7 ms·

Why the CIA won't waterboard, even if ordered by the president

52 points by SCAQTony 11y ago

alexandrerond 11y ago
> "Let me give you a punchline: If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act," Mr. Hayden told Mr. Maher. "You are required not to follow an unlawful order. That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict." Of course. This is totally how the world works, and, in particular, how the American armed forces act.
- mtgx 11y ago
  Well, it helps when the next president says "it's okay, we should just move on", instead of prosecuting those committing those crimes. Keeping government officials accountable for crimes is what will stop them from doing it in the future, not a sense of "duty", or even more laughable "international treaties" - as if that's going to stop a CIA agent from following a direct order from above. No. Make it clear that they will be prosecuted for war crimes, and then actually do it after it happens. That's what will put an end to this. The same should go for abuses of surveillance powers.
- knodi123 11y ago
  Yeah, you absolutely never order someone to do something illegal. Instead, you simply give your people some disavowable waterboarding equipment, and a bunch of evil prisoners, and then demand results, while making sure there is no oversight. Alternatively you ship them to a country that is more than happy to openly and gleefully torture. But you never simply order your troops to torture. That would be politically stupid.
chippy 11y ago
The writer Ian Banks was very much opposed to torture and wrote that even if in some cases it could stop deaths (e.g. torture of terrorist to find the bomb that will save lives), it should still always be illegal. In other words - the torturers will be breaking the law, and should be fully prosecuted, even if they saved lives in the process of the torture. This is a different way of looking at it than the usual ways of "it's all bad, illegal and should never to be used, ever" or "some forms are less bad and should be legal sometimes" and "only when there are lives saves should it be legal"
- knodi123 11y ago
  A bunch of people I've met seem to love it for utilitarian reasons. But even if, for the sake of conversation, I grant that it has utility- I still say we shouldn't ever do it. I'd rather have an america where some people die of terrorism, than one that I feel ashamed of. To hell with the argument that we need to become evil in order to avert evil.
  - dv_dt 11y ago
    But you shouldn't grant that it has any utility, as soon as you start torturing a suspect any information they give is uncertain. You'll never know without further research if it's made up to stop the torture or if it's real information. There is already enough uncertainty in the intelligence game without generating even more.
    - Retric 11y ago
      Some information is verifiable. It's useless in a war setting as bad information can be extremely costly, but questions like "Where did you hide the money?" are different as digging is generally a low risk activity. So, from a utility standpoint, it's far more likely to be useful for the Mob than any government.
    - peeters 11y ago
      I won't grant that it has utility, but that's from my ignorance. It might have utility; I don't know and am not qualified to say. The argument used matters to me, because if tomorrow it's proven that torture works, I still believe that civilized nations should be against it. If we hinge the argument on its utility, then when we lose that premise we lose the argument.
  - 794CD01 11y ago
    Is choosing not to save the lives of innocent people because you have religious concerns about the method used to save them not evil?
    - 11y ago
facetube 11y ago
CIA to to the rule of law in the US: "Come on baby, I've changed; I won't hurt you again, I promise"
JamilD 11y ago
Here's an op-ed by Michael Hayden, written less than 5 years ago, comparing those who oppose waterboarding to birthers and truthers: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303745304576359820767777538 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023037453045763598... It's incredible how quickly he's had a "change of heart".
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  Strictly speaking, he wasn't comparing people who "opposed" waterboarding to birthers or truthers; but rather "interrogation deniers", or in his own words: individuals who hold that the enhanced interrogation techniques used against CIA detainees have never yielded useful intelligence. Still, the juxtaposition of operative viewpoints is... fascinating, to say the least. On the whole it sounds like waterboarding has been added to the list of things the CIA continually swears it would "never do" -- like, you know, assassinating foreign leaders; getting into bed with torturers, death squads, drug runners and mafiosi of various stripes; spying on not just on American citizens, but on rival branches of the U.S. government itself -- but of course has kept on doing, and doing, and doing anyway, since its very inception.
allendoerfer 11y ago
Terrible waste of an opportunity to use a nazi reference, where it actually would have made sense. See also Legal positivism [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_positivism
