I'm absolutely, 100% against torture of enemy combatants. This is such a slippery slope to go down and we didn't stop with torture either. For fuck sakes, we assassinated an American citizen without apprehension or trial. If these two behaviors don't speak volumes about our morality, I don't know what will. At the same time, it really rustles my jimmies every time I see this photo below and I stop feeling so bad for the guys who got the rectal feeding tube. Spoiler For me, the reality of the situation and as mentioned earlier, nothing will harden our enemies resolve more than knowing how we are treating our prisoners. How many of the detainees at Gitmo and other black sites around the world that aren't even mentioned have been released back into the general population? How many of those do you think were innocent? How many of those innocents that were released do you think went on to support or take part in terrorism against the U.S. because of their treatment? I say almost all of them. This was such a bad idea and I sincerely hope it is brought to an end because we are fueling this fire with our behavior.
I was just asking for a general primer, because all I've read has been too politically-tinted on one side or another and/or just takes the "fuck America!!!" stance. And upon asking that question in this thread, and reading the answers, it was unfortunately exactly as I thought: one big tangled ball of fucked-upness. There's no right or kinda-wrong. There's just.... all wrong.
The answers in this thread have been pretty civilized and factual. Even the part where people are discussing one administration or another, its been based on facts of things that happened. Check out the Wall Street Journal articles on it or something, those will give you the cliff notes version.
I think the biggest part is I just don't want to acknowledge this actually happened. I live in this country, and support it, contingent upon a moral basis being upheld. If this was a few "rogue" individuals I might understand it, but this was systemic. And it makes me question, if they did that then, what are they doing now that I don't know about? What will the next report be in 10 years? And do I really want to support this?
Focus: What do you think about this? Do the ends of a program like this justify the means? Attempting to think about this objectively is difficult because of the emotions I (or we) went through on 9-11. Seeing the picture of people jumping from the building again makes me want to "go to war" all over again. But, remove the emotion and there is no world where this is ok from a moral standpoint. I know I said earlier in this thread that I don't care what happens to known/proven terrorists from a torture stand point, that's just not accurate. I want them draw and quartered, I want them dead, I want their families dead. Again though, that's just emotion and anger. Think about a husband who catches another guy raping his wife, or child. What would you do? If I look at it while attempting to remove all of that this is wrong, so totally and completely wrong that I'm embarrassed for our country. It has been brought up that quantifying a program like this is nearly impossible. If good intel is a result could we have gotten it through other means? Who knows. Even if it were effective it would be morally wrong. Still, when I factor in my emotions I would probably try to look the other way while it happened. Alt-Focus: What do you do with the people involved in this program? I think this is difficult. Did the ones actually torturing people make the decision to do so? Were they following orders? What is the suicide rate among the interrogators? Depression rate? Were people chosen for this line of work because of a predisposition to violence and a broken moral compass? Those who made the decisions must bear responsibility, those who carried out the orders have to be looked at on an individual basis. I have to believe there were some prison guards at the German concentration camps that didn't enjoy, follow order completely, and or showed some compassion to their captives and should face lesser or no penalty. That said I'm glad I won't have to sit in judgment.
It's interesting, because when I was in Military College, we spent a lot of time studying The Massacre of My Lai in order to help us understand that as a soldier, you don't just blindly follow orders; you have a moral and ethical obligation as a human being that trumps all. It'd be really interesting to see some insight into the program to see how many people that were involved spoke up against it, tried to move away from it or be reassigned, versus those who actively sought it out and treated it like their own little Island of Dr. Moreau.
I found this to be amusing when I was going through boot camp and combat training. There's a mantra that we repeated over and over and over again. "Discipline is instant and willing obedience to all orders, respect for authority, self-reliance, and teamwork" (I avoided typing "SIR" at the end of it, as that ended up being part of the mantra) Day in and day out. When the platoon fucked up, we sat in a push-up position and yelled that over and over again. When someone fucked up egregiously, he ended up in the sand pit yelling that over and over again. One day, they gave us a thirty-minute class on Ethics and how you have the obligation to refuse an illegal order. It was muddled and badly presented with very little effort. Too many kids fell asleep during the class, (or maybe they just felt like fucking with us) so we all went out to the sand pit, did push-ups, and yelled Discipline is Instant and Willing Obedience To All Orders several dozen times. Oh hey, it's on the Marines' Twitter, too.
