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pecuniumBecause I spent much of today playing "whack-a-mole" at HuffPo.
Why?
Because George Bush admitted to more crimes.
Specifically he said he'd had Khalid Sheik Mohammad tortured, and would do it again.
He said he'd do it to, "save lives," but we know that's a myth; the myth of the honest answer.
The Washington Post had a recent article explaining that very thing (which anyone who has been reading me for the past six years... hence the growing collections of prize tickets from playing whack-a-mole with the torture mongers and apologists, has known for oh... six years, or so).
Dan Froomkin has a nice wrap up on the subject, but the money quotation is probably this:
Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture.
That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists.
Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."
What a surprise. Beat on someone and he tells lies. Those lies can't be corroborated (or disproven) and limited assets to chase down plot and threats are diverted into blind alleys of wasted effort.
And George Bush, says he'd do it all over again, "to save lives."
Arrogant, ignorant, asshole.
Ok, so what does this mean? It ought to mean we try him, haul the evils he caused to happen into the harsh light of day, and (in a just world) sentence him to live the rest of his (I'd hope very long) life in prison.
If not, we can hope he is foolish enough to accept an invitation to Spain.
For really poetic justice someone might, while he's visiting Poppy in Kennebunkport, decide to invoke the "Noriega Doctrine" his father created, and swoop in and kidnap him to the Hague.
None of those, sadly, are going to happen. Therefore I shan't buy the champagne just yet, but a person can dream.
Why?
Because George Bush admitted to more crimes.
Specifically he said he'd had Khalid Sheik Mohammad tortured, and would do it again.
He said he'd do it to, "save lives," but we know that's a myth; the myth of the honest answer.
The Washington Post had a recent article explaining that very thing (which anyone who has been reading me for the past six years... hence the growing collections of prize tickets from playing whack-a-mole with the torture mongers and apologists, has known for oh... six years, or so).
Dan Froomkin has a nice wrap up on the subject, but the money quotation is probably this:
Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture.
That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists.
Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."
What a surprise. Beat on someone and he tells lies. Those lies can't be corroborated (or disproven) and limited assets to chase down plot and threats are diverted into blind alleys of wasted effort.
And George Bush, says he'd do it all over again, "to save lives."
Arrogant, ignorant, asshole.
Ok, so what does this mean? It ought to mean we try him, haul the evils he caused to happen into the harsh light of day, and (in a just world) sentence him to live the rest of his (I'd hope very long) life in prison.
If not, we can hope he is foolish enough to accept an invitation to Spain.
For really poetic justice someone might, while he's visiting Poppy in Kennebunkport, decide to invoke the "Noriega Doctrine" his father created, and swoop in and kidnap him to the Hague.
None of those, sadly, are going to happen. Therefore I shan't buy the champagne just yet, but a person can dream.
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An exercise in futility (fytte the first)
Date: 2010-06-06 04:42 am (UTC)Look at China. Guy confessed, to a capital charge. The victim wasn't dead.
The thing I keep saying, and which you keep trying to pretend you are in a better position to know than I am; because really, how many years have you spent studying interrogation and torture? I will wager, at long odds, I know more about torture, and how to apply it, than you do. I know I have more experience at interrogation than you to. I know more people who have done the job.
I have personal acquaintance with more torturers, and almost certainly more with people who have been tortured.
But you don't care; you have this narrative in your head that torture, "works", and, if what you want is for people to answer the questions it does "work". What it doesn't do is get reliably honest answers.
Ask Stockdale, ask McCain. Look at what they "gave up". I forget which of them rattled of baseball players as names for people in his squadron. That got some reprieve. As fibs go, it was good and bad. They were names which might be cross-checkable. That's bad (for values of bad that involve trying to keep the enemy from torturing you some more for telling provable lies).
It's good because it's a list of names he could remember.
As to the question of "truth if not tortured," stop trying to be obtuse. You know that's neither what I said, nor what I meant. If a prisoner wants to lie, she will lie. If I torture her the odds of lies go up (because the odds are she knows nothing).
If I have enough prisoners, and I don't give them incentives to lie, then I can sift for the truth. And, the simple fact of the matter is, most people tell the truth. Even more than that, most people are horrible liars. Absent encouragement they can't tell the same lie repeatedly.
If I don't have a narrative I am chasing down, then the lies won't match, and I can drop them from the list of potential theories/facts. I can stop chasing them.
If, however, I have a story to pursue, and I am willing to beat it out of someone, the lies will converge, and they will look true. I will have no good way to drop them from the mix.
(continued)
Re: An exercise in futility (fytte the first)
Date: 2010-06-06 04:44 am (UTC)On balance, I will take my utilitarian argument (that I can get good info without torture; and that even if torture is capable of getting honest answers, non-torture is more reliable, and faster) and my moral argument (that it's wrong, and the specious argument that it saves lives; invalidated by the utilitarian argument), and stick to that then to join Conservatives (such as yourself) who aver "Liberals" don't have, i.e. a moral absolute, and then say that the word torture is used too much, and the deed not enough in reference to things they decried when the N. Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians and the N. Vietnamese did them.
Which, as I have noted elsewhen, makes you a torture monger. That you misrepresent my position, comes; from years of interaction, as no surprise. It is, actually, completely in keeping with the rest of your actions. The mass of evidence is against you; you present an abstract; from a small number of people, who most certainly have reason to wish torture works (or at least was legal), and offer it up as refutation of a position I don't hold (i.e. no one ever tells the truth when tortured; which is not my argument), and then get offended because those who know, and argue from that knowledge, that torture, is both a moral wrong, and functionally useless, are "insulting your intelligence." You, elsewhere, say that the position of those who oppose torture is lazy, that we aren't willing to contemplate the level of dirt we need to get on our hands to keep our civilisation. Please.
That is, of course, the same sort of strawmanning you decry in that post. It, as you say you don't suffer gladly, is an insult to our intelligence (which is more favorable than calling it a willful lie. I am not actually willing to rule that out, all things considered, but I shall be charitable enough to do no more than publicly entertain the concept; since if I don't, someone else might).
Really, there isn't anything more to say.
You have a belief, on either a desire to torture; for reasons incomprehensible, or a willingness to accept the opinion of a compromised minority; in the face of centuries of evidence the contrary. You are either unable to understand the position of those who disagree with you, or perfectly willing to mis-represent them in an attempt to make them refutable.
Those are the reasons your arguments don't sway me. I have experience which contradicts the accounts you appeal to. I have corroboration of that experience from people I know, and respect; from several nations. I have an (overwhelming) textual record with which my experience, and those accounts are supported.
Against that I have you complaining that a small handful of guys who tortured people are saying they got good info, and I won't cop to them being right.
Hrmn... Faced with a rebuttal like that, why yes, I guess I'll just forget all that other stuff and jump on the torture apologist bandwagon.
Or not