulate public support.
To forfeit our highest values due to the fear of violent terrorism, is to concede to the belief that we are cowards and not true warriors.
"I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Whether or not information gained by illegal torture is reliable should no be used as the criteria for its justification; torture should never be tolerated by a civilized society. The question remains: do we have the moral character that a civilized society would require? -
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earthlingerer8 months, 2 weeks ago
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If you can't, or don't do it (by policy) to prisoners in US jails or prisons, you don't do it to others.
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This is with the understanding that there are in fact people in US prisons, who if they we tortured and told everything they know, the information would be able to prevent the deaths of many thousands of people.
Of course there are those incredible idiots who would defend torture publicly, and help to gauge an "acceptable level." These people are not, and never were Americans. -
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Progressive8 months, 2 weeks ago
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Last week, the Obama administration's top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, privately told intelligence employees that "high value information" was obtained through the harsh interrogation techniques. However, on Tuesday, in a written statement, Blair said, "The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means."
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30367871 -
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antibrainwasher8 months, 2 weeks ago
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For Cheney and Rumesfeld to order torture to elicit false confessions of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, to justify the mass murder of Iraqis, not to mention sending 5,000 kids to die for a neocon lie nation building exercise for the benefit of big oil and war profiteers and Israel right wing AIPAC agents, is beyond treason, its simple mass murder for profit. Dick Cheney is a murdering traitor.
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Dick Cheney is a murdering traitor.
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