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
I bet if you had asked on 10SEP2011 they would have said "absolutely no waterboarding!" as well.
dsr_ 11y ago
Translation: CIA director John Brennan does not expect to keep his job for long in a Republican administration.
lizardking 11y ago
If the wrong president gets in there, the first order of business will be to staff the CIA with compliant officers willing to do whatever he asks.
zxcvvcxz 11y ago
I'm admittedly ignorant on this topic. Have there been studies detailing the efficacy on these methods to obtain information that lead to the saving of lives? E.g. if X people were subjected to waterboarding, what % of X revealed information that lead to derailing terrorist plots? And then we'd need a control group as well that wasn't subjected. Edit - downvoted for what, trying to quantify this topic and weigh the pros and cons? Christ.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I think it might be quite hard to do those studies for ethical reasons. From what I remember, the consensus among professional interrogators is that torture is largely useless, because people go more or less instantly from not saying anything at all to making up any old nonsense that sounds vaguely plausible just to make the pain and confusion stop. Psychological torture is even less useful, because people simply stop making any sense at all after a while. The most reliable methods were based on extended conversations, with the interrogator pretending to be an equal and gradually persuading a prisoner to open up and/or reveal possible gaps in their story. This kind of interrogation isn't fast, but the ticking timebomb excuse for torture has never been very convincing anyway. Pain on its own is very unlikely to change the mind of anyone who's so indoctrinated they volunteer to take part in a mass terrorist attack.
  - zxcvvcxz 11y ago
    Sure, alright that's what I suspected intuitively. Would appreciate some resources to read on the topic. I don't think studies of the nature I proposed are particularly hard to do, but they may be locked in classified status, so civilians wouldn't know.
- EliRivers 11y ago
  As a starter for some reading, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2009/0420/p99s01-duts.html http://www.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2009/0420/... I have no doubt that if torture had led to significant success stories, someone would have either announced it or leaked it to get some points for the pro-torture side. "They communicated this to agency higher-ups in Washington, who nonetheless insisted on the use of the practice, and asked to watch it take place." I don't know what's more fucked up; to order torture, or to ask to watch.
coldtea 11y ago
Yeah, sure.
grindlach800 11y ago
>But public opinion on torture flows in the opposite direction from experts: 82 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats favor torture. That's pretty despicable and disgusting.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Do they actually have the exact questions asked? I tend to wait on declaring it "despicable and disgusting" until I know what was asked and not the interpretation of it.
Tharkun 11y ago
Beating someone with a rubber hose is probably cheaper. Good guy CIA, trying to save water.
- protomyth 11y ago
  If I remember correctly, messing with sleeping habits (telling them they had 8 hours sleep when they had 3, putting them on a variable length day, etc.) and getting their body off cycle is more effective. Depending on who you are, that might be torture or it might not be.
banku_brougham 11y ago
>Brennan makes his position clear: "Absolutely, I would not agree to having any CIA officer carrying out waterboarding again." Sure. We outsource our torture after rendition to 'black sites' in places like Romania, Thailand, wherever. This article and these official statements mean nothing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05/a-staggering-map-of-the-54-countries-that-reportedly-participated-in-the-cias-rendition-program/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05...
- Nelson69 11y ago
  It's unfortunate that we've become so jaded but I thought the same thing. That was too specific a statement. CIA officer's won't do the torture, it will be Saudis, Israelis, British, etc.. Or American's that are employed as "contractors."
fucking_tragedy 11y ago
They don't arm insurgents either.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
anexprogrammer 11y ago
I don't understand the recurrence of torture. It's very clearly shown it isn't reliable. We train our military to resist coercive questioning, to plant misleading answers, and avoid use of yes or no answers to prevent video edited confessions later. Is it reasonable to suppose that none of our opponents will be aware of these techniques? An untrained person is just as likely to tell you anything that might make you stop as the crucial fact you need (presuming they even know it). It might save lives. It might lead to mistreatment of many innocent people. How do you know which beforehand? If you can't know, are you happy with the abandonment of innocent until proven guilty? Last, I've noticed an increasingly positive portrayal of torture in TV of late, say the last ten years. It's neater. The good guys seem to do it as a matter of course. It's more likely to be effective. Is this coincidental? Am I just watching the wrong shows?
