what exactly is waterboarding?

[mook jong man]

I don't think it's as bad as hacking peoples heads off ,filming it and plastering it all over the internet like the other side does !

 

[Andrew Green]

I don't think it's as bad as hacking peoples heads off ,filming it and plastering it all over the internet like the other side does !

Neither side can claim innocence on inappropriate material being posted online....

 

[shesulsa]

I think Americans need to get used to the idea that our government does the same kinds of things we think only other countries do - the barbaric ones - and we do it for a reason.

 

[Twin Fist]

Giving them more reasons to think the west is evil, like using these techniques on prisoners, is only going to recruit more fighters to their cause.

uh dude?

they CUT PEOPLE'S HEADS OFF AND PUT IT ON YOUTUBE

there is nothing we can do to make them think we are any more or less evil. They dont even think we are human.

Are you seriously saying we need to cater to the sense of "honor" of people that think beheading, stoning rape victims, honor killings and the like are hunky dory?

you cant seriously think that.


not to mention that the facts contradict you, AQ is having a HARDER time recruiting thee days. Thats why they had to strap explosives on a retarded woman and use her for a human bomb. They are running out of recruits cuz we keep killing the ones they do have.

 

[Twin Fist]

Neither side can claim innocence on inappropriate material being posted online....

this is moral relativism and it is a flawed, defeatist attitude.

they are worse than we are
they do worse things than we do
we are better examples of humanity than they are

it's true, you can say it.

 

[Sukerkin]

I agree that you can say it, TF but I'm not sure that it's something proveable by quoting examples of what we consider to be barbaric behaviour.

Morality is always hard to discuss and the same person can hold inconsistent views on things.

For example, as I've gotten older and seen more of the bad results of ineffective punishment, I have actually come to be in favour of the death penalty (with stringent standards for the certitude of proof of guilt).

Execution is murder by any other name; it's just done with the approval of the government and the implicit complicity of the population. Not an enlightened or moral procedure really.

However, I consider the use of torture such an anathema to a moral civilisation that I would not argue against the death penalty for those who enact it or sanction it.

Two moral 'wrongs' there and I would use one to punish another - not very logical.

That doesn't even begin to factor in the truth that you cannot use one cultures moral yardstick to measure the actions of another - some things are moral absolutes but many are not.

Public beheadings? They might not have had YouTube but the media of the day took great delight in spreading the news of the thousands of these carried out by the French during their Revolution. Or even worse, the public burnings of Catholics or Protestants (depending who had the ascendency at the time) - who did that? We did, the oh-so-civilised British. These were also publicised to act as a deterrent to other 'wrong thinkers'.

Please reread sentence one at this point - I can only put these forward as examples, they are not proof of anything but they do suggest that no nation is pure and all go through evolutions of morality where their 'humanity' (for want of a better term) waxes and wanes.

I might not believe in an all powerful God that created everything but the Bible does have some pretty useful wisdom in it when it comes to moral behaviour. I'm not going to quote various bits and pieces of it to suit my argument, just suggest that when it comes to people taking pride in their Christian Morality, they need to accept all of what they base that on.

 

[Twin Fist]

not so fast

"murder" is the illegal killing of a human being

executions are not illegal

ergo, murder and executions are not the same thing,

someone may claim to "feel" they are the same, but that feeling isnt based on reality

The radical islamic terrorists are worse examples of humanity than the west is.

there isnt any real room to debate this.

 

[Sukerkin]

That is true if there is no willingness to even consider that moral certainty is an illusion.

I shall pursue this no further as it can lead nowhere productive.

I just hope that one day you might see things differently but it's not my place to try and show you. If I did attempt such a thing, I'd just cause a hardening of attitudes and a decline in the politeness with which we have come to address each other.

Plus, I'll be getting a smack for thread drift if I'm not careful anyway.

 

[Darth F.Takeda]

All these animals have endured is waterboarding and in the case of Abu Grahb, some humiliation, nothing has been done to these guys that our own people dont go through in SERE schol and these are things that go on as hazing in University Greek clubs.

If it can get you into Delta Force or Delta house, it aint torture, unpleasent but not torture.

They cut off heads, we puor water down their throats an ensure they live through it.

As for the argument that we make more Jihadis', so what?
Anything we do does that. We were pretty leanent on the M.E. durring the Clinton years and the first 8 months of the Bush admin. and they still did the Cole bombings, attacked embassies and did 9-11.

If more hear the call to Jihad, that's just more that have to be killed.

 

[Makalakumu]

...but that feeling isnt based on reality...

Whose reality?

 

[Makalakumu]

All these animals have endured is waterboarding and in the case of Abu Grahb, some humiliation, nothing has been done to these guys that our own people dont go through in SERE schol and these are things that go on as hazing in University Greek clubs.

If it can get you into Delta Force or Delta house, it aint torture, unpleasent but not torture.

They cut off heads, we puor water down their throats an ensure they live through it.

As for the argument that we make more Jihadis', so what?
Anything we do does that. We were pretty leanent on the M.E. durring the Clinton years and the first 8 months of the Bush admin. and they still did the Cole bombings, attacked embassies and did 9-11.

If more hear the call to Jihad, that's just more that have to be killed.

This is precisely the kind of rationalization that I labeled as an evil thing. The war never stops and even genocide is not out of the question.

In early 2006, a study came out that stated that inintended casualties related to the Iraq war was hovering right around half a million. How many 911s is this? How many times does the US have to revisit 911 upon a people who had nothing to do with 911? How many people have to die before the war ends? Everyone?

I think we all need to stop and think about rationalizations like this. In our society, this is an evil thing, yet there are so many people that have cast away any sense of morality in favor of...what?

