Hard Labor in North Korea
As you’ve no doubt heard, two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, have been arrested by the North Korean government and sentenced to twelve years hard labor. I’ve been trying to Google around for more information on the DPRK’s labor camps, but part of the nature of the Hermit Kingdom seems to be that there’s relatively little available in the way of up-to-date information. That said, the U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea did publish this report on “The Hidden Gulag” several years ago based on defector reports mostly from the 1990s. You won’t be surprised to learn that conditions are terrible:
The concentration camp is a kind of closed town where a number of camps are linked together by a road. At least two of the camps, Hoeryong and Hwasong in Hamkyong Province, are larger in area than the District of Columbia. All the gulags are located in remote and desolate mountain areas to further their anonymity and isolation to foreigners and dissidents. Presently, there are six gulags known to the outside world where it is speculated that some 150,000 to 200,000 inmates are imprisoned.
As in the Soviet Union during the high tide of the Gulag, it appears that the forced labor camps are important to the regime not just as a mechanism of repression, but as part of the economic model and the internal incentives of the bureaucracy. Spencer Ackerman also links to the State Department’s human rights report on the DPRK:
[P]rolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; being hung by the wrists; being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse.
Needless to say, it’s easy to recognize this sort of barbarism as the torture that it is when you read about it being done by North Korea (it appears that the Bush administration and the DPRK were both modeling themselves on the Chinese Communist tactics from the Korean War). And it is being done, and on a massive scale. Meanwhile, a related angle to this is that many of the people in the prison camps are people who actually escaped from North Korea and then wound up getting apprehended in China and deported back. In terms of practical things that could be done to help the population of North Korea, getting the Chinese to stop doing this.
81 Responses to “Hard Labor in North Korea”
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June 8th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
“…stop doing this [would be at the top of the list].”
Okay, I’ve made the world a better place today.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
In terms of improving your writing, sentence fragments.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
It’s safe to assume our prisons have better conditions than North Korea’s, but we still might want to look at ourselves on this issue. We have the world’s largest prison labor force. Our economic model also requires the cheap labor provided by prisoners. Who sorts your recyclables? Who picks up trash on the highways? Who cleans up after major storms? And here’s the kicker: who’s taking your credit card when you buy something over the phone? Without prisoners doing our work, a lot of it wouldn’t get done.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
…confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods…
Those North Koreans are total wusses! My office is very small and uncomfortable but you don’t see me complaining.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
The American journalists are getting off easy. North Korean journalists are sentenced to life in North Korea.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Not that these two woman figure into China’s calculation, but this crisis makes me again wonder how much longer North Korea can be considered too big to fail.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Who sorts your recyclables? Who picks up trash on the highways? Who cleans up after major storms?
I’m in NYC, and non-convicts do all these jobs. In fact, a number of them pay good, solid union wages. I approve of this for many reasons. One of them is that economies with a high dependence on involuntary labor are unstable and evil societies.
I hope these poor women are freed soon. And I hope they can take comfort in the knowledge that their suffering has drawn the world’s attention to the suffering of others. And hopefully that will be an impetus for change.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
When I first heard about this, reports said the reporters were on Chinese soil. The North Koreans crossed the river to snatch them for using binoculars to spy on NK. This NPR piece repeats this. Somebody has some explaining to do.
As for Gore, I suspect the only thing he knows about the far east, is that using Buddhist monks to funnel illegal campaign contributions was a bad idea.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
I know you tried desperately to get through a post without some moral equivalency, Matthew. Keep trying.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
I’m pretty sure China does this so that North Koreans don’t cross the Chinese border. Isn’t that, like, their biggest fear?
June 8th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Get ready for the hypocritical right to start screaming ‘TORTURE!!!!! TORTURE!!!!’ now.
You want your number one reason to oppose torture carried out by Americans? You got it right here.
We’re supposed to lecture the North Koreans on how to treat prisoners, now? Let alone get them to concede that they can’t, in good conscience, do it to these women?
June 8th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Not to disagree with Matt’s basic point (i.e. America tortures people, and shouldn’t), but those quotes he chose (to make that point) really don’t a proper idea of how horrible those camps are, based on the evidence we have.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I highly recommend reading the book “Aquariums of Pyongyang”. It’s written by someone who lived in a North Korean work camp starting at the age of 9 for ten years. He later escaped the country.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
“I’m in NYC, and non-convicts do all these jobs.”
Good for NYC. Here in Colorado, it’s prison labor. The funny part is that rather than hire cheap immigrant labor, companies can wait until the immigrants get busted and then hire them for even less.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
When I first heard about this, reports said the reporters were on Chinese soil. The North Koreans crossed the river to snatch them for using binoculars to spy on NK. This NPR piece repeats this. Somebody has some explaining to do.
Yeah, it’s called extraordinary rendition.! I wonder who else has been doing that recently?
June 8th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
[P]rolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; being hung by the wrists; being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse.
None of which, let’s remember, is considered to be torture by Republicans. Is the above a description of conditions in a hideous Communist Gulag or an American prison camp? You be the judge!
June 8th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Stefan, I’d say there’s a bit of a difference between the prisoners at Gitmo and their crimes and these two women. You left wing Dems blow my mind, you try to skew every issue to compare our country’s policies in the face of terrorism to your benefit. If I were you I’d take a hard look at who kept your backside safe after 9/11 and quit trying to compare what was done in the face of that evil to everything else. You’d probably look at it a bit differently if one of your loved ones was killed on 9/11, but then, probably not. Your brainwashed mind would call what the terrorists did “fair” or “payback” for all of America’s alleged failings worldwide. You’re an idiot.
June 8th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Who sorts your recyclables? Who picks up trash on the highways? Who cleans up after major storms? And here’s the kicker: who’s taking your credit card when you buy something over the phone?
I’m sure you didn’t intend to compare this type of “labor” with the grueling work endured in North Korean prison camps by prisoners who are also beaten and deprived food on a daily basis. The survival rate is dismal.
Not even close to the US Penal System’s use of labor, or our general treatment of prisoners.
June 8th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
there’s a bit of a difference between the prisoners at Gitmo and their crimes and these two women.
How do we know what crimes the prisoners held at Guantánamo committed, or whether they committed any crimes at all? ‘Cause Cheney and Rumsfeld said so? Tool.
June 8th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Nothing Lisa says refutes Stefan and MY’s perfectly valid point that the descriptions of horrible torture carried out in North Korea could equally be applied to the actions our own government has undertaken against prisoners. Name calling and inventing arguments that no one is making don’t really change anything.
Also, Lisa, please note that many many many of the prisoners we tortured at Guantanamo and elsewhere were completely innocent. And several of the innocent prisoners we imprisoned and tortured at remote camps were reporters who were capture for no other reason that they were reporting stories we did not like and refused to work for us as spies within their own news organizations.
You may be sincere in your belief that torturing innocent Muslims somehow kept your backside safe. I, however, do not share this delusion.
June 8th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Lisa,
Go back to your exurban red-state hovel if you want to wet yourself in fear, and let those of us who actually live and work in the types of places that get targeted by al Qaeda alone.
June 8th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
One question, Lisa. Is “prolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; being hung by the wrists; being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse” torture? Or isn’t it?
A simple yes or no will suffice.
June 8th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
“I’m sure you didn’t intend to compare this type of “labor” with the grueling work endured in North Korean prison camps”
I didn’t, which is why I was clear about that upfront. My point was more about allowing a prison labor force to become so large that it becomes an important part of the economy. We have allowed that to happen, and it’s a bad trend. But I can tell you that sorting recyclables for ten hours a day isn’t exactly pleasant work. And getting 30 cents an hour that you can only spend at the prison commissary doesn’t make it much better.
June 8th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias I’ve been trying to Google around for more information on the DPRK’s labor camps, but part of the nature of the Hermit Kingdom seems to be that there’s relatively little available in the way of up-to-date information. That said, the U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea did publish this report on “The Hidden Gulag” several years ago based on defector reports mostly from the 1990s. You won’t be surprised to learn that conditions are terrible: [...]
