Read this article by the New York Times explaining what we do to our detainees. Here's an excerpt:
"A. B. Krongard, who was the executive director of the C.I.A., the No. 3 post at the agency, from 2001 to 2004, agreed with that assessment but acknowledged that the agency had to create an interrogation program from scratch in 2002.
He said officers quickly consulted counterparts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and other countries to compile a 'catalog' of techniques said to be effective against Arab and Muslim prisoners. They added other methods drawn from those that American troops were trained to withstand in case of capture."
Gee, I wonder what we learned from the Egyptians and the Saudis about how to interrogate detainees. And as the rest of the article explains, we "reverse engineered" CIA programs meant to resist Soviet torture techniques to apply those same techniques against our own detainees. So, we adopted old Soviet torture techniques as our own. Makes you proud.
I try to tell people abroad that we didn't used to be like this. That America was a better place. They don't really believe it anymore. But they're wrong. The facts are clear. As this article explains from the highest sources inside the US government, we changed in approximately 2002. We did so at the direction of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush. We became uglier and we adopted practices we used to abhor and fight against.
These men have done great damage to America, not just to our national interests but to what we stand for as a country. If you're not embarrassed of them and what they have done in our names, then you never really knew what it meant to be an American in the first place.
The Young Turks
Reader Comments ( Page 1 of 1)
1. It must be nice to be so smug, so morally upright. Playing war like it was a neat little game. Wake up to reality. My husband was killed in the Trade Towers attack, along with 3000 other American CIVILIANS. If torturing these slime balls saves another American family from what happened on 9/11, it's MORE than worth it. Because the next time it could be a nuclear bomb they set off. Or a plan like the current one just exposed which was to blow up the fuel lines going to Kennedy Airport in NY, which run through residential neighborhoods and would have killed thousands of OUR civilians. You think tortured is NEVER justified to get information that may save thousands, possibly MILLIONS of Americans? Then you are a self righteous idiot. Maybe you'd feel different if you had lost someone you love to these fanatical morons. This enemy kidnaps people and DELIBERATELY kills them,often beheads them like Daniel Pearl, blows up children in market places,oppresses women, suppresses religions with different beliefs, and recently MURDERED some American soldiers they kidnapped. Captured soldiers are supposed to be made PRISONERS, not murdered. Since this enemy plays by no rules, why should we? This is fascism parading as a religion. Reality check...the life that some torturer saves may be your own.
LJ at 8:52AM on Jun 4th 2007
2. @ LJ (comment 1)
You said, "If torturing these slime balls saves another American family.."
That's a huge 'if'.
You are willing to abandon the moral high ground entirely then?
Guess you don't bother thinking that America is great anymore then, since you say, "Since this enemy plays by no rules, why should we?"
No, your new slogan..."America, just as bad as them, and proud of it!!!"
Or, "America, great BECAUSE we sank so low, so fast!!"
Or, "America, still the greatest! Now, also the greatest torturers too!!"
How about, "Torture is just Ethics with teeth", or "I'm scared shitless... you shoud be too."
"Lindy Englund... simply ahead of her time"
"You thought that we were sub-human? Well, you were absolutely right!!"
pboyfloyd at 5:34PM on Jun 4th 2007
3. Floyd (#2) Spoken like a drive-by commentator who has not been touched by this modern tragedy. It's always safer on the sidelines, second guessing hard decisions. Are you telling me that if you had reason to think there was a plan to blow up a school full of kids, that it would not be worth torturing someone to prevent it? Maybe you should talk to the grieving parents in Beslan, Russia. In September of 2004, Muslim fanatics took over a school full of children there. Remember? After several days of terrorizing the children,including denying them water and shooting many to death, the result was about 400 civilians killed, including almost 200 children. Yes, I believe those parents would have supported torture in that case if it would have prevented the tragedy. I would support it in that case too. Since WW II, where we bombed Dresden and hit Hiroshima so effectively,( both vicious enemies who got what they deserved) the world has come to think that we have gotten too soft, too lazy or too "guilty" to defend ourselves.The message we sent during WW II was that any enemy of ours would be pulverized . As the decades passed we made the mistake of trying to "understand" enemies who have no cultural or moral values in common with us. They view our attempts at reason as weakness. Thats a mistake on our part.Because people who kill children, plant bombs in public squares and and behead prisoners are not worth reasoning with anyway. I will always love America, but see the country's greatness slipping away because of political correctness, self-loathing Americans and the push of illegal immigrants who do not appreciate nor care to embrace American values.( Those weren't AMERICAN flags they protested with.)
Cutsie political slogans won't change the reality that there are people out there who want to kill us. In my opinion we should make it clear that anyone who attacks us will be met with horrifying force in response, and it will be THEIR responsibility. Think you can just talk them out of attacking us? The academicians who want to debate the ethics of torture or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin will be singing another tune if our country is nuked by these fanatics, and people they love die. If we keep worrying about the "rights" of foreign fascists who want to kill us, that day will come. Your smug sense of ethics will do you, or the country, very little good then. Do the ends justify the means? Yes, they do, if it means saving innocent lives. Here's an old American slogan I like, assuming you know any American history: "Don't tred on me."
