What Waterboarding Looks Like

What does “viciously effective” mean in this context? Is it supposed to have been very good at extracting reliable information? Wasn’t the Khmer Rouge doing a good old-fashioned arbitrary purge, rather than tracking down individuals who were really plotting against the government?

What does “viciously effective” mean in this context?

You would have to click the link and read the column to find out the answer to that.

… the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies–the states where US military personnel might have faced torture–were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That’s what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.

The point about torture not being used by the KR to gain information or intelligence is a very important one I feel. The people who criticise torture on the grounds that it ‘doesnt work’ are of course right but this presupposes that torture is predominantly used to actually gain information. But it’s obvious that torture isn’t used to much to gain information as to create fear, to encourager les autres, and compel obedience (not just from torturees but from the population you are trying to intimidate). And in that respect, torture does work and very effectively.

Another thing about torture that is rarely discussed is that it’s obviously fun. You can see it in the faces of the guards at Abu Ghraib. They are grinning from ear to ear. They’re having the time of their lives. Having another human being grovel naked at your feet is obviously pretty close to the ultimate turn on and again, if it’s giving pleasure that is the objective then torture (and murder) is obviously again, very effective.

Yeah, so, you EU citizens living in the US? You can still work in the EU. Just, by the way.

According to Rich Lowry, we can rest easy because any waterboarding takes place while the terrorists are in La-Z Boy recliners and watching DVDs.

Am I missing something here? That actually looks kinda’ fun.

Carlos, Presumably the military in your country had received some torture training from the US.

The Cambodian museum in question, is S-21 Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh. I had the opportunity to visit it earlier this year and found it absolutely harrowing.

14: Well, at least they would if they were capable of taking US troops hostage. I don’t think they really are, except maybe through dumb luck.

I want to see a live demonstration of waterboarding on network television. Ideally on Dick Cheney, but Rick ‘Taser’ Sanchez will do.

And the point of torture is torture; or more subtly, to be someone who tortures. 1984 isn’t their ops manual; Discipline and Punish is.

abb1,

Its a technical point but since they are keeping the torture secret, its technically not free-market torture. They waterboard Saddam on pay-per-view then you’ve got a comparison.

If one side says, “We need this to be safe” and the other side says “But it’s sort of bad and doesn’t really work and we shouldn’t do it” what do you think the result will be?

Now if someone would say, “Torturers are monsters and criminals who deserve to be put to death.” Or “Torturers are sinners against God who will be eternally damned for their descretation of the image of God in man.” Or “torture is the tool of Communists.” Or “torture makes every American who travels abroad a target.”

There’s a rule that every trial lawyer learns- if you want the jury to say it to you, you have to say it to them. No substantial block of voters will hold a more negative view of the administration and its practices than the most negative of the mainstream political and journalist voices.

#22 strikes me as absolutely, and depressingly, spot on.

http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/09/conservatives_f.html

#23: Of course there is an effective spin about the torture/habeas-corpus politics:

“The Republican government in Washington just gave itself the right to lock you up and torture you at any time for any reason …”

Graphics of black-suited thugs knocking in the middle of the night to drag away a nice, harmless looking 30ish guy while his pretty, distraught wife and daughter look on, traumatized. (Note to self: family all blonde, make troopers subtly swarthy.)

Wife: What did you do?!?
Man: I … I said I didn’t like the President.
Trooper: *cuff*

is that too much?

anyhow, I’d think there’s a vast swath of conservative voters who should be appalled by it.

let Republicans tie themselves in knots explaining that you still have your rights unless the government accuses you of supporting terror somehow.

“What waterboarding looks like”

Maybe it’s part of the problem that it doesn’t look like anything much at all. Having water poured on your head doesn’t look like torture. And the description–that it makes you feel like you are drowning–does not seem particularly frightening, either. I have no doubt that the actual experience is terrifying, but it doesn’t seem as viscerally horrible to me as “pulling off fingernails.”

6 & 24 are spot on.

