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I'm close to losing my patience with you, SignyM. I said primarily psychological

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Originally posted by citizen:
Isn't all torture primarily psychological?

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Personally, I think psychological and physical torture are too intertwined to distinguish. [...] So why distinguish?

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Originally posted by citizen:
A big, perhaps largest, component of any torture is fear. In torture based around physical pain it's fear of pain. All torture uses fear to push a person beyond their psychological coping mechanisms, in essence causing a psychological breakdown. What's going on in the victim of waterboarding is exactly the same as what's happening in the victim of any other type of torture.

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Originally posted by Geezer:

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Originally posted by chrisisall:
You made yourself sound like a genuine fool there, please retract it, okay?

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Take it up with Mr. Hitchens, who wrote it for Vanity Fair.

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Originally posted by chrisisall:
My you're clever. Not quite clever enough to avoid a knuckle sandwich next time I see you on the street, though...

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Originally posted by GinoBiffaroni:

Actually I was comparing the American-Fascists to the Cardassians

but whatever

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
You guys get so hung up on the most trivial things sometimes.

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
Good people have to do bad things sometimes, but when you start planning the bad things, writing up procedures and talking to your lawyers about liability, you've crossed the line.

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
If you're right, Geezer, the loss of our moral standing in the world seems a pretty steep price to pay just to drum up a little personal fear in this or that detainee, doesn't it?

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You call Hitchens' article a horror story? Do you think he's exaggerating? Putting some kind of sensational spin on something which is in fact rather benign?

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It troubles me that people do carry around preformed opinions on all this stuff. Kinda makes one wonder what the point of discussion is.

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:
Going hands-on in an interrogation is the surest sign of absolute incompetence, and without a doubt the best way to flood your intel base with fictional trash spouted just to make the torture stop until the whole damn thing is useless.

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Originally posted by Geezer:
I suspect that a lot of the people who believe the US has lost its moral standing in the world due to the few reported instances of waterboarding - and due to the fact that we don't immediately repudiate and ban any aggressinve interrogation methods - probably didn't have too good an opinion of America's moral standing in the first place.

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Originally posted by SergeantX:
Why do you think we're so fucking upset by all this? Because we think America is evil? I think you are smart enough to realize that its exactly the opposite.

I love my country and I love the fact that we pretty much wrote the book on standing up for the dignity of the individual. But when I see fear driving so many of us, so easily, toward the tactics of those we've despised, it makes me want to vomit. How can you not see this??

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If the only way to defend our country is to bathe ourselves in the evil we claim to abhor, then there's nothing left to defend. It's already lost. Fortunately, that's not the only way (it won't work anyway) - we can regain the moral high ground. But we have to quit pretending that the path we're on is infallible.

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This ain't got shit to do with getting information, it's got everything to do with creating terror amongst those who oppose us, right on the same level as suicide bombing their elementary schools or lopping heads off and stoning people, the goal is obviously to terrorise an opponent, and the hypocrisy of it is so damned apalling that no one dares mention it.

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Originally posted by GinoBiffaroni:
There Are Four Lights........

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Originally posted by Geezer:
On the world-wide stage, I think most of the 'US has lost its moral standing over waterboarding' folks don't think we have any moral standing anyway.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Exactly. And Geezer even avows to that, and others sagely nod their heads... "Yes, yes... I can see how terrorizing people with a few examples will make it easier for us in the end."

Most have so implicitly accepted the notion that we SHOULD be terrorizing people that it makes good sense to them.

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Originally posted by chrisisall:
...but at least it wasn't POLICY!!!! Get it???
For an American President to officially sanction TORTURE is SHAMEFUL. I takes us down even more than some more destructive & deadly covert stuff!
It's us saying " Yeah, we bad, wanna f**k wit us now, dog?" We're acknowledging that we're the biggest, baddest bully on the block, and THAT is what disgusts me so about this subject.

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Originally posted by Geezer:
Fourth, nobody's waterboarding any more, per their statements, and very few folk ever were. We didn't go too far down that road before deciding it was a bad idea. The waterboarding has stopped. Rejoice! The beating of the dead horse, on the other hand...

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Originally posted by chrisisall:
For an American President to officially sanction TORTURE is SHAMEFUL.

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Originally posted by SergeantX:
But I don't recall my nation ever being so brazen and proud of it's mistakes.

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Originally posted by citizen:
Well, if they did it in the 1800's...

Though there's no actual mention of torture there.

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It is estimated that from 1862–1865, more than 6,000 Confederate prisoners died from disease, starvation, and the bitter cold winters (although as many as 1,500 were reported as "unaccounted" for). The largest number of prisoners held at any one time was 12,000 in December 1864. Accounts vary as to precise numbers. According to 80 Acres of Hell, a television documentary produced by the A&E Network and the The History Channel, the reason for the uncertainty is that many records were intentionally destroyed after the war. The documentary also alleges that, for a period of time, the camp contracted with an unscrupulous undertaker who sold some of the bodies of Confederate prisoners to medical schools and had the rest buried in shallow graves without coffins. Some were even dumped in Lake Michigan only to wash up on its shores. Many, however, were initially buried in unmarked pauper's graves in Chicago's City Cemetery (located on the site of today's Lincoln Park), but in 1867 were reinterred at what is now known as Confederate Mound in Oak Woods Cemetery (5 miles south of the former Camp Douglas).

Nobody was ever held accountable for the conditions and actions at Camp Douglas, in fact the only Union general to gain the rank without seeing combat was an overseer of Camp Douglas. This is also to this date the largest mass grave in the western hemisphere, as documented by the book To Die in Chicago.


