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Tortured Fallout: It wasn't supposed to happen like this
Submitted by Lonestar Bill on Sun, 05/17/2009 - 14:13
When Obama was elected president and the democrats increased their control over congress by a wide margin last November, many on the left envisioned a delightful scene unfolding:
Picture it:
A federal courtroom, filled with reporters, foreign press, a presiding judge, and at the defendants' table, two well known figures in bright orange jumpsuits-Dick Cheney and George Bush.
"Would the defendants like to make a statement before I sentence them?" the judge asks. Bush looks around the room thoroughly confused, unaware of the gravity of his situation. Cheney, his arrogant sneer replaced by a look of anguish and despair, rises to speak, his leg irons rattling in the silent courtroom. "Your honor I would like to beg this court and the American people for mercy in this case . . .we were simply trying to protect . . ." The judge cuts him off. "Silence! The court will not hear of your lame attempt to defend the contemptuous actions of your administration!" Cheney slinks back into his chair.
The judge then reads the sentence "you will be confined to federal prison for the rest of you natural lives . . ." The crowd gasps as the two are led from the court by armed marshals. Justice! Sweet justice!!!! Church bells ring as people gather to in town squares across the land . . .
But that's not exactly how its played out . . .
And of course, it never was going to play out that way. Trumped up charges of war crimes against political opponents works well in Banana Republics, but not in the United States of America.
And now we are finding out that some of the very democrats yelling the loudest about "Truth Commissions" and "War Criminals" were indeed in positions of power and well aware -and even supportive- of the enhanced interrogation techniques they now are so appalled by. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are getting some very bad press as they try to find wiggle room foir their past positions on and knowlege of the issue. Pelosi's newsconference was hard to watch as she twisted and turned and generally looked guilty.
The truth it is said, will set you free. Partial truths will get the Speaker into very hot water.
(2 votes)
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Comments
You do realize, don't you?
You guys do realize, don't you, that most of the "active" left, the people that follow the news and participate in local organizing and activism, don't give two sh*ts about Nancy Pelosi. The only people who care about Pelosi are Republicans, who have turned it up to 11 recently because they can't go after Obama because he's too personally popular. Pelosi and Reid mean bupkis, this is Obama's party now. My parents and most of the people you'll meet on the street couldn't name the current Speaker and SML if their lives depended on it. If Nancy has to take a dive to get a Truth Commission going that lays the groundwork for prosecutions this is one progressive who's not going to lose a wink of sleep over it.
We tortured people. Most of them were bad people, some of them weren't though. But it doesn't matter if they were the worst of the worst, We're a nation of laws, and torture is against the law. All of this posturing on both sides is just stalling the inevitable. There's a LOT of dirty laundry that's about to be aired, and there's nothing political about the drive for it. This is a thousand times worse than Watergate. It goes all the way up. But does the buck stop with Cheney or Bush? It's going to come down to that eventually.
Here's Cheney, "throwing [Bush] under the bus" as the RedStaters are so fond of saying, on Face the Nation last week:
How sad for your parents
That they don't know who is third in line for the presidency. Of course given your general lack of knowlege demonstrated here, not particularlly suprising.
Way to go
Very nice, pick out one comment, inflate it's importance, and focus entirely on it to the exclusion of all other information. Pretty much par for the course and what I expect from reading your comments here, Billy.
How about addressing the substance of my response instead of taking shots at my folks or against me personally? What I said wasn't a knock against my parents or the man on the street, it's a sad reality. And guess what, the GOP's ignorance of reality is about to bite them in the ass. Most people can't be bothered to know who these people are because most of them aren't as obsessed with partisan politics as you or I. Nancy Pelosi has about as much relevance as Sam Rayburn. When she's gone or stepped down or voted out or whatever she'll be quickly forgotten. You're building her up to be so much more important than she actually is. You have MUCH bigger problems on your hands. The Republican party's last president and vice president are about to go through what promises to be a shocking and embarassing airing of criminal and unethical behavior. I doubt the party will survive it, honestly, but there's really no precedent on this time scale. Their chances of getting away with it were dashed with the dawn of the information age.