LJ at 11:19PM on Jun 5th 2007
4. What a bunch of BS about water boarding being "TORTURE". The bleeding hearts would have us be restricted to asking pretty please if you don't mind tell us what you know. The one being water boarded isn't physically harmed, the shit scared out of them, maybe but, we aren’t putting electricity to their genitals or drilling holes their body parts ... as they are doing to our people ... let alone beheading them!
This is what happens when a county has had it too soft for too long!
Jack at 3:22PM on Jun 6th 2007
5. The fact of the matter is that the ticking time bomb scenarios don't exist and have not yet and doubtfully will ever exist. They are, and have been used as justification for torture that is often time solely punitive, that is only for punishment sake at the zeal of the captor, and has little if anything to do with interrogation. The best interrogators tend to agree that a little bit of the stick, mild sleep depravation or food (for one or two meals) or a little of the carrot are what works most effectively and the big carrot and big stick don't.
The most interesting things I have seen on the debate of torture recently is that no one addresses (probably because it is easier) the vast number of innocent people that will indeed be tortured in a program like this despite best efforts to the contrary. Are they collateral damage? The hypo of you have ten people 9 of whom are completely innocent and 1 of whom is definitely knows of a 'ticking time bomb' Now do we torture? Or the better idea still of torturing friends and family members of the suspected 'ticking time bomber.'
I noted during recent U.S. Presidential debates the idea that "if it will save American lives" practically anything was on the table, specifically torture (humorously as long as it was not called torture). I found this curious as for the first couple hundred years or so the number one goal of America was preserving liberty, and now it appears to be preserving American lives? Why every go to war and fight when you could just role over and give up, offer to be slaves and probably save "American Lives."
These foolish hypotheticals really irk me, because as long as you are going to be in the no man's land of ridiculous hypo's why not say a "ticking time bomber" has a remote device and you know for sure he is in Hoboken, NJ across the river from N.Y. City about to detonate it remotely from his computer. It will kill a quarter of Manhattan if it goes off. Do you drop a bomb and completely wipe out Hoboken before the bomb is detonated? After all it will save hundreds of thousands of lives? It is a fun exercise in moral and ethical philosophy that should have absolutely nothing to do with the way the United States decides how to operate as a nation.
For the record, before you decide to dismiss my arguments as those of some softie, lefty, never been touched by personal tragey, moral ivory tower dweller. I used to serve this nation as a special agent and conducted non-torture interviews and I was at the trade centers on 9-11 and not only lost a colleague but also escorted his widow to ground zero. Yet these facts nor the absence of them don't make my comments anymore correct or incorrect, nor do they for anyone else.
Silence Dogood at 8:50PM on Jun 8th 2007
6. @ LJ (comment 3)
There is no excuse for torture, ever.
@ Jack (comment 4)
Waterboarding is torture.
To treat prisoners as animals is to become animals yourself.
In philosophy, moral relativism is the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect objective and/or universal moral truths, but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances.
Why are you Christians so willing to chuck the Bible out the window when something like 9/11 happens? Hypocrites!
pboyfloyd at 3:04PM on Jun 9th 2007
7. We have been at war for years and so far the opposition accusations of American "torture" has been exactly what? That guys were made to be naked and photographed with people laughing, got food they didn't enjoy or didn't get a copy of their prayer book? Thats torture? Then you don't know anything about the enemies we faced in WW II. The current Muslim enemy, has no compunction about killing civilians, children and unarmed combatants,all against the so-called "rules" of war, which they ignore but liberals insist we must observe. Moreover, they kill by beheading and there have been documented signs on bodies of whippings, body part amputation, burns and other real torture.Add that to the mass graves discovered in Iraq periodically.This is an enemy with no feelings about how or why they kill people. In fact they have no good reason to be killing that I can see except blanket hatred of everything Western and specifically American. Have we done any of those things? No, we are accused of "torture" if you let a snarling German Shepherd get too close to a prisoner. This is being scrupulous on a massive, and massively stupid, scale. Islamofascists motivations are no different from the Kamikazi pilots,and the Nazi concentration camp directors and others of their ilk...blind hatred, philosophic fanaticism. There is a moral difference in motivation. IF NECESSARY, we do what me must to DEFEND ourselves and other innocents ( we were NOT at war before 9/11, a detail liberals like to forget...we were attacked). In the years we have been at war, I have seen NO wholesale arrest of Muslims. The prisoners in GITMO are overwhelmingly prisoners taken in combat, hardly innocent bystanders. In fact, some who were RELEASED have been captured AGAIN!!! To Silence Dogood (#5) .....if you feel so much personal empathy for those whose only object is to kill us, its just as well that you have apparently left public service. Yes, sometimes there is collateral damage...like the civilians at Hiroshima. But dropping that bomb saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the war the JAPANESE started. "Ticking time bomb scenarios don't exist"???? What do you imagine 9/11 was then? If someone had confronted the hijackers of the first two planes at the last moment, history would have been changed, as it was at Shanksville.Suppose they had carried a nuclear device with them on the plane...imagine a city of 8 million people dead or incapacitated.Is it worth torture to prevent such a thing? In my opinion, it is. To pboyfloyd #6---The bible is one of the bloodiest books you can ever read. Get over the moral snobbery, we can no longer afford it. By the way, Silence ..... Ben Franklin was never afraid to stand up for what he believed, even at considerable personal cost. I do not recall that he ever advocated a pacifistic approach to fighting the British.
LJ at 3:06PM on Jun 12th 2007