Verschärfte Vernehmung

by Lee

Posted by on 05/29/07 at 10:48 AM from

Were Bush/Rumsfield/Cheney to loose a war, there is no doubt they would be charged with war crimes. The only reason they are not in jail/executed is because they have not lost a war.

Posted by on 05/29/07 at 07:56 PM from

What’s the matter, pro-torture folks.  Cat got your tongue?

Aren’t you the hypocrite? 

Paveway blew your arm off?  No sweat.
Shot through the head?  Great.
Grenade to the nuts?  Bring it on.
Squashed by a tank?  You deserve it, bitch.
Flame thrower melted your face off?  Awesome.
Bayoneted in the spleen?  Stop crying Islamofacist.

Oh wait, we caught you?  New rules guys.

How the hell do you justify the horror of battle, and not the horror of captivity?  You can justify killing or disfiguring someone to defend your beliefs, but you won’t degrade someone?  You won’t hurt them?  WTF kind of sense does that make? 

How the hell could a guy like Al-Zarqawi be in play for untold amounts of pain, suffering, disfigurement, and death while he’s sitting at home stroking it to some porn, while a guy who was just shooting at you on the battlefield and knows where Zarqawi is, is off limits?

I’m sorry, but your position is idiotic.  If you are willing to use violence as a means to achieve your goal, you’ve already crossed the torture line.  It doesn’t make a difference whether it happens in a jail cell or someone’s living room.

There’s no such thing as civility in war.  War is war.  We’re trying to kill each other because our diametrically opposed idiology cannot be resolved civilly.  If you’re willing to murder someone who belongs to a group that has an immediate desire and ability to kill you, that immediacy does not go away simply because you’ve captured him.

That said, I in no way “support torture.” I don’t support torture in the same way I don’t support murdering people.  Seems to me though, there’s a pretty damned big gray area that justifies me in blowing someone’s head off in the defense of myself and those I love.  If murder can be justified, then there’s a gray area for torture too.

As for Sully’s equivalencing:

“It would be extremely instructive for everyone, some members of the Wehrmacht were already able to do so, to inspect such a concentration camp. Once they have seen it, they are convinced of the fact that no one had been sent there unjustly ; that it is the offal of criminals and freaks. No better demonstration of the laws of inheritance and race, as set forth by Doctor Guett, exists than such a concentration camp. There you can find people with hydrocephalus, people who are cross-eyed, deformed, half-Jewish, and a number of racially inferior products. All that is assembled there. Of course, we distinguish between those inmates who are only there for a few months for the purpose of education, and those who are to stay for a very long time. On the whole, education consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis, for the prisoners have, for the most part, slave-like souls; and only very few people of real character can be found there.”

These slave-like souls were subject to a different set of guidelines in the Shutzstaffel-Sicherheitdienst manual.  They were subject to forced labor, laboratory testing, starvation, rape, mutilation, and ultimately mass genocide.  This is the dotted line that’s buried in the equivocation that sully is making.

American military approved methods?  Two words. Fuck you.

Posted by Lee on 05/29/07 at 08:28 PM from

How the hell do you justify the horror of battle, and not the horror of captivity?  You can justify killing or disfiguring someone to defend your beliefs, but you won’t degrade someone?  You won’t hurt them?  WTF kind of sense does that make?

It makes perfect sense, because it depends on whether the suspect is in captivity or not.  It’s about threat negation.  When Zarqawi is on the battlefield he’s a legitimate target, to be captured or killed as necessary.  Once he is in captivity, however, he is subject to a different set of rules.  He’s no longer a direct threat.  He’s in shackles and locked in rooms and unarmed.  He can’t do anything from that point on.

It’s just like the police.  When they’re chasing you they have wide latitude in what they can do:  car chase, run through private property, shoot to kill, taser, police dogs, and so on.  However, once the suspect is in custody the threat is negated, and none of those things are permitted. 

Look at the death penalty.  For convicted murderers, even of the worst kind, most states have switched to lethal injection.  Why not have someone beat the suspect to death with a golf club?  How about throwing them in a shark tank?  Maybe cutting off their fingers and toes and showing them up their ass?  Why not do it, they’re a convicted murderer, who gives a shit?

Look, our police are able to interrogate anyone.  The same goes for the military and CIA and everyone else.  The police manage to get even hardened criminals to talk simply by mindfucking them.  They don’t have to beat them, or cause them pain or injury or threaten them with bodily harm.  In fact, that will get a case thrown out of court.