It's sad, really, and quite troubling, because the potential result of one-party control by the Democrats isn't good for anyone, absolute power etcetera etcetera...
Too bad 4u...
...that the American People Support "Torture."
I've said it before and I'll say it again, some people (incl. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al Sheibh (sp?) and Abu Zubeidah (sp?)) deserve to be tortured.
And this doesn't even mention the fact that waterboarding isn't torture.
torture only bad people
"Torture just the bad people"
That does seem to be where the right is on torture. If we were to accept the premise that it's moral/ethical to only torture bad people (which I don't), we're still left with one major problem. Where does "bad" start? Sure for the Khalid Sheikh Mohammad's its easy. If life were always that easy, we wouldn't need lawyers or courts. The whole point of laws, lawyers and courts is when it's NOT clear. At some point it will become nebulous as you have to decide who's good and who's bad. So the question then becomes, what error rate is acceptable? How many "good" people will you have to torture to get to 1 bad one? Is that ratio acceptable? Is that ethical? Is that moral? So until you weigh the negative consequences of that with whatever value you get from torturing bad people, you're not being a serious thinker.
Very well
If your point is that Nancy Pelosi is unimportant, I disagree. She is a top ranking democrat and Speaker of the House. If you say she is irrelevant because most Americans don't know or care who she is, you are wrong. She can and is causing great distraction from the Obama agenda with this sideshow, and has weakened the chances of hanging the "torture" issue solely on the GOP.
Are you kidding? Pelosi sacrifice her role as Speaker in order to clear the way for Truth Commissions? You may think her role is insignificant, but I can assure you she does not. She would be one of the one's going to jail!
They are? When? In what format? The whole point is that Pelosi, Reid, Schumer et al knew what was going on and either approved explicitly or by not objecting. Now they are as involved as the former administration as far as any "Truth Commissions" go.
Add to that the fact that Nancy Pelosi has called out the CIA for lying, and the CIA has denied it. This leaves Obama with a lying CIA director or a lying House Speaker. Now he has to deal with the fallout from that thanks to her lack of forethought. He wants no part of the mess she has created, and will continue to distance himself.
Soon we will be hearing "lets move forward" on this whole issue.
more torturous discussions
1. Actually, Republicans haven't done much of anything to get Pelosi into trouble. Republicans have been saying for months that Pelosi knew about waterboarding all the way back in 2002; it's only recently that Pelosi got herself into trouble by lying and accusing the CIA of committing crimes. Republicans didn't make her give 3 different accounts of the 2002 briefings. It's weird - Democrats completely control Washington and yet you still blame Republicans.
2. You say "we tortured people". Define torture. You can't do it in anything resembling an objective way. Every definition that has been offered - in international treaties, in our own laws, in case law, in the so-called "torture memos" - is vague and open to interpretation. Torture is more an emotional rather than an intellectual concept, which is, of course, the whole problem with the "truth commission" nonsense. We have the former opposition party, now in charge, who are (or, in Pelosi's case, claim falsely to be) morally outraged over torture, wanting to "uncover the truth" about the unpopular former president, using an emotionally laden definition of torture. So what exactly is to stop the "truth commission" from degenerating into a witch-hunt? Absolutely nothing. Witch-hunts are the exact opposite of the rule of law.
3. Oh, and if you think the desire for "truth commissions" isn't at least partly motivated by electoral politics, then I have a bridge in New York to sell you.
4. If you really want to see the rule of law executed, a concept with which I am in full agreement, then the remedy is simple: prosecute the alleged torturers using existing law and existing courts. Don't prosecute lawyers who offered legal opinions on torture - they didn't torture anyone. Don't prosecute politicians who made decisions based on those opinions - again, they didn't inflict torture onto anyone. This should be obvious - you prosecute the person who committed the crime. But the fact that the political left focuses so little of their energy on the low-level CIA operatives who may have committed some crime, and focus so much of their energies on the lawyers and politicians who were never even in the same room as a waterboard, tells me againt that the desire for the "rule of law" is more of an expression of BDS than anything else.
define torture?
why fucking bother? we have 100 dead prisoners on our hands. murdered by our troops. I don't care whether or not they were tortured, their deaths are a violation of their human rights.
