Quote:Good. You've demonstrated you can criticize. So my criterion is useless. Fine, what do you have to propose that is better?

Quote:Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Quote:...they also waterboarded Abu Zubaydah (allegedly 83 times)...

Quote:So, then to be fair, I guess he should only be tortured as many times as he has victims. In his case then he has some ~3000 more times to go just for his 911 attack.

Quote: . . . The baseline struggle against America by various disaffected third world malcontent/scum is not something Shrub invented. . . .

Quote:As I read it, it's a hangover from Woodrow Wilson's bloody progressivism ...

Quote:My experience in the dealing with terrorists of the Islamic sort goes back to Beirut gun line, early 1980's. It's an old problem too long overlooked by both our Army and the Congress who "organizes and fund" our armed services. ALso, one's enemy gets a vote.

Quote:To call out "barbarism" as the enemy is, to me, as impractical as the strategic statement General Joulwan made in late 1990's when he was commander of NATO: "The threat is instability." In short, it doesn't do anything for policy or problem solution.

Quote:The fight, the struggle between varying camps and ideologies, is standard human practice. The pretense that we, as in we the human race, are somehow beyond war needs to be dispelled if any fool out there still holds it, particularly if that fool is a decision maker.

Quote:Bush, as a policy maker, violated nearly all of Clausewitz' and Sun Tzu's advice on how to match aims and means, as well as Bismarck's, so he was bound to screw up quite of bit of what he tried in the war field.

Quote:Obama isn't showing me much better form. My hope is that he learns on the job. No confidence in that, however. We shall see.

Quote:I won't recommend targetting barbarism. I recommend targetting barbarians, like the Mexican drug cartels. It's not like they haven't been at this for a couple of generations .... and their war is a political and economic power grab.

Quote:I'm not crying any tears for Abu Zubaydah. But this isn't about him. We didn't torture Goering, and he committed crimes a thousand times worse. Simple retribution is simply useless and petty.

Quote:I didn't mean as retribution. Only as a means of ferreting out what he knew about Al Queyda operations.

Quote:There isn't going to be a hard and fast definition, but I think the UN guidelines look pretty good to me.

Quote:The important bits being "severe", . . .

Quote: . . . "physical or mental" . . .

Quote: . . . "intentionally".

Quote:Treating someone shabbily is not torture. Imprisonment, at least in its ordinary form, is not torture, but something like the Oubliette is, especially over long periods. Ordinary labour is not torture, but forced exertion to the point of physical damage (death march) is. Missing the occasional meal or not sleeping the occasional night is not torture, but chronic or severe deprivation of food or sleep is. Discomfort is not torture, but severe pain is. Some level of fear is inevitable, but the intentional infliction of acute terror, especially when repeated, is torture. Extreme humiliation is a grey area, but should be avoided by civilized nations on the basis of the disturbing effect it has on those doing the humiliation.

Quote:Sometimes I view this struggle against tyranny like a tug of war, and every time we weaken our resolve the rope moves closer to their side. We give Hugo Chavez a kiss on the cheek, they win a little. We bend over for Castro, they win a little more. We don't react when Daniel Ortega ridicules the US, and we lose a little more. Our President travels around the world prostrating himself before the world, offering apologies for American arrogance, and we lose a little more. We gut our military again, and humiliate the American agencies who are doing their best to protect the nation, and we have lost more ground. How long does it take to forget the lesson of 911? I guess about two Presidential terms is the limit of American will power. Yes, I know it is not so one dimensional, but it feels this way sometimes.

Quote:All of these links point to Larison's blog, hosted on the American Conservative site, which is the magazine he writes for, so these are hardly left-wing critiques.

Quote:Sorry, I think the UN guidelines are every bit as useless as my definition which you demolished. We still don't know what torture is.

Quote:However, what I entered this whole sub-thread about was that the category of mental torture should not be simply tossed out, which you appeared to be doing.

Quote:There, as everywhere, there are evolving standards. If you're hoping for a single ahistorical, universally valid measure of torture (and I'm sure you're not), then it's not going to appear, here or elsewhere. Each court, each army, each person is going to have to make the decision, over and over again, so long as war exists, which, as Occhi rightly points out, is probably going to be forever.

Quote:Whoa, Nelly. In my struggle to start a discussion of what torture is, I said "Defining that line may be difficult, but as a start, physical harm should be a criterion." Nowhere did I exclude mental torture. Nor would I.