June 8th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
This post overlooks the possibility – no, extreme probability – that the 12-year sentence was a piece of political theater by the North Koreans.
The two journalists are being held for negotiating leverage against the U.S. My guess is that they will be pardoned within the year, after a U.S. negotiator intercedes. The journalists are very unlikely to be given hard labor.
June 8th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Lyle Leander thinks what the North Koreans do to their inmates in those labor camps is the same “torture” that the US engaged in at Guantanamo, I get such a kick out of the simpleton mindset that thinks scaring the bejessuz out of somebody is the same as starving them or working them to death. Nobody died from being tortured by our prison guards in Cuba. Thousands die each year in those ghastly places. What a moron you are mr. leander….
June 8th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
In his quest to score a point on Republicans, Matt failed to mention some of the rather more hideous conditions and torture that occur in North Korea. Newborn infants killed in from of their mothers, people’s ears torn off, starvation until people eat rats (but eating rats is forbidden and severely punished), and on and on.
June 8th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Is waterboarding torture? Nope. Sorry libbies, keep trying…
June 8th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Matt is simply trying to make the point that working for Al Gore’s Current TV is similar to working for Al-Qaeda.
June 8th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
In his quest to score a point on Republicans, Matt failed to mention some of the rather more hideous conditions and torture that occur in North Korea.
Then the standard you think the US should aspire to is to not be as bad as North Korea? I suppose setting realistic goals is important.
June 8th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
As the U.S. (even reporters and commenters) we need to be careful about speculating what N. Korea will/will not do. We don’t want to aggravate them and, therefore, entice them to act more violently than originally planned. Expert from ABC news agrees. http://www.newsy.com/videos/12_years_hard_labor_for_u_s_journalists
June 8th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Let’s see if I get this straight… the US interrogates prisoners to stop potential attacks. The NOKOs interrogate prisoners to…er… stop…uh…reporters from reporting…
Yeah, you guys are right: the US and North Korea are just alike!
June 8th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
I find it remarkable that a rising young star of the left – and one who prides himself on foreign policy expertise – is so ignorant of the North Korean gulag system.
Also incredible is the eagerness to compare a gulag system which has existed for over 50 years, in which new born babies are murdered, women used as sex slaves, criticism and self-criticism performed daily, children made to work in mines for over 12 hours a day, people stoned, shot, and hung in public, and people intentionally starved to an American prison for members of Al-Qaida. Simply amazing is the level of intentional ignorance on display.
Matthew, if you care to actually learn about North Korea, I recommend you read Martin Bradley’s “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader”, Chol-hwan Kang’s “The Aquariums of Pyongyang”, and if you can find it Soon-ok Lee’s “Eyes of the Tailless Animals”. I would also urge you from making silly, ignorant remarks about a country you clearly know nothing about.
June 8th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
There have been at least four detainee deaths at Guantanamo.
June 8th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
I see there are a whole lot of eager-beaver defenders of Lady Liberty’s chastity swarming the thread with indignant expressions.
Oddly enough, I haven’t seen any of them refute this point.
June 8th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Looks like that link from the Corner has brought us a plague of torture apologists! Awesome.
I see that they’re following the standard format, too…
1) Someone accurately points out that the US is using interrogation methods developed by the Chinese Communists in the Korean War, accurately notes that these methods were considered torture when used against our troops, and criticizes the Bush Administration for sanctioning torture.
2) Some idiot right-winger accuses person 1 of drawing a moral equivalence between the US and the Chinese Communists.
3) A flock of right-wing douchebags harasses person 1, borrowing this same phrase, “moral equivalence,” which does not mean what they think it means.
4) Someone else points out that person 1 did not actually draw a moral equivalence between the US and the Chinese Communists, because we aren’t comparing the motives for using these methods or the moral standing of the people on the receiving end. We’re simply comparing the methods. And methods that are torture when used by bad people do not magically cease to be torture when used by people with good intentions.
5) Flock of right-wing douchebags considers this point for several seconds, can’t wrap their brains around the high school level concepts involved, and doubles down on accusations of treason at person 1 and person 4.
June 8th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
[...] more thing: thanks to Matthew Yglesias for putting everything in its proper perspective with a George W. Bush reference. No criticism of any barbarism or wrongdoing anywhere, ever, is ever complete without a George W. [...]
June 8th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Nobody died from being tortured by our prison guards in Cuba.
Simply a lie. And why limit it to Cuba, and not include the secret prisons and black sites run by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq, and various other locations? More than 100 prisoners have died violent deaths in US military and/or CIA custody since 2003, and the Pentagon itself has classified at least 34 of these deaths as homicides.
Which is to say, these prisoners were tortured to death.
June 8th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
4) Someone else points out that person 1 did not actually draw a moral equivalence between the US and the Chinese Communists, because we aren’t comparing the motives for using these methods or the moral standing of the people on the receiving end. We’re simply comparing the methods. And methods that are torture when used by bad people do not magically cease to be torture when used by people with good intentions.
I think in this case the right-wing douchebags have a bit of a point in that many of the the comparisons come across as kind of facile, since some posters don’t seem to understand (or at least make clear they understand) that even if the North Koreans use many of the same techniques, the frequency, intensity, and combination with other techniques that weren’t used by US torturers are such that people in NK hard labor camps almost all end up dying fairly quickly, whereas most US torture victims were not actually tortured to the point of death (most). You yourself totally ignore this kind of thing in your comment, and talk as though the only difference other commenters were pointing to was the difference in motives.
Again, this is not to say that there isn’t a valid point here that a number of the techniques are the same even if the intensity or combination with other tortures and living conditions is not, so it is hypocritical to call these shared techniques torture when the North Koreans do it but not call it that when Americans do it. Still, like I said, it does come across as a pretty facile comparison if a person don’t make very clear that they understand the significant differences in what North Korean prisoners are subjected to as well as the similarities, and these differences are definitely not just a matter of different intentions.
June 8th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Prison practices of the DPRK and the US (under the Bush administration GWOT policies) are not remotely equivalent.
We don’t imprison journalists we disagree with. GWOT “detainees” are almost always captured in combat with our troops or while engaged in terrorist activities (planning, funding, training, executing, etc.) against Americans.
The US doesn’t take torture lightly. As the “torture memos” revealed, the Bush administration agonized over how best to protect the country while upholding legal and moral standards. They debated the efficacy of each technique, preformed sophisticated legal analysis, consulted physicians and psychologists to ensure minimal risk of injury to the detainees, and struggled with the ethical implications. By all accounts, there were no such debates or considerations in DPRK policies.
The US doesn’t torture thousands of prisoners indiscriminately, nor does it use torture for punishment or out of cruelty. The “harsh techniques” at issue were used in rare cases to elicit critical intelligence believed necessary to save lives. For example, we know of only 3 detainees who were water boarded.
It important for Americans to debate the torture issue. But your equivalence argument drags that debate into the gutter, and weakens the moral power of the anti-torture position.
June 8th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
We don’t imprison journalists we disagree with.
April 16, 2008
AP photographer freed by US after 2 years
By ROBERT H. REID
Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD (AP) — Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein was reunited with family and colleagues Wednesday, ending more than two years in U.S. military custody after Iraqi judges dropped all legal proceedings against him.
Tearful relatives rushed to embrace Hussein, who had been given just a few hours’ notice of his release. He thanked co-workers and supporters around the world who had worked on his behalf.
“I have spent two years in prison even though I was innocent. I thank everybody,” said Hussein, 36…..
In New York, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Joel Simon, said the group was “thrilled” by Hussein’s release.
“He now joins a growing list of journalists detained in conflict zones by the U.S. military for prolonged periods and eventually released without any charges or crimes ever substantiated against them,” said Simon. “This deplorable practice should be of concern to all journalists. It basically allows the U.S. military to remove journalists from the field, lock them up and never be compelled to say why.”
