US tortures

[Gfted1]

 

Who gives a damn about Cuba? What do they have to offer us (besides cigars rolled in the thighs of virgins)?

What do you mean. The point is just to abandon a falied dogmatic approach to Cuban forgein relations. This is a good thing. Shows character being able to examine and learn from your own mistakes. 

 

 

Cuba is so important that we use it as a prison.

 

I guess its fine that we can pat ourselves on the back for our sudden "enlightenment" but at the end of the day, Cuba is about on par with Haiti as far as foreign relations go.

[Drowsy Emperor]

I can't take the suggestion that "free market should reign" in healthcare seriously. If it was up to the free market anyone unable to pay would be left in the street to die. On the other hand, a cartel based policy in which the state is complicit is a disaster but that's no longer the state as an expression of the will of the majority, rather as an oligarchy setting things up according to its own interest.

 

Americans misunderstand european statism as communism. In Europe it is expected and desired that the state should handle things that are for the common good, (indeed it was the extremely conservative and imperialistic rule of Bismark in Germany that came up with pensions, a fact that would probably send american conservatives into a seizure), and that belief significantly predates communism as an ideology. The idea of "free" communal services predates statism by centuries, going as far back as the beginning of the human race.

 

Anyway I don't see what's wrong with it. A society in which everyone has free access to education, the best health care available (the former Yugoslavia used to pay even very expensive trearments for its citizens in foreign countries when they couldn't be provided within the state) etc. is a happier and productive place than one where everyone is struggling to get by. Within that type society at least you know what you're paying when you pay your taxes.

[Gorgon]

That, and insurers are middlemen, driving the price up and making the actual cost of services provided by hospitals hard to decipher. Having the goverment be the main employer is much more efficient. This what makes it possible to lift the huge burden of providing healthcare to everyone. The secondary market for non essential healthcare such as elective surgery and dental care ect. is then private. It's a model that is tried and tested and works well in Europe and Japan for instance.

[Gorgon]

I kinda view the difference between lifting that burden together as the difference between being a self absorbed teenager and becoming, you know, an adult. 

 

The US has taken the first baby steps, hopefully the whole thing won't revert with a new president.  

[Gfted1]

Nah, Congress will snuff it out.

[Barothmuk]

 

Quote from article:

 

“These changes will lead to legitimacy for a government that shamelessly continuously abuses human rights"

 

Amusing considering the thread. Edited December 18, 2014 by Barothmuk

[Gfted1]

That's because our use of torture is a legitimate intelligence gathering tactic and is required to spread freedom around the globe. Everyone else is doing it wrong.

[Drowsy Emperor]

^ At least he's honest about it.

[Gfted1]

Did you miss my winkyface emoticon?

 

Seriously though, while distasteful, I find it laughable when people say that torture wont produce results. You know, because every single mook is a hardened Rambo-esque mercenary that laughs off pain while feeding false information.   Trust me, everyone in this forum would sing like a canary if put to the test.

 

As an aside, I wonder why they don't consider warfare to be torture too. The stress & pain are surely more magnified over the duration of a war, no? Id rather stand all day with my dong out than get shot, but I guess we all have our crosses to bear. 

[Barothmuk]

Trust me, everyone in this forum would sing like a canary if put to the test.

That's generally why torture is useless. The victim will eventually confess to anything.

[Gfted1]

That's why hopefully interrogators are more intelligent than forum posters, to suss out fact from fiction.

[Drowsy Emperor]

Did you miss my winkyface emoticon?

 

Seriously though, while distasteful, I find it laughable when people say that torture wont produce results. You know, because every single mook is a hardened Rambo-esque mercenary that laughs off pain while feeding false information.   Trust me, everyone in this forum would sing like a canary if put to the test.

 

As an aside, I wonder why they don't consider warfare to be torture too. The stress & pain are surely more magnified over the duration of a war, no? Id rather stand all day with my dong out than get shot, but I guess we all have our crosses to bear. 

 

Nope, I was approving that you weren't trying to justify or downplay it. 

 

I have a KGB manual and it doesn't say that torture doesn't provide results, its says that the information received isn't reliable, which amounts to the same thing. Doesn't say they were giving up on it either though.

 

I'm fairly certain that all secret services of the world torture and assassinate individuals, I just can't stand people presenting it as something its not/whitewashing it. 

 

I hope you don't get riled up when someone tortures a US agent/soldier whatever though, if its all in the game... well, its all in the game?

Edited December 18, 2014 by Drowsy Emperor

[Gfted1]

...its says that the information received isn't reliable, which amounts to the same thing.

I think this is important. What constitutes "reliability". 100% accuracy? 75%?

 

If your government had to torture a terror cell (lets say 20 people for the sake of conversation) to prevent a school bombing type incident like what recently happened in Pakistan, would it be acceptable to you that 19 didn't know anything but one did and gave it up?

[Barothmuk]

That's why hopefully interrogators are more intelligent than forum posters, to suss out fact from fiction.

