More Bush Double Talk on Waterboarding

The range of answers we've gotten from the Bush administration over the last few months is stunning. The DOJ just announced that laws already enacted make waterboarding illegal:

A senior Justice Department official says laws and other limits enacted since three terrorism suspects were waterboarded have eliminated the technique from what is now legally allowed. "The set of interrogation methods authorized for current use is narrower than before, and it does not today include waterboarding," Steven G. Bradbury, acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, says in remarks prepared for his appearance Thursday before the House Judiciary Constitution subcommittee.

But wait. Less than 24 hours earlier, the Senate voted to ban waterboarding as part of an intelligence authorization bill and Bush threatened to veto it:

Congress on Wednesday moved to prohibit the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods on terror suspects, despite President Bush's threat to veto any measure that limits the agency's interrogation techniques.

So let's survey the range of responses we've heard lately:

1. Mukasey refused to say whether waterboarding was torture or not, but he did say that waterboarding was illegal now and that he could not imagine (!) the president violating the law.

2. The DOJ says that waterboarding is already illegal.

3. The Director of National Intelligence says we used waterboarding three times but we don't do it anymore. But we could do it again if we wanted to.

4. Bush says if you make waterboarding illegal, I'll veto the bill.

Mr. Orwell, call your office.

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I don't see how this is torture, it doesn't cause pain or physical damage. They will recover. Also it does not apply to the 8th amendment, it is not punishment for a crime. I think something as tame as waterboarding should be widely used to extract vital information from suspected terrorists.

We can't waterboard, but they can lock school kids in a burning building because their faces arent covered, they can shoot them in the back, they can stone women to death for being seen in public with an unrelated male, burn people alive, ect.

But we cant dunk their fucking heads in water to possibly save thousands of lives, what the fuck.

Wow, you're out of your mind. Get back on those meds.

I don't see how this is torture

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...d.php?t=448717

so what dude, he's fine, got scared, yet survived totally unscathed.

It's not like his fingernails are being pulled off, or his testicles blowtorched. Point is the waterborded will survive, the victims of a bomb WILL NOT.

So you are willing to trade a few minutes of discomfort to one person for the lives of possible thousands of terror bomb victims..... right

Yea...see...

I have this outrageous ideas that the ends don't justify the means. How evil of me.

Yes it is outrageous, It's absolutely absurd, you would rather see countless people die than to have one terrorism suspect have water poured on his face. Un fucking believable

Yea. My ethics are wrong. Love the tolerance from the right!

Then again, I'm just an anti-american moron!! HAR HAR HAR!

See, I have these things called ethical standards. And while I hate seeing people die, I'm not ready to compromise these standards. You know, those standards, such as basic human dignity and rights? Any of this ringing bell? Making any sense? No? Of course not. I wouldn't expect a right-winged, gun-toting, jingoistic bigot to get it. As long as you're in the position of safety and power, we can take those basic human rights and burn them. Who gives a fuck, right? Riiight?

So yea. I'm against torture in its entirety. I think that the ends don't justify the means. I'm of the opinion that torture makes us worse than them. If that makes me evil in your eyes, so be it. You're the one whose so paranoid about a military state? Seems awfully hypocritical of you to give them the ability to torture.

First I do not agree that waterboarding is torture, I am most certainly not a bigot, or even a right winger. But I do agree with your side of the story, in much the same way I feel about the death penalty. If the system was perfect I would never see a problem with executing proven murderers, but the fact is it is not, there have been people in recent history proven innocent after they were executed.

But we're not talking about death here. I think breaking legs, and fingers, cutting body parts off. Impalement, ugh anyway that's what represents torture to me.

You point out my wariness of a police state, it's already here. And it's because of your side of the equasion, it's so easy for you liberals to give give give, when it's someone els' dollars, but I don't want to pay for someone to sit on their ass and make babies while I bust my ass 60 hours a week for what I need. And the government lets me keep some of what I earn, what I spent the majority of my life doing, my time my body my labor. They let me keep some. And at any given time a politician by dipping into my pockets can buy some quick votes from the "less fortunate" Does that make make me more fortunate? NO I make decisions that earn me what I have, I have never recieved a handout in order to get where I am, not by luck, by hard work. And when you tell me I am just more fortunate it trivializes all of my effort.

I believe in personal responsibility not government welfare. It's a sickness that has, does, and will destroy great nations.

So back on track, if you were a federal agent, in possession of an islamic extremist, you have him in custody because someone turned him in believing they have information vital to prevent an attack and save hundreds possibly thousands of lives. How would you get the information?

First I do not agree that waterboarding is torture

So we can go off of the impressions and anecdotes of a few, or we can go off of the data gathered by thousands of researchers...

So back on track, if you were a federal agent, in possession of an islamic extremist, you have him in custody because someone turned him in believing they have information vital to prevent an attack and save hundreds possibly thousands of lives. How would you get the information?

Constitutionally, and ethically.

So we can go off of the impressions and anecdotes of a few, or we can go off of the data gathered by thousands of researchers... Constitutionally, and ethically.

How would you go about getting the information out of them?

First I do not agree that waterboarding is torture, I am most certainly not a bigot, or even a right winger. But I do agree with your side of the story, in much the same way I feel about the death penalty. If the system was perfect I would never see a problem with executing proven murderers, but the fact is it is not, there have been people in recent history proven innocent after they were executed.