[edit] Conditions
Henry Whitney Bellows, president of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, wrote to Colonel Hoffman his superior after visiting the camp: "Sir, the amount of standing water, unpoliced grounds, of foul sinks, of unventilated and crowded barracks, of general disorder, of soil reeking miasmatic accretions, of rotten bones and emptying of camp kettles, is enough to drive a sanitarian to despair. I hope that no thought will be entertained of mending matters. The absolute abandonment of the spot seems to be the only judicious course, I do not believe that any amount of drainage would purge that soil loaded with accumulated filth or those barracks fetid with two stories of vermin and animal exhalations. Nothing but fire can cleanse them." (in the documentary 80 Acres of Hell).

According to the History Channel documentary, the commander before Sweet imposed the following harsh conditions: 3oz daily meat portions, sitting naked in the winter, crippling sittings on a sawhorse device, and beating or shooting of those trying to circumvent food rations — even, for example, to punish the eating of snow. [1]

During Colonel B.J. Sweet's command of Camp Douglas, he used reduced food rations — removing vegetables and decreasing the 3oz daily meat portions — to control the prison population and reduce escape attempt numbers. The reduced rations increased instances of diseases such as scurvy and helped to increase mortality rates. Sweet rewarded guards for shooting prisoners, restricted prisoner movement, and enforced nightly quiet hours. Acting on rumors of a pre-election Camp Douglas Conspiracy to break prisoners free, Sweet extends martial law from the blocks surrounding Camp Douglas to the city of Chicago and arrests about a hundred citizens suspected of treason (reference: 80 Acres of Hell).

Prisoners were tortured to try to extract information. Prisoners were hung by their thumbs or forced to ride the "wooden horse" or "mule", with weight hung on their feet to make the experience more painful (reference: 80 Acres of Hell).

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Originally posted by SergeantX:
I haven't seen any clarity or conviction in this regard. Given that this policy was approved, even promoted, at the highest levels, it needs to be disavowed there as well. When that happens, and when the tools who pursued this policy in the first place are removed from office, I'll rejoice.

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Well, first off I never said we SHOULD be "terrorizing" people, just that the government probably thought the potential threat of waterboarding was of some use.... I suspect that US intelligence agencies have gotten more mileage, interrogation-wise, out of seeming ready to waterboard folk than they ever have in the few reported instances of waterboarding ....Waterboarding obviously tripped it for you. Didn't quite reach that level for me... {or} Lincoln

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Originally posted by Geezer:
Link doesn't like ending with a ).

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Originally posted by Geezer:
Stop and think about this statement for a moment, Sarge. Do you really consider waterboarding a few folk, none of whom dies, as being superior in brazen evil to the killing fields of Cambodia, the gas chambers of the Nazis, the 60 million or so killed in various Soviet terror campaigns, Rwanda, Sudan, etc.?

It's almost like you want us to be the most evil. Why is that?

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Originally posted by Geezer:
Do you really consider waterboarding a few folk, none of whom dies, as being superior in brazen evil to the killing fields of Cambodia, the gas chambers of the Nazis, the 60 million or so killed in various Soviet terror campaigns, Rwanda, Sudan, etc.?

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Originally posted by Geezer:

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Originally posted by Geezer:
Do you really consider waterboarding a few folk, none of whom dies, as being superior in brazen evil to the killing fields of Cambodia, the gas chambers of the Nazis, the 60 million or so killed in various Soviet terror campaigns, Rwanda, Sudan, etc.?

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And just so you don't think I'm picking on foreigners, How about the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Trail of Tears, Lincoln's suspension of Habeus Corpus, Jim Crow, the Black Hills, Hawaii, internment of Japanese-Americans, Montgomery, the Bay of Pigs, etc.

What makes waterboarding so much worse than these things?

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Originally posted by Geezer:
It's almost like you want us to be the most evil. Why is that?

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Originally posted by citizen:
If your yard stick is the most fucked up people you can find, more power to you

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Originally posted by Geezer:
January. Can we give the dead horse a break then?

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Originally posted by SergeantX:
Don't fling the America-hater crap in my face. I never said we were as evil as the KGB or the Nazis.

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We can't just up on that, we can't be afraid to criticize of our leaders and their decisions because of some misguided "for us or against us" demagoguery.

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January. Can we give the dead horse a break then?

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Originally posted by Geezer:
Sorry Cit, I didn't mean to slight Olde Blighty.

How about conquering half the world, setting native americans against unarmed women and children during the Revolution, massive nightime incendary bombing of population centers, a few little atrocities during the Indian colonial period, the treatment of politicial prisoners in Northern Ireland (through several governments from both sides of the aisle).

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Originally posted by Geezer:

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Originally posted by SergeantX:
Don't fling the America-hater crap in my face. I never said we were as evil as the KGB or the Nazis.

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"But I don't recall my nation ever being so brazen and proud of it's mistakes... Like the Nazi SS, or the Soviet KGB, we now wield a reputation for evil as a tool for political control."

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You say it's the most shameful thing ever, and that it puts us in the same category as the worst in the world.

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Originally posted by Geezer:

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Originally posted by SergeantX:
But I don't recall my nation ever being so brazen and proud of it's mistakes.

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Stop and think about this statement for a moment, Sarge. Do you really consider waterboarding a few folk, none of whom dies, as being superior in brazen evil to the killing fields of Cambodia, the gas chambers of the Nazis, the 60 million or so killed in various Soviet terror campaigns, Rwanda, Sudan, etc.?

It's almost like you want us to be the most evil. Why is that?

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