if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803
Back in the USSR
by Lee
Via Sullivan comes this brilliant piece in the NYT today.
In 2002, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon became concerned that standard questioning was inadequate for suspected terrorists and turned to a military training program called Survival, Evasion, Reconnaissance and Escape, or SERE. For decades, SERE trainers had exposed aviators and others at high risk for capture to Soviet-style tactics, including disrupted sleep, exposure to extreme heat and cold, and hours in uncomfortable stress positions. Sometimes the ordeal included waterboarding, in which a prisoner’s face is covered with cloth and water is poured from above to create a feeling of suffocation.
Some of those techniques have been used on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the C.I.A.’s secret overseas jails for high-level operatives of Al Qaeda.
Many SERE veterans were appalled at the “reverse engineering” of their methods, said Charles A. Morgan III, a Yale psychiatrist who has worked closely with SERE trainers for a decade.
“How did something used as an example of what an unethical government would do become something we do?” he asked.
The answer is right there in the question—we are being led by an unethical government. But wait, it gets better!
His question is only underscored by a 1956 article, “Communist Interrogation,” in The Annals of Neurology and Psychology, recently turned up by the Intelligence Science Board, which advises the spy agencies. Written by doctors working as Defense Department consultants, Lawrence E. Hinkle Jr. and Harold G. Wolff, the article shows that methods embraced after 2001 were once considered torture that would produce false information.
False information? No, torture would never give us false information, would it? So what was up with communist interrogation? Quotes in italics are from the 1956 article.
The effects of isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger produce disturbances of mood, attitudes and behavior in nearly all prisoners. The living organism cannot entirely withstand such assaults. The Communists do not look upon these assaults as “torture.” But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.
Of course there’s a reason. When the soviets do it, it’s torture. When we do it, it’s an “enhanced interrogation technique,” and anyone who disagrees with employing these tactics is a Bush-hatimg left-wing crypto-socialist who wants to see terrists destroy Amurka.
Another [technique] widely used is that of requiring the prisoner to stand throughout the interrogation session or to maintain some other physical position which becomes painful. This, like other features of the KGB procedure, is a form of physical torture, in spite of the fact that the prisoners and KGB officers alike do not ordinarily perceive it as such. Any fixed position which is maintained over a long period of time ultimately produces excruciating pain.
Yeah. but it doesn’t leave bruises or marks, so it must not be torture. And besides, anyone we torture is a terrorist. If we do it long enough, we’ll get the confession, thus giving us justification for the torture in the first place.
In typical Communist legalistic fashion, the N.K.V.D. rationalized its use of torture and pressure in the interrogation of prisoners of war. When it desired to use such methods against a prisoner or to obtain from him a propaganda statement or “confession,” it simply declared the prisoner a “war-crimes uspect” and informed him that, therefore, he was not subject to international rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war.
Wow! So the Soviets had a designation where they could take a prisoner, with the stroke of a pen declare him to be of a certain status, which would subsequently deny him whatever protections he might have had through international law. President Bush’s administration has created such a distinction, where with the stroke of a pen a prisoner is denied not only his rights under international law, but any rights and protections he have been entitled to under the US Constitution.
In the last few days I’ve posted an article quoting Nazi documents where the make the same bullshit arguments as the Bush administration. Now here’s documentary proof that the communists did exactly the same thing. In response to this post I expect countless rationalizations from the usual crop of people.
In this post I wrote, “Bush isn’t bad, he’s weak. And weak men can be encouraged to do bad things.” QED.
Update: Here’s something I wrote in 2005. Read the current post first, then pop on back to the 2005 post.
This is where the short-sightedness comes in. I’m not saying, suggesting, intimating, or hinting that Bush is going to turn into a tyrant or a despot. He’s not going to be rounding up Americans to lock them up in cattle cars and ship them off to the camps. But Bush is only going to be president until 2008; who’s next? Would you want, say, Hillary Clinton to have the power to imprison anyone she liked without any kind of oversight? Who’s going to be president 20 years from now? This future president, who is probably in his 30s right now, can you say for certain that he is not someone who will abuse the power of lettre de cachet? What’s to stop this future president from declaring his political enemies to be enemy combatants and having them shipped off to a detention center somewhere, stripped of their constitutional protections? Don’t think it’s so crazy, Abraham Lincoln did a number of things in very much this vein after he suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus. It can very well happen again.
See now? Do you see what I’m talking about?
Update 2: Follow-up here.
Comments
I’d like to ask you a favor: Please set up another category called ‘torture’, and re-code this, and your past work on the subject. You have done some extraordinary work on this subject, and it would be wonderful to use this as a resource when ever, “The Argument” comes up.
Well done.