Well, the death penalty is another issue altogether. Even for Osama I would not advocate the death penalty.

But we're not talking about death here. I think breaking legs, and fingers, cutting body parts off. Impalement, ugh anyway that's what represents torture to me.

Torture does not necessarily have to leave permanent physical damage. For instance, I would consider rape torture, though it most often does not leave permanent physical damage.

How would you go about getting the information out of them?

I would hire someone more qualified, first of all. Secondly, I would ensure that they tried more conventional means.

I don't see how you can even claim for or against waterboarding when it has not happened to you. It makes you feel like you're going to drown, and what they tell you on FoxNews is the sugar coated version of the story, you and I both know very well that behind closed doors shit is a lot worse than what we're being spoon fed.

I'd like to think we could have better means of extracting "information" than waterboarding.

Now, let's back it up a few steps, what the fuck even is the poing of waterboarding and worrying so greatly about trying to extract information that may even in itself be insignificant. Remember 9/11? Apparently we had been tipped off about it a good year in advance, we knew it was going to happen, and yet we couldn't stop it. There had been detainees and intelligence pointing to an attack on America, they could even get it down to a specific time of the year, and we still couldn't stop it. So how does torturing people that may or may not have had anything to specfically do with it justifying our bitterness that they caught us with our pants around our ankles?... It doesn't

Adrena, in your other chest-thumping thread, you quoted this:

The victimhood syndrome buzzwords — “disenfranchised,” “marginalized” and “voiceless” — don’t resonate with him.

But waterboarding is itself one of these buzzwords, a euphemism created to sugar coat what the process actually is. "Waterboarding" has become such a common word in the past year that it's a cliche to the point where the meaning of the words themselves is lost. It's not waterboarding, it's forced drowning. Using these same buzzwords that you hate is hypocritical, IMO.

Drowing is my greatest fear, honestly, that and being trapped in a burning building. I think if I was being held down be 3-4 officials trying to make me suffocate on water/not being able to breathe I would definately consider that torture, anyone that argues it being tortue is just being fucking oblivious

D3V You're right, you make a very good point about what good is getting information if it's not used properly. I am begining to agree with the anti waterboarding points.

Grav, if you think I am "chest-thumping" then that makes you a pussy, if you think working hard and holding pride in what I have earned is over the top, then you have much to learn my friend. Nothing in that article mentioned hating those words, just that they do not weigh on my conciense.
But aparently you are willing to take something completely out of context, inject it into another topic and personally attack me with it. Torture, national security, and foreign policy were not a part of these words that describe so called societal victims.

Although I do now understand that you misconstrue just about everything I say.

If you choose to miss the point, that's not my error.

Ok, sure, what is your point. What does my desdain for victimhood descriptors, have to do with torture, waterboarding, or this entire thread at all?

My thoughts about entitlement spending have nothing to do with this thread.

You may have seen the WIRED interview with Psychologist Philip Zimbardo and the mind-numbing pictures of torture linked there. A recent New Scientist interview of Darius Rejali is a necessary read on how torture deeply breaks both the sufferer and the torturer. Part of the NS interview:

Why is torture so hard to control? Usually the top authorises it and the bottom delivers. Then it's a slippery slope as torturers quickly become less responsive to centralised authority. One reason is competition between interrogators. When policemen track down information, they cooperate. In torture it's different. The guy who breaks the prisoner gets the reward. If you were the guy softening him up, would you hand him over for the next guy to get all the glory? Torturers adopt new techniques and become more vicious in the hope they can break their prisoner. Torturers also suffer traumatic stress themselves. It screws everybody up and it takes a long time to undo that damage. I fear the US is well on that path. Is there such a thing as a science of torture? If there were, then torture should be producing accurate information regularly. Each interrogator would know exactly how much pain to apply to get a person to break. But pain cannot be measured in the way people think. Typically interrogators know two things about pain. The first is that people have different sensitivities to different kinds of pain, and it is unpredictable which kind they are more sensitive to. The second is that over time a person becomes desensitised to pain. Sooner or later they don't feel anything. So torturers take a scatter-shot approach, try a wide variety of techniques, then ratchet it up as fast and early as they can, hoping to overtake the pain threshold of their victim. You wouldn't have to do that if there were a science of torture. How often do interrogators obtain useful information or truthful confessions using torture? The few statistical studies on this suggest the return is incredibly poor. There are several reasons. How do you know you have the right person? And even if you do, how do you know they're telling the truth? Third, torture can damage the brain, and anything that affects the brain's capacity to withhold information also affects its capacity to retrieve it. If it doesn't work, why does it persist? Myths and rumours. There is a perception that democracy makes us weak and only "real men" know how to do this stuff. People think torture worked for the Gestapo, for example. It didn't. What made the Gestapo so scarily efficient was its dependence on public cooperation. Informers betrayed the resistance repeatedly in Europe, and everyone knew this, but it was more convenient to say the Gestapo got the truth by beating it out of us. Public cooperation is the best way to gather information. After the failed bomb attacks in London in 2005, the British police found every one of the gang within a week. One was caught after his parents turned him in. They would not have done that if they'd thought he'd be tortured.