Which provides a perfect segue for me to a point out an irony at CT that I just noted — probably unsuccessfully — at the Volkh place: in his I-don’t-know-anything-about-the-subject-but-why-should-that-stop-me-from-making-an-elaborate-point-that-boils-down-to-the-idea-that-sometimes-we-might-use-consequentialist-ethics post, Eugene accidentally hits upon Elaine Scarry’s argument connecting torture to nuclear deterrence. Her claim, of course, is in line with 6 & 24: torture is a form of terror — a political act designed to annihilate a subject — and therefore shares affinities with the use of terror for other political ends (e.g., the balance of nuclear terror).

Odd.

But no one trounces this crap better than the MIA Giblets.

#28 / david kane – Y’know, you have a point, “torture apologists” is harsh. The sensitive term is “ethically challenged”. :-)

as long as I combine CT with LGF, I find myself with a reasonable amount of ideological diversity in my blog reading.

The same diversity of experience found by someone who rolls around in fields of cowshit then takes a shower to scrub away the stink.

Michael, you aren’t alone. The conservative tradition in this country is behind you. Before big government conservatism – which isn’t an ideology so much as a crime scene waiting for a RICO investigation — it used to be that conservatives were very jealous of our liberty, instead of giving it away to the first Republican president who asked for it. I’ve always thought Goldwater was right that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Although I take the defense of liberty to include more things than Barry ever dreamed of. But still…

The days of principled conservatism seem to be over. Alas.

hey what? doesn’t everyone remember when I told torture apologists to shut the fuck up, back in the day?
By The Power of Stipulation–I Have The Power!

so fuck a bunch of panera bread. and fuck these torture-supporting madman republicans and fuck spineless democrats who couldn’t filibuster this. I’ve been to Tuol Sleng. people who can’t see what’s wrong with waterboarding are congenitally lacking in imagination and empathy, so fuck them too.

I am so depressed and I can’t decide which is worse:
1. republican powers-that-be (cheney etc.) are straight-up darth vader evil, and support torture for its own sake.
2. they’re cynical partisan bastards willing to throw the constitution and human decency into the trash just to gain a momentary political edge.
maybe both are true! w00t. also, fuck.

I think the thing most worrying here, is not so much the US is now willing to go in for torture, is that they no longer feel the need to hide it – it’s not like these are new to the way the US government works, although they might be a bit more common than they used to be.

Does this suggest than any democratic state can be suborned into doing just about anything, as long as the media can be corrupted into compliance with the ruling class and the population are happy to eat up the propaganda and ask for more?

Yes, I would say so. Happened in many times and places. I would also say that one particularly worrying thing in America is that, because of the delusional “we’re always the good guys, in the shining city on the hill” self-image that grips so much of our population, this country’s resistance to this sort of perfidy may actually be particularly low.

This is a variant on an idea I’ve been bouncing around for a while but: how about getting groups of people to go around the country and offer $50 to anyone who can stand being waterboarded for 20 seconds? Maybe giving people a taste of what torture is like will convince them of the error of their ways; or maybe it’ll simply further the process of dehumanization that the Republicans seem to be pursuing, I dunno.

Don’t offer to pay the sick fucks anything.

Americans are desensitized to the point that you could easily find citizens who would agree to torture their exes or mothers-in-law on TV for $250,000.

This was the real purpose of shows such as Fear Factor and Jackass.

Since the US now employs the very same techniques as the Khmer Rouge, the editors of high school history textbooks will have to get busy rewriting all subsequent editions to read “tough interrogation methods” in lieu of the word torture.

Although I appreciate John, Henry, Michael et al taking the time to respond, perhaps I did not make my point clear.

1) CT’s policy is to have only left of center authors. That’s fine. It’s your blog.

2) CT’s claim, I think, is that it encourages comments from those it disagrees with. CT wants to have a conversation.

If you believe, as Henry does, that your opponents (a majority of American citizens who have no problem with waterboarding high value targets) lack any “human decency,” then it is going to be awfully tough to have a conversation. Again, Henry writes:

I’d like to think that torture apologists (a couple of whom occasionally infest our comments sections) would be deeply ashamed – but I suspect that they’ve lost the capacity for shame long ago, if they ever had it to begin with.

