The outsourcing of interagation and those techniques

[Neil D]

Bush backs policy on terror suspects

By Reuters | March 7, 2005

NEW YORK -- The Bush administration is defending its decision to give the CIA extensive authority to send terrorism suspects to foreign countries for interrogation.

ADVERTISEMENT

The New York Times reported yesterday that President Bush signed a still-classified directive just days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that gave the CIA broad power to operate without case-by-case approval from the White House in the transfer of suspects -- a process known as rendition.

The CIA declined to comment on the report, and the White House would not confirm the directive.

But White House counselor Dan Bartlett defended the administration's policies, saying it was important after the Sept. 11 attacks to take a ''hard look at our entire apparatus -- militarily, intelligence, diplomatic -- to see how we were going to fight and win the war on terror."

The rendition program has been under scrutiny in recent weeks after several former detainees complained of inhumane treatment and human rights groups have complained that the operations violated American standards condemning torture.

Representative Edward Markey filed legislation last month to eliminate what he called ''outsourcing torture."

''The president needs to rescind his extraordinary rendition 'outsourcing torture' directives so that Americans can know that we are neither engaging in torture ourselves, nor outsourcing torture to other nations," the Massachusetts Democrat said yesterday.

Markey also called on the president to declassify the secret order.

The Bush administration has publicly said the United States did not hand over people to be tortured. ''At every step of the way, President Bush and his administration has made very clear that we abide by the laws of our land and the treaty obligations we have," Bartlett told CNN.

[:"blue"] Ok, we outsource torture, and we become like the Jews who asked the gentiles to make thier fire on Sabbath...[irony mode-on]But the US never tortures it's enemies...We just send them to our allies who do toruture.... [iM-off] [/]

[Ron Lambert]

How much do you want to bet the US never resorts to torture?

Let's have some common sense and a sense of priorities here. Suppose a CIA agent on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border reports that the terrorist group he has infiltrated has an atom bomb, and has already succeeded in smuggling it into the United States, with the plan being to detonate it in Washington, D.C. just a few days hence. Then the US sends in SEALS and Special Forces in a combined lightning raid, and nabs the top leaders of the terrorist group.

With only days or hours to go before the atom bomb is detonated, and the normal means of "civilized" interrogation taking months to succeed (if ever), does any sane person doubt that the US would itself take the terrorist leaders off somewhere out of public scrutiny and apply extreme torture to break them and find out where the bomb is hidden as fast as possible?

Anyone who would think it is more moral to observe "civilized" interrogation methods and allow millions of innocent U.S. citizens to be killed, is stupid, irresponsible, and unloving of their fellow humans, and utterly immoral in their self-righteousness, no matter what they may piously claim.

The ends usually do not justify the means, but there are times when the ends truly are more important than the means.

[Bravus]

Two points:

1. Basically single person who knows anything about the issue, from either a psychological/medical perspective or an intelligence agent perspective, says that information gathered by torture is worthless: the victim doesn't tell the truth, he says what he believes the interrogators want to hear.

2. The kind of extreme hypothetical case you cite is one thing, but in the case of all the people who have been tortured (including water-boarding, stress positions etc, which the adminsitration wants to use to dance around the technical definition of 'torture') since 9/11, precisely *none* of them were in this kind of specific situation where the torture was in a position to directly save lives.

I'm not the guy for absolutist judgements that don't take context into account, but 'torture is wrong' goes extremely close. And as I noted in the other thread, it's not the fact that this administration might resort to it under special circumstances in an extreme situation that's worrying, it's the fact that they're setting policies in place that make it almost routine.

[Ron Lambert]

But you do admit, Bravus, there may be a case where extreme torture is justified--don't you? So having admitted that, the real question for you to address is where to draw the line between when extreme torture is warranted, and when it is not.

[Neil D]

Quote:

---

But you do admit, Bravus, there may be a case where extreme torture is justified--don't you? So having admitted that, the real question for you to address is where to draw the line between when extreme torture is warranted, and when it is not.

---

If I could leave that question in trustworthy hands, I think I could do that....But with an administration who routinely uses torture to obtain information and has policies on torture, can I say that they are trustworthy? I don't think so...

This administration may be more 'civilized' and yet evil than we suspect...

[Ron Lambert]

How do you know the administration routinely uses torture to obtain information? That sounds like partisan conjecture.

Most of us do not have valid knowledge of torture techniques and their effectiveness, beyond what opinions of others we have read about it. And for that matter, we have not agreed as a society on what exactly constitutes torture. Most of us would probably agree that torture that involves inflicting pain and causing physical injury would be extreme torture in anyone's book. Are CIA interrogators really shooting people in the kneecaps and cutting off fingers one-by-one on a routine basis? I would doubt it.

Reasonably, what even the most extreme torture we use probably consists of is the use of psychoactive drugs that suppress volition (so called "truth serums," like Sodium Pentathol), along with hooking the subject up to a lie detector, well-calculated applications of pain with the suggestion that there will be no limit to how far the interrogator would go while actually permanent injury is avoided, and use of psychological methods to keep the subject off-balance and unsure of how much the interrogator really knows. After being punished a few times for saying things the interrogator knows are false, and after being told that his comrades have broken down and confessed and the interrogator is only looking for confirmation, it is quite likely that the subject will eventually be compelled to tell the truth. It is only when the interrogator is incompetent that the subject would wind up admitting to anything and inventing horrendous things to confess to just to make the pain stop.

Bravus mentioned "water-boarding." That is a form of interrogation where the subject is held down on a board, and water is poured over his nose and mouth preventing him from breathing, and giving him the feeling that he is about to drown. The extreme, fundamental sense of panic this causes can be a powerful inducement to tell the truth. Yet normally this torture technique does not result in any lasting damage, except sometimes producing aspiration pneumonia, but this is rare. Depending on how important the information is that you are seeking, such techniques may be warranted, such as if you are desperately trying to find out where an atomic bomb has been hidden before it is detonated.

[there buster]

I just saw Hotel Rwanda. Two of my friends (he was best man at my wedding) were in Rwanda at the time. This simply brought back the revulsion I felt at that time.

Anyone who pretends to any moral seriousness had better do some serious confessing about Clinton's and the UN's non-handling of Rwanda, and the senseless destruction of nearly 1,000,000 men, women, and children.

Excuse that, and there's no "there" for me to communicate with.

[Ron Lambert]

But you know, Ed, sometimes governments are convicted and their sense of shame leads them to seek to make amends.

For example, anti-semitic prejudice was common in the U.S. and in most other western countries before and during World War II. History records a ship loaded with Jewish refugees that all the major western countries (including America) refused to accept. When reports began leaking out of Nazi-occupied Europe about what was really going on at the death camps like Auschwitz, most government leaders in America and elsewhere refused to believe them, dismissing them as Jewish propaganda. But then when Allied armed forces liberated those death camps and discovered that the truth was even more horrible than the worst of the previous reports, and the West truly grasped that an attempt at genocide had really been made against the Jews of Europe, shame and a sense of obligation led America and Britain and some other countries to encourage the creation of a national homeland for the Jews, on the belief that if Jews had their own country, then Jews everywhere would enjoy a better standing of respect, and there would be less persecution and mistreatment of the Jewish people.

They were right, and it has largely worked, at least in the nations of the West, where now Jews are largely respected, and anti-semitism is now recognized as a great evil.