We could have done the same thing.  We could have, from day one, extended Geneva protections or something damn close to it to these prisoners.  We could have made the process open, allowed in the Red Cross, given them access to counsel, and so on.  It would have been like Nuremberg, where the guilty were punished according to the severity of their crimes and the innocent are set free.  It would have had legitimacy in the eyes of the world.

But the real badasses had to hear that A-rab scream.  What kind of fucking pussy only wants to talk to someone?

If you’re willing to murder someone who belongs to a group that has an immediate desire and ability to kill you, that immediacy does not go away simply because you’ve captured him.

Murder is the illegal taking of a human life.  Killing someone in self-defense is not illegal.  It is, however, incumbent upon you to prove after the fact that there was indeed a threat, that the threat was imminent, and that deadly force was justified.  (Each state is different in the specifics, but that’s generally the case.) If you cannot prove that there was sufficient cause for you to use deadly force, you will likely be prosecuted for murder.

The desire for murder doesn’t go away, but the justification for it does.

Posted by Lee on 05/29/07 at 08:30 PM from

They were subject to forced labor, laboratory testing, starvation, rape, mutilation, and ultimately mass genocide.  This is the dotted line that’s buried in the equivocation that sully is making.

And the point you’re missing is that this sort of rule-bending is exactly what happened at the start of Nazi Germany, and the rules continued to be bent until Auschwitz became a reality and the rules were long forgotten.

Disrespect for a society’s fundamental principles is the way that societies rot and die from the inside out.

Posted by on 05/29/07 at 09:25 PM from

this sort of rule-bending is exactly what happened at the start of Nazi Germany,

I don’t want to get too far out on a tangent here, but Nazi Germany was founded on the inferiority of impure races.  That wasn’t rule bending.  That was the rule.  Those were the fundamental principals of the socialist state that Hitler intended to create.  It wasn’t an erosion of an ideal.  It was an ideal that was corrupt to begin with.

It’s just like the police.

No. It’s not just like the police.  Zarqawi and his ilk aren’t taken as prisoners simply because they shoot at random people.  The threat they pose isn’t just the weapon they hold.  They are members of a group that wants to impose an ideal through violent actions.  It’s the imposition of the ideal that’s the threat. 

Zarqawi is a prime example of this problem.  His personal immediate ability to harm us isn’t the main concern.  That’s not why we wanted him captive, or why we blew his ass up.  We were concerned with the methods in which he and his group intend to usurp our ideal.  The AK47 in his hand was nothing compared to the thousands of bombs and rifles under his command.  His knowledge of the conflict was the greatest weapon that he held against us.  Far more harm has come to us from that, then any weapon he fired personally.

So how does that speak to your standard of immediacy? Does that fact meet the ticking time bomb test?  You know he knows information that will result in the death of your friends.  He knows you know. 

It would have been like Nuremberg, where the guilty were punished according to the severity of their crimes and the innocent are set free.

You forget that Nuremberg took place after the war was completed.  The Nazis surrendered and were disarmed.  Nuremberg only tried a few of the most important Nazi leadership.  The evidence against them was presented without the need for secrecy regarding how that evidence was collected. 

How do you intend to mark the day when the war against Islamic terrorists is completed?  Who are the most criminal of the Islamic leaders?  How do you intend to provide evidence against them without compromising your ability to fight further Islamic fundamentalism?

Do you really believe that the world would feel that the execution of everyone that we could prove murdered or aided in the murder of innocent people was legitimate?  Hell the execution of Saddam is still a tough sell in most of the “world”

Posted by Lee on 05/29/07 at 10:07 PM from

I don’t want to get too far out on a tangent here, but Nazi Germany was founded on the inferiority of impure races.  That wasn’t rule bending.  That was the rule.  Those were the fundamental principals of the socialist state that Hitler intended to create.  It wasn’t an erosion of an ideal.  It was an ideal that was corrupt to begin with.

True, but look at the date—1937.  Hitler had only been in power for 4 years, and the process of completely killing whatever remnants of the old regime were still getting started.  The Krystallnacht wasn’t until 1938, for God’s sake, and he didn’t invade Poland until 1939.  You are correct that Hitler’s ideology was based on the inferiority of certain people’s, I see parallels to what we’re doing right now. 

Arab?  Terrorist.
Happened to be arrested in a combat area?  Terrorist.
Muslim?  Terrorist.

These are the criteria which qualify people for possible status as a terrorist.  In order to get them to “confess” to terrorism we torture them a little.  Then they “confess” to crimes of which they are not guilty, thereby justifying our treatment of them.  “See?  He’s a terrorist, and we only torture terrorists.”

