Water Boarding

I am almost sure there was already a thread on this, but if there was then i cant find it

Republican Pair Would Bring Back Water boarding

Sky News 2011, 9:52, Sunday 13 November 2011

US Republican presidential hopefuls Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann have both said they would reinstate the water boarding interrogation technique if elected.

Businessman Mr Cain said he does not support torture but would bring back the controversial practice, where captives experience the sensation of drowning, because he sees it as "enhanced interrogation".
George W Bush's administration argued using it saved lives as it led to valuable information being gleaned about terror attacks.

Mr Bush confirmed he had authorised its use to extract information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al Qaeda mastermind behind the 9/11 atrocity.

However, Barack Obama banned the technique when he was elected to the White House.

Mr Cain said he would leave it up to military leaders, rather than their civilian superiors, to
decide what forms of interrogation amounted to torture.

Minnesota congresswoman Mrs Bachmann also said she would be willing to allow water boarding if elected president, calling the practice "very effective".

"It gained information for our country," she added.

But the other Republican contenders are split over whether water boarding would be an effective tool.

Ex-Utah governor Jon Huntsman said the technique diminished America's standing in the world and undermined the nation's values.

Texas congressman Ron Paul said it was illegal.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney was not directly asked about the issue but stated he would use whatever means necessary to protect America.

The candidates were questioned on foreign policy during a debate in South Carolina, which revealed deep differences between them.

They roundly accused Mr Obama of being too soft with America's enemies, but over how to effectively project American strength and protect the homeland they were often at odds.

On Iran, the candidates argued about how to discourage the regime in Tehran from carrying out alleged plans to develop a nuclear weapon.

Former house speaker Newt Gingrich said if all other steps failed, "you have to take whatever steps are necessary" to prevent that outcome.

He said the approach should include covertly "taking out their scientists" and "breaking up their systems".

Mr Romney said Iran would obtain a nuclear weapon if Mr Obama was re-elected.

"And if you elect Mitt Romney, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon," he said.

Mr Cain said Mr Obama has been on the wrong side of nearly every situation in the Arab world and the US mishandled the uprisings in the region.
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I really don’t see the point of Water Boarding or for that matter any other kind of torture. US Republican presidential hopefuls Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann ought to have a trial go at it and then they might not be so big on the idea.

The strangest part about what they say is that it is coming from two people that want to be President. They wish to be President of a country that denounces just about every country that has bad human rights issues. It is a bad message to send out to the rest of the world. You have to improve your human rights issues to be accepted into the free world, but we will do as we damn well please.

It is a fact that if a person is being tortured then you can bet your life that he will admit to anything you want just to stop the torture. It has been known for people to admit to crimes they never committed just to stop the torture, preferring death to torture.

Herman Cain says he doesn’t support torture but this is just a method of "enhanced interrogation". Is this guy living on the same planet as me, because if he makes President, then the world is in for one hell of an awakening?

Michele Bachmann? Well someone must have really pissed on her shoes sometime in her sad life.

Be well IAN 2411

Indeed, the thought of one of these fuckwits being elected president is worrying. As for how to project America's strength: I guess that everybody who wants to know will know by now there isn't all that much strength to project. All it takes to make the American military piss of asap is a few thousand really determined fanatics and some backyard-built IEDs.

Re Iran: I don't think neither America nor anybody else can do anything about them building a bomb. Not as long as the Chinese and the Russians block every UN-Resolution that would really hurt Iran, like effectively banning their oil from being sold.

To all these POLITICIANS ( and I use the word in the worst context) who condone waterboarcding, I DEMAND they spend 1 hour being Waterboarding themselves. Then see what they say about waterboarding others.

I agree, if it's not torture they should be willing to try it. It is torture, which not only doesn't work but it is wrong. Tortured people will tell you anything you want to hear, not necessarily the truth or any useful information at all.

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Originally Posted by ksst

I agree, if it's not torture they should be willing to try it. It is torture, which not only doesn't work but it is wrong. Tortured people will tell you anything you want to hear, not necessarily the truth or any useful information at all.

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That's not exactly true. For long term interrogations, torture can be very effective. You can end the torture when you have the information, then start again if the info turns out to be false. But for short term results, it's pretty much useless.