We prosecuted Goebbels, even though he didn't kill a Single Jew. We have laws on the books for lawyers who act irresponsibly, including disbarment. Why not use all the laws we've got, and throw the book at everyone? Including pelosi!
The low level grunts objected to the use of torture. They said it was actively harming the intelligence efforts. Besides, the grunts are still USEFUL. Aka getting rid of them would do yet more harm to an already decimated CIA. The lawyers? Nobody gives two shits about the lawyers, nor the higher level CIA operatives who engineered the torture.
Riiiiiiight...
...because, you know, political witchunts against our intelligence agencies didn't, like, directly lead to September 11th, 2001 or anything.
no, no they don't.
Political witchhunts like drawing FBI agents away from actual counterterrorism to rifle through Clinton's file cabinets? that's what causes 9-11's.
My cited source on this is a Republican -- David Brin (he's got more intel contacts than I do).
Umm, not to point out the historical record but they do hurt.
You may not be old enough to recall, let alone mature enough to read and learn, but the FrankChurch's post-Watergate work on destroying and hamstringing the intelligence AND law enforcement communities directly lead to the failure of the Clinton Administration 20 yrs later to effect meaningful intelligence gathering of human assets in the world. Even with countless struggles and yeoman efforts by the Reagan Administration, our intell community was still being hampered by the post-Watergate silliness and that very mindset (typified by Carter appt Stansfield Turner) lead inexorably to the failure to see Islamic terrorism as anything but a policing matter... we paid dearly for that failure.
Clinton had his enemies list and the high priestess, Hillary, was calling the shots on the end game of using federal intel assets to coerce political allies instead of using those assets to get real, human, actionable intell.
As Stansfield Turner --a dys-patriot if there ever was one-- once said, "I don't think Americans are a good source of intell" when it came to the utility of domestic spying... because, to Stansfield, he couldn't imagine a world where Americans would be engaged in treasonable actions against the Republic. Idiot.
FISA and FISC exists because of FrankChurch's over-reach and over-reaction. That lone Democrat did almost as much as JimmineyCricketCarter to undermine American intell operations for a generation or more.
Check the record. Learn. The seeds of failure from 9-11 can be best laid directly at Democrat Frank Church's and Democrat Stansfield Turner's feet.
What's Your Point?
People need to go to prison over this. A lot of people. If some of those people are now members of Congress, I'm sure it would have a positive effect on the members who do not accompany them.
Whether or not Pelosi "knew" about it does not make torture any less of a crime, and we know that this crime took place. We don't know whether or not Pelois was an accesory or an accessory after the fact, but isn't that why we investigate stuff? So let's investigate the heck out of this despicable crime and make sure it never stains our history again.
Best way to do that is to make sure that people go to prison for this one.
Would You Like Some Cheese With that Whine?!?
n/t
congressional crimes
So, which crimes do you think members of Congress are guilty of?
I haven't made any accusations
"If some of those people are members of Congress," is not an accusation, it is a demand that we find this stuff out. They could be accessories before or after the fact, but I don't think they performed any actual torture, any more than the lawyers who papered it over.
I'm in less doubt about Yoo, Bybee, Bradbury et al. They should go to prison, and Bybee should be impeached so he doesn't get to collect his Federal salary from a cell.
crimes of lawyers
Why should they go to jail? What crimes - be specific - do you think they are guilty of?
willfully disregarding established legislative law,
treaties and obligations, and established case law. Their treatment of Zelikow's argument shows clearly that they were acting in bad-faith (this is what legal ethics professors are saying, at any rate).