Quote:Yes, yes I do. You're talking about extracting information from people who do not want to talk to you. You're going to what, keep them up past their bedtime and let them go without dessert?

This is a thread about *coercive* methods. If you don't push hunger at least to the point where they're desperate, then you might as well just feed them, at least then they'll be lucid. If you don't make them "lack" sleep until they're "deprived" of it, what exactly are you expecting to get? Yawns? In this context, if you say "hunger" and "lack of sleep" are acceptable, I think it's pretty reasonable to interpret that as as "starvation" (not necessarily fatal, but damaging) and "sleep deprivation." If all you mean is that you don't give them a second helping of potatoes and make sure they're up at the crack of dawn, then fine, but it's a bit misleading.

Regardless, even if this is 100% the pot calling the kettle black, that doesn't alter the charge. I didn't say squat all about never being allowed to use any kind of mental discomfort whatsoever. I just said that your "physical harm" criterion doesn't make sense.

-Jester

Quote:If there is no threat of a consequence, there is little to no incentive for cooperation. When time is no facter, that may be an agreeable state of play. When it is (and in politics, perception is reality) then playing the waiting game is a guaranteed non successful ploy. When you are dealing with the class of people that fit into "True Believer" models, see Hoffer, you are not dealing with anything other than a difficult to impossible information extraction task. See also Stockdale, a True Believer in his own right.

Quote:You and people like you weren't. Guess why? You aren't a threat, nor do you habitually associate with people who blow other people up by flying planes into buildings for reasons[i] that remain acceptable to you, obviously, but not to me.

Quote:I think you make an enormous mistake in presuming that the war of symbols will only be won your way, by your perceived method of rightness.

Quote:The enemy gets a vote. They spit at your modern world, and its effete sensibilities. You aren't winning anyone's hearts and minds, except within your own imagination.

Quote:That would be the source of the misunderstanding, then. I had assumed, apparently incorrectly, that you meant criterion as "necessary but not sufficient". If all you mean is "some kinds of torture involve physical harm", then of course, I agree.

Quote:As for criteria (in the broad sense) that I consider important, I think there are several. Pain is one of them, I think anything involving inflicting pain to coerce or interrogate is almost certainly torture.

Quote:Acute terror is another.

Quote:Obviously, anything that leaves wounds or disfigurement is included. Anything which compromises the long term health of the prisoner, or causes a nontrivial chance of death, is also included.

Quote:Discomfort is tougher, but I think stress positions is clearly over the line, as it has a fairly good chance of causing harm.

Quote:Humiliation, as I said before, is questionable. I don't think (for instance) desecrating holy text is a civilized thing to do from the perspective of an interrogator, but it's not on the level of torture. Subjecting them to sexual humiliation is similar. I think those things should be banned and punished by any organization simply for internal discipline reasons, but I'm less sure they need to be banned by international treaty. However, I don't think those tactics have ever yielded good information, and so are probably quite pointless anyway.

Quote:Quibbling, here, but I'm going to disagree. Consider an interrogator backhanding a suspect across the face, once. Torture? I don't think so.

Quote:In general, I agree. However, consider incarcerating a claustrophobic. Here we need the 'intent' aspect from the UN guidelines.

Quote:Humiliation is very culture dependent. In a culture where the only recourse from humiliation is death, physical pain may be less torture than is humiliation. Examples would be feudal Japan and many of the American native tribes.

Quote:The oft repeated notion that torture is an inefficient way to obtain information is false. In almost every case it will generate a lot of information. What is in doubt is the accuracy of that information. A confession generated by torture is useless in determining if the accused is guilty, since an innocent person is just as likely to confess as is a guilty just to stop the pain. General information is equally suspect. But for cases where the information is specific and testable (e.g., a safe combo, the location of an accomplice or of a hostage, etc.), torture is very efficient.

The reason not to use torture is thus not a pragmatic one, but a moral one.

Quote:We didn't torture Goering, and he committed crimes a thousand times worse.

Quote:If torture is soooo ineffective, why has it been used since the beginning of history?

Quote:We weren't trying to get intel out of him, either. We tried him for his crimes and sentenced him to death.

Quote:If torture is soooo ineffective, why has it been used since the beginning of history?

Quote:Torture is a relatively poor method of intelligence collection, and a remarkably effective tool of coercion.