10 'torture' techniques blessed by Bush
- Thread starter sammsky1
- Start date
Blanket concept?
If they do not meet the threshold for torture then they certainly meet the threshold for CIDT. Both are absolutely prohibited.
And European legal precedent? Those cases only follow the received opinion on this matter, which includes the Uniform Code for Military Justice.
George W.Bush said:
Half the Congress felt these actions constituted torture:
- Jane C. Kim, ‘Nonrefoulement Under the Convention Against Torture: How U.S. Assurances for Diplomatic Assurances Contravene Treaty Obligations and Federal Law’ (2007) 32 Brooklyn J. Intl. L. 1227
- Dab Eggen, ‘Bush Announces Veto of Waterboarding Ban’ Washington Post (Washington 8 February 2008) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030800304.html
The U.S. Army felt that waterboarding weas torture too: Department of the Army, ‘FM 2-22.3 (FM 34-52) Human Intelligence Collector Operations’ (6 September 2006) http://www.army.mil/institution/armypublicaffairs/pdf/fm2-22-3.pdf accessed 13 January 2009, [4-41], [5-74]-[5-75], [8-35], [8-48]
The concept of torture is hardly ambiguous either:
But if you want to focus on US law, look at the Eighth Amendment.
Punishments are cruel when they involve torture or a lingering death; but the punishment of death is not cruel within the meaning of that word as used in the Constitution. It implies there something inhuman and barbarous, something more than the mere extinguishment of life.
- re Kemmler 136 U.S. 436 at 447 (1890)
In Roper v. Simmons, 125 S Ct 1183 (2005) Kennedy J specifically drew upon the jurisprudence of other jurisdictions in ruling that juvenile executions violated the Eighth Amendment.
If thr Supreme Court is willing to turn to international law and other national courts in interpreting the US Constitution then why is what the European Court of Human Rights irrelevant when it comes to the definition of torture?
Furthermore, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 provides that
Jackson v. Bishop (8th Cir., 1968) outlawed corporal punishment in prison as 'cruel and unusual'. Again, if corporal punishment was outlawed in prison why should waterboarding not be considered it?
The concept of torture is hardly ambiguous either:
There you have it. What constitutes severe pain and suffering is completely ambiguous. The fact that this is poorly written makes it entirely unenforceable - particularly in the case of the US who aren't even going to prosecute their own much less pursue the ultimate farce of giving up their citizens to some international body.
There you have it. What constitutes severe pain and suffering is completely ambiguous. The fact that this is poorly written makes it entirely unenforceable - particularly in the case of the US who aren't even going to prosecute their own much less pursue the ultimate farce of giving up their citizens to some international body.
That's why I said they 'have to' be extra vigilant.. I'm well aware that governments generally don't. There is a moral need to protect your principles in times of danger, because times of danger are when it's easiest for people in power to justify abandoning those principles.
If they don't hold in times of danger the principles are worth shit.
Is the US against torture in principle? Ought it to be?
We're not talking about what's objective or realistic. We're talking about what's right. You don't need to be a lawyer or an interrogation specialist or to have seen war close up or lost relatives in 9/11 to have a discussion about what you believe to be right and wrong.
Are those people wrong to cut US soldiers' heads off?
Is it wrong to waterboard someone 183 times in a month?
Raoul, in a time of national emergency, is anything wrong?
If they received an order saying, "Cut this guy's balls off and make him eat them", do you believe they would be morally obliged to disobey those orders?
If they followed them, should they be immune from prosecution?
That's just rhetoric, it's not getting slightly wet. It's simulating drowning, depriving people of sleep, finding out what they fear most and locking them in small dark boxes with that thing. In other words, it's torture.
Yes, it is partly about the risk to me and other innocents. There's a strong element of that, because governments are stupid and get the wrong guy. Governments also fine and imprison the wrong guy, but I'm prepared to undergo the risk of being fined and imprisoned. I'm not prepared to undergo the risk of torture, because I consider it the worst thing anyone can do to me.
It's also about the act in itself. I was wrong to say "I don't care about terrorists" - I believe it's beyond the pale to torture anyone, because it's too cruel. I don't want to be part of a society that does it, even at the risk of that entire society being destroyed. (In theory anyway. In practice I might not be brave enough to hold to the principle. If so, it's because I'm weak, not because the principle is wrong.)
Is there anything you feel the same way about? If the only way of society surviving was for us to practice cannibalism, would you do it, or would you decide, feck it, death's better than that. Because if there are any such things (i.e., if you have any principles), then that's a way into understanding the mindset of someone like me who's "insane" enough to be against torture. We just have different points at which we say 'enough'.
