Torture in Iran
I think it’s probably conventional wisdom here in the United States that the Iranian government treats people very poorly, so I don’t think anyone will be shocked to learn that Roozbeh Mirebrahimi’s experiences in Iranian prison were pretty awful:
I spent 60 days in solitary confinement, where I was released only three times a day to use a bathroom for two to three minutes under camera surveillance. I was interrogated and tortured for days on end. Security agents blindfolded me and beat me repeatedly, pushing my head into the wall and onto a desk. They asked me questions about my relations with other journalists, particularly women, and with Westerners, and they constantly insulted my family.
This is the sort of thing that the American press, and the American government, rightly and unambiguously call “torture.” The point of pushing someone into a wall is to cause them pain, and use the threat of pain to coerce statements out of them. Torture, in other words. And yet somehow Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Dick Cheney, and the bulk of the conservative movement in the United States doesn’t see it that way when the person doing the slamming into a wall is American. It’s bizarre.
43 Responses to “Torture in Iran”
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April 22nd, 2009 at 12:12 am
Your intentional obtuseness is noteworthy, but let us repeat one more time: as opposed to situational ethics driven liberals, conservatives are moral absolutists- no matter what the identity of the person or country doing the evil deed, evil is always evil.
Ooops. Does not apply in case of torture. If a Republican President orders torture, it’s no longer evil or even illegal.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:20 am
(slightly) off topic, but the Sen. Armed Services report is worth a look.
They connect all the dots leading from Rumsfeld to Abu Ghraib.
If the press has any guts, tomorrow will be an interesting day.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:25 am
John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and writer, coined the phrase “conventional wisdom” more than four decades ago in his 1958 best-selling book, “The Affluent Society.” As Galbraith defined it, the conventional wisdom embodied the prevailing set of beliefs about any particular subject or topic. The beliefs didn’t have to be correct. They simply had to be widely held and respectable. Since then, the term has gradually filtered into everyday language, and although Galbraith’s original meaning has survived, it has also inspired modern variations. Galbraith’s conventional wisdom was solid, staid, and pervasive; newer versions often connote what’s trendy, intellectually fashionable, or hip. But whether new or old, the conventional wisdom is (as Galbraith noted) frequently wrong.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:26 am
Whoa. Whoa. Hold on. What you’re trying to tell me is that there should be a straightforward description of what torture is and that it should be applied to all nations in the same way?
B-b-but what about American exceptionalism? We are inherently good, and all our acts are therefore good, even the bad- oops, I mean the few bad apples/ the past mistakes/ over-enthusiastic/ 9/11-made-them-do-it-those-were-scary-times.
Next thing you know you’re gonna start saying our freedom fighters look a lot like terrorists. Okay, I mean we did call them terrorists before, but you know, that was when they weren’t being used/ using us to further our/ their goals I mean freedoms.
You just got to trust that whatever our government does in the war on Communism/ Drugs/ Terror/ is in the world’s best interests…. as long as it happens under a Republican Administration, that is. Under the Dems obviously it is a conspiracy to throw hardworking Americans into FEMA reeducation camps and give all our tax-dollars to welfare mothers. Oh and One World Guvmint yadda yadda.
Just know that we love democracy (except in Gaza, or Chile, or Guatemala, Venezuela, Iran, etc…) and support freedom. That’s why we have a military nearly the size of the rest of the world’s military forces -combined- because freedom is a great burden. If we have to impose freedom on the peoples of the world who are unfree, we will do it. Sometimes freedom takes time and we may only be able to free the oil or the resources or the markets for foreign investors, but be assured that the freedom of capital to move into and mostly out of every nation and into the hands of the extremely wealthy is what America is all about. U!S!A! U!S!A!
/sarcastic rant ovah.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:28 am
They don’t really believe it’s not torture. They just don’t have the courage to admit what they have done and to accept the consequences.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:33 am
If the press has any guts, tomorrow will be an interesting day.