June 8th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
GWOT “detainees” are almost always captured in combat with our troops or while engaged in terrorist activities (planning, funding, training, executing, etc.) against Americans.
Completely false. An out and out lie. In fact, a Cornell study of the prisoners at Guantanamo using the Pentagon’s own figures found that only about 5% of prisoners there had been captured in battlefield conditions. The vast majority had been captured either around the world (in locations as odd as on vacation in Thailand, or at border crossings in Yugoslavia) or were handed over by Afghan tribal bounty hunters.
June 8th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Bull. Shit. The US tortured one Kabul cab driver to death – hanging him up by his wrists and beating his legs until the bones of his thighs were pulverized.
The thugs thought he sounded like Timmy from South Park when he screamed. They made him yell “Timm-eh!”
But we don’t take torture lightly.
June 8th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
[...] Meg et. al wanted to know what the work camps are like. Here is a blog post on the situation related to camp conditions complete with interesting commentary on the situation. I believe this is an excellent post on the [...]
June 8th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
It is odd how the left won’t even try to understand the argument that the U.S. had the right to detain enemy combatants in Gitmo (where conditions are far superior to any other prison on the island of Cuba or North Korea). Or even try to understand that doing so is much different than the NK grabbing innocent journalist and putting them in a brutal gulag all for the purpose of gaining political leverage with the U.S. If you are unable to accept that these are two entirely different situations then you really have lost your moral perspective (Bush hatred will do that to you).
Of course when this is pointed out, defenders claim they weren’t making a moral equivalance argument. That is true; argument would imply their was some intelectual content. Instead all we see is a snide comment that implies moral equivalance without the ability to actually explain how that could possibly be the case.
And of course the statement that the tactics being used were drawn from the same source is either false or so stretching the truth as to be meaningless.
June 8th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
I addition to the report Matt cites, there are a very few first-person accounts of camp life in North Korea. One is Kang Chol-hwan’s “The Aquariums of Pyongyang.” The other is the new “Long Road Home” by Kim Yong. There’s also an account written by a former guard, but it has never been published in book form. Unfortunately I can’t remember his name.
June 8th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
That’s awful. When did it happen? I guess it’s no surprise that the right-wing American media covered it up.
June 8th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Herschel wrote:
Um, Herschel, I seem to remember that Cheney asked that documents describing what has been learned at Gitmo from these “innocents” and your Messiah has said “no”.
Anyone who equates the US with the DPRK isn’t to be taken seriously.
June 8th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
cheneyfools,
Dilawar.
It’s rough reading.
June 8th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Oh, yes, the magical memos that will prove Dick Cheney right about everything that, gosh darnit, are classified and the government won’t release them. That poor guy, he can’t ever catch a break.
Uh huh.
June 8th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
You know, Evan Sayet’s “How The Modern Liberal Thinks” video exemplifies what I read in this one blog post and the comments. How morally confused most of you sound to compare the actions of a brutal corrupt dictator and spit on our great country. Bilal Hussein was held because he had the uncanny “instinct” to always get the photo of the terrorist sniper shooting our soldiers in the head or setting off a mortar shot that landed in a crowded marketplace, killing women and children…in short, there was a suspicion he was providing our enemy with a propaganda tool. Aren’t you Americans first? Shouldn’t that bother you at all? AG Eric Holder says that to torture someone, the element of intent of the “torturer” must be ascertained. Are you saying Lisa Ling’s sister is the equivalent of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, or that the North Korean KGB/SS are the same as our CIA and Army interrogators? That the intents of our American servicemen and intelligence officers are comparable to this brutal regime where the people have literally shrunk in height over the past few generations due to malnutrition? Matt, you folks hate America and all your sanctimony can’t conceal it. As Hirsan Ali says you live in freedom so you can spit on it and on the Americans who have died to keep you safe. We may not be a perfect country and we may have some bad individuals, but the delight you guys take in pointing it out clearly shows your moral depravity. I know, I know…I’m just a defender of BusHitler and therefore just another fascist Nazi…funny, as a Long Island jew I don’t feel like goose-stepping….
June 8th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
“It is odd how the left won’t even try to understand the argument that the U.S. had the right to detain enemy combatants in Gitmo (where conditions are far superior to any other prison on the island of Cuba or North Korea).”
No, it’s odd that anyone expects this argument to be taken seriously. Geneva Convention signatories very clearly DON’T have the right to detain enemy combatants indefinitely without trial or repatriation, or to coerce information from them. Nor does the US criminal justice system allow us to treat criminals in such fashion. So we cynically declared these people to be “unlawful enemy combatants”, created an ad hoc grey-legal detention system for them outside of US soil, and strongly resisted all efforts, foreign or domestic, to bring them under the authority of either American law or international law. And then we tortured some of them for information.
Yes, it’s good that Guantanamo is much more pleasant than North Korean prisons (unless you were one of the prisoners who Dick Cheney thought might have politically useful information about Saddam Hussein.) Republicans are much less horrible than totalitarian monsters. Pat yourselves on the back. But it’s odd how apologists for such policies seem to think that it’s inappropriate to criticize such policies without inserting cheerful disclaimers into every sentence about how our troops are so much fucking nicer than the NK army. I take it as a given that US prisons are less despicable than North Korean ones, but I hold my government to a higher standard than that.
“Or even try to understand that doing so is much different than the NK grabbing innocent journalist and putting them in a brutal gulag all for the purpose of gaining political leverage with the U.S. If you are unable to accept that these are two entirely different situations then you really have lost your moral perspective.”
Of course the intentions are different. Of course there isn’t a perfect moral equivalency between the two political systems. No one said there was. The complaint is that we’re adopting many of the same inexcusable tactics. The only facile argument here is the one that uses good intentions and “not as bad as Kim Jong-Il” comparisons to excuse atrocities. That’s pure moral relativism, and I find it profoundly ridiculous to be lectured about my “moral bearings” from someone who clearly has no concept of what the word morality means.
And in light of recent revelations about how waterboarding was used to extract questionable intelligence to support the Iraq War, and how few of the enemy combatants in Gitmo were actually captured on the battlefield, you shouldn’t expect a free pass for “good intentions” either.
June 8th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
rich,
“It’s different cuz we’re the good guyz,” isn’t good enough if we’re doing bad guy shit like torturing people. Who the hell are you to lecture people about moral reasoning? You defend torture.
June 8th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
LarryW wrote:
It is odd how the left won’t even try to understand the argument that the U.S. had the right to detain enemy combatants in Gitmo (where conditions are far superior to any other prison on the island of Cuba or North Korea). Or even try to understand that doing so is much different than the NK grabbing innocent journalist and putting them in a brutal gulag all for the purpose of gaining political leverage with the U.S. If you are unable to accept that these are two entirely different situations then you really have lost your moral perspective (Bush hatred will do that to you).
Of course when this is pointed out, defenders claim they weren’t making a moral equivalance argument. That is true; argument would imply their was some intelectual content. Instead all we see is a snide comment that implies moral equivalance without the ability to actually explain how that could possibly be the case.
So you think if the people being tortured are guilty that automatically makes it OK? Are you unable to understand an ethical perspective which says some ways of treating other humans just inherently wrong on principle regardless of who they are done to? A comparison might be made to rape–if some terrorist women were captured, do you think it would be morally acceptable to repeatedly rape them in order to try to get them to talk?