Plech i think you're completely misinterpreting the mindset that takes place immediately following an attack. The Government tightens up in fear of other imminent attacks and a celebration of civil liberties generally slips to the bottom of the priority list because the Government has to do whatever is necessary to protect its people. Once safety has been reestablished, then they can take a step back and evaluate its best practices and see what it could improve should something similar happen again. Unfortunately, the US was caught completely off guard during the 9/11 attacks. The mentality that ensued was one of security first. The fact that there haven't been any more attacks since then is a testament to the success of the Government's posture following 9/11.
That is a rubbish argument. US as a country is not prone or vulnerable to terror attacks like those in Asia or Middle east due to various factors. It is not as if Bush admin stepped in to change a trend of attacks with some new policies. If they had introduced something drastic like martial law, you could use the same argument to justify that.
Brilliant!
We can do you one better in terms of cruelty.
Are we willing to become the very monsters we abhor?
How do you know that ? You don't have access to information about attacks that may have been thwarted after 9/11, whether as a result of information obtained from interrogations or otherwise. If you don't know, then you have no way of assessing. It goes without saying that the argument that there haven't been any attacks since 9/11 is a nuisance to foreigners who relish criticizing US policies, but the reality is that we don't know what has been averted.
Obama admin are pivy to that information and the fact that they have decided to discontinue with the same practice is good proof that it played no part in averting any strikes. And I don't take any pleasure in criticinsg US police. I don't see how you can have it both ways. Either Bush admin was right to authorise torture or Obama's is wrong to scrap it.
When torture becomes a policy, we become polluted with those very monsters whose crimes we lose the right to condemn.
That's no proof, thats an assumption on your part - which happens to be off the mark. The reason he discontinued it is because he ran on a platform of reestablishing American international relations following the turbulence of the Bush years, and this was one of the controversial components that he wanted to scrap in order to improve relations and the perception that the US was being excessively unilateral during Bush's "War on Terror". Obama has done a number of things since coming into office (including dropping the War on Terror phrase), and discontinuing Bush's interrogation policies was one. I don't fault him for that as it was the platform he ran on.
Eh? You think establishing International relations is more important that averting any terror strikes?
That appears to be Obama's policy.
So, let us hear from the interrogators and legal experts:
Ladies and Gents 'The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib' speak -
You might want to start with this one...
There is no nudity in any of the video edits
There is no nudity in any of the video edits
Another of the first videos to watch... sets up the rest of the clips.
I'll get right to it Rob. Saves me from going down the road to the blockbuster.
That's all I've got for now... took me 10 hrs to keep the edits within the best context, excluding all of the nude photos.
I'll get right to it Rob. Saves me from going down the road to the blockbuster.
Did you go to see Hillary speak?
Sorry to hear you boys have had a bad few days... The Washington Post is reporting more than 160 deaths, in fighting over the past two days.
More grim news from the Washington Post - The DOD has announced that it will be releasing more of the 'Prisoner Abuse Photos' <--- in the words of the DOD.
Yes i did actually.
Well... did she have anything meaningful to say?
Sorry if the videos turned out to be a thread killer.
It does put the upper brass as well as the boots on the ground guilty of war crimes. The interviews of the soldiers and Gen. Larpinski seem to prove a controlled chaos situation.
Rumsfeld, Gen. Miller, and several other high level officers encouraged brutal treatment and created an environment the allowed the soldiers to take matters into their own hands.
Sad, really...
It does put the upper brass as well as the boots on the ground guilty of war crimes. The interviews of the soldiers and Gen. Larpinski seem to prove a controlled chaos situation.
Rumsfeld, Gen. Miller, and several other high level officers encouraged brutal treatment and created an environment the allowed the soldiers to take matters into their own hands.
Sad, really...
Raoul, I know you mean well but as with the Iraq invasion, watching you defend the indefensible is sad.
Read this:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article6168270.ece
Read this:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article6168270.ece
Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11
A US major reveals the inside story of military interrogation in Iraq. By Patrick Cockburn, winner of the 2009 Orwell Prize for journalism
Sunday, 26 April 2009 Independent
The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.
Related articles
* US interpreter who witnessed torture in Iraq shot herself with service rifle
"The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.
Major Alexander's attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. "It plays into the hands of al-Qa'ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights," he says. An eloquent and highly intelligent man with experience as a criminal investigator within the US military, he says that torture is ineffective, as well as counter-productive. "People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop," he says. "They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped."
In his compelling book How to Break a Terrorist, Major Alexander explains that prisoners subjected to abuse usually clam up, say nothing, or provide misleading information. In an interview he was particularly dismissive of the "ticking bomb" argument often used in the justification of torture. This supposes that there is a bomb timed to explode on a bus or in the street which will kill many civilians. The authorities hold a prisoner who knows where the bomb is. Should they not torture him to find out in time where the bomb is before it explodes?
