sordavie

You can these accounts for example in the video interview in my first post in this thread, and the Japanese POW interview in Luna's link. Google will find you more.

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CingularDuality

I think we're using different definitions of 'torture'. Look, putting somebody in a room with a flickering light and one speaker playing Britney Spears and another speaker playing Billy Ray Cyrus would be quite tortuous. Some would consider a simple harsh verbal interrogation (with no techniques but hard questions) to be tortuous. Someone unable to swim and afraid of heights might find that being interrogated while handcuffed on the edge of a ten meter high dive platform is simply unbearable. The problem is that torture is such a subjective term.

Me? I think waterboarding is a tortuous technique. Again, I don't care.

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kilevvri1

If you honestly think so, your are either trying to goad me or your being naive. The fact that the US even launched a war on terror, the fact that it has one, if not the largest military budget of any country on earth means that they do understand that they have to be on constant vigil to survive. Make no mistake there are countries constantly prodding to find a weak spot in the armor of the US counter-intelligence and freedom.

Corny but if the constant attacks on the other allies are anything to show the US is being very careful on threats to it's sovereignty. No attacks since 9/11 on US soil, whereas UK has had several. Am I right or wrong here?

Just because your paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get you. the US has a perfect right to be paranoid, they have been for decades, if not centuries. Just think, if Rome had been as paranoid as the US we might all be Romans now, but they thought they were invincible. Look how that turned out. You don't hear the term "Constant Vigil" for no reason.

Sorry about the off topic, just had to respond to that.

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ScratchMonkey

How much of this terrorism is not blowback from our meddling? It seems like we've grabbed a tiger by the tail, and now must figure out how to tame it.

This seems to describe one of the "tail grabbings":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Ir..._d%27%C3%A9tat

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Kerostasis

After following the history from your link for a bit, it would seem that this conflict is not rooted in anything done recently, but in events stretching back for centuries that have shaped the current situation. Not that this is surprising or unusual -- I think most international events are like that. But it does make it rather disingenuous to point to one event in 1953 and say "this one is the reason we have a conflict".

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AMosely

As is customary in the sandbox here, there are very few posts that actually respond to Luna's two questions or issues:

Regarding the suspension of Habeus Corpus and how it relates to the facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - of course Habeus Corpus is suspended, as is any other legal right, to the people being held there. Just ask yourself a simple question - why locate this facility off of American soil, isolated from all contact? It has nothing to do with security - we house the most dangerous people on earth at a federal detention facility in south central Colorado. Certainly nothing to do with cost or convenience - Guantanamo is located equally distant from any major battlefield as any place in North America. The placement of this facility is the best indication its true intentions - secrecy and isolation from any public form of law. Luna's reference to HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) is somewhat relevant in that the details of its operation were concealed from the public because of the perceived threat of the enemy within. Lessons should have been learned there, but apparently none were.

On the issue of water boarding, it's not 'discomfort' or some kind of mental anguish - it's physical torture, and has been employed as such for centuries. The claim that America does not torture is a lie, not simply with waterboarding but also with what has been called 'extraordinary renditions,' which are in clear violation of International law. Such international kidnappings (in itself a method of torture) have come under investigation by the UN, the Council of Europe, Brittish Parliament and at least seven other soverign governments. In the case of the Council of Europe (PACE), a resolution was passed calling for US complaince with existing European Union regulations (law) governing foreign intelligence services operating in European nations. Some write such resoltions off as political manuevering, but the US ignores such calls for justice on a regular basis - the torture question, the facility at Guantanamo and the broader 'war on terror' are all figments of unilateral American injustice.

Disgregarding the moral and legal debate surrounding Guantanamo, the facility still doesn't stand up as being worthwhile. Most interrogations at the facility have not yielded valuable information, and many detainees have been found to have no connection whatsoever to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. So, even with the moral and legal issues aside, the facility does not even successfully accomplish what it was supposedly created to do.

This last post caught my attention because it's something that I feel very few people make an honest effort to come to terms with - and I am not just talking about the 1953 Iranian coup (which so clearly provided motivation for the 1979 hostage crisis that so many disavow Iran in the name of) . The tail-grabbing analogy is a bit innacurate when it comes to today's Islamic terrorism, but it's not completely off base. While unwanted U.S. (foreign) intervention in the political affairs of a sovereign nation have unsurprising consequences, it's America's indirect intervention and influence that have more long-reaching and virulous consequences. For example, the unwavering American support for the state of Israel has had severe consequences on the image of the US among much of the Muslim world. American business dealings with Saudi Arabia (see John Perkins and Chas. T. Main corporation, an early competitor to Bechtel). Such economic dealings and disenfranchisement of indigenous populations and the political parties or governments they represent are seen as the ultimate evil, the 'blowback' of which ultimately turns to violence, often in the form of terrorism.

ScratchMonkey

Was the US involved in other events prior to that that would bring the ire of the Middle East down on it? I'm sure that's true of the British, but they've pissed everyone off at some point or other, even the US a couple hundred years ago.

The justification for torture seems to be that it stops attacks on the continental US. So my interest is in what motivates these people to attack the US, specifically.

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Morganan

I just want to comment about this portion of your post. Intelligence is a tricky business. Just getting good intel is difficult enough, knowing what to do with it is even more difficult. Just because a reporter is told they aren't getting anything good, does that make it truth since it's reported in the washington post? Just because Major Disaster at gibmo doesn't think they are getting any good info doesn't mean Colonel CharlieFoxtrot at the pentagon isn't blushing at the high quality of the source. You certainly aren't going to sprout off in the press that you are getting great intel as that kind of defeats the purpose of getting the intel. The more you use a source of intel, the less valuable it becomes. To use Cing's example, say we found out where Osama's gay hairdresser lives/works. We could then follow him and find out whom he contacts, follow them to see if they are players in this game or not. By finding one solid link, it would be possible to roll up a good portion of their organization if you were willing to be patient enough to do that instead of just go pick him up and play some water-based games with him. Then if we let the guy go who told us where the gay hairdresser could be found, chances are pretty good he will get that word out and then his information that we spent years getting out of him becomes useless as the hairdresser could just disappear and we loose our link. (I'll leave how he might disappear up to your imagination) Now how much information do you think we might have gotten if we got the guy a good lawyer? (lawyer's probably would line up to do this guys work pro bono) Plus we'll bypass the aspect that US laws don't apply outside of our jurisdiction. (which last time I checked, Cuba was outside our jurisdiction)

As I said in post #2 in this thread, I don't think torture is in the end very effective, but when the other side plays under a different set of rules then you do and their rules allow more leeway, that's a loosing proposition for you. Standing on the moral high-ground is always a lofty goal worthy of pursuit, but in this particular case hurts our cause more then helps it.