Of course saying some acts are wrong on principle is not quite the same as saying all instances of that act are “morally equivalent” in every respect–many who feel torture is universally wrong might nevertheless feel that torturing innocents is more wrong than torturing mass murderers. But even if they aren’t morally equivalent in all ways, they can be morally equivalent in one specific way, namely in the sense that they violate what is seen as a basic moral principle. Maybe you don’t believe in universal moral principles and think anything is permissible as long as someone is one of the bad guys, but it’s not like universal principles are a novel innovation liberals invented out of Bush-hatred.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
While it’s easy to sit on your moral high horse and be self-righteously indignant, the reality is that there has not been a successful terrorist attack on North Korean soil in decades.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Hey Joe,
The only torture I have to defend is the torturous venom of your first amendment right to twist the truth. Since our men and women in uniform do not torture people as a practice, I have no need to defend it. Both legally,morally and ethically, our CIA did not torture KSM, Ramzi bin al-Shib, or Abu-Zabudayyah. No one was killed or permanently physically or mentally harmed; our enemies cry “torture” whenever they get in front of the camera as they are trained to do. Are you really that gullible? Or do you just hate that we are indeed a noble and just country? How many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize waterboarding KSM? I want a specific number please.
June 8th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
“Since our men and women in uniform do not torture people as a practice, I have no need to defend it. Both legally,morally and ethically, our CIA did not torture KSM, Ramzi bin al-Shib, or Abu-Zabudayyah. No one was killed or permanently physically or mentally harmed; our enemies cry “torture” whenever they get in front of the camera as they are trained to do. Are you really that gullible? Or do you just hate that we are indeed a noble and just country? How many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize waterboarding KSM? I want a specific number please.”
I honestly don’t get what is the point of lying about these things. Not only do we know that we tortured people but we know that some of those people were killed in the process. Why would you start a paragraph saying that you don’t need to defend torture and then end it by defending torture?
June 8th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
rich wrote:
Both legally,morally and ethically, our CIA did not torture KSM, Ramzi bin al-Shib, or Abu-Zabudayyah. No one was killed or permanently physically or mentally harmed
Please define the boundary between torture and non-torture “legally, morally, and ethically”. Are you suggesting that as long as no one is “killed or permanently physically or mentally harmed” it isn’t torture? “Stress positions” that become excruciatingly painful when people are subjected to them for days on end don’t count, or waterboarding which subjectively feels exactly like drowning? How about if we were to subject someone to constant, very painful electric shocks for weeks on end, you wouldn’t define that as torture either as long as no permanent injuries occurred?
How many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize waterboarding KSM? I want a specific number please.
First answer the question: how many American lives saved would make it justifiable to torture the 3-year old daughter of a terrorist to get him to talk? Specific number please.
(hint: some things are wrong on principle, even if we can construct stupid philosophical thought-experiments where we might consider doing them anyway as a “lesser of two evils” because we have impossible foreknowledge of exactly how much suffering and death will occur if we don’t. For example, if an all-powerful space demon came and told us that we had to torture a 3-year old child for an hour or else he would torture the child along with 10 million other people for 23 years, and also take an additional 16 million lives, most of us would probably do it. By the way, did I mention that the 16 million were American lives???)
June 8th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
…has anyone ever read a firsthand report of how prisoners are/were treated at gitmo? i am not defending anything, but i have read reports of how prisoners are treated in NK at these labour camps, and it is horrifying. it is hard to make a comparison without knowledge. i sincerely pray that these women are released very, very soon…as well as the the other innocent who are imprisoned in NK’s gulag.
June 8th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Herschel wrote:
How do we know what crimes the prisoners held at Guantánamo committed, or whether they committed any crimes at all? ‘Cause Cheney and Rumsfeld said so? Tool.
Um, Herschel, I seem to remember that Cheney asked that documents describing what has been learned at Gitmo from these “innocents” and your Messiah has said “no”.
Anyone who equates the US with the DPRK isn’t to be taken seriously.
It’s breathtaking, how deficient the right wing is in the ability to think, to reason, or to argue. Look at the above. My goodness. Asking how you know that the prisoners held at Guantanamo are guilty of anything is equating the US with North Korea. Yes, of course. Well stated, my good man! Good show!
June 8th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
…i stand corrected as i have read further into this discussion. in no way, shape, or form do i think that torture is an acceptable form of punishment for suspected behaviour. as i do believe that the punishment should fit the crime, this form should be reserved for murderers, rapists, and child molestors. period.
June 8th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Those who died during detention were not the result of the president’s carefully crafted enhanced interrogation program. Prisoners end up crippled or dead quite often in American jails and prisons, but that doesn’t mean our conventional criminal justice system condones torture/murder. Rather, it’s the result of (to use a tired phrase) “a few bad apples” who are dealt with accordingly.
As for the enhanced interrogation program itself, no amount of physical pain or emotional distress can really be considered “torture” if it does not result in permanent physical or mental harm. Furthermore, as long as at least one American life is saved then said physical pain and emotional distress is easily justified.
Accordingly, I believe the enhanced interrogation program should be expanded to include domestic suspects, as well. How many innocent American lives could be saved if DHS agents were allowed to waterboard suspected domestic terrorists, for instance, or simply beat them up, or strip them and lock them in freezing cold cells, or keep them awake for days at time by blasting obnoxious music into their cells at all hours of the night– all the while careful, of course, to follow the strictest guidelines so as not to permanently injure them.
For all you morally confused liberals, let me put it this way: perhaps Dr. Tiller’s life could’ve been saved if Janet Napolitano had been able to arbitrarily detain and waterboard those who were threatening him. Or are you really going to say that an American’s *life* is not worth a little temporary discomfort for a domestic terrorist?
June 9th, 2009 at 1:16 am
I honestly don’t get what is the point of lying about these things. Not only do we know that we tortured people but we know that some of those people were killed in the process. Why would you start a paragraph saying that you don’t need to defend torture and then end it by defending torture?
Ryan, Fact 1. Most of you libs have only defined waterboarding as torture…I as yet have not heard if listening to loud music or speeches by Ted Kennedy qualify as torture (although the latter makes even me a bit nervous)…if someone has a heart attack during that I wouldn’t call it torture, I’d call it a mercy killing
Fact 2. As of me writing this, the 3 men who were waterboarded and thus “tortured” using legally sanctioned enhanced interrogation techniques are still alive and asking for their court appointed lawyers and a date with Oprah. Anyone else who was supposedly killed during detention see the obvious comment #62
Jesse: Please define the boundary between torture and non-torture “legally, morally, and ethically”. Are you suggesting that as long as no one is “killed or permanently physically or mentally harmed” it isn’t torture?
Answer: That’s a pretty good place for a moral nation to start when weighing the balance between its citizens lives and the comfort of the men who just left over 7000 American children without a mother or father. What if a plane hit your utopian ivory tower and you weren’t sure where the next one was going to hit? Does anyone who writes on these blogs even have children? For the record, the enhanced interrogation techniques which were approved were very specific as to duration and intensity of the techniques, and any technique which we used to train our own troops sounds good enough for me…
First answer the question: how many American lives saved would make it justifiable to torture the 3-year old daughter of a terrorist to get him to talk? Specific number please.(hint: some things are wrong on principle, even if we can construct stupid philosophical thought-experiments where we might consider doing them anyway as a “lesser of two evils” because we have impossible foreknowledge of exactly how much suffering and death will occur if we don’t. For example, if an all-powerful space demon came and told us that we had to torture a 3-year old child for an hour or else he would torture the child along with 10 million other people for 23 years, and also take an additional 16 million lives, most of us would probably do it. By the way, did I mention that the 16 million were American lives???)
Hey Jesse, Wonderful dodge to the question…now answer it…How many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize waterboarding KSM? I want a specific number please.
HINT: What you consider stupid philosophical thought-experiments was exactly the position we found ourselves on Sept 12, 2001…we knew very little about what was coming next…save the nation first and its citizens…save the sanctimonious hand-wringing about these bastards until we win the war, however long that takes. They think we are a bunch of pussies Jesse…stop proving them right. Right now bin-Ladin is looking at your all powerful space demon analogy and thinking…”I should put that in my terrorist book after the chapter on “How To Break Your Own Finger To Make It Look Like Torture” and “Use The Stupid Liberals Unless You Have One Under Your Knife…”
June 9th, 2009 at 3:13 am
Please define the boundary between torture and non-torture “legally, morally, and ethically”. Are you suggesting that as long as no one is “killed or permanently physically or mentally harmed” it isn’t torture?
