What About Mukasy's Position on Waterboarding?

[BCPVP]

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No one's forcing doritos down your throat against your will, are they? That someone could be stupid enough to try and equate the two is mind boggling.

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Anything done improperly can cause, as you say, "plenty of harm and even death". Doesn't make it cruel and unusual. Is that plain enough for you to understand?

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This is still retarded. Waterboarding is intentional asphyxiation. There is no way to safely asphyxiate someone. And of course there's no way to guarantee that it is done properly every time or that it is done only to big bad terrorists.

And it should seem pretty cruel and unusual to a normal human being to be borrowing a technique from the Spanish Inquisition, Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, but I guess some don't mind that company.

Waterboarding is the same as a mock execution, which is illegal under U.S. as well as international law (like it matters to you).

[MidGe]

I am amazed at the responses on this thread, specially the ones that claim, there is no permanent damage, it's only pain, so it is OK.

Ii is NOT ok. The US was instrumental in punishing people for water boarding following the second world war for instance.

What has the US become? A Sadists club? It is starting to look like it!

[adios]

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Why does an enemy combatant captured in Afghanistan have the same rights in the U.S. as a U.S. citizen? No U.S. citizens needn't give up the right to a lawyer or other rights. I'm not even implying that.

Again we're getting into the legal status of enemy combatants. Unless I missed something that's something Congress hasn't asked Mukasy too much about yet.

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padilla didn't, was tortured, and charged after 4 or 5 years of captivity and the judge said, hey, we wait until monday if a guy is arrested on friday, this is comparable ...

model for the future.

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Nope, Padilla case made it's way through the courts with Padilla basically getting favorable court decisions along the way. Ultimately the Enemy Combatent Law enacted by Congress didn't and doesn't apply to Padilla since he's a U.S. citizen. Ultimately the government backed down from it's stance and indicted him on criminal charges and he was tried as a U.S. citizen in the legal system. Basically the Bush administration backed down from it's stance.

The Padilla case is definitely an interesting one and on the surface the Bush administration's stance is troubling a lot of people (including me). I note though that the post you responded to specifically mentioned enemy combatents captured in Afghanistan which IMO is the type situation addressed by the enemy combatent law passed by Congress in 2006 I believe. Here's wiki's link to the case FWIW if anyone is interested:

Padilla Case

[adios]

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I am amazed at the responses on this thread, specially the ones that claim, there is no permanent damage, it's only pain, so it is OK.

Ii is NOT ok. The US was instrumental in punishing people for water boarding following the second world war for instance.

What has the US become? A Sadists club? It is starting to look like it!

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Would it have been right to inflict pain on POWs in WWII to get actionable intelligence? Put another way is it always wrong to inflict pain to gain actionable intelligence? Even in times of war?

[adios]

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Are interrogations supposed to be pleasant?

How do you personally know if waterboarding has been effective in foiling terror attacks? As far as I know, John McCain doesn't interrogate captured jihadists.

Waterboarding doesn't cause physical harm. Just scares the hell out of you. If a terrorist has bad dreams because of it, I'm fine with that. Though I think it's more likely his dreams would be haunted by the innocent people he has killed.

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The situation I was attacking was the stupid idea that you can get information out of people through torture to stop a terrorist attack that will happen in a few hours. Its not gonna happen. The best thing to do is to use actual reliable information to try and pinpoint where the bomb could be and to get people out. Torturing people wont do anything at all.

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How do you personally know if waterboarding has been effective in foiling terror attacks? As far as I know, John McCain doesn't interrogate captured jihadists.


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Because as I said people can lie. How many of those leads are you going to chase? Its a lazy way of doing things. The correct way is to actually investigate a situation and find out information that you know is rock solid. Torturing people leads mostly to dead ends. Most of these guys arent thinking of living after being captured they are ok with death. Seems pointless to stoop down to their level and torture them.

My thoughts are simple, dont play their games. Let the captured prisoners rot in a cell for the rest of their lives if they are found guilty of crimes and dont stoop down to their level by resorting to torture. This ensures that when they capture some of us they might show some restraint and not torture them and also makes them more likely to talk. If you treat them like any other prisoner and they rot in a prison for a couple of years some if not most will realize that this will be the rest of their lives and they will try to make it as comfortable as possible, which means talking. These guys want attention above all else nothing will piss them off more than being treated like any other prisoner. If you torture people you help feed the myth that Americans are evil and actually help those guys get more recruits and grow. There seems to be no positive aspect of using torture and a lot of negatives. I still dont get why its even an argument.

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Was torture by Nazi's effective in gaining information in WWII? Dershowitz claims in the article I posted a link to that torture was effective. Are you maintaining that Dershowitz is wrong?

But if I'm paraphrasing your original point correctly, torturing someone who is willing to die in some sort of extermist jihadist attack is a worthless exercise and I think that's a valid point. However, not all jihadists are willing to die for their "cause" at least that's my perception. Not stating at all though that it makes torture the preferred alternative. Dershowitz's example may be bogus as the Nazi's inflicting torture to illicit information may have been nothing more than sick sadists. Don't really know for sure.