How do people get like this? Who benefits from getting people like this? Who has the power to change history, control information, and control the image in order to get people to think like this?

This is another form of real.

 

[Twin Fist]

Never fear Sir, I like ya too much to get harsh with ya

That is true if there is no willingness to even consider that moral certainty is an illusion.

I shall pursue this no further as it can lead nowhere productive.

I just hope that one day you might see things differently but it's not my place to try and show you. If I did attempt such a thing, I'd just cause a hardening of attitudes and a decline in the politeness with which we have come to address each other.

Plus, I'll be getting a smack for thread drift if I'm not careful anyway.

 

[elder999]

Interestingly, wateboarding was used to elicit false confessions in Missippi, back in 1926, and the Missisippi Supreme court overturned a confession of murder, and called waterboarding torture.

Waterboarding was also used by U.S. soldiers in the Phillipines in 1898, and it caused something of a scandal at the time, though feelings were....mixed, those on both sides of the controversy called it torture.

The Japanese and the Gestapo used waterboarding on U.S. troops during WWII. Many Japanese and Germans were convicted of war crimes, including waterboarding, which was classified at the time as torture.

Waterboarding was declared illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam, and U.S. soldiers were forbidden from using the practice to get information. At least one U.S. soldier was court martialed for participating in waterboarding.The U.S. generals called it torture.

The Chilean Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture called the practice of waterboarding by the Pinochet regime torture.

Most interestingly, though, waterboarding is used in the SERE school because it was specifically used by Communist regimes-North Korea, Red China and North Vietnam-to elicit false confessions from American POWs. Consequently, one can conclude that, just as John McCain-a victim of torture himself-has said:torture doesn't work-the subject will say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear to make it stop.

What's waterboarding? Stupid,really stupid. It makes us look bad, and it doesn't work.

And it's torture.

 

[Twin Fist]

Stupid,really stupid. It makes us look bad, and it doesn't work.

And it's torture.

wrong again Elder

KSM cracked after less than 3 minutes, and we got a TON of information

it works very well.

 

[Makalakumu]

KSM cracked after less than 3 minutes, and we got a TON of information.

How do you know this?

 

[Marginal]

If one views ethics as situational, does one have ethics at all?

 

[Makalakumu]

If one views ethics as situational, does one have ethics at all?

If ethics are marketed as "situational" and the situations are "controlled" to the extent that you are told what to think, then how much do ethics really matter?

 

[Ninjamom]

The Japanese and the Gestapo used waterboarding on U.S. troops during WWII. Many Japanese and Germans were convicted of war crimes, including waterboarding, which was classified at the time as torture.

Waterboarding was declared illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam, and U.S. soldiers were forbidden from using the practice to get information. At least one U.S. soldier was court martialed for participating in waterboarding.The U.S. generals called it torture.

The Chilean Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture called the practice of waterboarding by the Pinochet regime torture.

I know that most of this is straight from Wikipedia, but it is also mostly incorrect, or at least grossly misleading (which is why the entire topic is locked at Wikipedia for review).

The term 'waterboarding' wasn't coined until 2004 (that was its first use that I could find), so to get these 'facts' about its historical use and classification as torture, its definition has been streeeeeeetched. The Japanese and German practices, for instance, did not resemble the waterboarding under discussion beyond the fact that they both used water. The SS was known for holding a person's head under water until near-suffocation or until the person passed out. There was no "simulated drowning" - the prisoner was being drowned, then stopped short to allow speech. The Japanese usually forced water from a hose directly into the stomachs of POWs. The prisoner's grotesquely distended stomach was then beaten. A skilled tormentor could get this to last hours before the stomach ruptured, resulting in an agonizing death. In both of these cases, there was genuine peril of imminent death. In the Japanese case there was lasting physical trauma/damage to any survivors. Both of these elements are missing from the waterboarding techniques currently under discussion.

As far as the US soldier who was courtmartialed for using waterboarding in Viet Nam , AFAIK, he did in fact use the technique currently under discussion. However, he used it without even having the authority to interrogate the prisoner, let alone use extreme measures.

In all of the above cases, the part that made the action illegal was the status of the victim, not the nature of their treatment with water. The Japanese routinely used their water torture on captured soldiers under uniform and authorirty of another nation, while the Chileans and the SS used it on unarmed unresisting civilians, both of which populations are protected under rules of warfare (Geneva accords 1 through 4). The lone US soldier in Viet Nam was an isolated incident of someone who acted outside the authority of his own chain of command - he was dealt with accordingly. In the current discussion, waterboarding has only been used against armed illegal combatants engaged in terror and/or sedition, a population which was deliberately excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

So, under the Geneva accords, it's actually OK to torture spies or sabateurs or terrorists. I know that doesn't make it right, but it does make it 'legal'. Not sure if this would be straying off topic, or part of the natural evolution of the topic, but I would like to leave the debate on whether waterboarding is torture, and discuss the broader question: is torture ever justified? I'll even grant that waterboarding is torture. Given that, is it OK to use it in extreme circumstances against captured terrorists actively plotting attacks on civilian population centers? Discuss please.

 

[Sukerkin]

I agree, Ninjamom that it would be good not to allow the thread to side-track onto "What constitutes torture?" and would be better served by investigating our views on whether it is justified or useful.

 

[Archangel M]

The "it doesn't work" statement is a huge ASSumption. Unless some of us are CIA, NSA, SOF etc. Nobody here can honestly tell us if its getting good, verifiable (for some reason people here think out intell agents just take data at face value) intelligence or not.

The "it doesn't work" crowd just doent WANT it to work because it IS an ugly thing to have to do.