- Retric 11y ago
  It's simply lazy writing. "Capture" is an easy way to show progress over a season. The public now knows torture happens, so not showing it seems less realistic. And TV shows are under 40 minutes per hour show. So, it's hard to show things that dead end. IMO, I think we are going to start seeing more plot lines where torture results in bad Intel for dramatic tension.
- sevensor 11y ago
  I was disturbed to see this when I took the kids to see Zootopia this weekend. The protagonists threaten to harm a petty criminal, who then coughs up the information they need. It made me wonder -- the writers seem to have been so careful with their message, so should I take this to mean they endorse torture along with racial tolerance?
  - mmsmatt 11y ago
    So I wasn't the only one? That scene jerked me out of happy animation land and made me think of The Wire.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
Zigurd 11y ago
Without transparency and prosecutions, Brennan's words, and any other assurances, carry no weight. The leaders and the foot-soldiers who tortured people all walk free. They got to keep the money they made in torture, and some are able to conceal their identities. All these people would do it again, to you or me or members of your family, at the stroke of a pen changing a policy, or under greater secrecy. Any German would tell you the US will inevitably use torture again, and in our lifetimes, because we left the ability to do it readily at hand.
venomsnake 11y ago
They obeyed once. Chances are they will obey again. An organisation's culture is near impossible to change.
is_this_tinder 11y ago
Lazy journalism. Of course no CIA officer will waterboard....however, he/she will gladly outsource it to a Bulgarian contractor.
rdtsc 11y ago
An interesting opinion on torture came from Slavoj Zizek. He was commenting on a movie called "Zero Dark Thirty" which brought torture to a Hollywood audience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0 His point was that torture should be so abhorrent, that it should be in the same category as rape. Even by discussing it and debating the benefits or downside of it, we've lost quite a bit of ground in a civilized society. For example nobody debates or discusses the trade-off of rape. It is obvious anyone who advocates for it is mentally ill, or vile and is shunned by others. But merits of torture now are open for debate. Maybe it does find terrorist, maybe it works, or, like in this movie "Oh but see, it affects the torturers just as much, so they are suffering too, they feel guilty too, don't blame them too much ..." and so on. Now clearly we've lost that battle because we've already engaged in it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nugga 11y ago
  You can argue the effectiveness of torture but this moral panic seems a bit too much in a world where we bomb and shoot people every day. If you're otherwise fine with or at least accept war and its inevitable civilian casualties and the damage it does to people I don't see how you can be so against torture. Torture in that case is just a tool - you inflict violence to your enemies (instead of killing them) to potentially gain information. Sam Harris wrote a piece on why torture can be the lesser evil in some cases: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-torture_b_8993.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-tortu...
  - e1g 11y ago
    >accept war ... and the damage it does to people I don't see how you can be so against torture We have collectively abolished many weapons and practices: chemical (e.g. nerve gas), technological (e.g. blinding lasers), or (e.g. booby traps), as well as many tactics (e.g. public executions). We held meetings (the Geneva/Hague conventions), and agreed these acts were too evil to continue. Now those choices are uniformly accepted as being progressive for our society. War is hell. We do hellish things to the "other" side. Historically, the "other" side often ends up being on "our" side sooner rather than later (alliances+migration). Every so often we decide which actions are too inhuman to perform, regardless of what uniform the human is wearing (if any). Right now we are deciding on whether the secrecy and severity of physical and mental torture, with no representation or defence available, is on the wrong side of who we want to be.
SeanDav 11y ago
and the check (cheque) is in the mail...
Tomcoe 11y ago
"Horror... Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies!(...)You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0rU6-7sKs&nohtml5=False https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0rU6-7sKs&nohtml5=False Make of this what you will, but I believe there is some truth in these words. If IS terrorists were to truly fear falling into enemies' hands, if they themselves were unable to instill fear in their enemies by brutally executing people, they wouldn't have that much of an impact. That being said, torture shouldn't have a place in any civilization. There's nothing civil about it. It's a contradictio in terminis.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