I have mentioned several times that I was cadre at the S.E.R.E. school referenced in the article. Our training for the students included all but the waterboarding,( they never did that while I was there).
The training did include some other methods to “prepare” the potential POW’s for what they might face if captured including mock executions, and requiring them to work in the garden, raising thier own food, serving them fish heads which they cooked into soup to eat.
We also kept bags over thier heads most of the time.
Of course these were all done under very controlled conditions. But never did I feel like I was torturing our students. By today’s definition, I guess I’m a criminal.
I’m a pretty big guy, and had a full beard and a Russian uniform. Apparently, I was hard to forget, as many of the students sought me out after the conclusion of the class for being a genuinely intimidating actor, and every one of them thanked me for helping them learn how to survive, even though they were scared shitless at times. There is a tipping point in every class where the students start to forget that it’s not real.
I guess my point is that my impression of this school is that it is helpful to the students who would depend on it to survive in the future. I can see how this type of interrogation would become part of the military psyche over the decades and even used in real world situations. We never, ever harmed our students, but through these techniques, many of them eventually talked to the interrogators. It often worked.
Perhaps the thinking that is if we do this to our own troops with no negative effect on them, but positive results from the techniques, maybe this kind of thing would work on terrorists.
I agree that torture doesn’t work and is immoral, but I guess I have a different definition of the word torture.
I’m still looking for a definition that I can subscribe to.
By today’s definition, I guess I’m a criminal.
Not at all. They volunteered for it, or at least completing it was a condition of achieving something they wanted. At any time they could have stood up and said “Fuck you, I’m out of here”. Of course, that means dismissal from the army (or whatever), but they still have the option. The lonely goat herd picking edelweiss in the Tora Bora has no such option.
Abraham Lincoln did a number of things in very much this vein after he suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus.
Yes, you all remember when that damn Bush suspended habeas corpus, declared martial law in Baltimore, deported a Democratic congressman for demanding an end to the war, used federal troops to violently put down anti-war riots in New York City, imprisoned enemy combatants without trial who were captured on enemy soil-where thousands of them died of neglect, and authorized the burning of a few dozen cities and towns on our own soil to terrorize the inhabitants.
Oh, you don’t remember that? Well, Lincoln did do all those things. You want to talk tyranny? Bush is a lightweight compared to Lincoln on the Despotometer. For all of these violations of human rights, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and saved our country. What has Bush done in committing all of these “abuses”? Other than preventing the Islamomaniacs from killing thousands of people in this country, nothing really.
Watching you become more and more unhinged over the past couple of years has been most entertaining.
Other than preventing the Islamomaniacs from killing thousands of people in this country, nothing really.
Since you can’t prove a negative, how do you know that he prevented anything with torture or wholesale gutting of rights? One thing preventing Bush from Lincoln’s activities is the transparency of the ubiquitous press and Internet.
While freeing the slaves was a good thing, Lincoln’s burning of the South was an abomination. I am sure what seemed to justify it was the secession of these states from the Union, but the Federal government made the case that they couldn’t do that. Effectively, Lincoln burned cities in his charge.
I don’t really think that there is a dime’s difference between people if you remove the details. We all share enough DNA to interbreed, and the human condition remains remarkably consistent throughout its history. Humans need a certain level of misery to survive. If we don’t have it, we will create it.
We have many policies that reinforce this notion. No one really gives a shit about minor addicts languishing unproductively in prison and released back into a society that will not assist them with an education or employment. We sneer at the stinky bum wandering the streets talking to the air. We tell Katrina victims it is their own fault for their plight because they were too stupid to move from New Orleans.
Why? Because we are all secretly glad it isn’t us that bears the burden of mankind’s misery, forgetting that it could be one day. With a flick of God’s wrist, any of us could be in any of those situations. A car wreck, a medical condition, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time could place any of us in that misery.
We attempt to transfer that risk to others for survival. It is a subconscious reaction. The addict, dirty bum, communist, terrorist, illegal alien, etc. are all scapegoats used for this transference. We naturally get pissed that others in the world are using us to play that role.
Thrill,
Bush has done not even what Lincoln could have done. He has brought us to the precipice of losing our republic entirely. We are only ten to twenty years away from becoming an empire just like what happened to Rome when Julius Caesar assumed the position of dictator for life.
We are at a point of crisis so severe, that the only way to fix the system would be the following:
1) States call a constitutional convention and use that to depose the entire elected government of the United States.
2) States pass a constitutional amendment giving one man, such as Ron Paul the same power to reform the US Code and bureaucracy that a dictator in Rome would have enjoyed.
3) Every leading Democrat and Republican is barred from politics for life.
I would have no problem with declaring Ron Paul to be dictator, with the power to rule by decree to rewrite all federal laws and regulations, as well as do things ranging from firing, to ordering the summary execution of any federal employee or serviceman who fails to obey his orders in a way that undermines the constitution.
