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Kazak_Hstan posted:Then why did that interrogator admit to the detainee that the world could never find out? For funsies? What interrogation purpose did that admission serve? If he wanted to terrorize the detainee into thinking he'd never get out alive, he could have, i don't know, locked him in a coffin for 300 hours and told him he'd never get out alive, which happens to be a Real Life Thing They Did. I suspect that the guy who said that legitimately believed that what he was doing was necessary, and that despite that the general public could never be allowed to know because we couldn't handle the awful truth, and that this person could watch A Few Good Men and be sincerely confused as to why Col. Jessup is portrayed as a villain. In short, I think that the CIA is literally run and staffed by violent lunatics.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:00
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tentative8e8op posted:They were told that what they were doing was explicitly illegal both domestically and internationally, but could be considered justifiable under domestic law due to "a novel application of the necessity defense". Papercut posted:C'mon man, this is only 12 pages into the report, which I'm assuming you've read since you're so engaged in this debate. I'm not trying to argue that it was actually legal. Just that they were told it was legal enough. Which would make the court case all the worse for the Obama administration. That's my point, that the nature of the Bush administration's attempts at muddying the legal waters were sufficient to make any prosecution at best a pyrrhic victory. Kazak_Hstan posted:
Well, yes if you can hire the DoJ to be your lawyer you can get away with a lot more.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:08
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I wonder where, exactly, future historians will say "here, this point, is where Americans abandoned the rule of law." Most historians only care about property rights of the powerful when judging whether a society had "the rule of law" anyway, so probably never!
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Dec 11, 2014 23:09
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Trabisnikof posted:I'm not trying to argue that it was actually legal. Just that they were told it was legal enough. Which would make the court case all the worse for the Obama administration. That's my point, that the nature of the Bush administration's attempts at muddying the legal waters were sufficient to make any prosecution at best a pyrrhic victory. Except that the report found that CIA heads misled the DoJ as to what was going on and CIA staff went beyond the boundaries set by the DoJ in the first place. Yes of course the criminals would attempt to defend themselves and would argue that they were just following orders, that's a truism and adds nothing to the discussion. That doesn't mean they've got a bulletproof case that would convince a jury, let alone that it's a reason not to attempt to prosecute them at all. You're going to torturous lengths (  ) to make it seem as if Obama's hands were tied, when in fact ActusRhesus explanation is a far, far more compelling explanation for his actions.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:13
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Papercut posted:Except that the report found that CIA heads misled the DoJ as to what was going on and CIA staff went beyond the boundaries set by the DoJ in the first place. Yes of course the criminals would attempt to defend themselves and would argue that they were just following orders, that's a truism and adds nothing to the discussion. That doesn't mean they've got a bulletproof case that would convince a jury, let alone that it's a reason not to attempt to prosecute them at all. Right, so why are you punishing some poor med-tech (who threw up afterwards btw and only did it for god and country) for what the leadership of the CIA did? The med-tech didn't know the DoJ had been lied to. Etc etc. ActusRhesus explanation and mine aren't exclusive. In fact, they work in concert. The right-wing blowup over a trial would help fuel the media circus that would get people talking about Dronsey and Friends. How can you not see that Fox would love nothing more than to turn a trial into "Defenders of America versus Anti-American Academic Obama"? These brave Americans, at great person cost, did what had to be done to save America from Terrorists. Meanwhile Obama gets to stay in his comfy office, go on Colbert and kill Americans with the touch of a button. Its pure ratings bliss for the conservative talking heads. Expect to see a lot of Ollie North, someone else "unfairly" punished for "political" crimes.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:21
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Trabisnikof posted:I'm not trying to argue that it was actually legal. Just that they were told it was legal enough. Which would make the court case all the worse for the Obama administration. That's my point, that the nature of the Bush administration's attempts at muddying the legal waters were sufficient to make any prosecution at best a pyrrhic victory. I don't actually expect a prosecution, given the last three or four decades crystallizing the unaccountability of the powerful. However, in a fantasy world where presidents had principles and attorneys general had spines, I see a prosecution offering more than a pyrrhic victory. For one thing, OLC memos don't carry the force of law For another, assuming a prosecution survived past a motion to dismiss, whether there was a conviction or not, there is immense value in the people involved in this sitting on a witness stand and being examined under oath, in the open. Finally, again assuming we got beyond a motion to dismiss, the utterly graphic and depraved facts of the case would carry far more weight than legal memoranda using adventurous interpretations of fairly unambiguous statutes, but in the eyes of a finder of fact and the public. Like, we almost literally have a case of "well, that depends on what the meaning of 'is' is," on one hand and "yeah, so that's when I pureed a whole meal and shoved it up a guy's rear end" on the other. That is a deck of cards I'd be willing to play with if I were a federal prosecutor.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:26