Major Alexander says he faced the "ticking time bomb" every day in Iraq because "we held people who knew about future suicide bombings". Leaving aside the moral arguments, he says torture simply does not work. "It hardens their resolve. They shut up." He points out that the FBI uses normal methods of interrogation to build up trust even when they are investigating a kidnapping and time is of the essence. He would do the same, he says, "even if my mother was on a bus" with a hypothetical ticking bomb on board. It is quite untrue to imagine that torture is the fastest way of obtaining information, he says.
A career officer, Major Alexander spent 14 years in the US air force, beginning by flying helicopters for special operations. He saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, was an air force counter-intelligence agent and criminal interrogator, and was stationed in Saudi Arabia, with an anti-terrorist role, during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some years later, the US army was short of interrogators. He wanted to help shape developments in Iraq and volunteered.
Arriving in Iraq in early 2006 he found that the team he was working with were mostly dedicated, but young, men between 18 and 24. "Many of them had never been out of the States before," he recalls. "When they sat down to interrogate somebody it was often the first time they had met a Muslim." In addition to these inexperienced officers, Major Alexander says there was "an old guard" of interrogators using the methods employed at Guantanamo. He could not say exactly what they had been doing for legal reasons, though in the rest of the interview he left little doubt that prisoners were being tortured and abused. The "old guard's" methods, he says, were based on instilling "fear and control" in a prisoner.
He refused to take part in torture and abuse, and forbade the team he commanded to use such methods. Instead, he says, he used normal US police interrogation techniques which are "based on relationship building and a degree of deception". He adds that the deception was often of a simple kind such as saying untruthfully that another prisoner has already told all.
Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype.
In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.
For Iraqi Sunni Arabs joining al-Qa'ida, the abuses played a role, but more often the reason for their recruitment was political rather than religious. They had taken up arms because the Shia Arabs were taking power; de-Baathification marginalised the Sunni and took away their jobs; they feared an Iranian takeover. Above all, al-Qa'ida was able to provide money and arms to the insurgents. Once, Major Alexander recalls, the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, came to visit the prison where he was working. Asking about what motivated the suspected al-Qa'ida prisoners, he was at first given the official story that they were Islamic Jihadi full of religious zeal. Major Alexander intervened to say that this really was not true and there was a much more complicated series of motivations at work. General Casey did not respond.
The objective of Major Alexander's team was to find Zarqawi, the Jordanian born leader of al-Qa'ida who built it into a fearsome organisation. Attempts by US military intelligence to locate him had failed despite three years of trying. Major Alexander was finally able to persuade one of Zarqawi's associates to give away his location because the associate had come to reject his methods, such as the mass slaughter of civilians.
What the major discovered was that many of the Sunni fighters were members of, or allied to, al-Qa'ida through necessity. They did not share its extreme, puritanical Sunni beliefs or hatred of the Shia majority. He says that General Casey had ignored his findings but he was pleased when General David Petraeus became commander in Iraq and began to take account of the real motives of the Sunni fighters. "He peeled back those Sunnis from al-Qa'ida," he says.
In the aftermath of his experience in Iraq, which he left at the end of 2006, Major Alexander came to believe that the battle against the US using torture was more important than the war in Iraq. He sees President Obama's declaration against torture as "a historic victory", though he is concerned about loopholes remaining and the lack of accountability of senior officers. Reflecting on his own interrogations, he says he always monitored his actions by asking himself, "If the enemy was doing this to one of my troops, would I consider it torture?" His overall message is that the American people do not have to make a choice between torture and terror.
How to Break a Terrorist: The US interrogators who used brains, not brutality, to take down the deadliest man in Iraq, by Matthew Alexander and John R Bruning (The Free Press)
A US major reveals the inside story of military interrogation in Iraq. By Patrick Cockburn, winner of the 2009 Orwell Prize for journalism
Sunday, 26 April 2009 Independent
The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.
Related articles
* US interpreter who witnessed torture in Iraq shot herself with service rifle
"The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.
Major Alexander's attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. "It plays into the hands of al-Qa'ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights," he says. An eloquent and highly intelligent man with experience as a criminal investigator within the US military, he says that torture is ineffective, as well as counter-productive. "People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop," he says. "They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped."
In his compelling book How to Break a Terrorist, Major Alexander explains that prisoners subjected to abuse usually clam up, say nothing, or provide misleading information. In an interview he was particularly dismissive of the "ticking bomb" argument often used in the justification of torture. This supposes that there is a bomb timed to explode on a bus or in the street which will kill many civilians. The authorities hold a prisoner who knows where the bomb is. Should they not torture him to find out in time where the bomb is before it explodes?
Major Alexander says he faced the "ticking time bomb" every day in Iraq because "we held people who knew about future suicide bombings". Leaving aside the moral arguments, he says torture simply does not work. "It hardens their resolve. They shut up." He points out that the FBI uses normal methods of interrogation to build up trust even when they are investigating a kidnapping and time is of the essence. He would do the same, he says, "even if my mother was on a bus" with a hypothetical ticking bomb on board. It is quite untrue to imagine that torture is the fastest way of obtaining information, he says.
