rvg, some couple of years later?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Sorry, this thread exploded since I was last here.

Seems like we still have the same things being repeated in this thread. It is a basic misunderstanding of what was done.
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Abuses distinct from the cia waterboarding program are another topic, if you want to pretend like people are praising the guys in abu gharaib or wherever be my guest.
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They most certainly "sat down and talked to them over a cup of tea first". That is why only 3 people ended up being waterboarded. Most talked without needing that kind of pressure. But it's a willful misunderstanding of human nature to think that people don't have enough pride to keep quiet, even in the face of a polite offer of tea. Do English people have some tremendous weakness to tea that I don't know about?
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There was never any situation in which someone would give information "just to get the pain to stop". That is pure imagination and has nothing to do with their methods.
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It was not about confessions. They were not interested in forcing confessions, they were interested in information about al queda because they were trying to learn everything they could to prevent another attack. Ironically the "chatting over a cup of coffee" is quite effective at getting a false confession, you just have to convince them that it's in their best interest.
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It's not clear to me why the people who say our version of waterboarding was torture don't say that sleep deprivation is torture. I think they are vastly underestimating it. You certainly don't see any youtube videos of people undergoing 3 days sleep deprivation. But IIRC the European Court of Human Rights ruled that it didn't reach the level of what was implied by torture. As I said if what we did had been accurately described in the first place I do not think we would be having this argument today.

A) freely, voluntarily, free of any duress or coersion
B) under the conditions imposed, the subject calculates that it isn't worth the hassle
C) blackmail or other forms of coersion not considered torture (broad, and not particulary relevant here)
D) inflicting pain, or other stimuli severe enough to be considered equal or worse, that causes so much stress that the subject mentally breaks and begins to talk

Everything under category D is torture in my view. I can imagine situations where there the distinction between pressure and torture becomes blurred, such as sleep deprivation with intermittent interrogations. Waterboarding is, by definition, a procedure that causes your body to "believe" it's in the process of dying, and should always be considered torture. Wether it can ever be acceptable is, of course, another question.

case in point. They never went for D, why would they even from a practical perspective, good lord. They have countless questions to ask and they need cogent answers. Their entire method was based on getting people to agree to cooperate. If they didn't when they first came in, they would start with the first method on the list. They work at creating the impression that they already know everything. People eventually think that it does not do much harm to talk, or that they can fool the interrogators, or they feel helpless and like it doesn't make any difference, or that they have endured enough that it is not shameful to talk, or they believe the bluffs and are worried it might get much worse. Essentially: they don't break, they let go.

I can't imagine what goes on in the heads of people who imagine it's a choice between chatting with a cup of coffee and inflicting sever pain until they shout out an answer in agony.


Incidentally, the quote from rvg that kadagar brought up to start the thread is quite praiseworthy. Principles tend by their nature to drastically oversimplify. Taking a religious attitude towards them, abandoning all reason and treating them as sacred and holy, is a form of non-thought that is responsible for much evil in the world. We should understand principles for what they are, an awkward stab at expressing something difficult to get a handle on. People who talk about "principles never being abandoned and moral lines never being crossed" believe they know the exact truth already and that no information or details about the situation is required, as evidenced from this thread. They are arriving at their principles by a legitimate means. It disturbs me that there are literally people out there who think of it as a "war of principles" instead of a real world response to a terrorist attack in which we worked at dismantling and disabling the terrorist group. Remember all that "if we pat people down at the airport, the terrorists win" and "you can't have a war or terror" nonsense? You have to be divorced from the real world to worry about the "principles" breached in the killing of osama etc.

How about this for a principle? How about "truth and accuracy over sensationalism"?