It may take more than a day to fully process, and indeed it may take the apparently now standard reliance on bloggers to do the hard work, but I think they will get there.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:04 am
If I were a Republican leader, I’d be pretty annoyed at Cheney. Because it really doesn’t help to be pushing back on this topic. The more they push back, the more they make Torture® the centerpiece of their brand identity. From a brand management standpoint, it’s suicide.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:07 am
Matt, snakes with 2 heads and bearded ladies are bizarre.
The right wing, as seen through the distorting lens of it’s 24/7 media circus sideshow, is emerging from a contorted and tortured chrysalis into something truly frightening.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:18 am
Americans for the next 200 years MUST NOT talk about torture, human rights violations, etc. What you scumbags have done in Gitmo and Abu Gharib automatically disqualifies you from any, I repeat any, pontifications with regards to other people’s affairs.
So shut the fuck up already.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:55 am
This isn’t puzzling at all, really. Mainly because Der Rudy cleared this up during the campaign: torture depends on who is doing the torturing. If Americans torture, it isn’t torture. It is “noble sacrifice to save American lives from Terrorists.” If Iranians or Iraqis torture, it is a cause for Glorious American Invasion to save the victims of torture/rape rooms.
It is kind of amazing that that really isn’t a parody of the GOP argument — at all.
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:17 am
As far as torture goes, I think Americans are in the same situation that we are as far as Iceland is with the banking/credit crisis.
We can look at Germany and say “At least we didn’t do that!” Of course, that still makes us unrepentant fucktards, and I agree with IranianDude that Americans should shut the fuck up about how bad torture is for a while. Let the Finns or Swedes take the reins on that issue…
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:29 am
Unlike in Iran these were fake walls!!!
Though I still think it is torture.
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:17 am
Why 200? Why not 150? Or 2000?
I’m an American. I didn’t do anything at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. I voted against the party and administration that directed those atrocities. I feel perfectly justified in saying that a) the United States shouldn’t torture people; b) Iran shouldn’t torture people; c) IranianDude ought to think about taking his own advice.
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:49 am
“The more they push back, the more they make Torture® the centerpiece of their brand identity.”
Torture is wrong, evil, illegal, and ineffective. But I’m
not sure that it’s unpopular – at least when it’s presented
as “being tough on terrorists”.
What finally killed Bush’s popularity was not his brutality
or his contempt for the law, but his incompetence, as shown in
the slow response to Hurricane Katrina and his inability to
actually win his wars.
April 22nd, 2009 at 6:00 am
Matthew,
I tried to click on your links to quotes illustrating the widely-held position among the bulk of the conservative movement that ‘it’s not torture when the person doing the slamming into a wall is American’, but your links didn’t work for me. Same goes for the links to the case(s?) where the alleged tortures involved slamming the victim into a wall in the first place, let alone ‘beating’ the victim ‘repeatedly’, as in the above Iran example. None of those links worked for me. Can you re-check your HTML tags and resubmit?
My impression was that the dispute is and has always been over whether a certain act (”waterboarding”) qualifies as torture. I guess you think it does. But you gloss over that (i.e. the actual issue) in this post by pretending that we’ve been talking about slamming people into walls this whole time. We haven’t been.
Moreover, I’ve never observed the position you describe (it’s ok if the person doing it is American) among conservatives. I have observed the position that coercive measures might be acceptable under certain circumstances, to save lives. I’m sure you disagree with that too, but you should have just said so, instead of inventing a whole new position/straw man to boldly disagree with.
April 22nd, 2009 at 6:35 am
@4 chunksmediocrites:
Funny, painful, and true. And strangely inspirational. Thanks for the words.
April 22nd, 2009 at 7:27 am
Richard Cownie,
Torture, even of “terrorists”, has only been acceptable to large numbers of Americans in hypotheticals. When confronted with real torture in real cases, the American people have rejected it.
That, of course, is why they destroyed the tapes: they knew the American people would not accept their government doing what was shown on the tapes. But as I think we are starting to see, and will continue to see, even documents and witnesses are going to be enough to create this effect.
April 22nd, 2009 at 7:32 am
One of the main purposes of the torture was to extract evidence of the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection. Reminds me of a joke I just heard on Balloon Juice:
Top members of Mossad, MI-5, and the CIA compete in the International Intelligence Service Olympics. They are told to enter a nearby forest and return with a fox.
