Letters to the Editor
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which side of the razorwire will you be on ? ? ?
1. torture does NOT 'work': you squeeze someone until they break, and they will say ANYTHING to make the pain stop, make the cold stop, make the drowning stop, make the 'stress position' stop, make the sleep deprivation stop; they will say ANYTHING, they will implicate their mothers, they will offer their children as your sex slave, they will humiliate themselves to their psychological core, they will confess to ANYTHING you offer as an out to make *whatever* just fucking stop ! ! !
(no, this is not a silly old squishy soft pinko's opinion, ANY AND ALL interviews and articles with professional/military interrogators tell us torture is a messy, inexact, stupid, counter-productive method to extract intelligence...)
2. the simplistic 'ticking timebomb' scenario to 'justify' torture is not only tortured logic, not only virtually impossible to happen in reality, but also an insane 'rationale' to base torturing the 99.999999999999% of torture victims who DON'T have any (theoretical) 'ticking timebomb' information...
3. in these post-bill-of-rights times, it hardly takes a stretch to imagine that AMERICANS who already had their constitutional rights held as optional by the unitary executive (aka big brother/fearless leader), will be the next subjects of torture when they dare to squawk...
(oops, jose padilla might have an opinion on that; too bad he doesn't have a fucking mind left now that we're done, you know, getting solid intel out of him...)
4. again, ANY AND ALL interrogators and torturers will tell you what most of the world recognizes AND makes -you know- quaint laws and treaties and stuff forbidding : 'handsoff', 'psychological', sensory-deprivation tortures are FAR 'worse' than most mere physical/painful tortures...
put some cozy ear muffs on, some cute oven mittens, a soothing blindfold, (don't even need the thorazine suppository!) and within 48 hours that person will be a slobbering mass of protoplasm who will say/do/feel WHATEVER THE FUCK the godlike creatures who reinvent the torture victim want...
you will note that the bush cabal and their evil minions of doom CONSISTENTLY and FLATLY reject ANY/ALL laws/treaties/etc which mention 'psychological'/sensory-deprivation totures...
you will also note that neither the mainstream mediawhores, nor our kongresskritters bother to make a point of this HUGE and glaring oversight into the subject of 'torture'...
gosh, ain't it swell having a korporate-kontrolled media and gummint ! ! !
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to find that torture is going on here!
Great article; but I'm a little confused about this statement:
It is not true, as the movie depicts, that CIA officers stand by in some Egyptian or Syrian torture room while a prisoner is electrocuted. Most CIA officers would find that abhorrent...
Is this intended to imply that CIA officers find torture abhorent only if they're forced to watch it?
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waterboarding
I wish people would stop calling waterboarding "simulated" drowning... That makes it sound like it's just pretend; like you can just take off your 3D glasses and it goes away.
Waterboarding is controlled drowning; in other words, you are suffocating, you are drowning and choking on water and dying.
At the last second, hopefully your interrogator gives you some air. Usually you live, but make no mistake. Lots of people have idea from drowning and heart attack while being waterboarded.
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Thanks
Thank you, Million Year Picnic, for your stirring letter on animal abuse. This marks the last time I will ever visit the
Salon website. If this is the kind of person who hangs out on this site, the thought that I've ever spent time here myself makes me sick.
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What about other countries?
Okay, the US has failed to uphold its constitution and prevent torture. What about other countries? There is universal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes against humanity. The second George W Bush or anyone else in the chain of command steps foot outside the US, he should be arrested and tried.
Nazi's were tried in Israel, Serbs were tried at the Hague. Justice for Bushco will have to be overseas as well.
Even if the result was just to keep them permanently confined to the US, that would be some justice. No skiing in Canada, no shopping in Paris, no beaches in Spain. Better than nothing.
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Ha! You call that agonizing???
Collectively, as a single continuous unit or entity, the Supreme Court has spent the vast majority of the last century to century and a half progressively building up its own immunity to the concepts of liberty and essential, "god-given" rights. It started with things like their own version of Bush's handy little arrogant signing statements--there are the equivalent of federal laws and statutes which stem directly from [often peripheral] personal commentary added in with official rulings by Supreme Court Justices (e.g., the fact that a bounty hunter can violate restrictions on the execution of interstate extraditions, etc., etc., and even break into a private residence, in the interest and course of fulfilling his contract to deliver a fugitive...yet will never even be thought of by any law enforcement entity in this country as being in slightest violation of any law or Constitutionally-"guaranteed" rights). But, naturally there is a practical limit on the number of irrelevant non-sequiturs thrown by Justices into their published opinions of a case that can reasonably be turned into holy dogma without the populace accusing them of trampling all over the checks and balances that keep them from becoming a legislative body by limiting them to the singular duty of merely interpreting law. So they had to come up with scenarios wherein the Constitution is supposedly a "living document", or indeed any number of other contrivances to meet their desired ends describing it as anything other than what it is: a straight-forward, black and white, clear and explicit set of guidelines that must maintain absolute rigidity ad infinitum, lest they become immediately worthless the very first time a creative interpretation occurs.
Think about their refusal to hear el-Masri's case on the grounds of "national security"--first, I'm not aware of "national security" being a law in any way or of any description. So how is it a relevant factor to the decisions and policy of a body whose duty is specifically, quite purposefully limited to the interpretation of the law? I know--that's a hazy, abstract, paint-your-own-minefield sort of topic that is subject mainly only to any number of relative personal viewpoints, opinions, etc. But that's OK. There's plenty of blatant disregard for--if not downright shredding of--plain and simple elements, not only of law, but of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence themselves. Elements that are furthermore not buried in some vast and cavernous, rarely ever gotten-around-to nether-region such as "Article W, Subsection #472". No, in fact they are a huge portion of the foundations on which both documents were built. It is among the primary, central presuppositions of both documents that not only are we the supposed masters of the state (not the other way around), but additionally that the state's only reason for existence in the first place is to protect the interests of the people. They paint it up real nice often enough, but underneath it all it is obvious that "national security" = the interests of the state. But even without that, we're talking about an entity of the state grievously infringing on any/all of the primary inborn rights of an ordinary citizen. And--let me get this straight--he's entitled to no restitution for these offenses because [essentially] they were harming a citizen in order to protect him (and every other citizen just like him). They were trampling all over his liberty...in order to protect things such, say for instance, HIS LIBERTY...and, of course: everyone else's. That's where they get you! There is tyranny in everything other than an absolute and reverent enforcement of individual rights--for everyone, yes--but enforced on an INDIVIDUAL BASIS. ALWAYS. There is nothing but pure evil lurking within the concept of collectivism. It all stems from the idea's inability to see the trees for the forest, thereby dismissing the rights of any individual tree by simply changing the subject, transposing it to a larger scale, the transition somehow coming out the larger end missing a great deal of the original elements, but appearing to be intact because at that resolution, you can't see enough minute details to ever even notice.