The Case for More Waterboarding
The orthodox conservative position at this point, it seems to me, is that waterboarding is not torture. Nor is having someone dangle from his shackled arms in a manner so painful as to prevent sleep for a period of days. What’s more, these non-torturous “harsh techniques” are highly effective at gathering intelligence. But if that’s true, and these are legal and effective means of securing reliable information, why are we doing so little of it?
After all, people doing organized crime investigations face a lot of challenges in terms of getting information from people. Maybe cops should do routine undercover drug buys, build a case against low level dealers, and then waterboard the guys they’ve arrested and move further up the food chain. Maybe waterboarding and “stress positions” should become routine treatment for battlefield detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why not?
Well I would say because it’s wrong. And also because it’s very unlikely to work. And also because this is the mentality that gave us Abu Ghraib and abuses at Bagram and all kinds of other horrible problems throughout the system. But if you take the view that these “enhanced techniques” aren’t illegal torture, and that “enhanced techniques” are highly effective, and that systematized approval of torture doesn’t inevitably lead to abuse, then why not?
78 Responses to “The Case for More Waterboarding”
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April 25th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Domestic violence, sexual assault, and rape allegations would all seem to be worthy of enhanced interrogation techniques, since you’re potentially dealing with people willing to commit truly despicable crimes and you’re trying to avoid the ticking bomb of yet another crime against a defenseless victim.
Because if these techniques work against foreign detainees, they work against domestic detainees, and if they’re justified because they’re supposed to deter the death of innocents in terror attacks, then they’re justified to avoid the possible death of a single domestic individual, and if they’re justified to avoid the death of a single U.S. citizen, it seems fair to extend that courtesy of protection to serious attacks and assaults such as domestic violence, rape, and sexual assaults.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
The difference is that you know Zubeydah or whoever is a bad man. You’re torturing to get intelligence, not to prosecute Zubeydah. In the case of domestic violence, rape, or sexual assault, you would ostensibly be torturing to determine whether the person is guilty or not. That’s a very different thing–torturing someone who may or may not be guilty.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Sadly, I don’t think you can use reductio ad absurdum on a political party that has already been reduced to an absurdum. For all too many wingnuts, the reply to Matt’s gambit would be: “Huh, good point. Never thought of that!”
April 25th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
why not here?
well, because it might be done to white people.
but provided that we could rule out that possibility, i think the conservatives would be totally fine with torturing the shit out of blacks and immigrants.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
I’m willing to expand waterboarding to former Bush officials testifying before Congress. Next time they give us that “I don’t recall” crap, bring out the waterboard. Sure, it won’t make them cooperate, but they won’t cooperate anyway. It will, however, demonstrate that waterboarding doesn’t work. And that’s really what we wanted answered anyway.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
@2: obviously, the thing to do would be to propose using it on convicted felons. Want to break up a gang? Why not make the incarcerated members betray the ones still on the street.
Legally, you run into “cruel and unusual punishment.” But if it doesn’t cause pain-and-suffering, how can it be cruel?
April 25th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
We already do this but using deals instead of torture–give some small fry a shorter sentence in order to nab the mastermind. You could argue that torture might be effective in eliciting compliance without having to reduce the sentence for someone who deserves the full sentence. That, of course, is assuming that torture works.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Has anyone asked Cheney if he would approve of Irving “Scooter” Libby being waterboarded to cut through his obstruction of justice?
Cranky
April 25th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Ted,
Do you really want to go there? Because I would be all for allowing the whipping of convicted drug dealers, child molesters, and other vicious criminal scumbags. Not merely for interrogation, but also as part of their punishment. I’m glad you and Yglesias appear to agree. So good- let’s restore corporal punishment to a central place in American criminal justice.
Kit Bitzer,
Ah, this stupid and idiotic skin game again. Islam isn’t a race, in case you didn’t realize that.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Oh, sorry. He mistook your religious discrimination for racial discrimination.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Unless, of course, you’re waterboarding people whom you think may know something related to preventing another crime. I mean, what if you’re not sure who the suspect is?
Isn’t it better to enhancedly interrogate (?) anyone connected in order to be sure that, say, one more woman is not going to be raped?
