• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

Torture Report Released

I am against torture - I believe in enhanced interrogation. It is a fine line and a slippery slope. It is one i am comfortable trying to balance and support no matter who the president is. Lets see how deplorable these drone strikes become when and if a repub takes office.
 
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/05/-versch-auml-rfte-vernehmung/228158/

The phrase "Verschärfte Vernehmung" is German for "enhanced interrogation". Other translations include "intensified interrogation" or "sharpened interrogation". It's a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their "enhanced interrogation techniques" would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan.

Also: the use of hypothermia, authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld, was initially forbidden. 'Waterboarding" was forbidden too, unlike that authorized by Bush. As time went on, historians have found that all the bureaucratic restrictions were eventually broken or abridged. Once you start torturing, it has a life of its own. The "cold bath" technique - the same as that used by Bush against al-Qahtani in Guantanamo - was, according to professor Darius Rejali of Reed College, "pioneered by a member of the French Gestapo by the pseudonym Masuy about 1943. The Belgian resistance referred to it as the Paris method, and the Gestapo authorized its extension from France to at least two places late in the war, Norway and Czechoslovakia. That is where people report experiencing it."

In Norway, we actually have a 1948 court case that weighs whether "enhanced interrogation" using the methods approved by president Bush amounted to torture. The proceedings are fascinating, with specific reference to the hypothermia used in Gitmo, and throughout interrogation centers across the field of conflict. The Nazi defense of the techniques is almost verbatim that of the Bush administration.

...

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.
Click to expand...
 
Deacs89 said:
I am against torture - I believe in enhanced interrogation. It is a fine line and a slippery slope. It is one i am comfortable trying to balance and support no matter who the president is. Lets see how deplorable these drone strikes become when and if a repub takes office.
Click to expand...

What Cheney and his henchmen called "enhanced interrogation" was unashamed, unabashed, unrepentant torture.

What else would you call hanging somebody by his arms from the ceiling? Then holding a gun to his head and revving drills by his genitals and body.

How about putting a person in a tiny t-shirt and tidy whities in a subzero room, on the floor until he died?

Major General Taguba (an American hero under multiple POTUS) stated Bush and his cabal had committed "systemic torture" and war crimes. He retired because of it. He did the honorable thing.

General Barry McCaffery sated "we tortured mercilessly."

There is no justification and no way to avoid that Bush, Cheney and the rest of them are war criminals. We convicted Nazis and Japanese for doing what were doing.

They should all be tried for their crimes against humanity.
 
Can we also try the senators and reps who approved? Chuckie Schumer was all for what was going on.

When you're dealing with uncivilized people who do shit like decapitate innocent people I say beat the living fuck out of them.

This isn't a normal war and the other side doesn't give a shit about the Geneva Conventions.

I guess Obama is also a war criminal for what he's doing with his little drone war. Killing a U.S. citizen with a drone without due process ring a bell? That said I'm perfectly fine with what the prez is doing.
 
RJKarl said:
What Cheney and his henchmen called "enhanced interrogation" was unashamed, unabashed, unrepentant torture.

What else would you call hanging somebody by his arms from the ceiling? Then holding a gun to his head and revving drills by his genitals and body.

How about putting a person in a tiny t-shirt and tidy whities in a subzero room, on the floor until he died?

Major General Taguba (an American hero under multiple POTUS) stated Bush and his cabal had committed "systemic torture" and war crimes. He retired because of it. He did the honorable thing.

General Barry McCaffery sated "we tortured mercilessly."

There is no justification and no way to avoid that Bush, Cheney and the rest of them are war criminals. We convicted Nazis and Japanese for doing what were doing.

They should all be tried for their crimes against humanity.
Click to expand...

I hear ya rj. I guess it's good I'm not in charge because i would crush all those bastards by any means necessary. Before everyone jumps me i know I'm morally reprehensible but I am not currently pursuing any opening in the government or military. Maybe I'm a heathen but i have zero sympathy for this scum.
 
SCDeac said:
Can we also try the senators and reps who approved? Chuckie Schumer was all for what was going on.

When you're dealing with uncivilized people who do shit like decapitate innocent people I say beat the living fuck out of them.

This isn't a normal war and the other side doesn't give a shit about the Geneva Conventions.

I guess Obama is also a war criminal for what he's doing with his little drone war. Killing a U.S. citizen with a drone without due process ring a bell? That said I'm perfectly fine with what the prez is doing.
Click to expand...

obviously fine with it...lol.
 
ONW said:
obviously fine with it...lol.
Click to expand...

Yeppers. 100% A-OK. You can't go on tirades about Bush and excuse Obama. I'm cool with what both are doing to defend our nation against pure barbarism. If I were in charge I'd want to bust out the wood chipper and go full Fargo on these mofos.
 
SCDeac said:
Yeppers. 100% A-OK. You can't go on tirades about Bush and excuse Obama. I'm cool with what both are doing to defend our nation against pure barbarism. If I were in charge I'd want to bust out the wood chipper and go full Fargo on these mofos.
Click to expand...

I've neither gone on a tirade about Bush nor excused Obama.
 
ONW said:
I've neither gone on a tirade about Bush nor excused Obama.
Click to expand...

I wasn't responding to you. Comrade Karl and his endless obsession with Bush while always being the classic Obama apologist.
 
Deacs89 said:
I am against torture - I believe in enhanced interrogation. It is a fine line and a slippery slope. It is one i am comfortable trying to balance and support no matter who the president is. Lets see how deplorable these drone strikes become when and if a repub takes office.
Click to expand...

I don't know what you consider ok "enhanced interrogation" but I'm ~75 pages into the report and I haven't seen many things in there that I wouldn't consider torture if it was the Vietnamese doing it to American POWs.
 
MysteryMen said:
I don't know what you consider ok "enhanced interrogation" but I'm ~75 pages into the report and I haven't seen many things in there that I wouldn't consider torture if it was the Vietnamese doing it to American POWs.
Click to expand...

You made it 74 pages farther than 99.9% of Americans.
 
MysteryMen said:
I don't know what you consider ok "enhanced interrogation" but I'm ~75 pages into the report and I haven't seen many things in there that I wouldn't consider torture if it was the Vietnamese doing it to American POWs.
Click to expand...

Which country are we at war with in the "war on terror?"
 
Deacs89 said:
I am against torture - I believe in enhanced interrogation. It is a fine line and a slippery slope. It is one i am comfortable trying to balance and support no matter who the president is. Lets see how deplorable these drone strikes become when and if a repub takes office.
Click to expand...

Deacfreak07 said:
This is about as Orwellian as it gets.
Click to expand...

Yes. After "this is what the Gestapo said," my next thought on reading 8XDeac's #BlazeingHotTake on torture was:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers....

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible....The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top