That’s a pretty good place for a moral nation to start when weighing the balance between its citizens lives and the comfort of the men who just left over 7000 American children without a mother or father.
In the quote you’re responding to I wasn’t asking whether you thought torture was morally justified, I was just asking about your definition of the word “torture” itself. I think you know perfectly well that inflicting extreme pain on prisoners for the sake of getting information from has been traditionally labeled “torture” even if it doesn’t cause permanent physical damage–are you saying that if we feel morally justified in inflicting such pain, then not only should we go ahead and do it, but we should redefine the word “torture” itself so we can say that what we’re doing doesn’t count as torture? How Orwellian!
Hey Jesse, Wonderful dodge to the question…now answer it…How many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize waterboarding KSM? I want a specific number please.
Do you think my question–”how many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize torturing a terrorist’s 3-year-old-daughter”–is a fair one to ask? If so, please answer it, if you are arguing in good faith as opposed to trolling. If you don’t think it’s a fair question, then why not? If you’d say it’s not fair because the premise isn’t realistic–since there’s never a situation where we know that the only way to save American lives is torturing a 3-year-old, where we know that no other alternative way of trying to get the terrorist to talk will work (and in fact many interrogators believe that gaining confidence of suspects is more effective at getting them to give information than torture, which often yields false confessions just to make it stop), and where we know that precisely X number of lives will definitely be lost if we don’t torture the kid–then perhaps you can understand why I might feel the same way about your own question. In the real world where we are limited beings who can’t say with any great confidence that torture will in fact save lives, it’s better to err on the side of caution and not rush to violate basic moral principles just based on a hunch. (Plus, even from a pure utilitarian point of view, even if torture does sometimes yield life-saving information, you have to weigh that against the fact that torture by the US probably increases the number of new recruits to terrorist organizations)
What you consider stupid philosophical thought-experiments was exactly the position we found ourselves on Sept 12, 2001
Oh really? On Sep. 12 someone invented an alternate-future-viewing machine that allowed us to see exactly how many people would die in the future if we did torture terrorists vs. how many people would die in the future if we stuck to the traditional interrogation techniques that served us throughout the Cold War and WWII?
Also, as horrible as the events of Sep. 11th were, if you’re concerned merely with the raw numbers of lives lost, more Americans die in traffic accidents each month than died on Sep. 11th…do you think this justifies torturing automakers until they design safer cars, or at least investing a few hundred billion to replace cars with a nationwide mass transit system?
They think we are a bunch of pussies Jesse…stop proving them right.
I don’t actually spend a lot of time worrying about what terrorists think of us (it’s not like they would suddenly stop wanting to attack us even if we went full-on fascist). I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to compromise all your moral principles out of the hysterical fear that someone somewhere thinks you’re a pussy.
June 9th, 2009 at 7:58 am
Wow. You were one of those people who got 1600 on your SAT’s, amirite?
June 9th, 2009 at 8:03 am
Read my link. Every single one of the tortures used against Dilawar was explicitly authorized. Why are you lying about this? Of are you just ignorant?
And you accuse other people of being naive.
June 9th, 2009 at 8:56 am
First of all, I am always suspicious of a commentor who writes at 3:15AM lol. I hope you are on the West Coast at least (by the tenor of your writings, perhaps San Francisco?)
1. I think you know perfectly well that inflicting extreme pain on prisoners for the sake of getting information from has been traditionally labeled “torture” even if it doesn’t cause permanent physical damage–are you saying that if we feel morally justified in inflicting such pain, then not only should we go ahead and do it, but we should redefine the word “torture” itself so we can say that what we’re doing doesn’t count as torture? How Orwellian!
Nice inaccurate straw man. I said “a good place to start”. My point is we disagree that the Enhanced Interogation Techniques performed on the 3 al-Quaida leaders was not torture. Their interrogators knew they were going to inflict discomfort on these men, but they knew they were not going to permanently harm them. In addition, they knew these men had information that would help us fight an enemy that had just killed 3000 of us. From a technique and intent standpoint, these CIA men are heroes for their efforts and I am thankful that we have men like this to protect this nation.
Do you think my question–”how many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize torturing a terrorist’s 3-year-old-daughter”–is a fair one to ask? If so, please answer it, if you are arguing in good faith as opposed to trolling. If you don’t think it’s a fair question, then why not? If you’d say it’s not fair because the premise isn’t realistic–since there’s never a situation where we know that the only way to save American lives is torturing a 3-year-old, where we know that no other alternative way of trying to get the terrorist to talk will work (and in fact many interrogators believe that gaining confidence of suspects is more effective at getting them to give information than torture, which often yields false confessions just to make it stop), and where we know that precisely X number of lives will definitely be lost if we don’t torture the kid–then perhaps you can understand why I might feel the same way about your own question. In the real world where we are limited beings who can’t say with any great confidence that torture will in fact save lives, it’s better to err on the side of caution and not rush to violate basic moral principles just based on a hunch. (Plus, even from a pure utilitarian point of view, even if torture does sometimes yield life-saving information, you have to weigh that against the fact that torture by the US probably increases the number of new recruits to terrorist organizations)
Sigh. Your statement just reinforces what I’ve said. 1. No basic moral principle was violated in what we did to these 3 men. 2. Join with me in asking the Obama administration then to release those memos showing what we learned from applying these techniques to these 3 men. The interrogators came back and said they believed they could get more information if they could apply more pressure. They did the 3 men sang like canaries…and then afterwords went back to their cells and dreamed of chopping off some morally confused Americans heads, without having suffered any physical damage or permanent mental harm. One more time for everybody in the fantasy land of the liberal dreamscape? Repeat after me.
How many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize waterboarding KSM? I want a specific number please.
Just say the answer you want to say and stop dancing around it. Here, I’ll even make it easier for you…
Do you think my question–”how many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize torturing a terrorist’s 3-year-old-daughter”–is a fair one to ask? If so, please answer it, if you are arguing in good faith as opposed to trolling. If you don’t think it’s a fair question, then why not?
Answer: It is not legal to torture a terrorist or his children. 2 Points: First, the framers realized when the safety and security of the country was at stake, a President might have to take extraordinary powers to keep the country safe. He might have to assume almost dictatorial power to fight off a threat and might have to do things outside the constraints of the Law to save America. For example, he might have to order martial law, he may have to suspend habeus corpus for American citizens, he may have to censor the free press, and yes, he may even have to order the torture of individuals to get information to save lives. I have no doubt our greatest wartime Presidents had to engage in these actions. Of course, you must believe we are at war to get this far, and I know you libs believe Sept 11 was just like a really bad multi-vehicle accident.
Second: Getting back to your example of torturing a child if some space-alien told me to to save 1,000,000 American lives.
For example, if an all-powerful space demon came and told us that we had to torture a 3-year old child for an hour or else he would torture the child along with 10 million other people for 23 years, and also take an additional 16 million lives, most of us would probably do it. By the way, did I mention that the 16 million were American lives???)
Answer: Most of us would probably do it?? Say it was real torture Jesse…you would chop off a little girls fingers? After all, that is true torture. The correct answer is: I would ask the all-powerful alien to hold the little girl down so I could make a clean cut, AND THEN CUT THE ALIENS 5 HEARTS OUT OR DIE TRYING….who do you think al-Quaida fears more…your sanctimonious whimpering or me?