And in any case, it's totally immoral, by anyone's standards.

Unless you're a good, Christian conservative, I guess.

How do you know when you have the correct information? If there were some other way of finding out the information, wouldn't it be better to start with that method? How many false confessions have been obtained over the history of using torture? Most of them?

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Originally Posted by ksst

How do you know when you have the correct information?

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By finding out whether the information is correct. Like, go to that house the dude mentioned and find that other bad guy you were after. Or not.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ksst

How many false confessions have been obtained over the history of using torture? Most of them?

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Probably. I heavily doubt that all the women and men who confessed to being witches were actually witches.

According to Cathy Young:

I never imagined, immediately after 9/11, that four years later we would be having a debate on whether and how much the United States should torture prisoners--or that the Bush administration would wage a losing battle against anti-torture legislation sponsored by a Republican senator. Maybe I should have seen it coming, after the attacks on New York and Washington ushered in a new culture of fear. Most people agree that desperate times call for desperate measures. But just how desperate can we get?

The disclosures of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib were followed by revelations that such tactics had also been used in interrogations of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, with high-level government approval. The issue finally came to a head in 2005 with the anti-torture legislation spearheaded by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), himself a survivor of torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese. The White House found itself in the curious position of arguing, simultaneously, that "we do not torture" and that the McCain bill (which clarifies that the ban on "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" applies to all U.S. personnel and all persons in U.S. custody) would tie our hands in the war on terror. In December the administration finally caved and dropped its opposition to the legislation, whose passage seemed inevitable.
Torture is the ultimate depravity. Fittingly, the torture debate has featured some new lows in depravity of the rhetorical kind. Leading conservative pundits, including Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, and Thomas Sowell, have derided opposition to torture as "moral preening" or "moral exhibitionism." Others made an issue of the homosexuality of journalist Andrew Sullivan, who has emerged as one of the most vocal critics of torture. After Sullivan condemned a notorious incident in which a female interrogator pretended to smear an Al Qaeda suspect with her menstrual blood in order to make him unclean in the eyes of his God, The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto suggested that Sullivan's reaction came from disgust at female physiology related to a lack of sexual experience with women.
The Journal editorial page also distinguished itself by taking the peculiar position that so-called "waterboarding," a technique in which a tightly bound detainee has water poured over his face in a way that induces a sensation of drowning, was not really torture but a "coercive interrogation" tactic relying on "psychological pressure."
The Journal just as bravely dismissed exposure to extreme heat and extreme cold, just short of causing fatal hypothermia, as mere "discomfort." The columnist and Council of Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot (a Journal editorial page alumnus) pronounced in the Los Angeles Times--on the very day the Bush administration dropped its opposition to the McCain bill--that the torture scandal was vastly overblown because a lot of this so-called torture was quite similar to what millions of U.S. soldiers have to endure in boot camp.
Of course, when those trainees are subjected to waterboarding, it's precisely to prepare them to withstand torture. Besides, one could use a similar analogy to argue that sodomizing a prisoner with a plastic tube is no big deal because it's quite similar to the colonoscopies voluntarily endured by millions of Americans every year.
The most nuanced "anti-anti-torture" case was made by Charles Krauthammer in The Weekly Standard. Krauthammer agreed that "torture is a terrible and monstrous thing, as degrading and morally corrupting to those who practice it as any conceivable human activity," and he did not try to excuse practices like waterboarding as "nontorture." But he also argued that some forms of this monstrous activity must remain permissible in extreme circumstances, and that our leaders must take this burden of conscience in order to save lives. He outlined two exceptions: the "ticking time bomb" scenario and the high-value, high-level terrorist who possesses a treasure trove of information about the terror network and the plots it's gestating.
But Krauthammer's argument has several weaknesses. He greatly overestimates the plausibility of the "ticking time bomb" scenario. If the attack is to take place within minutes, coercive or painful methods ought to be useless: The captive will tell the interrogators a fake story--possibly pre-planned in the event of capture--and by the time they realize they've been duped the bomb will have gone off.
The reliability of torture-extracted information aside, allowing what Krauthammer calls "torture-lite" (stress positions, heat and cold, probably waterboarding) with the goal of saving lives raises a disturbing question: What if the "lite" version doesn't break the detainee? Do we start pulling fingernails and administering electric shocks to genitals? Use "coercive" techniques on a terrorist's child? Where on the slippery slope do we stop?
Curiously, Krauthammer also argues that McCain's anti-torture position is more flexible than it's made out to be. The senator has said that the president may authorize illegal techniques in an emergency such as a hostage rescue or an imminent attack; and legal experts, including The National Journal's Stuart Taylor, suggest that his bill would likely be interpreted so that the harshness of allowed interrogation techniques could increase depending on the urgency of the situation.
This should trouble real anti-torture purists, but why does it bother Krauthammer, who concludes that "McCain embraces the same exceptions I do"? Because he thinks that McCain's anti-torture crusade is dishonestly moralistic, a claim to the moral high ground based on false pretenses. Krauthammer wants us "to be honest about doing terrible things." But what, from Krauthammer's point of view, do we have to gain from being honest?
I am more strongly opposed to torture than Krauthammer is, but I'm enough of a realist to recognize that any "no torture" stand will likely be qualified with some tacit acknowledgment that, under some very bad circumstances, some very bad things will happen. That's far better than a Krauthammer-style declaration that "we must all be prepared to torture." If we start with a "thou shalt not torture" absolute, we are likely to be extremely vigilant about lapses from this commandment. If we start with the idea that torture is sometimes acceptable, that slippery slope is going to take us pretty low.
Already, we've reached the point of seriously debating why torture is bad. On National Review's staff blog, Goldberg wonders what makes it so much worse than killing people in combat or putting them in prison.
Actually, there are a lot of reasons. Torture robs the individual of all control of his or her body and mind. It's quite possible to maintain one's human dignity and selfhood while imprisoned; not so with torture, which, as Sullivan put in The New Republic, "takes what is animal in us and deploys it against what makes us human."
Imprisonment does not do that. Nor does death; it simply ends the individual's existence. Many people have chosen death over severe pain --not only because of the suffering involved, but because of the loss of dignity.
On the giving end, the evil of torture is unique as well. It inflicts systematic severe suffering on a helpless human being. It also creates the danger that at least some of the torturers will enjoy it, particularly if they have been primed to see the one being tortured as an evil, subhuman creature getting his just deserts. Every pro-torture (or anti-anti-torture) argument, including Krauthammer's, relies on the assumption that terrorists are entitled to no humane treatment.
Anti-torture absolutists often point out that we were able to beat Hitler without resorting to torture. On the other side, there is the valid point that America did not really win that war with clean hands: Consider the internment of Japanese-Americans and the large-scale bombing of civilians. That we no longer do such things is surely a sign of moral progress. If the War on Terror brings us regression on the issue of torture, it will be a tragedy--and, in all likelihood, one as unnecessary as internment was during World War II.