Torturing to get intelligence to save an American life from a potential terrorist attack is in no way functionally or morally superior than torturing to get intelligence to save an American life from a potential domestic murder or rape attack. The former just potentially deals with greater numbers at once.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
That’s the same question I have been thinking and waiting for someone to bring up. The answer is mostly going to revolve around who gets the harsh interrogation. That will always revolve around race. In terms of course that avoid any mention of race. Or the answer will amount to ‘well, you just know’, and they do know.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
“The difference is that you know Zubeydah or whoever is a bad man. You’re torturing to get intelligence, not to prosecute Zubeydah. In the case of domestic violence, rape, or sexual assault, you would ostensibly be torturing to determine whether the person is guilty or not.”
Well, why don’t we get the geniuses who know for sure that everyone they torture is guilty, and apply their expertise to regular criminal cases? We wouldn’t even need trials then!
April 25th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
“Because I would be all for allowing the whipping of convicted drug dealers, child molesters, and other vicious criminal scumbags.”
You might change your mind if you knew who these “vicious criminal scumbags” are. Drugs dealers? These days, some of them are elderly people who sell their pain meds to get some extra money. Would you really whip a seventy year old grandmother? Child molesters? A lot of those guys are Catholic priests. Granted, it’s a little fuzzier in this case. Their mistreatment could be considered payback for the Spanish Inquisition.
In the end though, corporal punishment is just stupid. We already do a lot to ensure that our criminals become better criminals while in jail. Adding corporal punishment will only make them meaner.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Has My forgot about 9/11?
These enhanced interrogation techniques are used only on the worst of the worst. Would you prefer that we Mirandize terrorists? If we stop using these techniques, then there will likely be another attack, but this time, the blood will on MY’s hands!
Rudy/Palin 2012!
April 25th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
No matter how often conservatives and deranged individuals like Hector (I have never met a self-described “socialist” so eager to repeat right-wing nonsense) explain their talking points about the greatness of torture, I refuse to even engage in this debate.
This is America. We do no torture, at least we didn’t torture, and the people who did during the last 8 years should be prosecuted.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Do you really want to go there? Because I would be all for allowing the whipping of convicted drug dealers, child molesters, and other vicious criminal scumbags. Not merely for interrogation, but also as part of their punishment.
Corporal punishment, though I think it kind of a stupid idea, doesn’t raise the same problems as interrogation by torture, even if the methods used for both are the same. If you want to assign people a set number of whippings after being convicted of serious crimes in fair trials, fine, I’m sure some people would prefer that to prison. But it’s quite different to whip someone every time they refuse to testify, for obvious moral, pragmatic, and historical reasons.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Re: I refuse to even engage in this debate.
Probably because you realize that you are intellectually and morally outclassed.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
We should give the police “waterboard kits” so when they ask”Do you know how fast you were going?” and the perp answers incorrectly, they have that extra option.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
talking to some of my conservative friends on this issue and I have to say that I think it is only liberals and like minded people that keeps us from having the sort of domestic torture/detention facilities you describe.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Generally speaking, it appears that torture is fine, as long as it done by good people to bad people.
In fact, this is a universal concept that is often applied to such activities as murder, rape, theft, etc.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Probably because you realize that you are intellectually and morally outclassed.
It is impossible to be intellectually outclassed by any Republican leader at the moment. Not because they are stupid, but because they believe their base is stupid. The fact is that most interrogation experts have spoken out against torture. But reality has a well-known liberal bias.
As for the moral argument: Cheney tortured people in order to get false intelligence about the non-existent Iraq WMDs and launch his war, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the process. That’s your side, Mr “Socialist”: the real Axis of Evil.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
It finally clicked what Bybee’s line reminded of: “Oh, we got both kinds [of music]. Country *and* Western.”
April 25th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Good suggestion, but awkward. Perhaps we should require that automakers include a built in waterboarding option that only police can activate. This would save a lot of time.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Why oh Why,
Don’t be dumb. I opposed the Iraq war and I oppose the Republicans.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Race is a major component but anything that separates someone as “an other” will work. And don’t think the idea doesn’t have broad cultural support. Look at any police show on American TV and show me the one in which protagonists aren’t portrayed sympathetically for beating someone for a confession or to get additional information.