June 9th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Joe from Lowell…http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=dilawar…
2 Points. The first was Dilawar was not the top 3 highest ranking al-Quaida in custody. Second Assuming most of the info is correct, and I have some doubts on some of it, it sounds like, once again, some bad individuals abusing their power and committing illegal acts. Notice carefully Joe the part about the ARMY CONDUCTING A CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION. The intent of these men was not to gather life-saving information. The intent of these men was not in the best traditions of this country or the sanctioned policy of this country. Considering we are at war and the tens of thousands we have had to capture and process, it is no surprise that someone might die of natural causes while in custody. It is also possible someone with a heart condition or other hidden medical ailment might die during an enhanced interrogation technique. That still doesn’t rise to the level of torture. If these low-level interrogators and prison guards abused the man and he died, they should go to jail. However, an American would recognize the nature of the conflict we are in and give the benefit of the doubt to the country he supposedly loves. We are a good country, a good people, and are fighting this war the best we can…ALthough I’m sure al-Quaida would be shaking in their boots if Jesse and Joe were running the show…”Tell us where the nuclear bomb is or we might have to throw stuffed animals at you….oh wait..better take off the hard button eyes, you might trigger a lawsuit”….
June 9th, 2009 at 11:22 am
They think we are a bunch of pussies Jesse…stop proving them right.
I love how the right wing fascists have convinced themselves that having five or six soldiers torturing one naked, restrained and terrified man is the non-cowardly thing to do….
June 9th, 2009 at 11:25 am
No one was killed or permanently physically or mentally harmed;
First of all, over 100 people were killed during torture sessions, a fact the Pentagon itself admits — it has even classified at least 34 of these deaths as homicides.
Second, how do you know no one was permanently mentally harmed? Do you have access to their innermost thoughts?
June 9th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Answer: It is not legal to torture a terrorist or his children.
This is not, however, what the Bush regime claimed. Here is Bush regime lawyer and torture memo author John Yoo:
Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
June 9th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
My point is we disagree that the Enhanced Interogation Techniques performed on the 3 al-Quaida leaders was not torture. Their interrogators knew they were going to inflict discomfort on these men, but they knew they were not going to permanently harm them.
I asked you to justify your definition of the word “torture”, which contradicts the way the word has been used by basically everyone in the English-speaking world for centuries. Here you do not even attempt to justify it using any type of rational argument or reference to the history of word usage, instead you just repeat the bare assertion that because “they knew they were not going to permanently harm them”, it does not quality as torture. Are you familiar with the term “begging the question”?
In addition, they knew these men had information that would help us fight an enemy that had just killed 3000 of us. From a technique and intent standpoint, these CIA men are heroes for their efforts and I am thankful that we have men like this to protect this nation.
I wasn’t asking whether what they did was noble and good, just how you could say it wasn’t “torture”. Basically it sounds like your thought process is something like this: “torture is a ‘bad’ sounding word, but the CIA guys are ‘good guys’ and what they did to the evil terrorists was ‘good’, so it can’t be torture’”. If you wanted to say there are situations where torture is not only morally justified but a good and heroic thing, that at least would be a coherent ethical argument rather than an incoherent attempt to redefine the meaning of words purely for PR purposes.
Sigh. Your statement just reinforces what I’ve said. 1. No basic moral principle was violated in what we did to these 3 men.
People in this world disagree about basic moral principles, no? For example, some think abortion violates a basic moral principle while others don’t. In this case, I’m saying that I believe it to be a basic moral principle that torturing another human is never acceptable; I’m not saying I have any way of “proving” that this moral principle is correct so that you should believe it too.
2. Join with me in asking the Obama administration then to release those memos showing what we learned from applying these techniques to these 3 men.
Yes, I do want all information pertaining to the use of these techniques to be released.
The interrogators came back and said they believed they could get more information if they could apply more pressure. They did the 3 men sang like canaries…
Uh, if the information hasn’t been released, how exactly do you know that this is what happened? Did you read the article I linked to detailing how one interrogator gained crucial information–”including the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the architect of 9/11 and the dirty-bomb plot of Jose Padilla”–by gaining a captured terrorist’s confidence (and using some sleight-of-hand) rather than using torture, and how this interrogator in fact believed that torture was ineffective and counterproductive? And here is a story about another successful interrogator who decries the use of torture on practical as well as moral grounds, saying “At the prison where I conducted interrogations, we heard day in and day out, foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason that they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.” He concludes that the use of torture “literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.”
How many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize waterboarding KSM? I want a specific number please.
And I already gave specific arguments as to why this is an unfair question–it presupposes that waterboarding KSM would in fact save lives, and it presupposes that we have impossible alternate-universe knowledge of how many people would die if traditional interrogation techniques were used instead of waterboarding, as compared to the number that died in our universe. The question is every bit as unrealistic and “ivory tower” (to use your words) as my thought-experiment about the space demon.
Just say the answer you want to say and stop dancing around it. Here, I’ll even make it easier for you…
Do you think my question–”how many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize torturing a terrorist’s 3-year-old-daughter”–is a fair one to ask? If so, please answer it, if you are arguing in good faith as opposed to trolling. If you don’t think it’s a fair question, then why not?
Answer: It is not legal to torture a terrorist or his children.
OK, if you insist on redefining words based on nothing more than your own whims, I’ll play along. You apparently don’t find these kinds of philosophical thought-experiment questions unfair in general; I do, which is why I won’t answer them unless the questioner makes clear he understands that the premise of the thought-experiment is totally unrealistic and that the answer has no implications for policy in real life (if you tell me you understand with this then I will answer your question). But since you don’t, how about if I change the question to this:
“How many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize repeatedly waterboarding a terrorist’s 3-year-old-daughter”
Or if you mistakenly believe waterboarding is not an extremely traumatic physical experience, how about this:
“How many American lives saved would have made it justifiable for us to authorize subjecting a terrorist’s 3-year-old-daughter to a series of constant, extremely painful electric shocks many times per minute for an extended period, perhaps days or weeks (assume these shocks are just barely under the limit of what will cause permanent physical damage)”
Second: Getting back to your example of torturing a child if some space-alien told me to to save 1,000,000 American lives. Answer: Most of us would probably do it?? Say it was real torture Jesse…you would chop off a little girls fingers?
With the understanding that this is a totally unrealistic thought experiment with no bearing on the issue of real-life torture, then given the premise I would probably at least try to go through with it (especially if it was something brief like chopping off fingers), although I don’t know if I could make it. Remember, just as it’s a premise of your question that we know (thanks to our alternate-universe viewer) how many lives will be lost if we don’t waterboard KSM, it’s a premise of this question that we know that the girl will be tortured even worse by the demon if we don’t do it, and that in addition 10 million other innocent people will be tortured and 16 million innocent people will die if we don’t do it.
The correct answer is: I would ask the all-powerful alien to hold the little girl down so I could make a clean cut, AND THEN CUT THE ALIENS 5 HEARTS OUT OR DIE TRYING…
Ha ha, I see you want to fancy yourself a noble action movie hero, but I’m afraid resistance is futile in this case. The demon is protected by an inpenetrable force field far beyond our own technology’s ability to breach, and what’s more, God Himself has informed you that He’s not going to interfere with the demon’s evil plan (something to do with ‘free will’) and that with His omniscient knowledge, He can tell you in advance that if you don’t chop off the girls fingers, it’s 100% certain that the demon will go through with his promise to torture the girl along with 10 million others, and kill 16 million more.
Think this is an unfair and stupid thought-experiment? Well, that’s how I feel about yours. We don’t have an alternate-future viewer or the word of God that would allow us to know exactly how many people will die in a world where we waterboard KSM vs. how many will die in a world where we use traditional interrogation techniques, and I’m not willing to violate what I see as a basic moral principle based on a vague hunch, just as you apparently are not willing to violate your own principles about not torturing little girls.
June 9th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
rich, not realizing what he’s doing, concedes:
No, he was a cab driver without any connection to al Qaeda at all. So much for your “We don’t torture lightly” argument.
Every single one of those actions – including the kneeing in the thighs that reduced his femurs to shards – was authorized under George W. Bush.