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Trabisnikof posted:Right, so why are you punishing some poor med-tech (who threw up afterwards btw and only did it for god and country) for what the leadership of the CIA did? The med-tech didn't know the DoJ had been lied to. Etc etc. He threw up? After murdering Gul Rahman? That must have really hurt when he got his bonus and promotion. Sorry, I don't give a gently caress what Fox would be bloviating about during a trial. It's not a political question and there is no election calculus to be done.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:28
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Trabisnikof posted:Right, so why are you punishing some poor med-tech (who threw up afterwards btw and only did it for god and country) for what the leadership of the CIA did? The med-tech didn't know the DoJ had been lied to. Etc etc. Do you believe that prison guards at Nazi concentration camps deserved to be prosecuted? Why or why not? To make my point more bluntly: I don't give a loving rat's rear end what deep, inner feelings went on inside of someone committing torture. They committed torture and are deserving of just punishment. Vermain fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Dec 11, 2014 |
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Dec 11, 2014 23:32
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Of course Fox would say wild and awful poo poo. They already do. They have already spent six years calling Obama everything they could think of, regardless of what he does. Since that's all they will ever do, who cares? They're going to have Ollie North calling Obama a furrener and a human being three nights a week either way, why not get something done? They're gonna say mean things about me if I eat a big mac, they'll say the exact same mean things if I eat a steak, I'm eating the loving steak.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:33
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Trabisnikof posted:Right, so why are you punishing some poor med-tech (who threw up afterwards btw and only did it for god and country) for what the leadership of the CIA did? The med-tech didn't know the DoJ had been lied to. Etc etc. In my opinion even someone who breaks down crying during their third day torturing someone and requests to transfer elsewhere should be pinned, not as heavily as our leaders, but still tried. When faced with an unspeakable act, clocking out and simply handing a cattleprod to someone else in line is to me no excuse for not actively trying to stop such things.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:35
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Kazak_Hstan posted:I don't actually expect a prosecution, given the last three or four decades crystallizing the unaccountability of the powerful. However, in a fantasy world where presidents had principles and attorneys general had spines, I see a prosecution offering more than a pyrrhic victory. For one thing, OLC memos don't carry the force of law For another, assuming a prosecution survived past a motion to dismiss, whether there was a conviction or not, there is immense value in the people involved in this sitting on a witness stand and being examined under oath, in the open. Finally, again assuming we got beyond a motion to dismiss, the utterly graphic and depraved facts of the case would carry far more weight than legal memoranda using adventurous interpretations of fairly unambiguous statutes, but in the eyes of a finder of fact and the public. I'll be interested to see in a few years once people start talking about the investigation from the DoJ side. You may be right that this is all weak-willed political poo poo, but I just have a strong feeling that the CIA and Bush administration weren't so dumb as to not give themselves as many ways out as they can. And those real risks of "not guilty" combined with the political side were designed to make prosecution by future presidents a non-starter. Vermain posted:Do you believe that prison guards at Nazi concentration camps deserved to be prosecuted? Why or why not? But see, you want justice from America. That's your problem right there. When was a time that America was actually about justice? Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Dec 11, 2014 |
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Dec 11, 2014 23:35
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Trabisnikof posted:I'll be interested to see in a few years once people start talking about the investigation from the DoJ side. You may be right that this is all weak-willed political poo poo, but I just have a strong feeling that the CIA and Bush administration weren't so dumb as to not give themselves as many ways out as they can. And those real risks of "not guilty" combined with the political side were designed to make prosecution by future presidents a non-starter. And I have a strong feeling that you will be defending the Obama administration's actions no matter what evidence or facts may exist in the public realm. It's fun having feelings.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:38
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Stop bringing up Bush and Cheney by the way, if anybody is EVER going to even get a whiff of punishment at all (this will not ever happen) it's the Obama administration.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:39
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Papercut posted:And I have a strong feeling that you will be defending the Obama administration's actions no matter what evidence or facts may exist in the public realm. It's fun having feelings. Nah, if it turns out it was as good a case as US Attorneys usually brings and they dropped it for political/drama reasons, I'd be pretty pissed.
