sexual torture

[welsh]

i say toture the shit out of them........because after we are done with them they have the assurance the we wont light them on fire and drag their corpses through the streets, as they have done to our marines after interrogations.

Saying that interrogating prisoners is alright because they would kill our soldiers is bullshit. There's no sense in justifying assholery with degrees of assholery.

Agreed. The danger here is moral relativism- It's bad if they do it, but we can find excuses for it so it's ok that we do it.

Bullshit- look there is a convention against torture, and trying to be slippery about getting around it is just bullshit. You sign a convention, you make it a law, you stick to it. Simple as that.

And certaintly you don't want to decide what your level of behavior is based on what a bunch of terrorists do. You don't want to go on that slippery slope. Frankly, I think we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

I also think the case referred to was not marines but civilian contractors from the Blackwell Group - essentially paid civilian and armed mercenaries. Not saying that excuses it. But in the old days the CIA used to higher "contractors" or "cowboys" that woudl do their dirty/wet work. Do you think that happens now?

We interrogate prisoners in order to extract information. What do you people want us to do with them, just let them rot? Because if that's the case we might as well just execute terrorists that try to surrender, as they'd be more valuable to us dead than alive. Oh but that wouldn't be the humane thing to do, right?

Death penalty was used extensively after World War 2- lots of the Nuremburg defendants got death, and lots of Nazi war criminals and Japanese Warcriminals faced similar penalties.

As for me, if a person is an international terrorist who commits or is guilty of the crime of murder, they are little better than international pirates- criiminals that are subject to all jurisdictions and are punishable by death.

So torture, no. But death penalty is kosher.

We can't have prisoners and just not do anything with them. We'd be missing too big an opportunity not to try and take advantage of their knowlege.

But the danger is what happens when you start torturing people who are merely suspected on fairly flimsy charges?

Furthermore, there is also the problem that torture often brings little in the way of meaningful or useful information. The person you torture might confess under coercion- what good is that?

There is a reason why the police don't torture people anymore- do you think that the reasons don't apply to terrorists too?

 

[Bradylama]

Death penalty was used extensively after World War 2- lots of the Nuremburg defendants got death, and lots of Nazi war criminals and Japanese Warcriminals faced similar penalties.

Yes, but we'd have to try them before issuing the death penalty, wouldn't we?

But the danger is what happens when you start torturing people who are merely suspected on fairly flimsy charges?

Hey, I didn't say everything was peachy-keen. It isn't right that we're torturing suspected terrorists without due process. Combatants, on the other hand, are a different story.

The person you torture might confess under coercion- what good is that?

That's why you can never trust information extracted through interrogation, and that's why information needs to be confirmed. Extracted information is nothing more than a lead that needs to be pursued. The military isn't constrained by the law in a warzone, either, which makes it all the more easier to confirm information.

If the lead turns out to be false, then no harm done. Well, except to Achmed.

 

[Jabbapop]

Is this really torture, though? Degrading someone is torture, I recall, no? But degregation is a tool in interegation. I don't know if I believe that the interrragators are being sadistic, or justify their actions on some kind of tit-for-tat level. These are professionals doing work for the US government. They have to have extensive experience in these matters. Or maybe they don't maybe they're scheming brutes who have weezled their way in to where they are for petty reasons of prejudice.

Are there long term psychological effects? Who has information in this regard?

 

[Wooz]

Hmmm. Now, let's see.

If I'd tie you to a chair, and order an old, menstruating Puerto Rican cumbag to smear her crotch in your face, what would your reaction be?

Would there be any long term psychological effects?

 

[Jabbapop]

Hmmm. Now, let's see.

If I'd tie you to a chair, and order an old, menstruating Puerto Rican cumbag to smear her crotch in your face, what would your reaction be?

Would there be any long term psychological effects?

Honestly? Beats me. Sorry, I'm not Ph. D in psychology.

I guess it on some strange level it could be similar to rape.

Also, wouldn't it be a lifetime psychological pain to be imprisoned by people you perceive to be infidels for the rest of your life? I mean, in both cases, your culture is being mocked.

It wasn't real blood. She didn't smear her crotch in his face. She merely stuck her hand in her pants and rubbed fake blood on him, as well as rub up on him (clothed). In a debriefing session, you could tell them that it wasn't real blood and that she wasn't really menstruating. But will that really lessen the psychological harm? They'd still be 'haunted' by memories of being rubbed up against by a woman, which is against their culture. The only way this could be considered torture is by their culture. I think the same feelings by which they'd feel this as torture is linked to the same feelings which fuel their hate of women. If they had the chance, I bet you they would have really beaten any other woman who did the same. Should we really have sympathy for a culture which does that?

 

[Brother None]

If I'd tie you to a chair, and order an old, menstruating Puerto Rican cumbag to smear her crotch in your face, what would your reaction be?

Would there be any long term psychological effects?

Oohhh, it's way worse than that.

These people believe on a level most Christians have long stopped believing that this contact with this woman means Allah has damned them forever. They can not redeem themselves by blowing them up as they are in prison, so menstrual fluid buys them a one-way ticket to hell.

Imagine the psychological damage. This goes beyond threatening to kill someone, this is eternal damnation.

 

[Ashmo]

Kharn's probably the first person in this thread to get the actual consequences for the interrogatee (is that even a word?).

It's worse than a death penalty or even traditional "physical" torture (which could even make a terrorist prove his faith by staying faithful regardless of the pain inflicted upon him, I guess) for them because it makes their entire life meaningless and dooms them for eternity.

It can only roughly be compared to raping and killing everyone close to you, destroying your home and then locking you up in a cell until you die (naturally, or by suicide).
But even that would probably not cause as much psychological damage as that "interrogation practice" would for a faithful islamist. Even less if they ARE right and there IS an afterlife they have to spend in hell.

Yes it's torture and no, not everyone who's locked up in Guantanamo is a terrorist. The Americans weren't exactly picky when they selected their detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention that the objectivity might have been tainted in the former because it was felt as a sort of revenge for 9/11 by some people and probably also by some soldiers).

In Iraq the USA has been great at villifying itself in the mind of religious Islamists. Raiding mosques, breaking into bedrooms (which are a taboo for nearly everyone who isn't resting there) and similar actions which have occured on a regular basis (raids of private houses including inspection of said bedrooms on a regular basis were (are?) maintained for quite a while during the occupation of Iraq).
The maltreatment of prisoners (most of which, IIRC, never saw a court) tops it off.

If I was a religious Islamic extremist, I'd have any reason to join anti-American terrorists right now.