The best part is, obviously, “infests.”

As always, CT’s authors can do as they want. If they do not want to have a dialogue with reasonable, open-minded people who disagree with them about the proper way of treating enemy combatants, then just let us know (as Henry does above). We do not want to have a conversation if you do not want to have a conversation. (One way to start the conversation would be for a CT author to comment on this.)

Michael writes:

I don’t see anything in Henry’s post that’s unwelcoming to conservatives. He seems to have a problem with torture apologists. If you confuse the terms, that’s your problem.

Well, perhaps your dictionary has a different definition of “infests.” In any event, a (vast?) majority of the House, Senate and America people are, by your definition, “torture apologists.”

My point here is not to argue the torture issue per se but to ask the authors of CT to clarify what sort of conversation they want to have in these comments. If you do not want to discuss this issue, that’s fine by me. Michael seems to have access to a magic list of topics, like nationalized healthcare, that are in bounds, that right-of-center folks are welcome to discuss, that Henry will not worry about infestation with regards to.

Perhaps Michael can publish that list so that the rest of us know the ground rules.

It is your blog. You can do as you see fit, but you should be more clear about what you want. Or, since Henry is perfectly clear to me, you should stand by what you write.

David Kane: “Enemy combatants”? Right! That’s a sure way to show your open-mindedness!

Perhaps then, as John Quiggin says, there’s a magic list of people that David Kane knows — in a moment of divine revelation — that are Enemy Combatants(tm) even before a fair and just trial, so that there’s no need to have a fair and just trial to determine whether they’re Enemy Combatants(tm). Or maybe, there’s a magic list of people David Kane knows — again through divine revelation — to have access to divine revelation in telling which people are Enemy Combatants(tm). So, perhaps David Kane can publish these magic lists so that we know what he thinks are the ground rules for the applicability of torture, um I mean interrogation.

So, let the dialogue begin. I’m all ears.

In any event, a (vast?) majority of the House, Senate and America people are, by your definition, “torture apologists.”

I can’t speak to either the personal feelings of the Representatives or Senators involved, but your statement about the American people is simply wrong.

I followed DK’s link to Hugh Hewitt, and the opening question was

“1) Let’s get right to it. Do you support torture?

Let me say what I do support: When it comes to high value targets in the war on terror, wannabe evil-doers who possess or might possess important information, I support any measures necessary to extract that information.”

which I translate as saying “Yes, but I’m dishonest as well as evil, so I’m not going to give straight answers to any question on this topic”

If there was anything worth reading further down, I missed it.

The <blockquote> tag used to work fine here; now it only affects the first paragraph, even though in preview it looks like it’ll affect the whole thing.

Inside1

Inside2

Inside3

Of all the many points that need addressing here, this somewhat tangential bit calls loudly to me –

“a majority of American citizens who have no problem with waterboarding high value targets”
d.kane

The only terms in that phrase that aren’t masked and deceptive are “American citizens” and “waterboarding”.
The subject of the verbal clause “waterboarding high value targets” is implied, meaning the ones ordering and performing the torture, but the valid noun would be something like “the brave and loving heroes on the front lines of the War on Terror, who know these things, and do these things to make us safer”.
That’s a belief born out of desperation and panic. Both states artificially induced by the real figures behind all this, who are neither brave nor loving.
The men doing these things and ordering them are insane, and desperate themselves, serving something they don’t recognize at all for what it is, or for what it’s going to become.
Americans having “no problem” with torture is not too unlike having “no problem” with the factory-meat supply that makes their hamburger. As long as it’s done out of sight, it remains out of mind. Most Americans, and especially most American children, would be horrified and made instant vegetarians by an accurate close-up view of where their meat was coming from.
“high value targets” is a sadist’s term, cloaked in the camouflage-patterns of military terminology – it’s dehumanized, insectile, and what it carries, unexpressed, is the absolute disposability of the mis-apprehended and misjudged. The mistakes go in the dumpster.
The fact is the majority of American citizens are terrified, and responding to these sharp cues and opened gates like cattle to a prod in a stockyard.
They’ve been forced to deny the flimsy character of their news sources and their total reliance on the unproven integrity of those sources. They have to pretend the TV news is accurate and fair and balanced because otherwise they’ll have to face how dependent, how close to complete domestication they’ve come. They’re being told what to think and what to feel by people they can’t see and don’t know. They trust because the alternative is to reassume their humanity, and the risk and sacrifice that will entail.
Anyone offering the will of the majority as some kind of trump card, now, is on the payroll of whatever it is that’s doing that domesticating. It can’t be done without lies and intimidation, without breaking every moral code we’ve ever had, without surrendering what makes us human.
The deal is, baldly – give up your humanity and we’ll keep you alive.