@2 – who says Zubeydah is a bad man? As it stands, a small branch of the state is undertaking all aspects determining Zubeydah’s status and while they might be telling the truth it’s just as possible that they are lying. Hundreds of people every day are acquitted of charges brought by a government that considered the accused a “bad” man. If we eliminate the need to prove or show why someone is a “bad” man, I think we will find the list of “bad” men will grow very large, very fast.
@7 – of course, the problem with “deals” as well as torture is that you can always find someone else to marginalize, pressure, and coerce to corroborate your lie. Just look at what happened in Tulia TX and you can see how all it takes is a couple of bad actors, a majority population prepared to think the worst about the minority population, and virtually no judicial oversight and you can end up implicating a whole group in fictional criminal activities. And that can be done just with the threat of extended incarceration. Imagine how much more effective it is to get people to say whatever you want them to say when they are being tortured. That’s what police states do. They don’t torture to get real information. They torture to get false confessions to preserve and enhance the illusion of guilt.
In the case of Cheney/Bush, et.al., I’d be surprised if most of the torture wasn’t an attempt to bolster the Iraq-Al Queda lie.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I agree, Matt. While we’re at it, why not use it for tax evaders, airport security, and Final Jeopardy?
April 25th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
@abb1 – I’d say the corollary of your universal is that “good people = us” while “bad people=them” – always and forever.
April 25th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
NattyB is either a spoof or the stupidest fucking person in the world that can type.
April 25th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
It takes some real ingenuity to regard the torture of prisoners and criminal suspects in the U.S. as merely hypothetical.
April 25th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
In Defense of Torture by Sam Harris
April 25th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
link
April 25th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
What I find most interesting about this is the faux outrage by Congress. The Democratic leadership was briefed on this multiple times over the last few years; they didn’t see fit to raise any ruckus at the time.
So go ahead, have the truth commissions. It will be a lot of fun watching the bonfire burn down both parties.
April 25th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
So go ahead, have the truth commissions. It will be a lot of fun watching the bonfire burn down both parties.
Yawn, the same stupid right-wing talking point out again. Let’s compare the responsibility of the two main parties, regarding torture:
1. The Republican party leaders designed, authorized or ordered torture. They hand-picked lawyers who would approve of torture, and appointed them to rule over the Department of Justice. The President of the US was a Republican, and is fully responsible; after a criminal investigation, so will probably be his Vice-President (his two main advisers were key players in the path to torture) and his Secretary of Defense – not to mention his two Attorney Generals.
2. A couple of Democratic leaders in Congress may or may not have been briefed on this torture by Republican-appointed officials; they were not allowed to talk about it with anyone, and there was nothing they could do about it, as minority leaders or ranking members.
Yes, bring it on, not a useless ‘truth commission’, but a criminal prosecution for war crimes, torture and crimes against humanity. Let’s see what sticks.
April 25th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Yes, bring it on, not a useless ‘truth commission’, but a criminal prosecution for war crimes, torture and crimes against humanity
yep, basically. When we look at it this way, we see that the chain of blame for acts conceived of, ordered, and executed, fall on Republicans.
Right-wing talking points are like car commercials– they don’t exist to change anyone’s mind or to convince; they exist to make people more at peace with the bad decisions they’ve already made. Jim Bob has entered the stage where he’s trying to rationalize the 8 years he’s wasted being a shill for the Republicans. James– it’s a gutter ideology advocated by a bunch of people who spent their lives coming up with bad fiscal policies, stupid wars, and war crimes. Trying to justify yourself by saying “the dems did it too!” and getting defensive how you’re not one of those Republicans isn’t an excuse– you could have voted for Gore or Kerry, but you didn’t, because you were too tied to your own ideological and moral blindness.
April 25th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
and if the prosecutions bring down pelosi and harman and reid, what the fuck do i care? if they broke laws, they should go to jail.
i’m a democrat, and i’ve voted democratic all my life. but if anyone in office, any office, with any letter after their name, is complicit in crime, then they have to do the time.
rule of law: it’s not just for blow-jobs.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Democratic members of Congress who were briefed on the torture but did not raise any objections to it are complicit in that torture and subject to prosecution for conspiracy to torture.
