"Enhanced Interrogation" (torture)- when did it happen?

SVreX wrote: In reply to GameboyRMH: Because the terrorist is also not subject to the laws of our nation, nor benificiary of its rights and privileges. His goal is to inflict harm at any cost.

That's another legal problem and it's about as legit as redefining torture as "enhanced interrogation." The terrorists should be treated as either POWs or international criminals, but by legally reclassifying them into a no-man's land where they apparently don't have any human rights, that legally makes it OK to torture them.

IMO it defeats the point to "become the monster to beat the monster," but that's just me.

The legal system has handled people more insane and randomly dangerous than Islamic terrorists before. This isn't unexplored territory.

GameboyRMH wrote:

edizzle89 wrote: yes but if you rob a store you are punished to prevent you from robbing a store again, which involves jail and maybe interrogation for info of anybody else involed to prevent them from doing it again and on a larger scale: if your organization carrys out acts of terrorism on a country then you should be punished to prevent it from happening again, which in some cases may involve torture to get information to help prevent other attacks

Not a good analogy, to make equivalence here the thief would have to be tortured as part of the interrogation (possibly before anyone even has a good idea if he's guilty or not). Would that be a fair, legal and humane thing to do? If not, then why with the terrorist?

theft is a small crime vs. terrorism. thieves dont get the death penalty, serial killers do. its just the idea that based on your crime is how you will be handled.

GameboyRMH wrote:

SVreX wrote: Transparency is a fool's pursuit. There Is no such thing. The winners of that game are the people who are good enough at manipulating the circumstances and details to make it APPEAR like they have done no wrong.

But it's harder to manipulate the circumstances and details than to just have no transparency, in which case nobody know's what's going on at all and potentially horrible things are happening. Therefore I argue that there is value in transparency.

I disagree. It's a different skillset.

An attorney might be exceptionally good at showing all the documentation for how things were done right. A prison guard might not be good at that, but might have different skills. He might know just how to bend the rules, or cause pain without leaving a mark.

I am exceptionally good at taking tests. I don't choke, I am good at following the directions, and can read through questions well. If you and I both sat down and took a test, I would have a good chance of performing better than you. That DOES NOT mean I am better at whatever skill we were testing for.

edizzle89 wrote:

GameboyRMH wrote:

edizzle89 wrote: yes but if you rob a store you are punished to prevent you from robbing a store again, which involves jail and maybe interrogation for info of anybody else involed to prevent them from doing it again and on a larger scale: if your organization carrys out acts of terrorism on a country then you should be punished to prevent it from happening again, which in some cases may involve torture to get information to help prevent other attacks

Not a good analogy, to make equivalence here the thief would have to be tortured as part of the interrogation (possibly before anyone even has a good idea if he's guilty or not). Would that be a fair, legal and humane thing to do? If not, then why with the terrorist?

theft is a small crime vs. terrorism. thieves dont get the death penalty, serial killers do. its just the idea that based on your crime is how you will be handled.

That's just plain old revenge. Criminals should be treated equally through the legal process regardless of what they did (that's not just my opinion - that's legally supposed to be what happens). It's why Ariel Castro and Luca Magnotta got the same treatment a guy caught with a small amount of pot in certain states would get (apart from the trial proceedings), rather than being hog-tied by the cops, dragged back to the police station and thrown to the Pack of Hungry Dogs Reserved for Serious Bad Guys.

But for some reason when it's a terrorist things are different?

In reply to GameboyRMH:

We've also done much worse than this crap.....for gods sake, portions of our CIA were what we would consider today "terrorists" in the not so distant past. Just look at some central/south american areas they operated in.

SVreX wrote: I am exceptionally good at taking tests. I don't choke, I am good at following the directions, and can read through questions well. If you and I both sat down and took a test, I would have a good chance of performing better than you. That DOES NOT mean I am better at whatever skill we were testing for.

Absolutely right. And yet we don't abandon these testing methods because they're still useful. It's the same with transparency, it's far from a perfect solution but it definitely helps. We'd both do better on that test than some guy who didn't even study and has absolutely no clue what he's doing.

If you had the same attitude to testing as transparency, we'd just abandon it as a fool's errand and throw people at jobs and see who succeeds - which could really suck for things like medical care, flying a plane...not to mention all the bricks HR would E36 M3 and the turnover rates caused by this brute-force approach to hiring.