As a matter of fact, it was. They were questioning him about ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda.
No, it was not; but then, the intent of torturers and torture defenders is NEVER in the best traditions of this country.
As a matter of fact, every single technique they applied – hanging him from his wrists for long periods, kneeing him in the thighs, stripping him – was, once again, authorized practice for interrogations under George W. Bush.
Natural causes?!? READ THE FUCKING LINK, YOU SICK P.O.S.! They beat him until femurs were shards of bone!
I’m not even going to refute this statement. I’m just going to let it sit there, so everybody can see that even beating someone until his heart gives out doesn’t “rise to the level of torture” for you sickos.
You mean like the two panicky propaganda tapes al Qaeda rushed out ahead of Obama’s speech?
June 9th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
For the record, the enhanced interrogation techniques which were approved were very specific as to duration and intensity of the techniques, and any technique which we used to train our own troops sounds good enough for me…
One of the explicitly authorized techniques was locking a prisoner in a small box with his worst phobia a la 1984. He’s afraid of bugs? Lock him in a coffin full of them. (I’m fairly sure this is not done to American soldiers)
Soldiers in training know that what’s being done to them won’t go on forever, and that the instructors have their best interests at heart. That’s the difference.
June 9th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
[...] in North Korea; sentenced to prison camps– these two are basically destined to go through Cheneyesque torture. I wish this were a bigger deal: I have a sneaking suspicion that if these were white girls, it [...]
June 9th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
I’m not willing to violate what I see as a basic moral principle based on a vague hunch, just as you apparently are not willing to violate your own principles about not torturing little girls.
Once again…Your basic moral principle presupposes that we tortured terrorists as policy. I don’t subscribe to that view; it appears we can both find people in all levels of government to agree and disagree with us both. There was no hunch…the smoldering remains of people on 9/11 showed us these attackers were very real and we were in real danger…we were and are at war, and while you may enjoy the luxury of Monday morning quarterbacking behind the safety of your computer terminal, it was specifically these actions that had and have saved lives.
I have answered your questions as best as I can. If I was President, I might have to take actions for the safety of the nation that might create tension between the Commander-in-Chief role of the President and laws that interfere with that.Fortunatly, we have not yet (at least publicly) had to cross over the line into the examples which violate Convention Against Torture statutes, in my opinion, as would have to be done to electricute some little girl to get info. I would never truly torture a little girl to save lives…those lives that would be lost would be the burden I would have to bear forever.John Yoo’s book War By Other Means, Jack Goldsmiths book The Terror Presidency, Alan Dershowitz book Preemption A Double Edged Sword, George Tenents book…all these books detail the excruciatingly difficult time the men and women of our armed forces, intelligence agencies, and legal agencies all grappled with these weighty questions.
What disgusts me about most of those on the Left is the need to ascribe evil motives and intentions to Americans who have served there country ably and legally. You smear America and Americans by taking the actions of a few and casting America as having “brought this on themselves”…
Ourenemies are masters of media propaganda…they have had 40 years painting the tiny Jewish state of Israel as the cause of all the misery in the world…it is no surprise they can demonize anyone and anything because they value nothing we hold dear…life, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, etc. etc. As far as the idea of the misdeeds of a few, or mistakes that we may make as a country…our enemy had no problem trying to bring us death a decade before 9/11 by trying to bring the World Trade Center down with 50,000 people inside.
We don’t have a tried and true metric of “total number of terrorists created”…it would only be subjective. The only metric of any value is…how many times since Sept 11 have we been attacked? Answer: Zero. Must really make you patriotic Americans mad to know we were kept safe all these years by those evil fascist conservatives…you think you lost civil liberties now, wait until we lose a few city blocks to a nuke…come back and talk to me about hunches and thought-experiments then…
June 9th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Joe, after you stop frothing, please note, I didn’t say in Dilawars situation he died of natural causes…I just said that people can die of natural causes…if you have 100,000 people detained for any period of time, they can die without any other reason than a simple heart attack. Or, they may have died of natural causes during a period of sleep deprivation, or had a fatal arrythmia during the loud music…my point is, not everything is so clear and obvious as you America haters make it out to be.
2. I concede nothing. Any idiot understands that almost anything taken to an extreme can be lethal or physically harmful…play the loud music loud enough to blow out the eardrums…hell…drink enough water in a short enough period of time and you can die of water toxicity…authorization of procedures came with guidelines as to their use. Ultimately, the misuse of any one of them is a criminal offense, one which it seems as though our Armed Forces are pursuing. It seems a shame…Joe from Lowell is looking for a utopian war…not surprising….it goes hand in hand with the utopian vision of the world you libs want to create through your own brilliance….
June 9th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Once again…Your basic moral principle presupposes that we tortured terrorists as policy.
You’re playing word-games here. My basic moral principle is not that whatever we define as “torture” is bad and therefore if we change the definition like you did (which you still never even tried to justify in terms of any rational argument or history of word usage) it’s A-OK; my moral principle is that inflicting excruciating physical pain on people for the purposes of making them talk is wrong.
I don’t subscribe to that view; it appears we can both find people in all levels of government to agree and disagree with us both. There was no hunch…the smoldering remains of people on 9/11 showed us these attackers were very real and we were in real danger…
If you read the context of where I used the word “hunch”, I obviously wasn’t saying it was a mere hunch that there were dangerous people out to kill us, I said it was a hunch that torturing (or inflicting horrible pain that doesn’t cause physical damage, if you prefer) terrorists would save lives. You don’t know for a fact that inflicting such pain a better way of extracting information than the standard interrogation methods which have always been used, or that the number of people saved by information extracted through pain-infliction would not be offset by the number of extra lives lost as a result of these tactics giving terrorist organizations more recruits. Are you somehow claiming that the smoldering remains of people on 9/11 proved any of these things?
it was specifically these actions that had and have saved lives.
Again this is nothing more than a hunch on your part. I quoted an experienced interrogator who believed that hundreds or even thousands of American soldiers may have died as a result of increased terrorist recruitment which was significantly due to anger over how the US was perceived to treat its prisoners.
I have answered your questions as best as I can.
I appreciate the fact that you have answered some of my questions. But you didn’t answer my added questions about whether you would subject 3-year old children of terrorists to frequent waterboarding or a constant series of painful electric shocks (things which you don’t define as ‘torture’ apparently) in an effort to get the terrorists to talk.
.Fortunatly, we have not yet (at least publicly) had to cross over the line into the examples which violate Convention Against Torture statutes, in my opinion, as would have to be done to electricute some little girl to get info.
I thought you said that if it didn’t cause permanent physical damage it wasn’t torture! And I specified that the hypothetical shocks were not strong enough to cause such damage. And you explicitly said that tactics that have been used, like waterboarding and painful “stress position” (being hung by the wrists for many hours) are not torture, so would you subject a little girl to that stuff on the hunch that it might get her father to talk?
What disgusts me about most of those on the Left is the need to ascribe evil motives and intentions to Americans who have served there country ably and legally. You smear America and Americans by taking the actions of a few and casting America as having “brought this on themselves”…
You appear to be responding to an imaginary leftist caricature in your head rather than to anything I have actually said. I don’t think Americans brought the actions of terrorists on themselves, nor do I ascribe evil motives to the vast majority of people who serve in the military or set policy.
We don’t have a tried and true metric of “total number of terrorists created”…it would only be subjective. The only metric of any value is…how many times since Sept 11 have we been attacked? Answer: Zero.
I don’t think there were any Islamist terrorist attacks on American soil during Clinton’s 8 years in office, so this proves nothing about the effectiveness of the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Also, if there are no attacks during Obama’s administration either, will that have any effect on your belief in the effectiveness of these tactics? If not, that suggests that you are just making a rhetorical appeal here, and that your belief in the effectiveness of these tactics is more a matter of faith than something based on weighing the evidence thoughtfully.