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Dec 11, 2014 23:40
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Welp, just had to unfriend another person on Facebook for a 'Sound of Music' inspired dismissal about torture programs.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:08
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Chamale posted:September 8, 1974. Ford pardoning Nixon removed the last shred of belief that American leaders might not be above the law. Seconded. Watergate (and the home reaction to the Vietnam bondoggle in a lesser degree) was the embryo of the current political mold. I'm currently reading 'The Invisible Bridge", about Nixon's final years in power and the rise of Reagan, and it comes across very clear. A superpower defeated for the first time, and accused of behaving in ways that only the bad guys in other wars (and in he movies) behaved. Gas and meat prices rising and imperiling the myth of eternal plenty. A rebelling younger generation that the older one could barely understand, let alone deal with: hippies, Patty Hearst, feminism, the pill, you name it. And then, a corrupt president (which wasn't new) greedily appropriating the machinery of power to further his gals and wreck his rivals (which sort of was new). To some, this felt warranted. It meant the country was growing up, abandoning illusions and forging a new compromise, albeit a more cynical one. For others, it meant literally the death of the America they loved, and they would deny any reasons for it and fight any and all of its symptoms. Watergate and Nixon's resignation were a win for the skeptics, but they also galvanized the 'idealists' something fierce and got the ball rolling. It became imperative to never give another inch to he forces of degradation. And Reagan embodied that commitment from day one, defending Nixon, pinning everything on conspiracies and loose talk from unpatriotic liberals, minimizing each and every new revelation as immaterial right right up until Nixon quit, and then just shifting the subject to the next fight without conceding a thing. Goodies versus baddies, and the goodies must always win, by definition. And nothing you do against the baddies counts as wrong. Doesn't matter how much you bend institutions or edit narratives. Deviating is a betrayal. Changing your mind is actually worse than having been with the other side from day one, because you are showing that you can be swayed by facts, and what kind of squish does that?
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Dec 12, 2014 00:20
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Sadly executive lawlessness goes all the way back to Washington. The constitution isn't really a good system in terms of the holding the executive to laws. But that depends on your definition of law I guess.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:28
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Sadly executive lawlessness goes all the way back to Washington. The constitution isn't really a good system in terms of the holding the executive to laws. But that depends on your definition of law I guess.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:28
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Vermain posted:Do you believe that prison guards at Nazi concentration camps deserved to be prosecuted? Why or why not? The majority were not prosecuted. Those that were prosecuted went "above and beyond"
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Dec 12, 2014 00:32
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hobbesmaster posted:We hanged the officers that ordered war crimes after WWII, not the men that did them (they'd have been shot if they refused after all). This isn't entirely true. There are cases of Germans refusing orders on ethical grounds and most of the time the reaction was to just get someone else to do it instead. That said, there's a clear precedent of trying, convicting and hanging or imprisoning for a long long time those who order these kinds of crimes.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:34
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Jesus loving Christ this is an awful read.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:34
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ZenVulgarity posted:Jesus loving Christ this is an awful read. From an outside perspective... loving hell
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Dec 12, 2014 01:07
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http://www.thenation.com/article/tortures-dirty-secret-it-worksquote:This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's will and the collective will. Not entirely sure how I feel about this article but it is interesting, and fits in with the fact that everybody already knew that torture is ineffective at producing real information. The public debate about torture is always being framed as a question of whether or not it helped save lives, etc, so looking at it as having another purpose is new to me.
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Dec 12, 2014 02:33
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Goatse Master posted:http://www.thenation.com/article/tortures-dirty-secret-it-works It's kind of amazing to me that this is still news to people, considering that it's been public knowledge since at least 1948.
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Dec 12, 2014 03:21
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Goatse Master posted:http://www.thenation.com/article/tortures-dirty-secret-it-works CIA looks up to the stasi I guess.
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Dec 12, 2014 03:31
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Why Did US Medical Personnel Remove High-Value Detainee Abu Zubaydah's Eye?quote:Shortly after he was captured in March 2002 at a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, following an early morning raid jointly conducted by the CIA, FBI, Pakistani police and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Abu Zubaydah woke up at a black site prison in Thailand and discovered that his left eye had been surgically removed. quote:A US counterterrorism official, responding to a query from Truthout, said, "Zubaydah had a preexisting eye condition when he was captured" and "American medical personnel treated the condition, [but] he ultimately lost the eye." quote:Zubaydah seems to be under the impression that he lost his eye as a result of abusive treatment.
