Ah. No. Not at all. As I said before, I struggle because I don't want to condone or advocate something awful, but at the same time I fully recognize that given the chance, what someone like ISIS would do to me is every bit as evil as anything the CIA concocted. Fighting an ideology is hard.
Plausible deniability. CIA: Hey we got this guy who might know something. Administration: Oh? Well do what you gotta do, but remember the "law."
I don't understand why would ever want to cede the moral high ground to terrorists. I can't imagine what a field day terrorist recruiters have when this stuff comes out. And no, that isn't an argument to do it and keep it secret. Torture is illegal. And it is illegal even in the wake of disastrous events. There are no special circumstances that allow torture. At least according to the United Nations Convention Against torture that states "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." But the lovey-dovey hippy Ronald Reagan signed onto that one, so I guess it doesn't count. Even more disturbing is that we took the tortures used by communist nations to elicit false confessions and made them our own (link). These aren't methods meant to find the truth. They are simply meant to break minds. And that's something we don't take kindly when it is done to us. We executed Japanese soldiers who tortured American POWs (this included waterboarding) (link). Then again. This still isn't torture. They are "enhanced interrogation techniques." Which in German could translate to "Verschärfte Vernehmung." A phrase the Gestapo used to describe similar techniques. But hey, these people are all terrorists. Who cares? It's not like we rounded up people without cause and tortured them to death. Oh, wait a second... (link) As John McCain said (and if you didn't know he was brutally tortured as a POW), "Our enemies act without conscience. We must not."
You might have missed the part where they enacted legislation that exempted them from prosecution before they left office, protecting them from being charged with any of their previous acts.
For those wondering what I'm talking about: There was a Presidential Order that basically exempted Gitmo detainees from being considered prisoners or war, and that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to terrorists. My (potentially very wrong) understanding is that they therefore cannot be brought up on War Crimes charges because "terrorists" don't qualify to be considered, and because Gitmo is outside of the US, they're not charged with a US crime. There's a reason Gitmo is where it is. This was the first close explanation I found of it: http://www.democrats.com/senate-armed-s ... on-torture
Bush can assert whatever the hell he wants, and as Commander in Chief can dictate policy to the military, but he can't just magically exempt himself from federal law, under which torture is explicitly a crime (punishable by death under certain circumstances).
Except not anymore, the next administration modified that slightly. "Enhanced interrogation" was outlawed, and the administration said that dealing with terrorists and enemy combatants had to be in accordance with the Army Field Manual, which was compliant with the Geneva Convention. Then the Field Manual was modified to allow for enhanced interrogation under threats of imminent risk, which can be defined as almost anything.
Again these are all policy statements. The law remains the law. The court system is under no obligation to accept the executive's interpretation of the law, especially when it's so transparently bullshit as it is in this case.
“Ratification of the Convention (Against Torture) by the United States, will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately prevalent in the world today.” -- Ronald Reagan Nuff said. Our government has gone insane in every way it can. Kafka's worst nightmare manifest as reality.
I would have no problem with torture if it actually did anything. The problem is that it doesn't actually work. If it does work, it works by accident. If you want to force someone to confess to a crime whether or not he did it, great - go beat him up and deprive him of sleep or whatever. But the moment that a prisoner believes he has to say something, anything, to stop the pain, he'll make up a believable sounding lie and you're hosed. It's funny that the CIA has said that torture has saved lives and is vital for national security, because they can't actually point to any operations they've nabbed with torture. "Oh, it's classified." No, it's just useless. Interrogators have had much better success with (pretended) empathy and understanding. Get in his head, figure out his motivations, etc. Most people who do horrible things actually think that they're in the right, and they want to explain why they're right. That's how they catch rapists and child molesters. There's a great video where a police interrogator mentions a rapist he was interviewing. He started out by telling him, "Hey, I know the law says this... but I understand why you did it. Man, she's hot." He played him perfectly and got a full, earnest confession, (and the maximum allowed sentence) all by being nice and agreeing with the guy who was just a victim of The Man and those evil feminists wanting women to be treated like human beings. I think that the problem with this is the fact that it takes a really smart person to be able to do this. You'd need a guy who is an actor-psychologist-con man, and you'd need a lot of them to interrogate all of the different prisoners whom they think have information. I think that such people are rare, and in their place you get the thugs who are happy to waterboard people. "Cpl Shmuckatelli's getting people to talk way faster than that easygoing dipshit who shares his food with the prisoners. Why is that guy still around, anyway?"