Is Hewitt really more of a hackish partisan hack than Hinderaker? I guess hackometers with scales that go high enough to measure them accurately are scarce.

1) The post I linked to was written by Dean Barnett (aka SoxBlog).

2) Honestly, I used the term “enemy combatant” in an attempt to be neutral. The term “terrorist” would obviously beg the question. What (short) term would CT prefer I use? “Suspected terrorist”?

3) Several authors of CT are much more expert than I as to US public opinion, but I believe that it is a statement of fact that a vast majority (75%?) of Americans are in favor of the recent bill. If Anarch can point to other evidence, he should do so.

4) I am sorry that John did not have time to read the whole post I linked to. If you want to know why (intelligent) Republicans think the way they do, that post is a good guide.

5) Again, my point here is to clarify what the authors of CT want in terms of comment participation. Although I can’t find the link (does CT’s search work for comments?), the last time we discussed this, the claim was that right-wing commentators were welcome in the comments. Now, both Henry and John use the terms “infests” to refer to me and people like me. That’s fine! It is your blog! I (and, I hope, other conservatives) won’t comment here if you don’t want us to.

The problem with using polls on a subject that can easily induce moral panics is that the polls will widely vary.
Here’s a poll, taken in 2004 (closer in time to 9/11) which gives the opposite result from D.K.’s 75 percent (by the way, what poll gave that conclusion?):
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/Polls/torture_poll_040527.html

Inducing a moral panic to destroy a republic is a classic junta technique. This is why there are checks and balances on majoritarian rule — for instance, a hard to change constitution. Of course, constitutions are “parchment protections”, as Madison said, if the legislative and executive branches reach a certain point of moral corruption. Madison was right. Bush is his nightmare. Hopefully, though, on Bush’s next visit to a foreign country that has recognized the International court in the Hague, he’ll be picked up for crimes against humanity. It is pretty much an open and shut case. Sic Semper Tyrannus.

As DK points out, the evil and weaselly torture apologist to whom he linked was indeed Dean Barnett, posting on Hugh Hewitt’s blog, and not, as I thought, Hewitt himself. If DK can point me to something by Hewitt indicating either that he opposes torture (not likely!) or that he’s at least willing to say openly that he supports it, I’ll correct my characterization of him.

Henry writes:

I’ve no intention of getting involved in an argument with you because that would suggest that this is something that reasonable people can politely disagree about. It isn’t, anymore than reasonable people can disagree over whether slavery or anti-Semitism is a good or a bad thing. In a quite real sense, you and other torture apologists are morally depraved . . .

Good to know! Again, my goal has been to determine if you want comments from people like me at CT. It’s clear you (and John Q? and Belle? and even open-minded Daniel?) do not.

It’s your blog so I’ll abide by your wishes. Best of luck having a conversation with a bunch of people who all agree with you.

David Kane, thanks for telling us how open-minded you are. Unfortunately, our minds aren’t so open that our brains fall out.

Best of luck having conversations with people with, um, wide wide wide open minds.

bi, that really happens with appreciable frequency in psychologically high-pressure police questioning of young, dimwitted, or otherwise highly impressionable suspects- there have been a number of false confessions revealed by subsequent DNA testing, and who knows whether that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Sometimes life is stranger than snark…

I keep seeing the term “torture apologists” – but at this point, in my opinion, it’s Torture Advocates.