GameboyRMH wrote: But for some reason when it's a terrorist things are different?

when they are part of an organization trying to bring a war to our door step, it becomes different

Here's another example...

All of us file tax returns.

How about we pass a law that required we all share our tax returns in order to show that we don't have income inequalities in a given group of people, and insure we are all paying our fair share of taxes.

Do you think the transparency would give accurate information?

The fact is some of us are better at lying on our taxes than others. Those would be the winners.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

I think you are mixing up reasonable assessments with transparency.

Transparency in of itself has no useful purpose. Assessments to determine successful achievement of measurable goals have value.

Transparency doesn't really exist. We hide lots of stuff. There are plenty of things the average parent never tells their kids.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

You are actually reinforcing my original concern.

I believe this push for "transparency" is a political football in itself. I am of the opinion the current administration would like to expose the ass of everything they possibly can about the previous administration and its political opponents, and call it "transparency", while maintaining all the secrets it can about itself.

I do not believe there is a substantive difference in what is actually going on behind closed doors. One administration is smarter than the other, and better at playing the "transparency" game.

Meanwhile, all the media lapdogs play along and reinforce the perceptions, while failing to do their job and actually report the details (and timelines).

I'm not the one who is supposed to ask questions like this. The media is supposed to ask those questions in order to do their job fully and effectively.

edizzle89 wrote:

GameboyRMH wrote: But for some reason when it's a terrorist things are different?

when they are part of an organization trying to bring a war to our door step, it becomes different

OK then treat them as POWs. Agree?

SVreX wrote: Here's another example... All of us file tax returns. How about we pass a law that required we all share our tax returns in order to show that we don't have income inequalities in a given group of people, and insure we are all paying our fair share of taxes. Do you think the transparency would give accurate information? The fact is some of us are better at lying on our taxes than others. Those would be the winners.

Some countries actually do this, and if some dude looks like he works at a gas station on paper but is actually a CXO, everyone will know it and there will be social pressure to do something about it. In the US, the guy at the IRS looking at his taxes can just sigh and rubber-stamp it, or in some really corrupt hellhole he could glance out the window at the sweet SUV said exec bought him and gleefully rubber-stamp it.

SVreX wrote: Transparency in of itself has no useful purpose. Assessments to determine successful achievement of measurable goals have value. Transparency doesn't really exist. We hide lots of stuff. There are plenty of things the average parent never tells their kids.

If transparency has no useful purpose then why shouldn't governments just hide everything they're spending money on like one big "black projects budget"? No point in transparency, right?

Saying that transparency has no value or doesn't exist just breaks my brain.

I should not have said that as a universal statement.

Let's bring it back to the subject.

We are being lied to. We do not have any transparency as it relates to torture, and never will.

We have a document released by a partisan congress designed and timed to give their political opponents a black eye.

We also have a very smart administration, which is very good at hiding it's own indiscretions while trying to blame others for doing the same thing. We call that "transparency".

We don't need more transparency, we need more whistleblowers.

Transparency is making ones work open. If the public has negative thoughts about your work, but you want to stay transparent, you put yourself under layers, in the basement at Langley, with a minimal budget that gets wrapped up in more mundane things. You can say "the public had all the access to my work, but chose not to view it."

Instead, I think the public needs to change how it views whistleblowers. Snowden isn't a bad guy, he just didn't think we were doing right thing.

If your son is about to rape your best friends daughter, do you want his friends turning a blind eye and allowing him to commit such an act, or would you rather them intervene, make the wrong assumption, and be embarrassed at being cock blocks? Even if that rape is happening in public, someone still has to call the cops knowing they won't be accused of wrongdoing.

Our society is increasingly making the whistleblower into the accused, rather those doing the potential wrongs.

It'd be good if we had a independent national whistleblower review board that could basically say "yes, this department is transparent and the public knows of its activities" or "no, this administration is hiding this policy and its needs to be exposed."

Opening the books on a torture program isn't playing politics. It has to be done in an attempt to make doubly sure that we don't do this again. Saying this was done to make one football team look worse than the other is truly ridiculous. It's a moral issue as opposed to a political one.