Obama’s decision not to prosecute torturers who were acting in “good faith” is a violation of the Convention Against Torture, which requires all serious allegations of torture to be investigated and referred to legal authorities for the purpose of prosecution. Obama should be impeached for his violation of international law.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
being an accessory to a crime is just about as serious as doing the crime. If you guys think there were crimes committed, you have to be ready to see all the top people in both parties brought down.
Being cynical, I expect that there’s going to a quiet meeting between Reid, Pelosi, and Obama such that
– Obama punts the investigation to Holder
– everything goes quiet for months
– nothing more comes of it
If there’s one commonality between the two parties, it’s a desire to keep power. Pelosi and Reid are not going to allow themselves to be burned down, period. It was all fun until that became a possibility.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
being an accessory to a crime is just about as serious as doing the crime.
That’s an interesting theory; my guess is that you don’t know anything about Law, and neither do I. In your mind these two things are equivalent: designing and implementing a regime of systematic torture for any detainee, even if he might be innocent; or being told about ’stuff’ by a government agent/hack without any mean to confirm or protest that ’stuff’.
But James Robertson, I’m glad we agree on one point: let’s bring the full weight of the Law on everybody involved. It is great that you approve of President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Attorney Generals Ashcroft and Gonzales being sent to a jury of their peers in order to determine if they authorized torture, along with minority Congresspeople Pelosi and Reid. Thanks Robertson, you proved that some conservatives still care about the rule of law.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
I’d completely forgotten about Sam Harris until I read that “defense of torture” bullshit, but as long as we are ostracizing moral monsters he needs to get nudged into the shotgun blast.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Since James has brought up accessories to crime – let us remember the crime of murder. The murderer, Andrew Moonen, hired by Blackwater, walks free today. The accessory was the then acting ambassador to Iraq, Margaret Scobey, who helped him get away after he gunned down Raheef Khalif on Christmas. His excuse? He was a drunk racist pig who wanted an Iraqi head before he headed home. Knew that would impress the ever vile dittohead friends he had. This is an easy call. Scobey’s people at the state department were so diligent in whitewashing Moonen’s record that he was able to return to Kuwait, after gunning down Khalif for fun and sadism, and make more money on the U.S. taxpayer dollar.
Bring these two to trial. Let’s let Cheney testify about how he approves heartily of random murder, such as was committed by his beloved Einsatzkommando. Might be interesting.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Re: Corporal punishment, though I think it kind of a stupid idea, doesn’t raise the same problems as interrogation by torture, even if the methods used for both are the same. If you want to assign people a set number of whippings after being convicted of serious crimes in fair trials, fine, I’m sure some people would prefer that to prison. But it’s quite different to whip someone every time they refuse to testify, for obvious moral, pragmatic, and historical reasons.
Consumatopia,
I think I agree. I don’t think it’s OK to beat people who haven’t been convicted of any crime (or, at the very least, whose guilt is a matter of public record). And open-ended physical punishment (i.e. until he’s willing to talk) is right out.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
No wonder Bush administration alums are so fervently imposed to any investigation into the torture memos! As far as they can see, there would be no reason why the investigators wouldn’t torture them to get the truth. Not only that, but they feel like they’d deserve it for being suspects.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
… but as long as we are ostracizing moral monsters he needs to get nudged into the shotgun blast.
Sam Harris deftly moves out of range, and Ed Marshall gets it full in the face.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
With the pursuit of torture as standard criminal process and the nascent Swine Flu outbreak, I’m thinking we’re in a very large re-make of The Seventh Seal.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
jt are the idiot who usually posts the Obaliar, Obafraud, Obanoun, bullshit or do I have you confused with another moron?
April 25th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Sam Harris makes a lot of sense.
Ed Marshall is an abomination.
April 25th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
You guys don’t even make any sense anymore, I could be an abomination for a multitude of reasons, but thinking it’s wrong to torture prisoners isn’t one of them. Even if I’m wrongheaded and ill served in my (until really, really, really recently, universally held) view that it’s immoral and wrong, why would I be an abomination? I could be stupid, I could be wrong, but where is this righteous anger coming from? What the fuck is wrong with you people?
April 25th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
How ’bout we just waterboard the guys who say it’s not torture to see if they’re telling the truth?