Well their 1989 report seemed to believe torture to be an ineffective technique

 

“inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.”

 

And the latest report has reached the same conclusion.

Edited December 18, 2014 by Barothmuk

[Gfted1]

So they kept doing it for an additional 25 years? Weird.

[Drowsy Emperor]

I can't be arsed to drag out the manual but there are short codes for information that represent a category of reliability depending on various factors, such as the source, how the information was found out etc, and they go from fairly certain to rumors.

 

Information gained from torture is claimed to be "notoriously unreliable" so its on the lower end of the scale. Trusted informants, whether out of ideology or money are much more reliable which is why most intelligence services invest in people and networks first and foremost. It is generally a major failure of an intelligence service if it has to depend on coercive methods to gain necessary information because of how unreliable it is. It is the intelligence equivalent of grasping at straws, but they'll all engage in it regardless.

 

Regarding the conduct of the US. When reading up on Iraq post invasion many UK intelligence officers and soldiers criticized their US counterparts for "living in a bubble" and being unwilling to engage and invest in field intelligence gathering (as in working with people on the ground) and preferring to heavily use electronic methods instead. They also commented on a culture of security paranoia among US troops and how it was negatively affecting their relations with the populace.

The British, as a relatively small nation with a large empire learned that heavy handed methods generally don't work best, and if nothing else, know very well how to organize an intelligence community. If they didn't they'd have never held India with the equivalent of a dozen men.

By extension, its easy to conclude that the US will engage more, on average, in violent methods because:

a.) its not going to get as much good information out of its networks

b.) its a large country with a large military force so it cares less for subtlety and will use overwhelming force simply because it can

 

In this particular case an even larger disconnect was evident. I have read that interrogators were suggesting to their superiors and the "central" that they believed that the prisoners told everything they knew. And they merely received orders to continue. So you have your own command not trusting that the people its delegated this task to know their job? Or maybe they simply wanted torture done for torture's sake? 

 

You can argue its moral superiority here on "account of lives saved" but we can be pretty sure that no lives were saved otherwise the government PR campaign would be all over "successfully foiled terror plots" in its own defense, instead of releasing a very bad looking and at the same time heavily censored version of the document. And if you don't achieve a worthwhile goal, what's left? And to what purpose?

[Gfted1]

I don't think we will ever hear about how a plot was foiled, that would compromise the apparatus. Just seems mighty strange to me that these agencies (worldwide?) would continue to practice a method that was "disproven", thrice now per Barathmuk and yourself, for roughly 25 years after discovery of its iffeffectiveness. They must not have anything better to do.

[aluminiumtrioxid]

That's why hopefully interrogators are more intelligent than forum posters, to suss out fact from fiction.

 

Research has repeatedly shown that the people who generally have the most confidence in their ability to tell truth from lies perform the worst in tests where they're asked to assess a person's honesty. It might be possible that their hypothesised "superior ability to suss out fact from fiction" only works in a waterboarding-related environment, but I somehow have my doubts about that.

 

As far as I know, torture is only useful for confirming intel you already have.

[aluminiumtrioxid]

I don't think we will ever hear about how a plot was foiled, that would compromise the apparatus. Just seems mighty strange to me that these agencies (worldwide?) would continue to practice a method that was "disproven", thrice now per Barathmuk and yourself, for roughly 25 years after discovery of its iffeffectiveness. They must not have anything better to do.

 

Tradition is a powerful force.

 

And, as I've said, torture is useful for confirming the info you've gained from other sources. Just like violence, it's a powerful tool with a very limited application, and severely underperforms when used in an inappropriate manner.

Edited December 18, 2014 by aluminiumtrioxid

[Drowsy Emperor]

I don't think we will ever hear about how a plot was foiled, that would compromise the apparatus. Just seems mighty strange to me that these agencies (worldwide?) would continue to practice a method that was "disproven", thrice now per Barathmuk and yourself, for roughly 25 years after discovery of its iffeffectiveness. They must not have anything better to do.

 

I did not say it was disproved, merely unreliable. 

 

The circumstances here are strange, not because torture itself was involved but the fact that there were more than a few people tortured who had no relations to terrorism whatsoever (why the hell were they incarcerated in the first place?) and because the torturers were told to continue even though their opinion was that there was nothing more to be learned.

 

Besides that, the real deal here is the human rights abuse accusations that the US uses as a political weapon against other countries that people find galling. 

 

Do the Chinese, Russians etc. int agencies engage in unsavory activities? Sure. Are they habitually attacking other countries for it in the political arena and using it as a pretext for war on the other side of the globe? No, not really. 

 

If the US did not take a position of moral superiority there would be little ground for this event to become a major scandal. If newspapers said "Russian prisons all over the world", everybody would say "no surprise there" and shrug it off. But as long as Washington engages in the "good guy" "bad guy" Manichean rhetoric, coining terms such as "axis of evil" you can hardly be surprised that when it rains ****, it pours. 