Are we a moral nation? Assuming we are we need to examine our actions and determine if what we did was right. We are doing that now. Albeit while some butthurt jack holes kick and scream about having their horrific decisions brought out into daylight and being judged as wrong and unamerican. We obviously won't jail the liars, the torturers, or anyone else responsible because they don't live by the same laws that the rest of us do. They are part of the ruling class and are untouchable much like bankers and the police. Our last hope of having any kind of day of reckoning for the people who did this is to defame them publicly. I'm all for it.

Let's also consider that transparency is required in this because we are attempting to maintain a democracy. For our votes to mean anything requires us, as citizens, to be informed of what our elected officials are doing. Without that knowledge we can't vote effectively. Transparency, even when uncomfortable, is required for democracy to work.

Also consider, conservatives love to talk about how you can't trust the government. Mention any number of subjects and it's "We can't trust the government in that situation. They'll completely screw it up." Yet they trust the government to torture and imprison in their name without oversight. Intellectual dishonesty at it's best.

SVreX wrote: We are being lied to. We do not have any transparency as it relates to torture, and never will. We have a document released by a partisan congress designed and timed to give their political opponents a black eye. We also have a very smart administration, which is very good at hiding it's own indiscretions while trying to blame others for doing the same thing. We call that "transparency".

OK that's an argument I can work with. That's much like how I feel about the NSA reforms - not that they're a political football, but that the NSA is so unaccountable that the reforms are kind of pointless. The best we even know about what's going on is from Snowden's leaks.

And that's what's at the heart of this problem, another unaccountable and highly secretive 3-letter agency. It's just a recipe for a disaster that you can't even clean up properly. The governance equivalent of the idiotic test that led to the Chernobyl meltdown - and likewise it should be obvious that it's a terrible idea.

Ok, so let's have some transparency.

Back to my first post- where are the dates and timelines?

We can't know who did what and when without them.

On Jan 22, 2009 President Obama ordered the prompt closing of the detention facility at Guantanamo. It's still open.

If the techniques have been used since then, it's on him.

Release of a report and media attention does not change that.

GameboyRMH wrote:

edizzle89 wrote:

GameboyRMH wrote: But for some reason when it's a terrorist things are different?

when they are part of an organization trying to bring a war to our door step, it becomes different

OK then treat them as POWs. Agree?

There is a very specific set of rules you have to follow to be considered a POW. As yet, the terrorists don't follow them.

Toyman01 wrote: There is a very specific set of rules you have to follow to be considered a POW. As yet, the terrorists don't follow them.

Some quick research says that even illegal combatants should be treated as POWs (Edit: or at least under the 4th Geneva convention) when captured. Am I missing something?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_combatant

In reply to GameboyRMH:

These seem pertinent.

The Geneva Conventions apply in wars between two or more sovereign states.

The Geneva Conventions do not recognize any lawful status for combatants in conflicts not involving two or more nation states.

GameboyRMH wrote:

Toyman01 wrote: There is a very specific set of rules you have to follow to be considered a POW. As yet, the terrorists don't follow them.

Some quick research says that even illegal combatants should be treated as POWs (Edit: or at least under the 4th Geneva convention) when captured. Am I missing something? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_combatant

On the first section......

Wiki said:

The Geneva Conventions do not recognize any lawful status for combatants in conflicts not involving two or more nation states. A state in such a conflict is legally bound only to observe Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and may ignore all the other Articles. But each one of them is completely free to apply all or part of the remaining Articles of the Convention

If I am understanding this properly, as a "terror organization" member, they are not part of a nation state we are in conflict with. It all depends on the wording, as we declared an ill advised war on terror, it is not a war with particularly any other nation state.

Note, I could be wrong, but that is my interpretation of what that means and what we did.

Edit: Damn, toyman caught the same red flag I did.

I see. Such prisoners would still fall under Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#Common_Article_3_relating_to_Non-International_Armed_Conflict

Great article here on how not effective the CIA's torture was and how very effective the FBI's techniques were. SPOILER ALERT - The FBI used scientifically proven techniques that didn't involve torture and gained better and more intel.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

If we are apprehending foreign terrorists, then that is an international conflict, so Article 3 would be irrelevant.

Edit to repair stupid.