April 25th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
“Hi, my name is Ed Marshall, and I support terrorism.”
April 25th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
James “I supported the War on the Iraqi People, and I support torture” Robertson isn’t really in much of a position to sling mud here. You know what? Not one of the people on this board smart enough not to vote for the gang of sociopaths that currently constitute the Republican Party cares if a few Democrats are caught up and sent to prison for enabling torture. Unlike idiots like James “I <3 Torture” Robertson, there are few that vote for Democrats who are so stupid as to imagine them all to be saints.
So, bring it on fuckwit. I can’t speak for everyone on the board, but I can tell you I will be happy to be rid of every moron who said it was okay to torture. The Congress will be a better place without them. But, unlike James “Hooray for Mass Death in Iraq” Robertson, I don’t want it to just stop with those who were informed after the fact. I want it to get everyone who played an active role in enabling torture. Sorry James, that’s going to take down a lot of Republicans. There is some good news though – it would mean that the next time the Republicans are at the helm, they won’t have to deal with the kind of corrupt stinking infrastructure that Bush had when he hired all those criminals from the Nixon and Reagan teams.
April 25th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Ah, Mixner is posting as jt now. I thought something (other than the idiotic drivel of James Robertson) smelled bad in this thread.
April 25th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
orthodox? what do you mean? like how orthodox jews treat women?
what do you mean orthodox?
wtf?
April 25th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
You’re expecting a quick answer from the right?
By the way, who is it, other than fellow right wingers, are right wingers trying to convince that the right is better at keeping America safer? No one outside the 28% of outright crazies believes them any more. I get that this is their fixation, but I don’t get the incentive to try & convince outsiders.
April 25th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
“Hi, my name is Ed Marshall, and I support terrorism.”
Gotcha, it revolves around being illiterate, stupid, and convinced that everyone who disagrees with your moronic, immoral, bullshit is a supporter of terrorism. See how far that gets you.
April 25th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Somebody kidnapped our conservatives and replaced them with faulty models. Since waterboarding was torture and illegal from 1898 if not before, till 2002, wouldn’t a true conservative want to honor that tradition?
April 25th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Paging a copy editor and a comment moderator to the 3rd aisle…
April 26th, 2009 at 12:21 am
Thanks to Yglesias for posting the painting on the wall at one of the Khmer Rouge torture centers that shows visitors that waterboarding was one of the torture techniques they used. When Japanese soldiers were imprisoned and/ or executed for war crimes after WWII, some of those crimes included waterboarding U.S. soldiers. We didn’t call it enhanced interrogation techniques, we didn’t call it alleged torture.
When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes the tortures used by the Cheka in The Gulag Archipelago, including stress positions, sleep deprivation, prolonged nudity and exposure to cold, etc., it is the same thing we were doing to our prisoners, except we pretend it isn’t torture.
Every nation that commits torture thinks they are the good guys defending their great nation and citizens from the enemy, who is bad. An enemy so bad that they can be considered not human. Not-human enough to torture. Every torturer says I was just following orders. They said it at Nuremburg, and the court said no, that does not excuse you.
We need to face what the U.S. has done, and those who codified and ordered and committed torture need to be prosecuted.
Congress needs to put the Executive branch back in check and legislate limitations on the secrecy/ no oversight that allowed much of this to happen.
April 26th, 2009 at 12:27 am
Sam Harris has an interesting argument. As usual, I don’t buy it, but it at least has some intellectual heft to it. But Sam Harris is the kind of guy who makes Hector’s theological arguments seem real. Both are true to their respective positions, but neither position is even remotely convincing. Both assume a position and work the logic out from there. Science works the other way, and both Hector and Sam Harris should know that. Whether God exists or not is a question that simply cannot be answered either through science or theology. But whether we care about that answer can be answered by theology and science. In science, the answer is NO! In theology, it can be anything. In essence, science is nothing, but also everything. Theology is everything, yet nothing. Understand those last two sentences, and you know everything and nothing at once. And that’s nirvana.