Must really make you patriotic Americans mad to know we were kept safe all these years by those evil fascist conservatives…you think you lost civil liberties now, wait until we lose a few city blocks to a nuke…come back and talk to me about hunches and thought-experiments then…
I’ll certainly be forced to re-evaluate my stance on the practical benefits of the Bush administration’s interrogation and intelligence policies if we experience a sudden rash of attacks by Islamist terrorists in the next 4-8 years. But again, in the event that no such change is experienced, will that cause you to re-evaluate your stance even one little bit?
June 10th, 2009 at 12:11 am
I don’t think there were any Islamist terrorist attacks on American soil during Clinton’s 8 years in office, so this proves nothing about the effectiveness of the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Ummmm…when was the first World Trade Center bombing?
I’ll certainly be forced to re-evaluate my stance on the practical benefits of the Bush administration’s interrogation and intelligence policies if we experience a sudden rash of attacks by Islamist terrorists in the next 4-8 years. But again, in the event that no such change is experienced, will that cause you to re-evaluate your stance even one little bit?
Apples and oranges. The factors and variables that we encountered from 2001-2009 are certainly not the same we will face the next 10 years. The techniques that have been exposed to the world and our enemy will no longer be effective as they now know the limits to which we will go to pump them for info, sadly. I do agree with you in this…if we have another case like the Moussauoi case (i.e. having someone in custody who has knowledge of an upcoming attack) and the President doesnt authorize any and all legal means (perhaps extralegal as well) to uncover a plot, then woe be that politician and his party. I will sadly take your apology because the price we will pay may be awful as the legal roadblocks hindered our efforts before 9/11
June 10th, 2009 at 1:21 am
Ummmm…when was the first World Trade Center bombing?
Somehow it was in my head that this attack had been a complete failure, but looking it up I see that a bomb did go off, and although it obviously failed in its purpose to bring down the tower it did kill six people. Still, it happened just about a month after Clinton took office, so the no-Islamist-terrorism stretch for Clinton is just as long (slightly longer) than the stretch for Bush after Sep. 11th, I wonder why you give so much credit to Bush and none to Clinton.
Apples and oranges. The factors and variables that we encountered from 2001-2009 are certainly not the same we will face the next 10 years.
Every year is different from the last, but there’s no real reason to think terrorists will be making less of an effort in, say, the next six years than they did in the last six years (and also no particular reason to think they weren’t making an effort during the Clinton years), so giving the Bush administration credit for “keeping us safe” the last six years but not giving Obama credit if there are no Islamist terrorists attacks on American soil sounds like a pretty blinkered ideological position to me. Of course I’m not counting chickens, but like I said, if you’re willing to say in advance that even if this occurs it won’t change your opinion at all, that would suggest that you’re just believing whatever makes you feel good ideologically, and you don’t care at all about what the actual evidence might say about your beliefs. Of course I’m not actually 100% sure if your “apples and oranges” comment means you do admit an attack-free Obama administration would have no effect on your opinion, so feel free to clarify.
I do agree with you in this…if we have another case like the Moussauoi case (i.e. having someone in custody who has knowledge of an upcoming attack) and the President doesnt authorize any and all legal means (perhaps extralegal as well) to uncover a plot, then woe be that politician and his party.
Perhaps this is true about the future, but historically the problem in the Moussaoui case wasn’t primarily about not being able to get info out of him, it was about the higher-ups in the FBI just not taking the whole thing seriously. See for example this article from Reason, whose opening is:
“The trial of September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui provided definitive proof that the U.S. government missed some clear opportunities to stop the 9/11 attacks. Those missed opportunities had nothing to do with the legal restrictions later loosened by the PATRIOT Act. It was bureaucratic hierarchies and power trips that let the Federal Bureau of Investigation ignore the carefully gathered evidence of an attack.”
June 10th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Somehow it was in my head that this attack had been a complete failure, but looking it up I see that a bomb did go off, and although it obviously failed in its purpose to bring down the tower it did kill six people. Still, it happened just about a month after Clinton took office, so the no-Islamist-terrorism stretch for Clinton is just as long (slightly longer) than the stretch for Bush after Sep. 11th, I wonder why you give so much credit to Bush and none to Clinton.
This is a tangent…you didn’t say any failed attacks…you said attacks, and you were obviously wrong both factually as to the attack and the repercussions from it. The attacks and deaths on our embassies, the Cole, Khobar Towers and the failed Millenium bomb plot all were indications we had a serious danger which all of us, not just Clinton, failed to appreciate. There were some voices in the wilderness like Richard Clark, Steve Emerson, maybe Michael Scheur(sp), but that is the nature of peaceful democracies…we are slow to act on danger…
so giving the Bush administration credit for “keeping us safe” the last six years but not giving Obama credit if there are no Islamist terrorists attacks on American soil sounds like a pretty blinkered ideological position to me. Of course I’m not counting chickens, but like I said, if you’re willing to say in advance that even if this occurs it won’t change your opinion at all, that would suggest that you’re just believing whatever makes you feel good ideologically, and you don’t care at all about what the actual evidence might say about your beliefs. Of course I’m not actually 100% sure if your “apples and oranges” comment means you do admit an attack-free Obama administration would have no effect on your opinion, so feel free to clarify
I clarify. If Obama “keeps us safe” I will certainly credit him for his actions. My point is our position is much stronger today than it was in 2002-2003. Some safe havens for al-quaida have been destroyed, their initial leadership and lieutenants captured or killed except the top 2, and like a mob infiltration, we have had more time to insert ourselves into the organization, as the Israelis do. Perhaps Enhanced Interrogations are no longer necessary…indeed, we only waterboarded 3 people during the Bush Administration. My only comment is that I believe the people who say we gained almost 60% of what we learned about al-quaida from those interrogations in those early years…you don’t or believe those who say we could’ve learned the same thing if we just took the time to do “traditional” techniques.There is ambiguity about whether a)those techniques were tried (I believe they were) b) how long they were tried for ( I believe a suffiecient enough time, but time was not on our side) c) how effective they were (ineffective against hardened terrorists). Until Obama releases ALL the memos and not just his selective partisan release, we’ll never know.
Perhaps this is true about the future, but historically the problem in the Moussaoui case wasn’t primarily about not being able to get info out of him, it was about the higher-ups in the FBI just not taking the whole thing seriously.
Unlike those on the Left trying to redefine marriage, I don’t diagree with you Jesse about the term torture and I am not trying to redefine it. I think chronic, long-period, excruciating pain on an individual is torture (I believe that would fall under my view of significant mental injury)…if you boiled the top layer of skin off an individual, it would grow back with no lasting physical damage…again torture. Our moral principles do not differ that much…excepting I would never torture a 3 year old girl for any reason, even to save my own children. It would probably cost me my sanity, but if you have children as I do, that idea is a non-starter.
The question that started all of this was Matt’s ridiculous moral equivalence between the DPRK physically abusing or even torturing political prisoners for sadistic pleasure, and our use of techniques WITH SERIOUS MODIFICATIONS AND CONDITIONS to bring them within the law to hardened terrorists with information that saved American lives. You believe the line was crossed with these 3 guys. I don’t, and we all draw our moral lines somewhere…I just think your line is more likely to kill Americans than mine. And it was legal because it didn’t violate the CAT statues or American law.
The worst of all this is the congratualtory self-flagellation of America Matt and others on the Left when some American does not live up to the high standards we set for ourselves. It happens in peacetime and certainly in war. Does your side not believe WWII was still a “good” war even as Nazis mixed with innocent civilians were being carpet-bombed, incorrectly, imprisoned, tortured, etc? I think the selectivity is on your side…I think if Al Gore had been president, he would have done the same things (one would hope)this discussion would either not be happening or else significantly reduced. You certainly would have had the radical Left complaining, but Gore probably would have thrown some of his underlings under the bus rather than stand by these good men as both Bush and especially Cheney have done. I think this discussion has run its course unless you have any questions for me.