Since you can’t prove a negative, how do you know that he prevented anything with torture or wholesale gutting of rights?
Well, if Bush is torturing people and gutting rights (as some like to say), and we haven’t been attacked on the level of 9/11 since that day; deductive reasoning would suggest that we CAN prove this negative.
One thing preventing Bush from Lincoln’s activities is the transparency of the ubiquitous press and Internet.
Lincoln also contended with the limitations of the press. The newspapers of the day were far more partisan in his day than even the NYT or LA Times could dream of being. As for transparency, the number one source of intelligence regarding Union troop strength and movements available to the Confederates was Northern newspapers. Given his commitment to his cause, it’s hard to imagine that Lincoln would have been deterred by Chris Matthews or blogs such as this one.
Lincoln’s burning of the South was an abomination
I happen to think that all of the things I listed were abominations. They were effective in fulfilling the objective though. General Lee specifically said before surrendering that he did not want to drag out the war because it would invite the Union troops to go into areas of the South where they would not otherwise have gone and wreak havoc.
Posted by FlyingMonkeyOverlord on 06/04/07 at 07:50 AM from
Thrill,Bush has done not even what Lincoln could have done. He has brought us to the precipice of losing our republic entirely. We are only ten to twenty years away from becoming an empire just like what happened to Rome when Julius Caesar assumed the position of dictator for life.
All you had to do is read the list of Lincoln’s acts during the Civil War to see that Bush hasn’t even come close. Be serious. As Lincoln said to General Hooker, I would say to Bush: Win the war and I’ll risk the dictatorship.
Well, if Bush is torturing people and gutting rights (as some like to say), and we haven’t been attacked on the level of 9/11 since that day; deductive reasoning would suggest that we CAN prove this negative.
You’re absolutely right. This also proves that Bush’s torture policies have kept us safe from Martian attack.
As Lincoln said to General Hooker, I would say to Bush: Win the war and I’ll risk the dictatorship.
Well, unless you consider yourself fucking Emperor of America, the decision to “risk” the dictatorship is not yours to make. I don’t want to risk a dictatorship, I want to live in freedom. You just want to be controlled.
This also proves that Bush’s torture policies have kept us safe from Martian attack.
Had it been Bush’s stated goal to defend us from Martian attack, then yes, I would say so. It was not his stated goal, however; his stated goal was to defend us against attacks from Islamic Terrorists whether they’re from Mars, Trinidad, Pakistan, or wherever. In any case, he has been successful.
Well, unless you consider yourself fucking Emperor of America, the decision to “risk” the dictatorship is not yours to make.
We all make that decision. You accept the risk of dictatorship too because of your unwillingness to back up your bile with principles. If you are so afraid of Bush becoming Caesar, quit being so chickenshit and call for his impeachment.
If you are so afraid of Bush becoming Caesar, quit being so chickenshit and call for his impeachment.
He’s a lame duck. He’s done. Look, moron, I’ve covered this a thousand times.
This is where the short-sightedness comes in. I’m not saying, suggesting, intimating, or hinting that Bush is going to turn into a tyrant or a despot. He’s not going to be rounding up Americans to lock them up in cattle cars and ship them off to the camps. But Bush is only going to be president until 2008; who’s next? Would you want, say, Hillary Clinton to have the power to imprison anyone she liked without any kind of oversight? Who’s going to be president 20 years from now? This future president, who is probably in his 30s right now, can you say for certain that he is not someone who will abuse the power of lettre de cachet? What’s to stop this future president from declaring his political enemies to be enemy combatants and having them shipped off to a detention center somewhere, stripped of their constitutional protections? Don’t think it’s so crazy, Abraham Lincoln did a number of things in very much this vein after he suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus. It can very well happen again.
What’s the president 30 years from now going to do, huh?
He’s a lame duck. He’s done.
Are you kidding? So that means you expect him to step down once his term is over! Therefore, he isn’t a dictator and once again you’ve made your own points moot.
What’s the president 30 years from now going to do, huh?
Who can say? Lincoln carried out such spectacular civil rights abuses and yet President T. Roosevelt managed to avoid becoming a dictator.
I have more faith in our system and our people than you do, I suppose.
Thrill,
There is no verifiable cause and effect relationship between Bush’s policies and the lack of successful domestic terrorism. For all we know, 9-11 2.0 is being orchestrated as we speak and we’ll hear about it on TV tonight. There is simply no proof that Bush’s policies have been effective at preventing terrorist attacks, except by idiots.
I have more faith in our system and our people than you do, I suppose.
No you don’t. You have no faith in the system, which is why you want to bend the rules and change it and risk dictatorships just so you can go to sleep at night without being worried if there are terrists hiding under your bed.
