Breathtaking

[solarbird]

Alan Dershowitz defends torture on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page by noting it worked well for the Nazis:

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

I guess we're done here, then. First the US should be the Soviet Union, now the US should be Nazi Germany. Anyone got any ideas for lower levels to which the pro-torture party can sink?

By the way, the argument is, of course, based a lie. Amusingly, the "ticking time bomb" example he proceeds to use to support his scenario is also based on a premise which is a lie; it didn't actually involve - he even admits - the use of torture. But he uses it to support a pro-torture position anyway, because truth is irrelevant, and if you want to support a lie, you may as well use another lie.

This highlights the fundamental reality, and the actual point that he's lying about: torture produces whatever you want to hear. It can be truth; it can be falsehood. Truth is orthogonal to the process, and torture states always, always, always go from professing the desire for the former to extracting only the latter. Always.

Comments

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

Well, if it's good enough for Hitler...

[solarbird]

Godwin's Law: 1990-2007. RIP.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Yep. D-E-D. Kaputt. Shuffled off. Wanting for daisies to push up.

*sigh*

So, too, are the backbones of not just your average politician, but your average joe on the street... in 1773, when they started acting up like this, we started a frelling shooting war. Now what do we do? Blog. Yeah, I'm guilty too, but only because I know how hard cats are to herd...

[gamera-spinning.livejournal.com]

I'm without words.

[solarbird]

Oh, I got some words. Fascist motherfucking thugs with no mind to anything less bloody than slithering their fingers through the viscera of the dead as they celebrate their orgasmic six-year hate; shambling mindless vampiric chameleons without compass, reason, shame, or the inclination to use any tool above the rack and knife; fanatical beasts intent on whipping themselves into spasms of ecstasy through the pain of the target, these worshippers of torture, cruelty, and contempt have no goal higher than a perverted echo of primal, gutteral, animal dominance over and death to all but an ever-thinning inner core of like-minded wraiths and ghouls. No filth is too decayed to spew in service to that goal; no truth too pristine to defile. And the mere thought that these wretched hatemongerers continue not only to be taken seriously but continue to define the argument disgusts me beyond measure - and the continuing unwillingness of the "opposition" to actually oppose this leads me to fear that all, for this Republic, is genuinely lost.

Those are some of the words I have.

[lostkun.livejournal.com]

It's not that it never works - it's that it rarely works. And while when it works, yes, potentially valuable intelligence information that can potentially save more lives can be garnered, the fact of the matter is, it's not cost-effective or time-effective when there are much better means of intelligence gathering out there. Even intelligence from interrogations gathered under suitably humane conditions is considered to be the least reliable of all. Also, torture makes more terrorists. THAT is a fact. If you torture a normal guy, guess what, now he hates you, and if you torture a bad guy and he walks away, now he has street cred.

People are dumb dumb dumb. They want to show everyone how they're tough and willing to go the extra mile, and blah-blah-blah those liberal wussies don't want to get their hands dirty, but no matter how tough or scary you are, you're still dumb.

/rant

[darkphoenixrisn.livejournal.com]

Dershowitz has a history of supporting torture, and yet he still gets hailed as a "progressive attorney".

[solarbird]

The Court's petitioners and hangers-on, are, of course, insane.

[brombear.livejournal.com]

Just a little note to make you wonder...

Just where do you think we got our "manual" on torture?

The Nazi's had an extensive library on the subject, and how the body reacts under such measures.....where do you think all the material went at the end of WW2?

No need to answer...

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

I'll break radio silence on this one, and give you the (now-retired) front-line soldier's view on torture.

I can think of no circumstance at all whatsoever, where any form of torture leads to beneficial results. All that happens is that one receives unreliable information, from someone who is now certainly motivated to say anything that he or she thinks would stop the hurting. And the other consequence, the one that makes me angry enough a veteran to dare to write this at all: is that what we reap is a Total War, war to the knife a la Hitler-Stalin war of the Forties, where no quarter is given and no quarter is expected.

In our training, we were taught how to stand up to physical and psychological interrogation if ever captured (and, I might add, learn how futile that resistance would be); were therefore further led to appreciate the wisdom of not letting ourselves be captured, and of the general merits of the Geneva Conventions, particularly as regards civilian detainees and other Protected Persons under Geneva.

War may be nasty and ugly (it's not a sandbox game, the idea is to be able to hurt the other side worse than they hurt you, and bullet wounds HURT way more than they ever let on in the movies, I know this too well), but it has for the past seventy years has some semblence of rules, at least among civil socities. Please don't laugh. We tried really hard to follow those rules, the Laws of War, even if we were a bunch of innocent-minded beavers dressed up in Scouting uniforms.

Other than that case with the Airborne ten years or so ago, so far as I know we didn't go in for nastiness with people we captured, no matter what the provocation; frankly, what motivated us was the basic sense that if you have to surrender, the war is over for you now, whether your name be Laoyan, Tommy, Gwyneth or Muhammed.

The first time I saw cracks in that basic approach was in my time in Bosnia, when we started hearing rumours of bad acts by UN/IFOR soldiers, too, but never knew for sure.

However, in Afghanistan, late autumn of 2001 and into spring of 2002, I saw the first solid signs of a descent into undisciplined behaviour: of course we expected that from the other side(s), we'd been indoctrinated (maybe too thoroughly?) into expecting that; I certainly witnessed some terrible savagery at Dehra Dun, where the Chechens were pushing the Talibs forwards towards us with machine-gun and mortar fire. And we fought back, as fiercely as we could given the cluster-fuck circumstances we were dumped into. We'd made pacts among ourselves (as officers at least), that none of us would be taken alive. As the saying goes, save the last bullet (better yet, last grenade) for yourself. And I think it's credibly possible that some NATO troops did indiscriminately fire into crowds of civilians after IED attacks: that assertion's been made frequently in the past year and it has the ring of truth to it.