The Mossad agents return an hour later with a fox. Two hours later, MI-5 also returns with a fox. The two groups congratulate each other on their respective gold and silver prizes.
Hours pass. The judges begin to get restless.
Finally, the CIA agents emerge from the forest with a deer, battered and bleeding, with shackles on its legs, opaque goggles over its eyes, and muffled headphones on its ears. As it passes the judges’ stand they hear it saying over and over:
“I am a fox. I am a fox. I am a fox . . .”
h/t SGEW
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:04 am
What Matt fails to recognize is that the Iranians are the bad guys and what they do is torture, while we are the good guys and what we do is enhanced interrogation to save the world.
Sure, it may look the same, but proper thinking people know the difference.
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:17 am
I tried to click on your links to quotes illustrating the widely-held position among the bulk of the conservative movement that ‘it’s not torture when the person doing the slamming into a wall is American’, but your links didn’t work for me. Same goes for the links to the case(s?) where the alleged tortures involved slamming the victim into a wall in the first place, let alone ‘beating’ the victim ‘repeatedly’, as in the above Iran example. None of those links worked for me. Can you re-check your HTML tags and resubmit?
Thoughtful conservatives, including, no doubt yourself, seldom make this claim overtly, as it is rather obviously the philosophy of a nationalist bigot or a spoiled child.
When discussing current politics, though, we constantly have to deal with powerful people like Senator Inofe, who yesterday announced that he would filibuster a judicial appointment while on past record as denouncing the filibuster as evil, anti-democracy, etc.
Now, Senator Inofe may well be a rabid nationalist or spoiled adult child; there are plenty of them active in politics today. It is far more likely that he doesn’t care if he is philosophically inconsistent in his public advocacy, as he considers his public statements not as logical arguments, but as weapons to hurl at his political opponents. The more strident the statement, the more powerful it is as a weapon, and if he takes exactly the opposite position in a later debate, it doesn’t matter. To Inofe and his allies, this is a war of words, not a formal debate.
Likewise any ongoing debate about torture. Some people literally say torture is good when we do it, bad when someone else does it. Others say it is a good thing when the circumstances are dangerous enough, bad otherwise. Others, a lot of others, aren’t thinking much at all, and you point out their hypocrisy to confound and goad them.
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:20 am
“My impression was that the dispute is and has always been over whether a certain act (”waterboarding”) qualifies as torture. I guess you think it does.”
I guess the US government does too, when our enemies (e.g., the Japanese during WWII) do it).
“I have observed the position that coercive measures might be acceptable under certain circumstances, to save lives.”
There is not an atom of documented evidence that torture has ever saved a single life. The overwhelming evidence is that torture will never save any lives, because torture has never yielded novel and useful intellegence.
Smarter trolls, please.
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:22 am
Its un-american
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:39 am
It is incredibly simple and I don’t know why it isn’t understood. The people we do these things to are bad people. That’s the entire point. Bad people deserve it. They are the others. Not really fully people at all.
Mistreatment amounting to torture of course should not be done to good people. It’s at best unfortunate that we have to do it to bad people but it’s our right if not obligation to do it to them.
Everyone knows the Nazis, the Japanese and the Russian, Korean, Vietnamese and Cambodian Communists were bad people who tortured good people. We are good people who torture bad people. It’s apples and oranges.
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:47 am
in regards to the update, one of the things we must remember, is that the released memos are just legal justifications, which at most, in the field, would be guidelines. Things like the “walling”, which people that belittle it due to the fact that the memos state measures to protect the person being walled such as towel around the neck and cardboard on the wall, we dont really know the extent to how “wallings” were actually carried out.Based on the number of times waterboarding according in a month to two detainees, which was beyond the so called legal limit, can lead us to believe that what the memos justify and what actually happened may not be perfectly aligned. Unfortunately, we dont know the extent and exact means of the torture methods, all the tapes have been destoryed.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:06 am
Hey, I remember seeing a lot of movies about the mafia where when they’d beat somebody up they’d take precautions to make sure that they didn’t leave physical evidence on the victim. Who knew those were training films?
