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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: Hawkmoon who wrote (197240)8/14/2006 12:02:50 PM
From: jttmab  Read Replies (1) of 281500
 
You laugh and scoff at the analogy, but in legal terms there's not much of a difference,..

I laugh and scoff because the fundamental detainment of prisoners under the best circumstances would be illegal if applied to a parent/child relationship. Your comparison is ludicrous on it's face.

You insist on ignoring the thousands of detainees that have been confined and then subsequently released for not having committed or planned any acts of violence. Do you want to model the democracy we've set up in Iraq? Let's round up all the Muslims in Detroit as potential terrorists and release them when we get around to finding out who was swept up inappropriately. The Adminstration claims we are at war and the Bill of Rights are effectively suspended as he sees fit.

So you tell me where "honor" lies?? I'm trying to save lives and you're trying to preserve the dignity of an individual who is trying to kill innocent civilians.

I'm trying to preserve the dignity and moral compass of the US. I'm trying to prevent the creation of promotional material to be used by terrorists. Of those thousands of released detainees how many went on to become insurgents because of their detainment and treatment. Perhaps you think they've been busy writing thank you notes to the US Ambassador in Iraq. Thanks for the nice accommodations. I enjoyed the food and the hospitality of the US military. P.S. The guy from the CIA was a little cranky, but I only saw him once a month.

Now for the hard question. Between the lives saved through interrogation and the lives lost from the insurgents that inevitably were created along the line. And the additional AQ recruits from the promotional material: What was the net gain/loss? The answer is: You don't know.

if I'm absolutely positive that the detainee holds information that would save the lives of innocent civilians, or friendly forces, I would probably have to be restrained from doing whatever I have to do in order to get the detainee to provide the information I need to prevent those deaths.

You need a memo from DCI that it's a slam dunk? Absolutely positive is not the real world. The real world is he might know something of value.

You habitually fabricate a false reality. One where all the detainess are terrorists; all the detainees are instrangient and sociopaths; if you interrogate long enough and hard enough you will save lives. You create another false reality on the means of interrogation. You equate a parent's slap to a child to what you might use on a detainee. You equate a stress position to a parent telling his child to stand in a corner as if they are the same. Stress positions are used because they inflict pain, don't leave bruises and allow the captor to inflict pain indefinitely. There are a whole bunch of torture techniques that you can use that don't leave any bruises.

There are valid reasons why the rules for handling detainees are vague. It's impossible to draw lines in a spectrum. You can hit a detainee, but not too hard. What's too hard? No harder than you would strike a child? 5 kg of force? Hard enough to hurt but not leave a bruise? What if he bruies easily? Measure that. Maybe you want a policy of "Use common sense". That would be a joke.

The more specific you get in a spectrum of choices the more easy it becomes for someone to create a new technique that technically meets the rules.

List all the ways in which an interrogator can humiliate a prisoner and mark up which ones are ok, and which have crossed the line. I don't know, maybe you'll take the approach that humiliation is ok. But if you do make a list of ok's and not ok's make sure it's "complete". But I'll come up with variants that will technically make it to the ok list.

A habitual problem in prisons is that capturs hold power and control over prisoners. They learn to enjoy it.

jttmab
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