Edited December 18, 2014 by Drowsy Emperor

[pmp10]

 

I don't think we will ever hear about how a plot was foiled, that would compromise the apparatus. Just seems mighty strange to me that these agencies (worldwide?) would continue to practice a method that was "disproven", thrice now per Barathmuk and yourself, for roughly 25 years after discovery of its iffeffectiveness. They must not have anything better to do.

 

Tradition is a powerful force.

 

This has nothing to do with tradition but with it's historical usefulness.

Modern application of torture goes all the way back to Algerian civil war when it was very effectively applied by French paratroopers.

[aluminiumtrioxid]

 

 

Tradition is a powerful force.

 

This has nothing to do with tradition but with it's historical usefulness.

Modern application of torture goes all the way back to Algerian civil war when it was very effectively applied by French paratroopers.

 

 

"It's been historically useful (in a different set of circumstances, which have changed since)" is pretty much what I meant by "tradition". As I've said, torture is a useful tool for a limited set of purposes. (I also firmly believe that the utility gained by holding ourselves to standards where torture is not an option outweighs its usefulness, but that's a different matter entirely.)

[Gfted1]

I did not say it was disproved, merely unreliable. 

 

The circumstances here are strange, not because torture itself was involved but the fact that there were more than a few people tortured who had no relations to terrorism whatsoever (why the hell were they incarcerated in the first place?) and because the torturers were told to continue even though their opinion was that there was nothing more to be learned.

 

Besides that, the real deal here is the human rights abuse accusations that the US uses as a political weapon against other countries that people find galling. 

 

Do the Chinese, Russians etc. int agencies engage in unsavory activities? Sure. Are they habitually attacking other countries for it in the political arena and using it as a pretext for war on the other side of the globe? No, not really. 

 

If the US did not take a position of moral superiority there would be little ground for this event to become a major scandal. If newspapers said "Russian prisons all over the world", everybody would say "no surprise there" and shrug it off. But as long as Washington engages in the "good guy" "bad guy" Manichean rhetoric, coining terms such as "axis of evil" you can hardly be surprised that when it rains ****, it pours.

I can agree with this. Im not talking morality, I was disputing the opinion that torture doesn't get results.

[Zoraptor]

The British, as a relatively small nation with a large empire learned that heavy handed methods generally don't work best, and if nothing else, know very well how to organize an intelligence community. If they didn't they'd have never held India with the equivalent of a dozen men.

 

More or less, the British Empire ran on basically three different approaches. Get native leaders to run things for you with tame soldiers/ police. If not that then support the second strongest ethnic group against the strongest. If neither of those two work then the gloves are well and truly off, including torture- though the British were hardly the worst* and despite the White Man's Burden rhetoric were considerably more prosaic and realistic about things than the US with their manifest destiny/ messiah complex and uncomfortable and incompatible mix of naive idealism and sociopathic application.

 

*US ain't the worst either by a decent amount too, comparatively speaking it would probably be Belgium, or early Spain.

 

But, Britain has had a long history of doing things at very least equivalent to what the US has done, up to recently and historically- as have most imperial powers. The counter insurgency work against the IRA certainly employed a lot of informants and such which were effective, but also employed arbitrary arrests and torture. The response to the Maomao insurgency in Kenya involved copious torture which has only recently been somewhat admitted, and for which there will be no punishment. They essentially invented modern 'legal' collective punishment via the Boer War concentration camp. The Sepoy rebellion in India involved such humane punishments as tying prisoners to cannons then firing them through their bodies. And of course ten of millions of Indians starved on the British watch. It all tended to get justified similarly as well, as being stuff that at least 'worked'; even when it didn't.

 

People argue so strongly that torture works as a moral insulation; it is essentially cognitive dissonance, not wanting bad words applied to people/ countries you like, wanting them to be better than others and yes, to have done bad things for The Greater Good (the greater good). The Harvard study on the use of waterboarding as torture illustrates it pretty well. Prior to 2004 waterboarding was almost always referred to as torture by the US press- afterwards it almost never was. That is why some people so desperately want the US either not to have tortured or for it to have all been worth it. But if it doesn't work and provided no usable intelligence then you have to accept that you just had a bunch of our guys waterboarding and raping prisoners with dogs for absolutely no gain.

 

It doesn't make a lick of logical or objective sense, but makes a whole lot of subjective sense. There's also pretty much nothing you can do to persuade people that they're wrong about it precisely because it's so interwoven into a person's fundamental beliefs.

[aluminiumtrioxid]

 

the US with their manifest destiny/ messiah complex and uncomfortable and incompatible mix of naive idealism and sociopathic application.

 

 

 

 

But, Britain has had a long history of doing things at very least equivalent to what the US has done, up to recently and historically- as have most imperial powers.

 

 

This bears repeating. I know of exactly zero historical empires that haven't been built on atrocities.