[wacki]

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Serious, non-sarcastic question: what kind of waterboarding procedure *isn't* torture? I mean, I don't think I need to tell you that if the process *didn't* cause extreme mental duress (regardless of the 'specifics of the process'), it probably wouldn't be used as a means for extracting information.

I posted the quote from McCain (someone who might have some first-hand knowledge of the brutality and inhumanity of such things) for a reason: the notion that waterboarding is "torture-lite" is pretty silly. If the "specifics of the process" are such that it *doesn't* produce severe pain or suffering (otherwise known as torture), then I'm not sure why we do it at all.

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The answer's right there in your post. "Extreme." "Severe." Those are terms of degree. I don't doubt that it's an awful experience that's used to coerce confessions from people, but is it "extreme mental duress"? How does waterboarding compare to having electrodes hooked up to your balls? What exactly is the CIA-approved waterboarding process? It's all relevant, and it's 100% reasonable for Mukasey to want the facts before he makes a legal determination about it.

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All the facts that Mukasey needs can be found either here:
http://www.waterboarding.org/how-to

Or through a trip to a CIA interrogator for a live demo. If a reporter can go through a test run I'm sure Mukasey would have no trouble. That is unless he is deliberately avoiding the question for political reasons. This technique breaks CIA agents in an average of 14 seconds and the world record holder (an al Qaeda agent) lasted 2.5 minutes.

The only way I can see this being legitimately called "torture-lite" is because of the lack of long lasting physical damage. But by the same standards holding a taser to your balls would be "torture-lite".

http://www.rescuehumor.com/video/TASER_to_Balls.htm

I've never undergone waterboarding (although I'd love to try it) but if the above link is accurate and ABC's descriptions are accurate as well then this "debate" about whether or not waterboarding is a form of torture is nothing more than an act of deception that takes advantage of the ignorance of the general public. Whether or not we should be torturing terrorists is a completely different and legitimate debate though.

As far as "extreme mental duress" well that cop was fine. So that taser by itself wasn't "extreme mental duress". But if he experienced that every half hour for a month his mental health would end up being dramatically different. People that undergo that kind of torture under hostile conditions (sleep deprivation, surrounded by enemies, etc) will often break in ways that will take years of professional psychological therapy to recover from. Even with the best of help, many of them will never recover.

[Jorge10]

I think you are referring to this part. You posted like 4 links so maybe I picked the wrong one, but anyway.

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There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

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I think the situation is very different and the people we deal with are very different. The French guys being tortured were probably thinking that they were going to get out of it ok or that their families would just be captured, we dont really know what the Natzis said. I doubt the Natzis said we will kill your families if you tell us where they are. The information is different and the people are different. I dont think the WWII example applies.

Something else that is different about the current situation. As you said torturing people that dont care about their lives is pointless, which I agree with, the question then is how can we tell? How do we know that the guy we just tortured wasn't just messing with us? How do we know that he really broke and the information we got is good? If we treat every piece of information that we get through torture as accurate we will get mostly dead ends and it will actually make things more difficult.

[ConstantineX]

Well I learned something from this thread. I thought it was "torture-lite" as well. I still think that there's a legitimate case for its use.

[PLOlover]

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padilla didn't, was tortured, and charged after 4 or 5 years of captivity and the judge said, hey, we wait until monday if a guy is arrested on friday, this is comparable ...

model for the future.



Nope, Padilla case made it's way through the courts with Padilla basically getting favorable court decisions along the way.

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uh, no. from your wiki link.

padilla didn't(get a lawyer)
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Considering Padilla was held for years in military custody with no formal charges brought, many were shocked by this move by the George W. Bush presidential administration[18], and some reasoned that a repeat of such a process would allow the U.S. government to detain citizens indefinitely without presenting the cause that would eventually be tried.

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was tortured
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Allegations of torture during imprisonment

Padilla's legal team filed a motion to dismiss the case, alleging that during his imprisonment he has been subjected to torture, including sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, enforced stress positions and administered with various drugs including possibly LSD and PCP.[25]

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and charged after 4 or 5 years of captivity and the judge said, hey, we wait until monday if a guy is arrested on friday, this is comparable ...
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Delays in prosecution

Two additional motions also filed in October of 2006, argued that the case should be dismissed because the government took too much time between arresting Padilla and charging him.[2] In essence, the argument is that for constitutional speedy trial purposes, the arrest took place prior to his detention as an enemy combatant, and not simply when he was transferred to civilian custody.

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model for the future. <this was my editorial comment>

[PLOlover]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...110501681.html

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Mr. Levin was acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2004 when he volunteered to be waterboarded, according to a remarkable Nov. 2 report by Jan Crawford Greenburg and Ariane de Vogue of ABC News. In the midst of revising the Justice Department's legal rationale on interrogation methods after the repudiation of the infamous "torture memo," Mr. Levin wanted to experience waterboarding, or simulated drowning, to determine whether it triggered the legal definition of torture. After being subjected to the technique at a Washington area military installation, Mr. Levin concluded that waterboarding could be illegal unless performed under the strictest supervision and in the most limited of ways.

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