We’re setting ourselves up for the same thing.  Look at RICO.  It was written to go after the mafia, and it worked quite well.  Since then it’s been used on anti-abortion and anti-war protesters, all kinds of groups for which it was never intended.  The provisions of the Patriot Act which were supposed to “keep us safe” from “terrists who want to kill us” has been used vastly more in routine criminal investigations than it has in anything related to terrorism.  The so-called national security letters turned out to be used and abused thousands more times than the government initially admitted to.

And none of this concerns you?  You’re so fucking terrified of the remote specter of terrorism that you’ll empower your own government to do all kinds of nefarious shit?  This gets back to Ben Franklin’s famous line:  “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

No. It’s not just like the police.  Zarqawi and his ilk aren’t taken as prisoners simply because they shoot at random people.  The threat they pose isn’t just the weapon they hold.  They are members of a group that wants to impose an ideal through violent actions.  It’s the imposition of the ideal that’s the threat.

Actually you’ve just mentioned two threats.  One is the immediate threat, which can and should be met with deadly force according to the ROI.  The other is a completely different threat, far better battled psychologically than with beatings and stays in the cold room.

So how does that speak to your standard of immediacy? Does that fact meet the ticking time bomb test?  You know he knows information that will result in the death of your friends.  He knows you know.

No, it does not.  It’s not called the “Possibility of a ticking time bomb” standarad.  There has to actually be a ticking time bomb.  Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that police interrogators who can get serial killers, rapists, arsonists, gang thugs, drug manufacturers, and all other kinds of criminals to talk in detail about their operations are going to be stymied by the jihadic brilliance of Zarqawi?

I’ll issue you the same challenge that I’ve been issuing here for two years.  Provide me a single scholarly article, or an op-ed written by a professional military interrogator, which supports the use of torture as a superior form of gathering actionable intelligence.  Find one, I dare you.  Because I have found countless items from experts, soldiers, interrogators, spooks, and diplomats who all day that this is simply a technique which, while it makes red white and blue cocks go all stiff, doesn’t lead to jack shit which we can actually use. 

I issued this challenge to Drumwaster and he ran out of here like a little girl and never came back.  I issued it the other day to John Cross, and he hasn’t answered it either.

Is there ANYONE out there who supports the use of torture who can provide actual evidence of its superiority as an interrogation tool?

Zarqawi has lots of info in his head.  Do we mindfuck it out of him, or do we just beat his testicles with a hammer until he tells us whatever we want to hear?

Posted by Thrill on 05/29/07 at 10:14 PM from

Hitler had only been in power for 4 years, and the process of completely killing whatever remnants of the old regime were still getting started.

No, the old regime was widely despised by the German people.  Hitler did not have to work hard at destroying “the remnants” of it.  Germany had been a monarchy since unification and anti-Semitism had loooooong roots.  The idea that the US is that susceptible to such levels of evil after only 5 to 6 years of war isn’t worthy of a serious discussion.

Posted by Hal_10000 on 05/30/07 at 12:59 AM from

Germany had been a monarchy since unification and anti-Semitism had loooooong roots.  The idea that the US is that susceptible to such levels of evil after only 5 to 6 years of war isn’t worthy of a serious discussion.

I know a few native americans who might dispute you on what America is and is not capable of.

We seem to always forget two things here: first, the dark side of human nature that enjoy inflicting suffering.  It is so buried and so rarely seen in our country, that we forget it’s there.  The way we keep it in check is having strict rules and bright lines.  And you don’t set those bright lines at ripping someone’s nuts off.  You set them as far back as you can.

Second, we’re forgetting that almost all atrocities, whether something as gigantic as the holocaust or as small as beating a confsesion out of someone you know is guilty come not from evil people but from ordinary people just doing what they’re told.  Remember the Milgrom experiments.

Posted by Hal_10000 on 05/30/07 at 01:03 AM from

To addned:  the point isn’t that we are Nazis.  The point Sully is making and other is that horrible things begin when you start blurring the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour; when you start rationalizing bad behaviour and using euphemisms for it.  These are lines that ought not to be crossed—even when the danger is real.

To get away from the Nazis, think back to McCarthy and the wild accusations he would make and the lives that were ruined as a result.  There is no question there were Communist spies in our midst and the danger they created was real.  But his rape of the Constitution and abuse of his position did nothing to stop them.  it just ruined lives and created a climate of fear.

We have rules, even in war, even in combat, even when going after very dangerous enemies.  And we have those rules so that we do not become what we have beheld, so that we do not gain victory at the price of our soul.