I don't understand the debate about whether or not torture was/is justified. It was illegal, and they still did it. (Right? Correct me if I'm wrong.) Isn't that pretty cut and dried? If a guy murders someone, do people say "well the dead guy was an asshole though, so whatever." No, murder is illegal, period. The question shouldn't be "what do you think of the illegal torture methods the CIA used?" it should be "why the fuck is it so easy for the CIA to break the law like this and get away with it?" Like when the NSA stuff started coming out, a lot of people seemed to be saying "ok they lied to us and gathered all our information… but is that so bad? I have nothing to hide, maybe it's not so bad." Fuck that, the fact that they did it at all is the scary part. When a giant government agency starts playing by their own rules and ignoring the law, that in itself is fucked up.
While I've been admittedly read into to this, opinion-wise, from both sides, I still have yet to hear an unbiased version of the facts (or, at least, the report's facts) as to what actually happened. Can someone please give a pleb a primer as to what allegedly took place? I feel like this is a legitimate question.
The problem here is that just because he has decided that "enemy non-combatants" aren't considered "prisoners of war" as per the Geneva Convention doesn't mean that he has allowed or condoned torture. If you talk to a military lawyer, they'll likely argue in circles about the various GC conditions that need to be met for someone to be considered a "prisoner of war". They might be right about that, but I really couldn't comment as to the particulars of what the GC requires for one to be considered a "prisoner of war" vs. an "enemy combatant" vis-avis a nation's obligations to treat detainees as one vs. the other because, well, I'm not a lawyer. But you just said so within your own quotation, that the memo said clearly that prisoners are to be treated in a manner consistent with the GC, which means that whatever memo Bush signed clearly doesn't mean he has authorized torture or provided amnesty to anyone who has conducted torture. But I suppose that brings up another question. The U.S. government had previously admitted to water-boarding and other techniques and there was a discussion as to whether or not that was "torture", and even a presidential aide drafted a legal letter that tried to differentiate the level of pain that was required for something to be considered "torture". Which makes the moral outrage a bit funny - the U.S. government had admitted a long time ago that it had performed extremely painful procedures on detainees and the minor debate at that time was about whether or not what happened was "torture". Even when pictures of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison were released, there was a lot of talk that what happened was no different than your typical fraternity hazing ritual, which is kind of insane in its own way. What's so different now?
I'm too lazy to type my version. I tried to find articles for my students about this, so here are 3 that give decent overviews. This is the most basic. The huge new Senate report on CIA torture, explained for Vox I think the New York Times did a better job. Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations But since I can't assign The Times without people 'round these parts thinking I'm a heathen liberal here is the write up from Fox News which is good as well Senate panel releases scathing report on CIA interrogations amid security warnings
With all due respect (though I WILL read those articles I promise), can we get like a 10-bullet point summary of what exactly happened?
No, you really can't. The report covers way too much. The best I can tell you is the actual report, on pages 7 through about 20 has numbered points 1 - 20 which outlines the findings.
Three good ones: So they detained people illegally, didn't punish their personnel for "significant violations," and used unapproved torture techniques. No no wait, I'm sorry, enhanced interrogation techniques. Like I said before, it kind of blows my mind that this is a debate. Even if you convinced me that torture is an effective, necessary evil, that's still not really even the point. The CIA is making up its own rules and getting away with it; they've done it before and apparently they're still doing it. That's completely fucked up. It's also not good for the integrity of the country when its own central intelligence agency is pulling shit like that.
Actually, this is another Hitchens article that is nearly prophetic: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... umane.html If the Brits could manage to not torture Nazi spies during WWII, don't tell me we can't not torture terrorists in the 21st century.
You're asking that a 525 page report about a complex human rights issue be boiled down to a few bullets for you. If you want to engage in a complex discussion or understand a complex issue, it's probably best if you do enough reading to understand it instead of having it spoonfed. If you don't have the time to read up on the subject, leave it until another time when you do.