I am not a lawyer. I do not know what the statutory legislation is for breaking these laws. I'm hoping we can come up with something, however. Because the violation of the Geneva Convention is properly tried in the International Criminal Court, under the broad banner War Crimes (again, I am not a lawyer. there are specific statutory punishments that have been agreed, and presumably further cemented in the last sixty years by case law).
Does this make sense? It's rather unfair to ask a physicist to tell you what specific laws are germane to criminal misconduct, don't you think? ;-)
witch hunting the lawyers
Thank you for your moment of honesty. You think they OUGHT to go to jail, and it's just a matter of trying to pin a case on them. Convict, then accuse.
This is precisely the witch-hunter's mentality that I'm warning against.
No, it's not. If you think it is, then perhaps you should have a firmer understanding of why individuals ought to go to jail before you start declaring that they should be residing in prison.
they Broke the Law.
that's enough for me.
It takes years to get a license in law. I'm not going to spend those years getting up to date on everything. It satisifies me that the legal ethics profs think that the lawyers did something wrong, in clear bad faith.
If there's truly NO way to prosecute someoen who breaks the law, well, I'll sit my lily ass down and get started writing the law. But I highly doubt that's the case.
the law
Which law did they break? You can't answer this because you don't care. You just want them to go to jail anyway.
I believe you were so kind as to quote them
Geneva conventions among others. I don't need to quote them to have read about them.
You may disagree with my idea that they broke the law. That's fine, in fact, it's rather normal. But I do care that they broke the law. I'm glad that America has laws against torture.
lawyers and torture
So, please explain to us how you think Yoo, Bybee and the other lawyers broke the laws against torture.
they were guilty of gross malpractice.
which is at the very least punishable by revocation of their license to practice law.
At the most? Civil charges for failing to do their damn job.
But let's pull them up on FOIA charges as well, and obstructing other legal cases...
I don't know the actual law, but I'm fairly certain that they crafted, in bad faith, deliberately one-sided, partisan rulings. The OLC is supposed to be nonpartisan and objective, they were neither. There should be some consequences for this -- I don't know the actual law. Maybe there's no consequence for deliberately not doing your job properly. But that seems odd. It seems more likely that deliberately doing wrong things in the name of the government is punishable by some statute or another. ("abuse of governmental authority?")
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/68315.html
"The (al Qaida-Iraq) links go back," Cheney said. "We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it."
These are Cheney's own words. I'm not sure what you can prosecute him with, in terms of outright manufacturing evidence through illicit and illegal means. Still, I think there should be something. "Conspiracy to commit..." is a term of art that is rising to my mind.
I made my point
you do not make one. But, please, by all means take a shot . . .
Whether Nancy Pelosi knew or not...
...is immaterial to the discussion of the punishment for commit this crime. All it does it possibly add another person to the list who has blood on their hands.
Oh its material
If it looks like Pelosi would be the subject of the "investigation" rather than the director of the "investigation", watch how fast this entire issue will disappear.
This was not torture and these were trumped up charges to try to get to Bush/Cheney. I do not accept your premise that a crime was committed by anyone.
Please
Do not insult my intelligence. What is it about being chained in a standing position for over a week that isn't "torture." Why did we hang Japanese soldiers who performed the exact same waterboarding "techniques" on our people? At least a hundred prisoners DIED under our treatment of them, several of whom were beaten to death.
You need to get up to speed on this. Try the Taguba Report, from which this is taken:
As a patriotic American and a United States Army veteran, I find this stuff disgusting. Your Patriotism may vary.
The Republican Position can
The Republican Position can be summarized as follows:
1. If it was torture then it was Nancy Pelosi's fault.
2. But it was not torture so Nancy Pelosi is a liar.
the myth of japanese waterboarding
Let us put this one myth to rest, shall we? We did not execute anyone for the SOLE crime of waterboarding. Yukio Asano, the Japanese officer that Ted Kennedy thundered about on the floor of the U.S. Senate, was convicted of 15 years hard labor for the following:
It was a bit more than just waterboarding.
Also, for the record...