As much as I want to say "They're terrorists, fuck them, what we did was ok." I can't say that because then to me, we are no better than they are. Let's kill them with kindness, show them we are superior beings. Then I think about ISIS and saying it's ok to rape women, and all the other radical shit they do and my blood boils again and start to think it's all ok. Truth is I don't know what to think right now, and I honestly never really will because my opinion will switch every minute. This is a fucked up world we live in with all kinds of fucked up people and there are too many thoughts and emotions going through my head so I'm just going to go back to my little world and try and forget all the fucked up people on this planet.
Call me a cold hearted bastard, but I don't care about torture involving things like water boarding and sleep deprivation when it's done on known terrorists. If you think these practices put a country on the same par as ISIS, the Nazis, and the Khmer Rouge you're a fucking idiot. Really. What bothered me about the report is the reduced standards for holding detainees, which basically seemed to be as simple as 'suspected of knowing something.' Then, there's the part about threatening family members. That needs to stop. I shudder to think what our government was doing during the Vietnam war era in the name of 'enhanced interrogation'. We'll likely never know all the details. I've been in the middle of starting a new job and moving the last few days so I'm just starting to catch up on the story now. I don't believe people when they say torture never works. It's obviously very imperfect and has it's flaws, but if you have twenty known terrorists in custody odds are someone is going to break and you're going to find out something useful. However that being said, I don't think anyone on this board is really in a position to judge the effectiveness of these procedures, and certainly not yet when we have everybody and their mother throwing all their opinions against the wall (most of which is partisan motivated).
Dear everyone, I'd like to provide some specificity to the warnings that are given at the beginning of each Serious Thread - you know, the ones about how it's a sensitive topic, so please don't act like a... well, not to be repetitive, but a fucking idiot. What constitutes said behavior, you might ask? I refer you to Mr. Trinker's first paragraph, above. Taking an opinion reasoned through by others in the thread and, with no commentary, stating that the holder of those opinions are fucking idiots does, in fact, make you the same. Kindly refrain from doing this.
God, it's like Wikipedia was invented for moments like this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding
I'd be happy to respond to that, but since it doesn't go along with the board narrative, it'd just be deleted. Edit: Well, since you both want to respond I'll try again. The comment Binary quoted, as I wrote earlier was not directed at anyone in the thread. It was in response to things I read in the media/blogosphere. But since you seem to actually think water boarding makes America comparable to those regimes let's take a closer look, namely... - systematic genocide - mass sex slavery - repression of all civil rights for citizens in the regime - medical experiments and mutilation of children ... do I need to on? So they're equal because they both did water boarding? Are you really making that argument? That because Americans water boarded terrorists they're the same as a regime that killed 25% of it's own population? They're the same as a regime that tried to exterminate several ethnic groups? I mean, I know you guys love your hyperbole, but this is getting really far gone. Moreover, I never said I agreed with everything they did, quite the opposite in regards to the whole story. But does that make them Nazis, or ISIS? Not by a fucking long shot.
Hold on there a second. There is no board narrative other than in a serious thread of this nature (as we warned about at the top) we thought it would be better for everyone if we all tried to keep the exchange of ideas civil, whatever the opinion. Yes, America has never engaged in this type of behavior (shut up, Chief Running Two Waters, and stop being such a Goddamn pussy, we gave you blankets and some desert territory you fucking ingrates!) I will admit, my knowledge and further review of American history doesn't reveal any such scheme (unless, of course, you were black and a slave, then hey, fair game!). Ok, fair enough. If, for instance, the US engaged in wholesale spying on all of its citizens, killed American citizens without charge or trial, held citizens without charge indefinitely, had secret courts, relaxed warrant requirements, targeted groups for speech, would that qualify? Yes, we did. It was in the early 1900's and we exposed children to syphilis. We also conducted experiments in Tuskegee on poor black males, pretending to treat them for syphilis when all that was really done was charting the progress of the disease. But that ended a long time ago. Like 1972. Like the year I was born. Yes, you do. "The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." - Lao Tzu I am surprised and heartened by the majority of the responses in this thread. I assumed (like the spying scandal) most people would be evenly split. It horrified me. The behavior we - and it is we as our government is us - are engaging in since 9/11 is abysmal. We are acting like those that we are fighting. The dialogue in the media is atrocious. The 'sides' are split as to whether or not it was effective. Really? This is the benchmark? I guess I was hoping for more compelling arguments on the other side about the necessity, the inevitability of the onslaught of terrorists bringing America to our knees and destroying our way of life if we didn't do this. But the 'terrorists' have already won. We have eschewed our way of life. We act like those that we fear (think Boston Red Sox/Yankees rivalry). And we quibble about 'effectiveness?' Do we not have a soul anymore? Doesn't human decency mean anything? Aren't we supposed to be the good guys? What the hell happened to being better than the other guy? We should not engage in this behavior because by any benchmark it is wrong. This is not who we were. But it is who we've become. We need to stop it. You want to be a World Leader, America? Leading at gunpoint isn't leading, it's bullying. Lead by example, by excellence. This program and the arguments of those saying we shouldn't have exposed it, terrifies me.