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:14 am
If you are physically abused to the point you die isn’t it just that much sooner you’ve joined Jesus in heaven? What’s the problem? The interrogators have merely liberated your soul from the shackles of your earthly body. They should get a medal.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:23 am
Waterboarding a man one time is torture. It’s illegal and wrong. Whatever hypothetical leniency we think the torturer might deserve for discovering an imaginary ticking nuclear bomb, should be decided by the judge and jury. This imaginary torturer would go down as a hero who willingly ate his punishment for his country.
Waterboarding a man 183 times is medical experimentation on a prisoner. The President, Vice President and Defense Secretary who ordered it are war criminals who should plead for leniency before an international war crimes tribunal.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:23 am
Sasha’s point @ #24 is key. Obama says that CIA agents who followed the advice “in good faith” won’t be prosecuted. But they must have known they went beyond the advice because the tapes are gone. Now it’s just the detainees’ word against the agents’ word. But in legal proceedings, if one side is in sole control of the evidence and then destroys that evidence, it is often possible to infer that the evidence destroyed would have been harmful to that party. So, stay tuned about possible prosecutions of the CIA agents involved — hopefully in addition to the prosecutions of the attorneys.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:30 am
This “walling” concept is confusing. Why is walling preferable to hitting the prisoner in the face with a board? I’m only sort of kidding.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:30 am
“I have observed the position that coercive measures might be acceptable under certain circumstances, to save lives.”
There is not an atom of documented evidence that torture has ever saved a single life. The overwhelming evidence is that torture will never save any lives, because torture has never yielded novel and useful intellegence.
Now, this is the kind of silly overstatement that the conservatives love to quote. You can look through the records of any rural thug police sherriff and find some instance where pistol-whipping a suspect yielded a “true positive”–an accurate confession.
Of course, for every true positive you get some unintentional false positives, and some deliberate false positives because people get beaten into false confessions to fill a quota, or because the sherriff just didn’t like them or their ethnic group. Then there are the people who get beaten up so the sherriff can show how serious he is about law enforcement, or so he can show other miscreants who the boss is in the jail. Eventually you learn that good cops are leaving the department because they can’t stand the brutality and corruption, and eventually it is staffed mainly with sadists and thugs who brutalize prisoners for trivial reasons because they enjoy it and it makes them feel strong and superior.
Overall, the good information could have been generated by smarter, more humane methods, and the bad information renders the good information suspect, and you pay for all this compromised intelligence with moral and emotional rot that undermines your efficiency and poisons the lives of your people.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:37 am
Overall, the good information could have been generated by smarter, more humane methods, and the bad information renders the good information suspect
Part of it is that most people — particularly those blinded by the appeal of getting to torture someone — don’t really understand the concept of “opportunity cost.” The other issue is that, quite honestly, lots of people like the idea of being able to torture and getting away with it for a “just cause.”
If you explain to some people that in the event that you could get someone to tell you something via normal interrogation methods that would otherwise be gained via torture, they’ll prefer the torture method. They think torture is cool. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:40 am
Midland, the point of torture is to generate intentional false positives. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Why do you think they waterboarded Zubaydeh 183 times n one month? They wanted him to say that Al Qaida was taking orders from Saddam Hussein. They weren’t looking for true information, they wanted false information. From witches to the Inquisition to Stalin and Pol Pot, that’s what torture has always been for – to create excuses for killing people that you’ve already decided you’re going to kill.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:51 am
rapier:
Everyone knows the Nazis, the Japanese and the Russian, Korean, Vietnamese and Cambodian Communists were bad people who tortured good people. We are good people who torture bad people. It’s apples and oranges.
This is how conservatives see it. Bad people using torture is wrong. Good people using it on bad people to save lives is the right thing to do. They don’t care if waterboarding is torture or not. No doubt this is how Iran justifies it.
Obama is right, a bipartisan 9/11-type commission is the way to go.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:53 am
Maybe it wasn’t just sadism. Maybe it was sadism for a clear objective.
Via Balloon-Juice:
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:55 am
Why is walling preferable to hitting the prisoner in the face with a board?
As described in the Bybee memo, the wall is constructed in such a way as to bounce the victim off the wall and make a load noise, thereby increasing the psychological effect of the impact.