The problem is denu that these two creeps, and i am being polite by calling them that name, have no intention of debating the subject if elected. You are now talking about 9/11 as if that is a good reason[not your personal reason] but America's, to change the goal posts. There is no moral argument for torture, you are either for or against, do it or oppose it. If the USA think that torture, and I am talking about "enhanced interrogation" [Yea Right] Is the correct way to go, then who are they to run down China and like countries about human rights issues. These two presidential hopefuls are a danger to the civilised world. If Herman Cain had been in an African jail twenty years ago he would not be talking about "enhanced interrogation" like a crack pot now. Michele Bachmann, Bless her cotten socks just needs help and a lot of it.

Be well IAN 2411

I agree.

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Originally Posted by IAN 2411

" You are now talking about 9/11 as if that is a good reason[not your personal reason] but America's, to change the goal posts."

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I am sorry it is not my intention to give any such impression; my position on the use of torture is that its wrong and I hate that its necessary to even mention that "torture" also includes enhanced questioning methods.

I believe the quoted article is overall admonishing the use of torture (including so called enhanced interrogation techniques etc) despite airing both sides of the issue and the respected justifications for those viewpoints.

I confess to being a bit confused about this issue - is it a political election trick, or some idea of making what the US is already doing legal?

Personally I am against torture, as you become what you fight.