Example and excellence are hard. They require that the ego be laid aside and the really hard, truly self aware decisions be made. Americans don't have the stomach to stare themselves collectively in the mirror and admit that for everything we get right, we get, and got, some things horribly horribly wrong. If we can't do that, we can't begin to do ANYTHING to right the ship. edit: Also, Americans have a difficult time separating "Muslims" from "The Taliban/Terrorists". The attack in Pakistan today will reinforce for many that these are subhuman people whose belief structure causes them to deserve this type of treatment.
You'll notice that nowhere did I say that they were equal. I think you're using that hyperbole because you're grasping at straws. Are you really saying it's okay for America to do some of the bad things that the Nazis and Khmer Rouge did because at least America isn't doing the even worse things? But then, I think the point here is that you just don't think waterboarding is a particularly bad thing to do to someone, and I think you have that opinion because it's been practiced by the U.S. government. Principles and the rule of law start to mean less and less when you're willing to forgive yourself for pretty much anything.
I've been thinking about this- I have a feeling it'd be a different scenario if Guantanamo's prisoners weren't mostly (if not all?) Muslims from across the world, i.e. folks that have largely been demonized in the eyes of the West during the past few decades. On another (very different) messageboard discussing this I see a self-righteous "fuck 'em all" attitude from the majority that doesn't seem to take in account that these are in fact real human beings the USA has been torturing just like them, except with darker skin.
I'm sorry VI, but what America did in the 1840s or 1905 has absolutely nothing to do with 21rst century water boarding, but ok, if you want to judge a country by every bad thing that's ever happened in their entire history, then sure, we're all Nazis. Your response looked a bit like that was what you were saying. As I said earlier, I'm not ok with everything that was in the report, but it's not the water boarding of the known terrorists that bothers me. It's the part where they were doing these things to anyone suspected of knowing anything and threatening family members that irks me. If they raised the standards is it still going to happen to innocents? I would say probably even if much less frequent, but I can accept that. Like I can accept some civilians are going to die in any war, and some innocent people will wind up in prison while understanding that doesn't mean we need to get rid our justice system. Some people won't accept that, but I'm going to remain skeptical of this view that you can get all the information you need by being buddy-buddy with the terrorists. Again, don't think anyone on here is anywhere close to qualified enough to evaluate how well this method works and that one doesn't. I would agree that a lot of Americans are ignorantly lumping all Muslims together, but on the other side of that some people seem to really believe every problem over there can be solved with more money, more education, more compassion, and sadly that's just as ignorant. Yes, most of them are not active terrorists, but a lot more support terrorism and middle age barbarism than the bleeding hearts seem willing to believe. It kind of reminds me of how Ben Affleck was on Bill Maher recently and kept speaking as if 99%+ of them are great normal people, and it's just that one little fringe group giving them all a bad name. Sadly, that just isn't true. A lot of people think too that this report is going to help terrorists recruit. I don't know. Maybe. You would think that would be the case, but then you look at how Americans and the west are already viewed in the middle east and I'm not sure it's going to change anything. Most of them already think it was either the United States or Israel who orchestrated 9/11, and that we're over there harvesting civilians' organs (and this is just naming a couple of bizarre common beliefs) so while this report actually happened I'm not so sure it changes anything. At least not at the impact some people have implied.
Yeah, but was the dead guy brown? Did he have a long funny name? Look like some other asshole who T-boned your son's car? You're ignoring the extenuating circumstances here. (sarcasm, of course) Folks in this thread saying "well ISIS does worse" like it's automatically assumed all the people tortured belonged to ISIS. I guess if it's unlikely you personally will get sent to Gitmo (due to your skin color, name, family history, or immigration status) then fuck those other people, right? https://www.google.com/search?q=innocen ... 8&oe=utf-8