No you don’t. You have no faith in the system, which is why you want to bend the rules and change it and risk dictatorships just so you can go to sleep at night without being worried if there are terrists hiding under your bed.
I don’t think so Lee, but I think Thrill underestimates our enemy just a wee bit. I don’t think he understands that a part of the enemy winning is making us compromise our freedoms.
Terrorists hate us for our freedoms right? seems to me the destruction of Habaeus Corpus would be a wonderful victory against liberty and freedom. what better treat is there than to watch your enemy destroy themselves?
No you don’t. You have no faith in the system, which is why you want to bend the rules and change it and risk dictatorships
The system works because it can adapt with the times. We will overcome this threat as we have others and the Constitution will survive. We have 200+ years of tradition of freedom and if you really think that it’s so frail that an unpopular president like Bush can eliminate that with the “stroke of a pen” then you clearly lack faith and any kind of historical perspective. Hell, the guy can’t even get Social Security Reform done.
There is no verifiable cause and effect relationship between Bush’s policies and the lack of successful domestic terrorism.
Oh, we have a special kind of twit with us in you today, Flying Monkey Overlord. I guess that the thwarting of the recent JFK Airport plot was the work of Susan Sarandon. Even Lee was objective enough to give credit to the Administration.
There is simply no proof that Bush’s policies have been effective at preventing terrorist attacks, except by idiots.
Except, of course, for the total lack of domestic terrorist attacks. Hey, why let facts get in the way?
I don’t think he understands that a part of the enemy winning is making us compromise our freedoms.
That may be so, although I tend to think that they consider our freedoms to be evidence of our weakness, not a strength. What they really want to do is cripple our economy with attacks on financial targets, spending on counter terrorism, and higher gas prices. They think our economy makes us strong and our freedoms make us decadent and weak against “true believers” such as themselves.
Thrill,
You spoke too soon. Once again, I am vindicated by current events. Homeland Security has just blown this attack off, calling it technically infeasible. I do give the President credit for that, as I said that his policies have been great at catching the idiots among the jihadists.
Except, of course, for the total lack of domestic terrorist attacks. Hey, why let facts get in the way?
Do you actually think that if they foiled a 9/11-level terrorist attack that they’d be silent about it. President Bush’s ratings are so low that most Americans across the board can actually find common ground of wanting his ass out of office. If he could claim credit for saving thousands of lives, you can bet your ass he’d claim credit for it and make sure that even previously undiscovered tribes in the Amazon basin knew about it.
If he could claim credit for saving thousands of lives, you can bet your ass he’d claim credit for it and make sure that even previously undiscovered tribes in the Amazon basin knew about it.
Is that a paraphrase of a joke from The Young Ones?
“Rick, I don’t mean to say that that joke was predictable, but there are as-yet undiscovered tribes in the heart of the Preuvian jungle who knew you were going to say that.”
That may be so, although I tend to think that they consider our freedoms to be evidence of our weakness, not a strength. What they really want to do is cripple our economy with attacks on financial targets, spending on counter terrorism, and higher gas prices. They think our economy makes us strong and our freedoms make us decadent and weak against “true believers” such as themselves.
What a load of horseshit. Look they use the same age old Jerry fallwell bytes to justify terror on innocents. “We’re godless heathans, our women aren’t burhkaed and we listen to crazy shit that has us brain-washed by satan.
and any little victory works for them. if they can get our government to cave in on promises made to the citizens how is that not a victory for them? And they’re not stupid, they know what’s important to Americans. Freedom. that’s it. don’t tell us what the fuck to do and don’t tell us how to do it, it’s all we’ve ever asked for and the basis of our country’s foundation.
I’m sure they’re laughing they’re asses off watching debates like these. All it took was one attack and a lot of fear tactics and we’re cowering bitches begging for our rights to be taken away.
they might as well institute Sharia and get it over with if this is how easily we’re defeated.
they might as well institute Sharia and get it over with if this is how easily we’re defeated.
The rallying cry used to be “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
Somewhere along the way this has been contorted into “Take my liberty, or give me Sharia.”
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One of the things that happens in karate dojos to “toughen up” students is to go into a deep horse stance and maintain it for 15 minutes or more. You can, over time, build some huge fucking leg muscles from doing this and get though it unfazed. And by “over time” I mean after doing it every day for months on end. I’ve seen some people hold a static position for 30 minutes, and we considered them to be fucking inhuman.
However, even for most black belts that have are used to this sort of stuff during hours of training, it’s a total bitch. The last time we did static position training most of us (all black belts) started to experience muscle tremors after about 7 or 8 minutes. After 15 it was agony, and many of us had cramps up to two days later. It hurts like all fucking hell - don’t kid yourself that it doesn’t.