...when the Japs "waterboarded" our boys, they used saltwater and did it for faaar longer than 40 seconds at a time.
seems implausible.
we have recorded seizures and potential braindamage from 40 seconds. perhaps the rate of water was different?
when the Japs "waterboarded"
So if we only pull out ONE fingernail, it isn't torture?
The apologists for the indefensible amaze me. I wonder whether any of them ever went to church.
No form of torture is acceptable, according to our international treaty obligations and federal law signed by Ronald Reagan. Not even "a little" waterboarding. Much less six times a day for a month. Not even a week of being chained in a standing position with loud noises at random intervals, much less the "permitted" eleven days.
Torture is used to extract false confessions when such confessions are necessary, which doesn't say a lot for the credibility of any information obtained that way. Even if torture "worked," which it does not, it is no more moral than cutting off a prisoner's leg to prevent escape. Of course amputation "works" in that regard, but it is no less heinous and reprehensible even though it is effective.
If we oppose those whose morality we find offensive, why would we subscribe to their form of morality?
Are you a Christian? Our Lord was tortured to death by people who had the law on their side. Do you agree with the Pharisees that torturing that troublemaker Jesus was a legitimate and moral act of local government, or do you think there is a Higher Law that prohibits torture under any circumstances, even if the prisoner is as evil as a Tim McVeigh or Charles Manson? Who do YOU think Jesus would torture?
except for the last two
we have documented evidence of US soldiers commiting the same.
Thats a different subject
But, you don't make the case that the situation with the MP's was directed by the White House. In fact, you are making the point that there has already been an investigation and conclusion on this matter. Didn't a high ranking General lose her job over this?Weren't changes made?
What we are discussing here is whether torture was sanctioned or directed by high ranking political officials.
oh the tangled logic on
oh the tangled logic on display. it's like watching a kitten with way too much yarn. the reason it called "enhanced interrogation" is because no one wanted to call it torture. you can cal the guy with the mop and bucket a "sanitation engineer" if you want to but i know a janitor when i see one.
if i want to make you think you're drowning, that's torture. if you actually drawn, that's called murder.
Bush/Cheney did damage to this country for sure, but his greatest crime may have been what they did to the Republican party in particular. They forced the Right to defend the indefensible. And the more you defend it, the worse the party looks to those not already under the ever shrinking tent.
Bush/Cheney took a viable political party and brand and hung from it violations of the Geneva Convention and forces it followers to defend it. and no one on the Right has figured out a way to unbell that cat.
definition of torture
According to you? Okay. According to international treaty?
It's not so clear. If I want to make you think you're drowning not for the purpose of extracting information, but because I'm just a sick bastard, then it's not torture. If I want to make you think you're drowning for just a second or two, then it's not torture because it's not "severe".
According to US law?
So according to US law, if I want to make you think you're drowning, for the purpose of extracting information, but there is no physical harm as a result, and there is no "severe mental pain or suffering" because you do not suffer any "prolonged" harm, then it's not torture. That doesn't make it right, just that it's not torture.
If you think the law ought to be changed, then advocate for it to be changed. But don't suggest that people should be prosecuted for an imaginary crime of torture.
please please please stay with the discussion!
waterboarding is torture by current case law, as established by reagan's doj. quoting legislative law that was cited in the fucking trial is INAPPROPRIATE distraction.
Plus, you do realize we had fucking tracheotomy kits on hand just incase the "attempted drowing" would actually turn into a "real drowning"?
At the point where we are actively inducing seizures via waterboarding, that's severe pain and suffering. At the point where a mentally capable adult is rendered incapable of standing trial, we have induced too much psych suffering. Both of these have actually occurred.