A career officer, Major Alexander spent 14 years in the US air force, beginning by flying helicopters for special operations. He saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, was an air force counter-intelligence agent and criminal interrogator, and was stationed in Saudi Arabia, with an anti-terrorist role, during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some years later, the US army was short of interrogators. He wanted to help shape developments in Iraq and volunteered.
Arriving in Iraq in early 2006 he found that the team he was working with were mostly dedicated, but young, men between 18 and 24. "Many of them had never been out of the States before," he recalls. "When they sat down to interrogate somebody it was often the first time they had met a Muslim." In addition to these inexperienced officers, Major Alexander says there was "an old guard" of interrogators using the methods employed at Guantanamo. He could not say exactly what they had been doing for legal reasons, though in the rest of the interview he left little doubt that prisoners were being tortured and abused. The "old guard's" methods, he says, were based on instilling "fear and control" in a prisoner.
He refused to take part in torture and abuse, and forbade the team he commanded to use such methods. Instead, he says, he used normal US police interrogation techniques which are "based on relationship building and a degree of deception". He adds that the deception was often of a simple kind such as saying untruthfully that another prisoner has already told all.
Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype.
In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.
For Iraqi Sunni Arabs joining al-Qa'ida, the abuses played a role, but more often the reason for their recruitment was political rather than religious. They had taken up arms because the Shia Arabs were taking power; de-Baathification marginalised the Sunni and took away their jobs; they feared an Iranian takeover. Above all, al-Qa'ida was able to provide money and arms to the insurgents. Once, Major Alexander recalls, the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, came to visit the prison where he was working. Asking about what motivated the suspected al-Qa'ida prisoners, he was at first given the official story that they were Islamic Jihadi full of religious zeal. Major Alexander intervened to say that this really was not true and there was a much more complicated series of motivations at work. General Casey did not respond.
The objective of Major Alexander's team was to find Zarqawi, the Jordanian born leader of al-Qa'ida who built it into a fearsome organisation. Attempts by US military intelligence to locate him had failed despite three years of trying. Major Alexander was finally able to persuade one of Zarqawi's associates to give away his location because the associate had come to reject his methods, such as the mass slaughter of civilians.
What the major discovered was that many of the Sunni fighters were members of, or allied to, al-Qa'ida through necessity. They did not share its extreme, puritanical Sunni beliefs or hatred of the Shia majority. He says that General Casey had ignored his findings but he was pleased when General David Petraeus became commander in Iraq and began to take account of the real motives of the Sunni fighters. "He peeled back those Sunnis from al-Qa'ida," he says.
In the aftermath of his experience in Iraq, which he left at the end of 2006, Major Alexander came to believe that the battle against the US using torture was more important than the war in Iraq. He sees President Obama's declaration against torture as "a historic victory", though he is concerned about loopholes remaining and the lack of accountability of senior officers. Reflecting on his own interrogations, he says he always monitored his actions by asking himself, "If the enemy was doing this to one of my troops, would I consider it torture?" His overall message is that the American people do not have to make a choice between torture and terror.
How to Break a Terrorist: The US interrogators who used brains, not brutality, to take down the deadliest man in Iraq, by Matthew Alexander and John R Bruning (The Free Press)
'In fact, what’s remarkable is how solid the story has stayed from its beginnings six years ago. Nobody now disputes the following: after 9/11, President Bush secretly suspended the Geneva conventions for prisoners captured in the war on terror. The prison camp at Guantanamo Bay – under the jurisdiction of neither Havana nor Wash-ington – was picked to find a legal loophole to permit the torture of prisoners.
The techniques included multiple beatings; total sensory deprivation; keeping suspects awake for weeks on end; keeping prisoners on the edge of medical hypo-thermia and extreme heat; stress positions that make a human being buckle under muscular distress and pain; and religious, sexual, cultural and psychological abuse. Bush and Cheney also added waterboarding, long classified as torture in American and international law.
All of this was reiterated in numbing and often disturbing bureaucratic language. Yes, this is how banal evil looks in modern America'
The best summary I have read on this entire sordid affair
Nick, this is a fantastic article, written objectively and without agenda. Ive taken the liberty to paste it an implore everybody interested in this subject to read it.
The invasion of Arab land by a non-Arab country provided the neccessary motivation in the first place, I'd say. However, Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib sealed it for most of them.
Agreed.
It was also the manner in which the whole affair was carried out. The whole build up, the lies, no sensitivities regards culture, religion or it's people.
The British had far fewer problems, because on the whole they acted as a police force rather than invaders.
The fact it also came so soon after Afghanistan, and from a neo-con government also antagonised the Muslim world.