I'm going to monitor this closely because it's a pretty tough topic, but hey, let's give it a shot: A committee study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program was done and released to the public recently. It's a serious read - 525 pages of detailed findings: http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/stud ... study1.pdf There are lots and lots of media findings on the report. Please feel free to post up the more thoughtful or thorough takes. https://www.google.com/search?&q=cia%20torture%20report Focus: What do you think about this? Do the ends of a program like this justify the means? Spoiler What stands out to me is the number of detainees and recipients of the "enhanced interrogation" measures that were found to have either no information, or providing incorrect information in the hopes of alleviating their pain, and worse, that many of these people continued to be subject to torture and prison after it was decided they did not have information. Example: So... basically they declared the program a success because the person they tortured didn't know anything, and that proved another source to be wrong. Alt-Focus: What do you do with the people involved in this program? Spoiler Multiple people, including the ACLU, have suggested that they be formally pardoned, which sounds crazy unless you accept the fact that it's likely they will never be convicted of anything. Issuing formal pardons with conditions of testimony might be the only way that anyone involved in this program is acknowledged to have actually committed a crime. IMO, the people involved should be charged. They should be convicted. They should be held responsible for the torture of fellow human beings against the laws of the world, some of whom were proved to have no knowledge or involvement in terrorist plots. But if that will not happen, issuing formal pardons would at least mark these people as having committed the acts and would not protect them from all legal ramifications both in and out of the country.
I think Nice Guy Eddie said it best. "If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he'll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire, now that don't necessarily make it fucking so!" As to the people that ordered the torture and those that carried it out? There really isn't any moral difference to me between them and the commanders and guards at a concentration camp. There needs to be trials at the Hague. Televise that shit. America and specifically its government needs to be taken down a peg or thousand. You can't claim the moral high ground against terrorists by committing terrorism yourself.
I have no problem with torture, fuck them, but as jimmie stated above, after a while how do you know if the information is true?
Torture seems less like a source of information and much more as a "this is what you get for fucking with us". It's counter-productive. A person will say any bullshit to make the pain stop, and you're pulling focus away from where it can be used elsewhere. They had to have known this, because it's documented that it produced shit results. Bad people deserve to have bad things done to them, but life in solitary prison will solve that problem on its own. Jeremy Scahill is well-worldly and educated on the subject, and has been preaching about this for years.
Quick question for those who have read more than I have on this topic (see: anything at all). Is the report giving the impression that the CIA is just torturing a bunch of innocent people that couldn't possibly have any information? Or is it that the CIA is torturing a bunch of people that could possibly have any information and going to the point where the people are now giving false information just so its stops? Or is it something else?
I've read some articles on this issue. But haven't read them all. Personally I'm pro torture if it saves lives. I don't think that they people who did torture should be punished. I think that the people who obfuscated or just plain lied about the usefulness and productivity of the torture program should the rest of their lives in jail. I think that the media discussions about what the Presidents knew are a complete waste of time. There in no doubt in my mind that they we're told repeatedly that it was a necessary evil and that it was protecting lives of Americans and the lives of many innocents around the world. I have a really depressing feeling that once the initial attempts didn't pan out the program was continued because of nightmarish levels of "I need to protect my department/budget" bureaucratic garbage.
Obligatory reading on this subject is Christopher Hitchens' article from Vanity Fair: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feat ... hens200808
How do you quantify that? People were tortured to try and extract information about terrorist plots. You can't know what someone is going to say before they say it, otherwise you wouldn't have to ask them in the first place. This isn't the movies where you bug the Bad Guy's phone and he says "I have an evil plan to kill a thousand people on December 16th. John Doe knows the details of the plan." If torture is an acceptable way of gathering information from people to stop terrorist plots, by definition it must be acceptable to torture people who do not have the information sought. These people may or may not be "innocent" in the most general sense of the word, but they also may not be directly involved in a specific plot. And if the ends justify the means - if torturing people is okay as long as it saves lives - then why do you feel strongly about punishing the people involved who may have lied? Surely, by chance alone, some lives were saved by extracting information in this manner. These people may have lied about the effectiveness of the program to keep it running, in which case they saved lives, in which case all is forgiven, right?
I don't know how I would quantify it. Probably with hindsight. Which means practically I don't think I could ever say "Yes, torture that person."
This whole discussion makes me a little uncomfortable. If these people are known terrorists I don't care what we do to them to try to get information, their lives are forfeit already in my mind. No death is bad enough for being a terrorist. Sometimes you have to work in the dark to get things done and if it saves lives its worth it. Binary brings up a good point though on how we quantify it. If we get bad info from one of these guys and nothing happens where they claimed it would it might be because they told us anything to stop the pain, the terror group changed plans when they were captured, or we "stopped" it from happening. We don't know which so maybe tearing the guys kidney out through his ass really wasn't necessary? Many of us have watched prisoners, What Hugh Jackman does to that dude.... but he was sure and it worked out. Granted a movie but an example of what might make some of us think twice about how far we might go to get information. That said if they might be innocent I'm very squeamish about it, and I also worry about what that says about me for saying it, that torture for known terrorists is ok, and what it says about those who seem to be good at it (able to do those things to another human).
I don't know. I don't want to say I am for torture, even on a known terrorist. At the same time...that person is a fucking terrorist whose belief system advocates beheading innocent civilians and broadcasting it for the world to see. That person is someone who would cheerfully endorse me and my family being ripped apart in the name of their ideology. My survival nature says fuck them. My compassion as a human being says maybe a bullet to the head of a known terrorist is more the way to go (for me). As to the information being extracted...eh. There's a line where people will say anything, anything at all, to just make it stop. It sounds like much of this could've crossed the line. Then again, I also know and understand quite well that protection of our way of life necessitates someone else doing something that I personally couldn't.
To those that accept torture as long as it's being practiced on terrorists: What does it say about the United States that someone thinks that a reasonable avenue of taking out their anger on us is a suicide bomb?
A former United States Vice President went on national television, admitted to a gross felony (and potentially a capital offense), implicated a former President in the same, and the whole country just shrugged. I feel like I'm in a Kafka novel.
Why? It's alarmingly accurate. The general public who shrugs at the idea of rectally feeding a suspected (or even not suspected just brown person) terrorist does so because "Yew gonna fuck wit dis here Murkka yew gon git yew a taste of some bad ass medicine, son. We gon fuck yew up". They view terrorists as less than human because of the terrorists' actions, and use the actions of terrorist groups like ISIS to validate the "Eye for an eye" mindset that so many people seem to be showing right now.