52 points by SCAQTony 11y ago

> "Let me give you a punchline: If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act," Mr. Hayden told Mr. Maher. "You are required not to follow an unlawful order. That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict." Of course. This is totally how the world works, and, in particular, how the American armed forces act.

mtgx 11y ago
Well, it helps when the next president says "it's okay, we should just move on", instead of prosecuting those committing those crimes. Keeping government officials accountable for crimes is what will stop them from doing it in the future, not a sense of "duty", or even more laughable "international treaties" - as if that's going to stop a CIA agent from following a direct order from above. No. Make it clear that they will be prosecuted for war crimes, and then actually do it after it happens. That's what will put an end to this. The same should go for abuses of surveillance powers.
knodi123 11y ago
Yeah, you absolutely never order someone to do something illegal. Instead, you simply give your people some disavowable waterboarding equipment, and a bunch of evil prisoners, and then demand results, while making sure there is no oversight. Alternatively you ship them to a country that is more than happy to openly and gleefully torture. But you never simply order your troops to torture. That would be politically stupid.

chippy 11y ago

The writer Ian Banks was very much opposed to torture and wrote that even if in some cases it could stop deaths (e.g. torture of terrorist to find the bomb that will save lives), it should still always be illegal. In other words - the torturers will be breaking the law, and should be fully prosecuted, even if they saved lives in the process of the torture. This is a different way of looking at it than the usual ways of "it's all bad, illegal and should never to be used, ever" or "some forms are less bad and should be legal sometimes" and "only when there are lives saves should it be legal"

knodi123 11y ago
A bunch of people I've met seem to love it for utilitarian reasons. But even if, for the sake of conversation, I grant that it has utility- I still say we shouldn't ever do it. I'd rather have an america where some people die of terrorism, than one that I feel ashamed of. To hell with the argument that we need to become evil in order to avert evil.
- dv_dt 11y ago
  But you shouldn't grant that it has any utility, as soon as you start torturing a suspect any information they give is uncertain. You'll never know without further research if it's made up to stop the torture or if it's real information. There is already enough uncertainty in the intelligence game without generating even more.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Some information is verifiable. It's useless in a war setting as bad information can be extremely costly, but questions like "Where did you hide the money?" are different as digging is generally a low risk activity. So, from a utility standpoint, it's far more likely to be useful for the Mob than any government.
  - peeters 11y ago
    I won't grant that it has utility, but that's from my ignorance. It might have utility; I don't know and am not qualified to say. The argument used matters to me, because if tomorrow it's proven that torture works, I still believe that civilized nations should be against it. If we hinge the argument on its utility, then when we lose that premise we lose the argument.
- 794CD01 11y ago
  Is choosing not to save the lives of innocent people because you have religious concerns about the method used to save them not evil?
  - 11y ago

facetube 11y ago

CIA to to the rule of law in the US: "Come on baby, I've changed; I won't hurt you again, I promise"

JamilD 11y ago

Here's an op-ed by Michael Hayden, written less than 5 years ago, comparing those who oppose waterboarding to birthers and truthers: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303745304576359820767777538 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023037453045763598... It's incredible how quickly he's had a "change of heart".

kafkaesq 11y ago
Strictly speaking, he wasn't comparing people who "opposed" waterboarding to birthers or truthers; but rather "interrogation deniers", or in his own words: individuals who hold that the enhanced interrogation techniques used against CIA detainees have never yielded useful intelligence. Still, the juxtaposition of operative viewpoints is... fascinating, to say the least. On the whole it sounds like waterboarding has been added to the list of things the CIA continually swears it would "never do" -- like, you know, assassinating foreign leaders; getting into bed with torturers, death squads, drug runners and mafiosi of various stripes; spying on not just on American citizens, but on rival branches of the U.S. government itself -- but of course has kept on doing, and doing, and doing anyway, since its very inception.

allendoerfer 11y ago

Terrible waste of an opportunity to use a nazi reference, where it actually would have made sense. See also Legal positivism [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_positivism