Waterboarding is torture, as established by current case law, that has not been overrided by new legislation.
the discussion
No, RisingTide, YOU stay with the discussion. You and your pals want to claim that the torture debate is all cut-and-dry. It's not. Torture is not easy to define. You blithely throw around half-truths and snippets of facts, relying more on your self-righteous moralizing than on any real case law or international treaty. You want to claim, ipso facto, that waterboarding is always torture. IT IS NOT. I have cited international treaty, criminal code, and given examples. You ignore it all in favor of your moral opinions. You are expressing moral opinions rather than statements of legal fact. That's great, it's a free country and all that. But when you want everyone else in the universe to dance to the tune of your moral judgment and demand that Dick Cheney be thrown in jail because he offended your moral compunction, well, that is where you encounter disagreement.
Oh and by the way, Departments of Justice don't establish case law. You don't know what you are talking about.
And clean up your language.
there were doctors on hand to
there were doctors on hand to make sure people did not die under the "enhanced interrogation". that doesn't strike you as a bit odd?
imagine this scene:
Chemjeff is in custody. They walk you into a room. You see three people. They sit you in a chair and say we want to ask you some questions. You look around the room. They strap you in a chair. One of the men step forward. He tells you not to worry, he's a doctor as he secures a wet towel over your head. The second man begins pouring water in a bucket . . .
are you about to be tortured here?
emotions and torture
I would probably feel like I was being tortured, yes. But here is the thing: are we going to prosecute people based on how we feel about torture, or are we going to prosecute people according to the written law?
If someone raped and killed my sister, I would be angry and I would personally want to go to the murderer and strangle him with my bare hands. Does that mean we should have the death penalty? No.
If someone burned down my house and every possession that I own, I would personally want to shoot the arsonist. Should we execute arsonists by firing squad? No.
If a banker embezzled my life savings and left me penniless, I think I might want to take an axe to his head. Should embezzlement become a capital crime? No.
You seem to want to focus
You seem to want to focus strictly on a fine parsing of the letter of the statutes and conventions, to disregard established case law, and also ask us to ignore the moral and emotional dimensions of our use of these techniques.
I have said here often that I approach this issue with a personal connection because my son serves in the Air Force. So I freely admit I am guilty as charged on the "emotional" front. I am also starting from the same moral position that Repack Rider expresses so well.
My question for you, and all who argue that the totality of the interrogation program does not constitute torture, is whether you would argue as passionately in defense of the Taliban employing these techniques should they capture a U.S. service member?
Is it so clear to you that these techniques are well within moral and legal limits, knowing only what has been revealed to date, that you could look a service member's mother in the eye and tell her that the Taliban were justified in using these methods because their citizens were subjected to attack and they were justified in using them to protect against future attacks, regrettable as her child's suffering has been?
Would you argue passionately against investigation and accountability for alleged Taliban perpetrators? Leaders?
If you tell me that you could look a service member's mother in the eye and defend these techniques used against her child, and would offer no protest to the Taliban actions, then I will at least have to respect your honesty and consistency. If you instead say, "it's not OK for the Taliban to use them, but OK for us" then I'll understand your position is based more on partisan interests than the defensibility of these techniques.
Taliban and Torture
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/1358063/I-was-one-of-the-Talibans-torturers-I-crucified-people.html
I doubt that they had Doctors standing by.
What we did is not torture. We are not dealing with an enemy that is in anyway civil, to their enemies, to their own people, to women in particular. The Taliban tortures as SOP, so I really can't find a starting point to answer your question. There is just no way to equate the U.S. to the Taliban, though I'm sure many will try.
If they did no more than waterboard our soldiers, with a doctor staning by, that would be a small miracle. They are much more likely to mutilate and execute them though.
I respect the nature of your question and the way you pose it, and I'm sure that there are many sleepless nights when your child is serving in the military. I hope he returns safely.
according to independent medical groups
torture was standard operating procedure for American Troops in Iraq. Beatings, nudity, you name it. 100 people were murdered by our troops -- that says that the amount of torture was endemic and pervasive. Because they weren't trying to murder them... one hopes!
The taliban are not very professional torturers. professional ones leave no marks.
Nonsense
Utter nonsense. And then you wonder why only 20% of the electorate is willing to be identified as a Republican.