I really wish I didn't have to write that.

Getting back to the issue of institutionalised torture, which is what this is all about: we constantly received command guidance that Geneva Conventions applied, all along. We were further reminded to treat our captives and civilian detainees with dignity and respect. By my name and word, I believe we consistently did that. What bugged the hell out of me then, and kept bothering me worse and worse (and finally led to my forced retirement) was that we were supposed to turn them over to the soldiers and civilian security contractors of [Nameless Imperial Power] who then sent them Gawd-knows where.

Well, of course I know, now, where those poor wretches went. And I have a pretty damn good idea what happened to them. If there's ever a modern version of the Nuremburg trials, I imagine I will be there myself, testifying. Conscience says that's what needs doing.

I ask you: is that what we all want? I sure as hell never did, and I've got the scars and nightmares to show for it.


Colour me,

very very very disgusted by the current state of affairs.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

Thank you for speaking out as a retired soldier. You have credibility on this issue that people without a military background, no matter how well-intentioned, simply don't have. There are a lot of people out there who will tune out what most of us have to say, who will listen to you. When enough people listen, this will stop.

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Well, I do apologise for being a bit less than coherent: this is a very very difficult issue for me, and for many of my compatriots as well. We've been having an intense national debate about it, which may not have made it into view Stateside, since, well, we're Canucks and we're all bloody socialists anyway.

And thanks for the kind words. In ways, this sharpens the stake in my heart: it's not the business of the soldiers, usually, to complain about the direction being given us by the politicians. But when the politicians seem to have so completely gone off the rails on this matter, and when we are at risk of sliding into an uncontrollable global conflict, then something must be said. Now that I'm out, I can express opinions, even considering that there may well be consequences for speaking out. Even here, even now; maybe especially now.

"When enough people listen, this will stop."

From your mouth to the Divine ears, may that come to pass!

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

As you say, people can give good information under torture. It's just that it's hard to filter the rare good info from the bad info, when anybody will tell you what you want to hear when you're torturing them. But even a few bits of good information among the bad don't validate torture as a technique. For one thing, operational details among terrorists are typically isolated by cell, and flexible enough that if someone is compromised the operation will simply change so that the good information extracted under torture is no longer relevant. And since most people know this, they only have to throw out enough bad information to delay investigations long enough for the rest of the organization to change its operations.

So even from a cold-hearted evaluation of torture techniques for individual suspects, torture doesn't pass the test. It also invariably turns the general population against the torturers, particularly when the rate of false accusations is so high (when you get rid of due process, you're guaranteed to interrogate, and torture, many innocent people.) Even putting the moral issue of torture aside--and how can we?--it's the wrong thing to do.

People need to watch the Battle of Algiers until they get it.

[loopback.livejournal.com]

You think the take-away message is going to be 'don't do this' and not, 'hey here are some tips' ?

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

Well there's a depressing thought, and all the more so because it's true.

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I'm sure members of the resistance gave up follow members under torture. I'm also sure that members also gave up friends/family members/neighbors/random strangers not involved in the resistance simply to make it stop, in other words a lot of false positives.

In the case of the Nazis it didn't matter because there was no cost to a false positive so round them all up and kill them and the mission is complete. But you'd hope in our "civilized society" where we presume innocence rather than guilt we'd do everything and anything to avoid false positives.

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

Dear mother of hell. They just Godwinned themselves and invoked "If it worked for the Nazis, it can work with us".

People have very little concept of just how BAD of a statement this is--there were other things that "worked for the Nazis" like, oh, putting political prisoners (among many others--there were of course the large categories of people who ended up as "enemies of the state" simply because of their religion and/or family heritage) in concentration camps and using historical revisionism to promote mass murder.

...does anyone think Sweden is offering political asylum yet? I'm not sure I *want* to find out what's *worse* than comparing one's self to the Nazis...

(Oh, ten bucks on them invoking Stalin next re torture :P)

[solarbird]

Where've you been? You know the fundamentalist wing has already been quoting Stalin without irony. We've already finished out that trifecta.

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

Actually, they've gone even worse than *that*--I was talking about the wings *outside* of dominionism (hell, I know from personal frigging *experience* that the dominionists have talked about frank genocide of anyone who ISN'T one--talk that is now starting to cross over into frank action what with "Watchers On The Walls" and similar antics).

And I was specifically thinking Holomodor (aka "Let's purposely starve the whole of Ukraine to death"), which I've not yet heard proposed--usually they just talk about putting people to the knife more directly :P

Also

[solarbird]

-there were other things that "worked for the Nazis" like, oh, putting political prisoners (among many others--there were of course the large categories of people who ended up as "enemies of the state" simply because of their religion and/or family heritage
...and sexuality. Queers were in the camps, too.

Re: Also

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

Yes, definitely that...the sick and sad thing is that there is a very popular form of Holocaust revisionism in dominionist circles that claims that LGBT people not only weren't killed en masse but were the architects of the Holocaust (and pretty much every other thing in human history objectionable to dominionists, up to and including the foundation of Islam and secular society).

I wish I was making this up. Unfortunately, it's popular enough that there are dominionist groups both in Eastern Europe and the US calling for literal progroms against LGBT people (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/17/165640/10) (which are sadly being at least somewhat successful)--including some frank leaders of large dominionist denominations (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/17/165640/10) calling for this publically (they've done so since forever *privately*, but they're not even bothering to keep a "private face" anymore).

It's something I'm all too aware of, because it's the reason I don't come out to my own folks.