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

I bet if you had asked on 10SEP2011 they would have said "absolutely no waterboarding!" as well.

dsr_ 11y ago

Translation: CIA director John Brennan does not expect to keep his job for long in a Republican administration.

lizardking 11y ago

If the wrong president gets in there, the first order of business will be to staff the CIA with compliant officers willing to do whatever he asks.

zxcvvcxz 11y ago

I'm admittedly ignorant on this topic. Have there been studies detailing the efficacy on these methods to obtain information that lead to the saving of lives? E.g. if X people were subjected to waterboarding, what % of X revealed information that lead to derailing terrorist plots? And then we'd need a control group as well that wasn't subjected. Edit - downvoted for what, trying to quantify this topic and weigh the pros and cons? Christ.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I think it might be quite hard to do those studies for ethical reasons. From what I remember, the consensus among professional interrogators is that torture is largely useless, because people go more or less instantly from not saying anything at all to making up any old nonsense that sounds vaguely plausible just to make the pain and confusion stop. Psychological torture is even less useful, because people simply stop making any sense at all after a while. The most reliable methods were based on extended conversations, with the interrogator pretending to be an equal and gradually persuading a prisoner to open up and/or reveal possible gaps in their story. This kind of interrogation isn't fast, but the ticking timebomb excuse for torture has never been very convincing anyway. Pain on its own is very unlikely to change the mind of anyone who's so indoctrinated they volunteer to take part in a mass terrorist attack.
- zxcvvcxz 11y ago
  Sure, alright that's what I suspected intuitively. Would appreciate some resources to read on the topic. I don't think studies of the nature I proposed are particularly hard to do, but they may be locked in classified status, so civilians wouldn't know.
EliRivers 11y ago
As a starter for some reading, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2009/0420/p99s01-duts.html http://www.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2009/0420/... I have no doubt that if torture had led to significant success stories, someone would have either announced it or leaked it to get some points for the pro-torture side. "They communicated this to agency higher-ups in Washington, who nonetheless insisted on the use of the practice, and asked to watch it take place." I don't know what's more fucked up; to order torture, or to ask to watch.

coldtea 11y ago

Yeah, sure.

grindlach800 11y ago

>But public opinion on torture flows in the opposite direction from experts: 82 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats favor torture. That's pretty despicable and disgusting.

protomyth 11y ago
Do they actually have the exact questions asked? I tend to wait on declaring it "despicable and disgusting" until I know what was asked and not the interpretation of it.

Tharkun 11y ago

Beating someone with a rubber hose is probably cheaper. Good guy CIA, trying to save water.

protomyth 11y ago
If I remember correctly, messing with sleeping habits (telling them they had 8 hours sleep when they had 3, putting them on a variable length day, etc.) and getting their body off cycle is more effective. Depending on who you are, that might be torture or it might not be.

banku_brougham 11y ago

>Brennan makes his position clear: "Absolutely, I would not agree to having any CIA officer carrying out waterboarding again." Sure. We outsource our torture after rendition to 'black sites' in places like Romania, Thailand, wherever. This article and these official statements mean nothing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05/a-staggering-map-of-the-54-countries-that-reportedly-participated-in-the-cias-rendition-program/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05...

Nelson69 11y ago
It's unfortunate that we've become so jaded but I thought the same thing. That was too specific a statement. CIA officer's won't do the torture, it will be Saudis, Israelis, British, etc.. Or American's that are employed as "contractors."

fucking_tragedy 11y ago

They don't arm insurgents either.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

anexprogrammer 11y ago

I don't understand the recurrence of torture. It's very clearly shown it isn't reliable. We train our military to resist coercive questioning, to plant misleading answers, and avoid use of yes or no answers to prevent video edited confessions later. Is it reasonable to suppose that none of our opponents will be aware of these techniques? An untrained person is just as likely to tell you anything that might make you stop as the crucial fact you need (presuming they even know it). It might save lives. It might lead to mistreatment of many innocent people. How do you know which beforehand? If you can't know, are you happy with the abandonment of innocent until proven guilty? Last, I've noticed an increasingly positive portrayal of torture in TV of late, say the last ten years. It's neater. The good guys seem to do it as a matter of course. It's more likely to be effective. Is this coincidental? Am I just watching the wrong shows?