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Dec 12, 2014 04:03
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Goatse Master posted:http://www.thenation.com/article/tortures-dirty-secret-it-works Wasn't American waterboarding used by groups like al-Qaeda as recruitment propaganda?
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Dec 12, 2014 04:06
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Is expatriating to a country that doesn't use my tax dollars to (with the enthusiastic support of its democracy) anally rape innocent people a reasonable response to all this or am I being too emotional?
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Dec 12, 2014 04:23
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IAMKOREA posted:Is expatriating to a country that doesn't use my tax dollars to (with the enthusiastic support of its democracy) anally rape innocent people a reasonable response to all this or am I being too emotional? team overhead smash posted:Not entirely, but...
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Dec 12, 2014 04:27
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While Canada facilitated torture its judicial system did rule it was wrong. More than the US can say.
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Dec 12, 2014 04:28
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computer parts posted:Depends how fast you can learn Norwegian! The country (other than the US) that I have the right to work/live in isn't on that list and I already speak the language. Leave tomorrow: y/n?
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Dec 12, 2014 04:28
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IAMKOREA posted:The country (other than the US) that I have the right to work/live in isn't on that list and I already speak the language. If you haven't got anything keeping you go ahead.
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Dec 12, 2014 04:32
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IAMKOREA posted:The country (other than the US) that I have the right to work/live in isn't on that list and I already speak the language. Yes. Please go. Now.
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Dec 12, 2014 04:32
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Papercut posted:This is not a productive line of debate because as pointed out above, it implicitly acknowledges that there could be circumstances under which torture is justified. It's taking the bait of the "saved thousands of lives!" line. To be fair though, there are some circumstances where torture really is justified. For example: Being a CIA informant, cooperating with the FBI, the desperate testimony of someone else who has been tortured, being related to someone else who is being tortured, when the VP needs to fabricate a casus belli, or being one of the 20% of people who get picked up at random and have nothing to do with anything. Also people who abuse animals, but I totes admit that is rooted in personal anger and serves no real purpose outside of my own desire for vengeance. Seriously though, the whole point of principles is that you stick to them even when it's tough. If you just throw your hands up and say "gently caress that, I am angry and/or scared" you don't really have principles, just soundbites. By the same token, even if torture was effective for intelligence purposes, if we want to be the good guys, we have to forego that advantage even if it creates greater risks. If that means we get hit more, well, fine - we can take it. The only foe to pose a true danger today is the erosion of our own values, and we capitulated to that without a fight.
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Dec 12, 2014 04:35
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i wonder how much longer till police are waterboarding suspects? they already use "pseudotorture" techniques like sleep deprivation and starvation
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Dec 12, 2014 10:11
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Condiv posted:i wonder how much longer till police are waterboarding suspects? they already use "pseudotorture" techniques like sleep deprivation and starvation Why torture when they can just straight up kill people?
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Dec 12, 2014 13:20
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Boris Galerkin posted:Why torture when they can just straight up kill people? "Hands up! Because they are tied into a stress position!"
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Dec 12, 2014 13:25
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Boris Galerkin posted:Why torture when they can just straight up kill people? The CIA can kill people too. Doesn't stop them shoving salad up people's asses.
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Dec 12, 2014 14:05
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Boris Galerkin posted:Why torture when they can just straight up kill people? cause people might not believe them when they say the latest bloody smear on the sidewalk was the serial killer they've been trying to catch plus people will be less likely to commit crimes if they know the police have taken the kid gloves off!
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Dec 12, 2014 14:53
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Thesaurasaurus posted:Because the little blue pill isn't enough for Cheney any longer. True, I was happier than I am, while yet Manhood remained to act the thing I thought,-- While lust was sweeter than revenge; and now Invention palls. Ay, we must all grow old. And but that there remains a deed to act Whose horror might make sharp an appetite Duller than mine--I 'd do,--I know not what. When I was young I thought of nothing else But pleasure; and I fed on honey sweets. Men, by St. Thomas! cannot live like bees,-- And I grew tired; yet, till I killed a foe, And heard his groans, and heard his children's groans, Knew I not what delight was else on earth,-- Which now delights me little. I the rather Look on such pangs as terror ill conceals-- The dry, fixed eyeball, the pale, quivering lip, Which tell me that the spirit weeps within Tears bitterer than the bloody sweat of Christ. I rarely kill the body, which preserves, Like a strong prison, the soul within my power, Wherein I feed it with the breath of fear For hourly pain.
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