Clarifying my questions
I re-read my post to be sure I did not refer to the techniques as torture. It would probably be a good idea for me to review the assumptions that underlied my hypothetical and questions:
I do not in any way equate the U.S. with the Taliban or argue that theirs is a civilized society or that they treat even their own people with humanity and dignity. I'm aware of their horrific abuses against women. I don't mind if we substitute a different regime for the hypothetical (Iran, North Korea, etc.), all of which are just as abusive of their own people and as barbarian in their treatment of captives.
I completely agree that the passge you posted is a sickening account of inhumanity. I did notice, though, that it makes no claim the conduct was designed to in any way gather intelligence; it sounds as if it was designed strictly to brutalize for the purpose of enforcing compliance with the regime's demands and for vengeance on those who failed to comply.
What disturbs me is that you seem to be saying that if their methods are more barbarian than ours, our methods are not torture? If the Taliban are brutal in their methods, we are justified in brutality in ours? Because they are inhumane to their own people, we are justified in being inhumane ourselves? An eye for an eye? Two wrongs make a right? Please let me know if I have misunderstood, but I'm just not following how their barbarism is relevant to determining whether our techniques violated our own and international laws, or our own values and ideals.
I hope you and others don't think I'm trying to rely on heartstrings in bringing up my son's service. You're right that sleepless nights go along with having a loved one in the service, as many others here have undoubtedly also experienced. Still, the fact that he may be captured and subjected to any range of techniques doesn't give me any superior standing in defining torture. All I'm asking is that we have the courage to hold ourselves accountable to confront what occurred, so that those who make the sacrifice of service are doing it for a nation that holds itself to its ideals.
torture and emotion
No. What I'm trying to dispel is the myth that we have some sort of double standard with respect to waterboarding, that we have punished people in the past for waterboarding. I'm saying that's false: we have NEVER punished ANYONE for the SOLE crime of waterboarding. I'm not judging whether that's right or wrong, that's just what it is.
With respect to Yukio Asano? Well, considering that we didn't even have laws against torture until the 1990's, then it stands to reason that we didn't charge him with torture when we sentenced him to 15 years' hard labor.
With regard to your son: Thank you, and him, very much for both of your service. It is great that you are both serving your country. But, I'm going to be a bit of a Cruel-Hearted Bastard(TM) now: Yeah, you are playing on people's heartstrings. We simply CANNOT decide issues like this on the basis of people's personal emotions. In the long run, it is an abrogation of justice, a substitution of emotion for rational thought. Incidentally I have the same problems with the death penalty - I think its defenders are too often motivated more by revenge than by fair standards of punishment fitting the crime. I also object to witness impact statements in criminal trials - I don't WANT the jury to be influenced by cryin' momma, because that influence does nothing but sway the jury against making a rational decision.
Question
What makes you think people would get prosecuted only for the waterboardings? As opposed to the say, the deaths of detainees in our custody and other torture as well?
Answer
I don't. Waterboarding is the one everyone is focused on. If someone died in our custody due to neglect or malfeasance, there is a remedy for that; it's called the UCMJ. Regrettably, it's not like it's never happened before. You don't need truth commissions to ferret it out, you don't need the sturm und drang of political theater to punish the offenders. But the point is, torture has a legal definition, and as far as prosecutions go, that is the only definition that matters. What you or I think or feel about waterboarding is irrelevant.
I was just trying to say that
(maybe not very effectively-my fault) I couldn't find a way to respond to your question because there is such a disparity between the Taliban and the US. No . . .I am not saying that "we torture less than they do so we are better". I am saying that what we did is not torture (my opinion) because "torture" has a specific legal definition, and from what I have seen we did not cross that line. We intended to get as close to it as we could.
I think this is solely a situation in which the US was attacked in a way that had never happened before, we did not know what was coming next, and everything was done that could be done to prevent future attacks. I doubt seriously that anyone had the thought that since the Taliban is lawless, we can be lawless. Thats why legal opinions were sought and guidelines set. If we set out to torture in the first place, why bother with legal advice?