Retric 11y ago
It's simply lazy writing. "Capture" is an easy way to show progress over a season. The public now knows torture happens, so not showing it seems less realistic. And TV shows are under 40 minutes per hour show. So, it's hard to show things that dead end. IMO, I think we are going to start seeing more plot lines where torture results in bad Intel for dramatic tension.
sevensor 11y ago
I was disturbed to see this when I took the kids to see Zootopia this weekend. The protagonists threaten to harm a petty criminal, who then coughs up the information they need. It made me wonder -- the writers seem to have been so careful with their message, so should I take this to mean they endorse torture along with racial tolerance?
- mmsmatt 11y ago
  So I wasn't the only one? That scene jerked me out of happy animation land and made me think of The Wire.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

Zigurd 11y ago

Without transparency and prosecutions, Brennan's words, and any other assurances, carry no weight. The leaders and the foot-soldiers who tortured people all walk free. They got to keep the money they made in torture, and some are able to conceal their identities. All these people would do it again, to you or me or members of your family, at the stroke of a pen changing a policy, or under greater secrecy. Any German would tell you the US will inevitably use torture again, and in our lifetimes, because we left the ability to do it readily at hand.

venomsnake 11y ago

They obeyed once. Chances are they will obey again. An organisation's culture is near impossible to change.

is_this_tinder 11y ago

Lazy journalism. Of course no CIA officer will waterboard....however, he/she will gladly outsource it to a Bulgarian contractor.

rdtsc 11y ago

An interesting opinion on torture came from Slavoj Zizek. He was commenting on a movie called "Zero Dark Thirty" which brought torture to a Hollywood audience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0 His point was that torture should be so abhorrent, that it should be in the same category as rape. Even by discussing it and debating the benefits or downside of it, we've lost quite a bit of ground in a civilized society. For example nobody debates or discusses the trade-off of rape. It is obvious anyone who advocates for it is mentally ill, or vile and is shunned by others. But merits of torture now are open for debate. Maybe it does find terrorist, maybe it works, or, like in this movie "Oh but see, it affects the torturers just as much, so they are suffering too, they feel guilty too, don't blame them too much ..." and so on. Now clearly we've lost that battle because we've already engaged in it.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nugga 11y ago
You can argue the effectiveness of torture but this moral panic seems a bit too much in a world where we bomb and shoot people every day. If you're otherwise fine with or at least accept war and its inevitable civilian casualties and the damage it does to people I don't see how you can be so against torture. Torture in that case is just a tool - you inflict violence to your enemies (instead of killing them) to potentially gain information. Sam Harris wrote a piece on why torture can be the lesser evil in some cases: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-torture_b_8993.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-tortu...
- e1g 11y ago
  >accept war ... and the damage it does to people I don't see how you can be so against torture We have collectively abolished many weapons and practices: chemical (e.g. nerve gas), technological (e.g. blinding lasers), or (e.g. booby traps), as well as many tactics (e.g. public executions). We held meetings (the Geneva/Hague conventions), and agreed these acts were too evil to continue. Now those choices are uniformly accepted as being progressive for our society. War is hell. We do hellish things to the "other" side. Historically, the "other" side often ends up being on "our" side sooner rather than later (alliances+migration). Every so often we decide which actions are too inhuman to perform, regardless of what uniform the human is wearing (if any). Right now we are deciding on whether the secrecy and severity of physical and mental torture, with no representation or defence available, is on the wrong side of who we want to be.

SeanDav 11y ago

and the check (cheque) is in the mail...

Tomcoe 11y ago

"Horror... Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies!(...)You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0rU6-7sKs&nohtml5=False https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0rU6-7sKs&nohtml5=False Make of this what you will, but I believe there is some truth in these words. If IS terrorists were to truly fear falling into enemies' hands, if they themselves were unable to instill fear in their enemies by brutally executing people, they wouldn't have that much of an impact. That being said, torture shouldn't have a place in any civilization. There's nothing civil about it. It's a contradictio in terminis.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]