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PollWhat should the government do about ailing financial institutions? Nothing, except to back off and get out—as any Objectivist knows, intervention is treating the disease with the disease 85% Intervene judiciously—enough to avert a catastrophe that is otherwise imminent 3% Intervene massively—as it's doing 2% Nationalize the whole economy and be done with it. Bring on the USSA! 2% Something else (specify) 8% Total votes: 59
 Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell
 Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
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Hitchens Gets Waterboarded Submitted by Jameson on Tue, 2008-07-08 12:27.
Christopher Hitchens put his body on the line to experience for himself the trials of Waterboarding. He survived it - just - and wrote about his terrifying experience in a Vanity Fair article entitled, "Believe Me, It’s Torture." "You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted."
Despite the trauma, Hitchens deemed his 'torturers' a highly honorable lot, part of the S.E.R.E. (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training team who teach U.S. soldiers how to survive interrogation. "This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution." Personally, as a Westerner, I feel no guilt on behalf of the men who engage in such practices against those who were picked up on the battlefield and shipped to Gitmo. As Hitchens mentions, Malcolm Nance, an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence, has publicly denounced the practice. Frankly, I don't give a damn. As Christopher says: "As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint."
In his article Hitchens repeatedly tells us how ashamed he was for only having lasted a few seconds of Waterboarding. He really shouldn't be embarrassed... he went for a second round to try and better his time. I ask you, is there a more courageous journalist breathing in this fucked up, twisted world than Christopher Hitchens?
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The request for a distinction
The request for a distinction to be made by the other poster on this thread.
Scott DeSalvo
www.desalvolaw.com
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Go for what, Scotty?
...
Go for it. We're listening.
Go for it. We're listening.
Scott DeSalvo
www.desalvolaw.com
FREE Injury Report and CD Reveal the Secrets You Need to Know to Protect Your RIGHTS!
Mindy
the U.S. is doing that ~ and sensibly so. This is an asymmetrical war and it's the enemy who have blurred the lines, fighting it undercover, using their families as shields. Wearing a uniform distinguishes the citizen from the soldier, a convention for which al Qaeda clearly has no respect. I don't hear the people complaining about the inevitable mix ups either (until they end up in Gitmo), but perhaps that's why they finally pushed the bastards out of Baghdad.
And welcome to SOLO, Mindy! How did you get here?
Distinction
Doesn't there need to be a distinction here between martial and domestic laws and processes?
If I were captured on a battlefield
carrying a gun and a Qur'an ~ and not shooting at the bad guys, I would accept responsibility for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and take the waterboarding until the good guys realised I was safe.
Having said that, I believe there are more effective interrogation techniques than waterboarding. I read an article somewhere, by a ex-rendition interrogator in Egypt, who used PSYOPS, a sophisticated good cop, bad cop programme that slowly gets the towel heads to flip. Takes a lot longer, but I understand the information they gather is far more reliable.
In the meantime, cut the moral equivalency; waterboarding ain't no electrodes to the gonads.
How about...
blowing the guys brains out and moving on to the next one?
Finding out where they are and blowing the piss out of them, their families, their friends, and their mullah? Literally siping them off the face of the earth if we have some intel that they are involved?
Seems the last we heard of Momar Quadaffi was when we blew the fuck out of his home and killed one of his sons. We need to teach these mullahs that it is not just their 17 year old brainwashed martry's asses on the line--it is their ass, their family's ass, their entire neighborhood's ass, their entire bloodline's ass.
How about putting an affirmative duty on THEM to prove to US that they are not secretly or otherwise supporting jihad--an America and abroad, rather than letting them build mosque after mosque?
How about building more nuclear reactors and putting our finest minds on better battery storage technology, and moving our entire economy off oil and the internal combustion engine?
How about a stated zero tolerance policy for Muslims, due to the difference IN KIND of their ideology?
We can disagree Richard, that's fine. I just do not know of any factual scenario like I posited and you seem to be relying on to support torture. There are just no examples of what you suggest on the record to justify such practices. But there are any number of examples of what the government does with new and "limited" authority given, particularly when it is administered by frustrated 18 year olds with faulty supervision, and no effective supervision of their commanders.
Pending the demonstration of one actual circumstance ever that some jihadi held the keys to an operation in his pea sized brain which required torture to uncover, I think the dangers I outlined are the VASTLY greater danger, especially with the totalitarian direction Ameerica is heading.
I have watched those beheadings on the internet, too. They make me heart-sick that human beings are capable of such ignoble evil. America, the shining light of humanity, must stand for better. Your call for torture has not met the burden of justifying besmirching my lovely lady of liberty.
Scott DeSalvo
www.desalvolaw.com
FREE Injury Report and CD Reveal the Secrets You Need to Know to Protect Your RIGHTS!
Sorry, but I can't agree
Sorry, but I can't agree with you Scott. If you are dealing with animals of the likes who beheaded Daniel Pearl, and if you know they hold information that could spare the lives of people who matter (because let's face it, the lives of those animals don't matter) then I say torture the cunts if that's what it will take to save the lives that matter. That is not torture as an end in itself. That is not debasement for the sake of debasement. That is simply facing what might possibly be a harsh reality. If it's the only option left, then it's the only option left. The alternative is to what? Shrug your shoulders and go, oh well, he's not going to tell us what we need to know. Not much I can do about that so I'll go put the jug on and put my feet up?
Torture is ignoble, and
Torture is ignoble, and civilized people do not do it and should not condone it.
Yes. Well said, as with the 'slippery slope' argument.