By the way, one of the more glaringly ridiculous passages in the Bybee memo is when he tries to argue that walling could not possibly be interpreted as a threat of severe physical pain because it doesn’t actually cause severe physical pain (or so they claim). But as described, walling is specifically designed to seem a lot worse than it actually is (again, or so they claim). And of course if you believed you were being slammed hard against a real wall, which is the apparent intent of the procedure, you would reasonably believe that serious injury and severe pain could result.
That isn’t the worst thing in the Bybee memo, but in my view it is one of the clearest examples of the sort of sophistry Bybee was willing to use.
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:38 am
Why is walling preferable to hitting the prisoner in the face with a board?
As described in the Bybee memo, the wall is constructed in such a way as to bounce the victim off the wall and make a load noise, thereby increasing the psychological effect of the impact.
As in professional wrestling, where bouncing someone off a canvas as tight as a drumhead looks and sounds far more violent than it actually is. So Bybee is trying to show that the beatings in Gitmo cells are no more torture than watching a World Wrestling Federation match?
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:51 am
Well, I might consider being forced to watch a WWF (etc) wrestling match as torture, but I think there are more common legal standards.
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:02 am
Midland, the point of torture is to generate intentional false positives. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Why do you think they waterboarded Zubaydeh 183 times n one month? They wanted him to say that Al Qaida was taking orders from Saddam Hussein. They weren’t looking for true information, they wanted false information. From witches to the Inquisition to Stalin and Pol Pot, that’s what torture has always been for – to create excuses for killing people that you’ve already decided you’re going to kill.
Hmmm . . . a universal conspiracy theory on a grander scale than any yet imagined, something easily laughed away by the pro-torture people.
Torture and brutalization have been a standard tool of police investigation and military interrogation since before the rise of human civilization. Yes, they are often used to secure false information and also to intimidate social inferiors and enemies of the political establishment. None the less, torture and brutality are, in most cultures, routinely used methods of securing information and that they have always been considered a viable means to do so. What we are arguing here is not that information gained by torture is never true, just that it is never trustworthy and better information can be gained by less morally destructive methods.
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:03 am
Well, I might consider being forced to watch a WWF (etc) wrestling match as torture, but I think there are more common legal standards.
I’m pretty sure there are such art/pop culture clauses in the Geneva conventions prohibiting torture, at least if the film “Top Secret” is to be trusted:
A: They’re still working on him. He won’t break. They’ve tried everything. Do you want me to bring out the LeRoy Neiman paints?
B: No! We cannot risk violating the Geneva Convention.
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:19 am
So Bybee is trying to show that the beatings in Gitmo cells are no more torture than watching a World Wrestling Federation match?
More like no more torture than being the losing participant in a WWF match. Except you can’t know it is fake. But you aren’t supposed to be afraid you might get seriously hurt.
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:40 am
Ted @18
It’s an old joke, I believe. The sad part is that it used to go: “. . . members of the CIA, Mossad, and the KGB . . .” where the CIA and Mossad won the gold and silver through more legitimate means, and the KGB agents “won” the bronze through torturing a confession.
Now we’re the KGB. It was never supposed to be a very “funny” joke, but it’s a lot less humorous now.
April 22nd, 2009 at 5:49 pm
You’ve never been in Federal prison before, have you, Matt – let alone state prison or a county jail…
Yes, the US DOES torture. Daily. Everywhere.
April 23rd, 2009 at 6:53 am
Thanks to Matthew for the update & link. No thanks for pretending that I claimed ‘America “only” waterboards’ or some such thing. I made no such claim about what forms of torture/coercion “America” does or doesn’t do (I have no such list in my head, oddly enough). My claim concerned what the debate had been about: that there had been debate about whether waterboarding in particular counts as torture, thus you could find conservatives taking the opposing view (i.e. that it doesn’t).
Matthew, are you unable to discuss this subject without resorting to straw-men? If your position is so reliant on straw-man caricatures of your opponents then it is necessarily a weak one. Alternatively, maybe the straw-man is just a mental tic on your part and you can’t help yourself. You tell me,