April 26th, 2009 at 12:51 am
Hannity agreed to be waterboarded. Charles Grodin talked him into it. Grodin also called him a fascist and mocked his lack of military service. A very strange clip.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/22/hannity-offers-to-be-wate_n_190354.html
April 26th, 2009 at 1:29 am
That’s an excellent point. A lot of Republicans and their lapdogs have spoken on the subject but not a single conservative of note has suggested that the Obama policy that prohibits waterboarding must be rescinded.
April 26th, 2009 at 2:08 am
“Hannity agreed to be waterboarded”
No, he didn’t. He agreed to the sanitized version of it. He’ll be able to stop it, and that’s not real. The only way it’s real is when you face the real people doing it. And you have to face it in an unsuspecting way. If you consent to a procedure that is supervised by medical professionals and it’s done by your consent, it’s not torture and it’s not an accurate concept of what really happens. In Hannity’s case, I’ll agree to it too. It’s safe, it’s easy, it’s temporary. So let Hannity agree to what’s real: let’s take him against his will, and at a time unknown, and we’ll send him to a prison in Syria where he has no rights. And if he dies, well nobody will ever know about that because nobody knows what happens there. If Hannity can’t do that, he’s full of shit. Disneyland is nice, but it says nothing about reality. But Disneyland is far closer to reality than Hannity can ever imagine. He’s in this crazy world where simulated crucifixion is just a stress position.
And I’ll add one thing. Our stress positions are every bit as bad as our waterboarding. Eventually, we have to understand the real extent of the program. If it were only waterboarding, it would have a snowball’s chance in Hell of being legal. But it’s worse than that. Our stress positions amount to crucifixion, and we need to understand that. And if the Christians among us accept it as being reasonable, then they need to say that Jesus got a light penalty. And lucky, actually. The stab was an act of mercy. It killed him with less suffering. As for that drink of vinegar, well, nothing will help you cope with hot dry climates better than vinegar. Anyone in Texas will tell you that. Ever wonder why BBQ is always served with pickles? Ever wonder why the Dallas Cowboys train with pickle juice? In the end, Jesus got off pretty lightly compared to what we do to people now. He was at least allowed to die*. So who’s dying for whose sins now?
*Jesus’s ‘death’ is very strange and not consistent with any medical knowledge we have now. His crucifixion happened way too fast for a normal one. That stab might account for it, but it could go either way depending on where he was stabbed. But if he was stabbed where he was said to have been stabbed, he’d never have made it to the cross. If he were stabbed slightly off, he’d live for years. His stab wound is either in the liver or it’s not. If it’s not, there is no reason he would die so quickly. Unless he had some other infection already. And God obviously must have disliked Jesus if that were the case. In the end,I see one probable theory: Jesus was poisoned so as to fake death. We can do this today with blowfish poison. And that’s an ancient technique. Jesus surely would have known it. He was a smart guy. So my theory is this: Jesus took the blowfish poison ad was pulled off the cross alive. Then he arose, making people think he was immortal. And then they made a cover story to make his existence seem okay.
April 26th, 2009 at 3:37 am
Interesting that the conservative posters won’t respond to MY’s question: Should the police be allowed to waterboard criminals in order to gain intel about future crimes? If you believe waterboarding is humane and effective, and that it doesn’t lead to abuse, should you not support giving law enforcement this tool? I expect that most Republicans would answer, “of course police should waterboard.” I’m surprised that they aren’t saying it proudly here.
April 26th, 2009 at 4:50 am
@28: @abb1 – I’d say the corollary of your universal is that “good people = us” while “bad people=them” – always and forever.
Correct, “good people” are always those who torture and murder; be it the CIA, or NKVD, or Mossad, or Gestapo, or the Spanish Inquisition. And “bad people” are those who they torture and murder in order to protect and defend all the good and decent things in this world.
April 26th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Fostert,
The stab wound happened after crucifixion, and in fact after death: the blood and water was interpreted as the evidence of death, and also of course is symbolic of the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist.
April 26th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Abb1,
The fact that different people use the same rationale about moral superiority, does not mean that they are all equally correct. Some people, causes and nations really are morally superior to others. (I do not consider America to be morally very good, but at the very least we are better than the jihadist hordes, the Khmer Rouge, or the Nazis.) As the motto of the late and unlamented William F. Buckley runs, “Quod licet Jovi non licet Bovi.” What is permitted to Jupiter, is not permitted to the cow.