No
If America is 'certain' then it may torture and commit any atrocity against a captive? Certain by what standard?
No matter what the standard, it will be a standard used by men and policed by no one, let's face it. So, no, no torture in America. And certainly no willy nilly torture on the hopes that someone might know something.
Kill them if they are captured and a danger. But torture is so ignoble that no civilized country should approve of it.
So what's next, the hypothetical? "What if we had a guaranteed proven jihadi who was guaranteed proven to be plotting to detonate a nuke in the Empire State Building in one hour and the jihadi was guaranteed to know all the operational details and we were guaranteed that torture was the only way to get the information and it was guaranteed-certain that this information was bona fide the only way to prevent the calamity?"
First, I'd say, put away the Tom Clancy fiction. Second, who is giving us all of these guarantees? I am telling you, if every man were a John Galt, then I guess you might possibly get me to approve. But every man is not John Galt. Once you give your seal of approval, you have taken your first step upon the slippery slope of non-supervision of government activities, and the expansion of a policy and the context shifting which is a hallmark of our government here in the US. Once we all accept torture in one context, we will direct our attention elsewhere as its use creeps ever wider, or we will be unaware that it is creeping ever wider, until we will wake up one day, and waterboarding, a "non-torture" will be an every day tool in the local police department.
Torture is ignoble, and civilized people do not do it and should not condone it.
Scott DeSalvo
www.desalvolaw.com
FREE Injury Report and CD Reveal the Secrets You Need to Know to Protect Your RIGHTS!
What if you have certainty?
What if you have certainty? Is it possible to have torture that isn't subhuman and animalistic, or is there only one flavour? You make it sound as if torture is an end in itself.
"The notion that some jihadi might know about some operation which might cause the death of innocents? Too many mights to devolve into subhuman animalistic torture."
Of course waterboarding is torture.
And of course America has disgraced itself by allowing this and other torture of captured jihadis.
Piss all over their Koran. Feed them bare sustenance.
But torture? This is not the sort of thing America does. Or ought to do.
The notion that some jihadi might know about some operation which might cause the death of innocents?
Too many mights to devolve into subhuman animalistic torture.
Hitchens is a rock star.
Scott DeSalvo
www.desalvolaw.com
FREE Injury Report and CD Reveal the Secrets You Need to Know to Protect Your RIGHTS!
That's what I'm saying!
Jameson -- Your observation about the Pentagon inappropriately releasing jihadis proves my point. But I think neither you, nor virtually any other Objectivist, nor virtually anyone else on this earth, understands this. Without adherence to objective law, the truth goes undetermined. Without trials, justice dies. The innocent aren't freed and the guilty aren't executed.
For you, and everyone else, there are evidently only two false and absurd alternatives: torturing the innocent and freeing the guilty. Almost no-one on earth, including Objectivists, seems to have the ability to see a third option. Worst of all, maybe: I seem to have no ability to persuade you or anyone else of what is, in fact, blazingly obvious.
I seem to live in a planetary madhouse. No-one on earth supports an objective, efficacious, accurate search for truth and justice regarding the suspected jihadis. The opposition to "rule by law, not by men" is evidently total. Even hard-line Objectivists are hard-line Nazis. This seems to be the nature of my ridiculous, idiotic, depraved planet.
I'm confused
"...any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down."
Christopher Hitchens appeared on BBC Newsnight last night and said he considered waterboarding to be torture and that it should be stopped.
KZ
I think we're all interested in finding out if these prisoners are jihadis, but asking them nicely in a court of law probably won't work. In fact it appears even waterboarding them has its limitations; this Pentagon fact sheet lists released prisoners that have since been killed or recaptured on the battlefield.
Innocent or Guilty?
Jason Q' -- Based on my reading of their above comments, neither Hitchens nor Jameson seems to care whether the imprisoned "terrorists" and "worst of the worst" are really jihadis, and neither calls for trials. Many captured innocents have already been freed by the US government -- but not before being tortured for years. Many more innocents surely remain. Why not follow the law, and search a bit for truth and justice, before water-boarding the suspects?
Prima (in your) Facie
"...or in the possession of weaponry in a warzone?"
Exactly, Gregster!
The Need For A New Enlightenment
"..only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of "progress," in a straight line. We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection. "Know yourself," said the Greeks, gently suggesting the consolations of philosophy. To clear the mind for this project, it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it."
Just finished his "god Is Not Great. How Religion Poisons Everything." I highly recommend the book.
Kyrel - Did the Americans find the suspects behind their local eaterie, or in the possession of weaponry in a warzone? I will go for the latter for now.
"And why does no-one --
"And why does no-one -- including Objectivists -- care in the least whether the water-boarded are innocent or guilty?"
Care to expand on this???
Empty Discussion
As always, no-one on earth -- including Objectivists -- seems to make a distinction between the innocent and the guilty. I guess it's all an irrelevant consideration.
Pretty much all these folks at Guantanamo and Abu Graib are suspected jihadis. It would be nice if we could determine if they are or are not jihadi murderers. One way to do that would be a trial -- even a really brief and primitive one.
Call me crazy, but I actually think it matters whether or not all these prisoners are innocent or guilty. I personally sometimes distinguish between these two categories of people(!). And rather than endless "interrogations" of suspected jihadis, I think the innocent should be freed and the guilty executed.
Why is everyone so desperately eager to "discuss" water-boarding, and express outrage one way or the other? And why does no-one -- including Objectivists -- care in the least whether the water-boarded are innocent or guilty?