Waterboarding for fun and profit.Follow

I'm not a fan of Hitchens, but good on him for going through it.

You in London yet? Enjoying the rainy weather?

A long while back, I linked to a Straight Dope Message Board thread where some Republican fellow waterboarded himself to find out what it was like. Having experienced it, he changed his tune regarding it in a hurry.

A related story I didn't have the enthusiasm to make a thread over (registration might be required):

This cracks me up. If the threshold for making someone give up or stop what they're doing is actually causing them to do so, then put my parents down for torturing me as a kid when they spanked me or sent me to my room for misbehavior. Of course interrogation practices make subjects give up info. If they didn't they would be much good, would they? If the person being subjected to discomfort wasn't made to give up what we wanted from them then why bother with catching people in the first place? You might as well just shoot them on the spot instead.

Dumb argument.

Totem

But its the same argument that can be used for any interrogation method that uses discomfort, but doesn't leave you physically scarred or disabled. When parents spank, it's for punishment. If your parents were spanking you to get you to talk, well...that splians some stuff;)

We're not punishing detainees. We can't punish them.

I'd say your argument was dumber, but does bring up the point about using pain, or mental/physical discomfort to get people to tell us what we want to hear. I would propose that interrogation beyond, say, complex questioning is tortous...and inhumane.

Im in London and the weather is the suckage, for sure. Managed a few beery pub lunches up in Shropshire tho, wich was ace. And a fine evening yesterday with some old mates, a lump of charras and, once the tennis was over, some bloody loud music in to the wee hours down in Brixton town

Yeah, I can't stand Hitchens either. Utter ******* but as you say good on him for putting up with it for about 4 seconds.

Personaly, the thing I found disturbing about it was the american accents coming from behind the hoods. I already know that the procedure is 'torture' and nothing more, but to hear the voices being so matter-of-fact about what they are doing, makes me feel that they are pretty used to doing it, 'following procedure' as such.

Pretty chilling imo. and when you consider that the real victims of this treatment dont have the luxury of an escape option, it makes it truly horrific to realise what is being done by the so-called good guys.

Totem said

I would confess to pretty much anything including shooting JFK and buggering small children if someone wanted me to, if I was subjected to this, so I would (of course) question the validity of anything gained from a person using this method.

To suggest that this is 'discomfort' is pretty disingenuous. Discomfort is sitting on an aeroplane in economy for 23 hours (***** British airways), , waterboarding is as much torture as is pulling out someones fingernails or poking hot things into someones ****.

The SDMB thread if anyone was interested.

Great!

So I assume this means you'll be starting a letter writing campaign to the UN to get them to define waterboarding as torture and include it on the list of banned techniques, right?

I'd like to think that crossing the street anywhere I want isn't jaywalking...


My point here is that how I personally define waterboarding isn't really relevant. It's how the applicable legal body defines it that matters.

As far as I know, no-one from the UN posts here (SR?) But if they did, I'd argue with them all day to convince them that Waterboarding is torture.

I guess someone at the UN needs to sack up and start saying what they really think.

They haven't?

The U.N. has a definition for torture which waterboarding clearly fits.

If they have an official list of activities which are considered torture or not, I'd be interested in reading it. If that were the case, I'm pretty sure I could think of lots of tortorous activies that wouldn't be listed, unless their list happens to be infinite in length...

Yes. So clearly that even though the technique of waterboarding has been used by many UN members for decades (including France and China), the UN committee on Torture failed to *ever* identify it as a banned interrogation technique until November of 2006. And they still didn't define it as "torture":



Note, that this doesn't explicitly declare waterboarding to be torture. It includes it in a list of things that constitute *either* torture *or* "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment". Specifically, the second set are those punishments which the Geneva Convention prohibits to all categories of prisoners taken during a time of war (whether POWs, civilians, or unlawful combatants, all must be treated humanely).


Not exactly a ringing declaration.

Let me also point out that as far as anyone knows the US only used waterboarding on three prisoners, and that was back in 2002/2003. So, years before the committee request for the US to stop using the technique.




There isn't a list, so much as sets of activities that have been clearly determined to be torture, and you'd have to dig through the documents of the committee on torture to find them all. I did a search for "waterboarding" and got only one hit. While it's possible that it may have been touched upon under a different name, I'm not going to go through every permutation possible to do this. I'll just trust the numerous sites out there that point out that the UN committee has never clearly defined waterboarding as torture. Which is not really surprising considering that the membership of the committee includes China, which is known to use the technique commonly, as well as other nations with pretty questionable human rights records.


Look. I tend to agree with you. I'd love to see waterboarding banned completely by the UN. But so far that body has failed to do anything except write one paper by one committee asking the US not to use it on prisoners captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's been incredibly selective as to how this is applied, which I find troubling. It's amazing the quantity of UN position holders who'll say to the media that it's torture, but this somehow never seems to translate into an actual resolution declaring it so.

A UN official telling a newspaper that waterboarding is torture is just one person stating an opinion. While it's a nice sound bite, it has no actual weight in terms of law.




Correct. But those actually do "clearly" fall under the definition of torture. See. The problem with waterboarding is that it does not actually cause any physical harm to the subject, and the question of mental harm is in doubt. While some experts will argue that victims can be traumatized and suffer for years after being waterboarded, the same can be said of *any* interrogation technique that goes beyond just politely asking questions. The definition of torture is very clearly speaks of "severe pain and suffering". This traditionally means doing things like burning, shocking, cutting, hitting, etc. While it's possible for someone to be harmed during waterboarding, again, the same thing can be said of any of a number of legal techniques.


The main question is the mental aspect of waterboarding. And that's tricky. While it evokes severe fear reactions from the victim, the effects typically don't last long. Long enough to get an answer to a question, but not long enough normally to qualify as "severe pain and suffering" on a mental level. Heck. You can cause a higher rate of long term mental harm with sleep deprivation then you can with waterboarding. Yet we don't ban that technique entirely (you're just limited to doing it until before severe mental pain and suffering occurs).



I'm not apologizing for waterboarding at all. I'd be perfectly happy if the technique were banned entirely. But then, let's do that. Let's not leave it in this nebulous state where one nation is condemned for using it three times during a time of war, but numerous others use it habitually on their own citizens (as well as POWs) and no one cares. It's either torture and is a violation of the UN resolution on torture, or it isn't.


Let's not have a double standard here. I know we all expect countries like China and North Korea to violate human rights. But that shouldn't be used to turn a blind eye when they do it. I'm perfectly happy to hold the US to a higher standard on a moral level, but that should not translate into how we handle international law. That should be applied equally, yet that's clearly not the case with this issue.

Edited, Jul 7th 2008 6:49pm by gbaji

Ok, deal. Join me in railing against the fact that the US and other nations use it. Condemn the administration for not banning it and for not taking the case to the UN that other nations are using it.

I mean, that's who's responsible for the US taking these things up to the UN, right? The State Department under the auspice of the Executive? So I hope you'll join me in asking why Bush isn't pressuring the United Nations to condemn China, et al for this practice.

What a load of ****. Are you saying your standard for following international law is to follow the lowest common denominator? Because I heard Hezbollah used to insert boiling eggs into people anuses in order to extract information, should we do that too?

Also, since when is other's people compliance a relevant factor in whether you comply or not? International law is almost never applied equally, you ****.

Finally, most of international law is normative. Obviously, since there is no enforcement power outside the SC, and even then it's only in specific cases. For everything that is outside peace and security and trade, there is simply no enforcement technique. And states only have themselves to blame for this situation.

Also, three cases? As Smash would say, Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, no.