April 26th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Because life is not like an action movie. It’s funny how the action heroes – Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, Eastwood, Norris, The Rock – gravitate towards the Republican party, where whole policies revolve around banging a few heads to annoy the liberals and get results.
But how quickly all you Chuck Norris wannabes forget: Col. Braddock was a hero for destroying the torture camp, not running the place.
April 26th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Hector, I don’t know who “we” are in your statement; you and I certainly are as far from each other as two people can be. But I certainly don’t see any difference between, say, Sadrist torture and CIA torture, except that CIA thugs are probably better educated and thus should know better. I’ll cut some slack to a jihadi who grew up in slums somewhere.
April 26th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
[...] 26, 2009 Matt Yglesias raised another interesting point about the torture “debate.” If it is true, as most conservatives seem to think, that (A) stress positions, days without sleep, [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 2:17 am
[...] And Yglesias sees where this is heading: [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 11:14 am
[...] post. There are a lot of flaws with the pro-torture argument. Matt Yglesias points out a good one here: if waterboarding is legal and wildly effective, how come its usage has been so abysmally low, and [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Indeed. Stand up for what you believe in! If you believe torture works, make it legal in every situation. Don’t be such a wuss as to not allow our police to torture – aren’t you just endangering the citizens at that point if the police don’t have that in their arsenal?
April 27th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
“why are we doing so little of it?” Because it’s illegal, not because it’s wrong. Why was it done at all? Because it was determined, in a clever if untenable way, that it did not violate international law. That may be false, but it was existence or non-existence of the legal space “created”, not any moral argument, that will settle this question.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:38 am
I doubt that it would be worth administering to every joe on the battlefield, because many of the detainees turn out to be petty criminals, sometimes thoroughly connected gangsters. But terrorists, or terrorists facilitators? They are probably rarer than you think.
I’m not quite so sure that it is highly effective. Look at how many times Zubaydah had to be waterboarded. It seems quite a bit different than what we first heard, where someone would be so mentally shattered that they would break after 10 seconds.
Remember that chestnut about the Navy Seals dropping it because it was too much for their men to take?
What I’m guessing is that this guy had it administered to him countless times, all the while being told that if he cooperated, he wouldn’t have to go through with it anymore.
For now, we know that at least 2 people have been waterboarded. I’m sure more will be discovered to have been waterboarded. But out of the hundreds or HVT’s we’ve captured, that isn’t very many. Seeing that it takes high level approval, drafted by attorneys to actually perform this stuff, I doubt that this group will turn out to be more than a tiny minority of HVT’s.
A question I have to ask is, WHAT do the anti-waterboarding torture/”stress position”/enhanced interrogation people want in place? Apparently this was needed back then when we had almost zero human intelligence assets in Iraq or Afghanistan.
What is this supposed to be replaced with? I really don’t get what the logical conclusion is. I’ve heard some people say, just follow the Army Field Manual. Well the Army doesn’t normally interrogate the people this technique is used on. The average rank of a U.S. army 35M (human intelligence collector, aka Interrogator) E4, about 22 years old. He/She may have 4 years actual time in MOS. They aren’t doing the interrogations of these folks.
Now the Army Field Manual has been updated, other government agencies have been told to use it. But do we expect that Presidential Directive to stay unchanged? I doubt we’ll refrain from using waterboarding, or worse, if we capture one of the top Al Qaeda or Taliban commanders.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:46 am
“Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. “I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
This part here must be mulled over. We hear that we’ve gotten a lot of good information out of this man. But if we was in such a state after going through this stuff after for weeks, how much sifting did they have to do? We might have yielded ” a lot of good information” from this man, but if it’s whatever, 50 leads, out of hundreds of statements by this man, it seems like a huge waste of time.
April 28th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Dude, don’t give them any ideas.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
[...] for what we have become. The difference is that you know Zubeydah or whoever is a bad man. (source) Has M.Y. forgot about 9/11? These enhanced interrogation techniques are used only on the worst of [...]
April 29th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
[...] for what we have become. The difference is that you know Zubeydah or whoever is a bad man. (source) Has M.Y. forgot about 9/11? These enhanced interrogation techniques are used only on the worst of [...]