Newshoggers Comments
Your example of using waterboarding in domestic criminal cases is great! Although now I'm afraid police will start pushing for it, since it causes no last damage.
This whole "no lasting damage" thing is such a red herring.
A broken foot, properly set, does no lasting physical damage. But when the broken bone ends rub against each other, it's enough to make a person soil themself. Ask any EMT.
Under this definition, breaking a foot and rolling the broken ends around is not torture.
I have to say this post makes me a little nervous. They just might decide to start a pilot program domestically to test that theory. ;=}
The real question should be: is it illegal for foreign governments to do it to capture US troops? It doesn't cause any long term damage, so what's the problem?
Waterboarding also causes PTSD. That IS lasting damage.
And, no, cwt, it wouldn't be legal for them, just us. Haven't you read the conservative playbook yet?
Torture does not work in order to gather information. What bits and pieces one does get needs to be cross-referenced, in effect, data-mining by torture.
I have received much more valuable and complete information by befriending a prisoner. It may take a few minutes longer but, in the end, eliminates a tremendous amount of noise and actually saves time.
If torture worked as the present administration asserts, we would be capturing and subjecting people to torture all the time. Would waterboarding work for investigations in Congress? Condi?
Torture only works when used for political purposes, and, IMO, you have to be pretty evil yourself to justify that end.
KSM broke very quickly and the info we got from him allowed us to scarf up dozens of AQ killers and saved countless lives.
I know this is in the contemporary folklore, but how do we know this to be true?
Yep, Tommy Corn, I was going to say that, but you beat me to it. I'd only add that the administration's credibility on this issue is somewhat strained by all the "terrorism" prosecutions that have fallen apart in real courts because they were based on bogus "facts" and wishful thinking. The "valuable" intel gotten from KSM could easily fall into the same category -- but we'll never know, will we? Bush's war on terror is so perfectly Kafka-esque that the truth is on a "need to know" basis and according to them, none of the American people need to know it.
Not to mention that standing law, I believe going back to English Common Law, prohibits the use of evidence gained through torture in court proceedings.
I.E., the purpose of torture by the United States is never to prosecute, because anything gained through it is inadmissible anyway. Torture relies on the kind of legal black holes we've become so familiar with, in effect disappearing the tortured because we can't legally hold them.
I've made this argument elsewhere. One of Rudy G.'s closest associates in his consulting firm and personal friends is an accused pedophile priest. Rudy says the guy deserves the benefit of the doubt, but I think it's a shame that the guy has to go around with the cloud of suspicion on his head.
So why not waterboard him and find out the truth? After all, pedophilia is a serious crime, I think we would all agree, and does lasting damage to our most vulnerable citizens. What's Rudy's position on this?
I'm with Uncle Jimbo on this one.
Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that Uncle Jimbo would of course believe strongly that waterboarding works. And I think it's quite likely that KSM provided many names as a result of his waterboarding. And those people were rounded up. My question is whether there was any independent verification of those names.
People will make up their minds about who is guilty and who is innocent, and then seek confirmation of their beliefs. Evidence which doesn't support the belief, or contradicts it is discounted or ignored. Which is why we have courts and defense lawyers and so on. And even then, a fair number of innocent folks go to jail. Do we really want to add torture to this list.
So, when we round up innocents solely on the basis of coerced information, how much damage does it do to our cause? How can we balance that off with the good it does, and I'm not saying that's none. I think it's it's probably a poor trade.
For me, the dealbreaker is how it affects the torturer and the society that condones him.
Shamanic, nice post, and I suppose Uncle Jimbo deserves credit for being civil. I think, however, you're giving him faaaaar too much credit. Did you read through the Nance piece he references and notice how he dodges its key points? I actually wrote a post on that angle recently, as did Sadly, No!
What do we really know about what KSM said, apart from the Bush administration's claims? That's hardly proof of torture working, and there's plenty of evidence to show it doesn't work — for getting the truth. For eliciting confessions, often false of course, it's great.
For just one counter-example, there's the case of Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah as related in The One Percent Doctrine (sorry, not intending to blogwhore here, just to cite). The Bush administration publicly touted him as a criminal mastermind, when in fact he was mentally ill and essentially "a travel agent":
"I said he was important," Bush said to Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?"...
"He received the finest medical attention on the planet," said one CIA official. "We got him in very good health, so we could start to torture him."...
He was stabilized by mid-May and, thus, ready. An extraordinary moment in the "war on terror" was about to unfold. After months of interdepartmental exchanges over the detainment, interrogation, and prosecution of captives in the "war on terror"—as well as debates over which "debriefing" techniques would work most effectively on al Qaeda—the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.
That torture led to some of those mall alerts and what not. None of that's to mention that obviously torture didn't "work" on Maher Arar or the many innocents we've tortured, or rendered to be tortured. But it's very rare to see any conservatives acknowledge that. Theoretical positives trump proven negatives for them all the time.
Batocchio, you're preaching to the choir, believe me. I think torture is fine if your goal is to break people and punish them for their political views. Of course, if you're leading the United States and that's your goal, you should be prosecuted and shamed before the entire world, and I hope that at some point, that happens to Bush and his crew.
shamanic | Homepage | 11.02.07 - 3:28 pm | #
Oh, I believe you! Sorry, I was writing late at night and wasn't particularly clear. I enjoyed your reductio ad absurdum, and share that chill over thinking that there are those that would be all for such policies. I think it's a very effective approach (probably more so than mine) and it artfully reveals the game.
I first discovered Uncle Jimbo's post through Sadly, No! and what really hit me was him ignoring virtually everything Nance wrote and trying to claim that torture had somehow been legalized. Meanwhile, what really struck me about the paragraph you highlighted was his claim that torture works. Personally, I'm really sick of hearing that argued, and really sick of right-wingers just ignoring all the evidence and all the major pieces out there on the subject. Not that I should be surprised, because that's pretty much their approach for everything (Novak and the gang still claiming Valerie Plame Wilson wasn't covert, etc.).
In any case, I have a new post up linking your piece here, basically covering the ground in my comment above. Like my previous post, it's more earnest than witty, certainly when compared to your piece. But there's no reason Uncle Jimbo can't be wrong on multiple levels. 
I try to check News Hoggers every so often, but please let me know if you write a new piece on the subject.
I'm starting to get e-mails from the BlackFive crew trying to explain both that waterboarding isn't torture and that it shouldn't be used on criminals. There's some pretzel logic happening here, and I'm certainly going to be writing on it more. I'll ping you when I do. Thanks for the link. 
I agree with Zak822-- 'Bring On'! this "torture" to our "criminal justice system"...
If I cheated on my taxes because I didn't want to pay for some crackhead's Food Stamps, I'd much rather be "waterboarded" than have "Leon" anally rape me every night for a year.
YMMV...
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