Torture
From the Washington Post (really!):
PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.
Of course, Mr. Bush didn’t come out and say he’s lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.
Here’s what I want to ask all these people who think torture is a good idea: When you were a kid watching Masterpiece Theatre about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, did you think, “Hey, it’s a good thing they tortured Mark Smeaton! Sure, there was no evidence that he’d been having an affair with Anne, but under horrible torture he confessed, so you know it had to be true!” Or when you were learning about the European witch-hunts, did you think, “Gosh, all those people really were flying on broomsticks and coating themselves with devil’s grease so they could slip through keyholes — they admitted it under torture! That’s the way to get the truth out of people, by golly!”
HOW FUCKING STUPID CAN YOU BE?
24 Responses to “Torture”
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Infidel says:
Please Mr.BinLaden stop training your minions to blow themselves up in proximity of other humans where the shrapnel, shot, and concussions will tear, pummel and render healthy brain tissue into pulp.
Mr. BinLaden I urgently stress that you forthwit restrain yourself from advocating lethal force against your enemies.
Binny baybeee coool your jets dude, don’t act like a crazy school boy.
Knock it off BinLaden
Look you ugly asshole, get your ass in a cave and keep your fucking mouth shut-or I’ll cut your balls off and shove them so far up your big ass fucking nares your chrism’ll go golly.
Now tell me where the fucking viles of anthrax are shitbag. No? Very well then you will sit in jail a short time while I prepare my case to present before a jury of peers. Here is all the information I have against you now. I will be sure to provide you with whatever else I come up with so that you can properly prepare a defense. If you cannot afford a lawyer one will be appointed to you by the court. You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can be used against you in the court of law- Then if found guilty, I presume your innocent, but if your found guilty you will pay the penalty society deems appropriate-it won’t be cruel or unusual, that’s how we say we do it here in America.September 16th, 2006 at 1:54 am EST -
Violet says:
You make no sense.
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love2all says:
You make no sense.
Yeah… especially since Bush is not even looking for Bin Laden
Isn’t that WEIRD? Gee, you’d almost think he and Bush were friends or something… But naw, we know better. We know Bush has more intelligence than we, the American people. We trust him when he says that Iraq is more dangerous than the people who actually attacked us.
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Violet says:
Infidel may be one of those people who actually thinks torture works. I don’t understand how anybody can be an adult and have gotten through life without learning from history that torture produces false confessions, false information, anything the person can think of that he or she thinks the torturer wants to hear. I mean you don’t even have to read; just a few movies and TV shows is all you have to see to grasp the fact that torture is the most unreliable means of gaining information ever invented. Aside from the fact that it’s evil and wrong; it doesn’t work.
Mind you, I wouldn’t approve of it even if it did work. It’s fucking evil. Evil and stupid. But hey, Bush is nothing if not evil and stupid.
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Violet says:
I don’t understand this: Bush threatens to shut CIA interrogation program. How is that a threat? We WANT you to shut down your goddamn torture gulag, you fucking war criminal! SHUT IT DOWN! Goddamn Nazi bastard! JESUS.
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Paul Tergeist says:
I don’t understand this: Bush threatens to shut CIA interrogation program. How is that a threat? We WANT you to shut down your goddamn torture gulag, you fucking war criminal! SHUT IT DOWN! Goddamn Nazi bastard! JESUS.
VSYou misunderstand the speech politic. He MEANS that if the CIA doesn’t keep doing what he wants them to do, which is use alternative interrogation techniques on people who are ‘disappeared’, he will slice off their secret budget and emasculate them. Think ‘purge’. Think ‘Stalin’. Think the white Idi Amin Dada, President-for-life.
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ehj2 says:
We might have learned during the middle ages that people who are willing to give their lives to a cause, have, in a sense, already died for their cause. Many who had committed “to the death” for a religiously felt conviction were surprisingly resistent to torture, sensing themselves already “in the arms of the beyond.” Many were burned alive at the stake, after days of absolutely abysmal treatment, without denying or recanting their original claims.
Torture costs you your soul, and returns NO benefit. The example perpetually offered, of a nuclear trigger in a major city, is false. A “true believer” won’t give up anything. And you’ll never know if you even had the right people.
A country that “needs” torture is no longer a simple rogue state, but deservably a pariah, a plague on the planet.
The insanity here is that we claim with our other Janus face that we invaded Iraq to shut down torture prisons because they are, demonstrably and in world opinion, barbarous.
The party of so-called compassionate conservatives, who claim they lead from the highest moral principles and an unwavering footing on bedrock values, and guided — they also claim — by the very voice of God … desire fervently for America to become the tyrant of the world, with a monopoly on barbarism.
Up is indeed down, enlightenment is darkness, war is actually peace, and God has become the Devil.
/ehj2
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Violet says:
ehj2, I echo your sentiments, which are far more thoughtfully phrased than mine.
The fact that the President of the United States — of my country — is publicly demanding the right to torture people distresses me so profoundly that all I can do is rail incoherently and use as many curse words as I can fit into a sentence.
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richard cherry says:
I thought we had already agreed on a previous post he is slightly less bright than a stick – which can also be used to extract information from recalcitrant heathens (so why do we need him, again?). Can’t we debate ballet – oh my God you just had to break your own rule ‘Never ever open your big fat gob’ now Violet will regale us with ‘who was your favourite dancer blah blah blah?’ when we could be talking about morality (or even entering the new contest (!!!!) and wining HUGE PRIZES over at my blog. Still, I wouldn’t want to advertise that shamelessly and irrelevantly on a whole other blog, but as everyone will have stopped reading by now, I’ll be fine. Even if that fascist VS doesn’t moderate me to hell and back. I’m off to play with Shannon). Actually everyone already knows I never ever can follow that rule so hey…I’m going to send manual spam to my least favourite blogs – newly including Scott (boring) and the woman from Mars Bar Hill (freaky) – well 17 of them tonight and I’ll see what I can do tomorrow.
Off-thread or what? -
Infidel says:
hmmm…many curse words strung together, sounds like turretts syndrome to me.
Juxtapose base feelings of torture and revenge against polite request and due process.
Aren’t the “terrorists” common criminals? Murderers? Isn’t there already ways developed to deal with them? Arresting them, trial, conviction? Can there really ever be pre-emptive war on terror?
“Infidel may be one of those people who actually thinks torture works.”-VS-
There is nothing that can be done that works. I find it incomprehensible the president would actually present a defense of torture on the part of CIA interrogators on the basis of them having to take out insurance policies to finance their defense in court if victims of torture sue them. I find it incomprehensible the president defends torture on the basis of it working. I find it incomprehensible the president defends torture. I find the president incomprehensible. But there it is- my comprehension and his actions. I don’t make sense? I don’t make sense?? Fuck, shit, *&*%%$m, $$$#@, !&$%, What makes sense? Terrorists are already tried and convicted, so are murderers. Matching the title to the proper nouns should be the focus of executing a “war on terror” and it should be done. Torture is something done by terrorists, if it is done at the behest of the one in power giving commands-I think I can match title to the proper noun. I pray that proper noun is not the President of the United States of America, but there it is. -
Pastor Al E Pistle says:
You people are all crazy. IT ISN’T MURDER OR TORTURE IF GOD TELLS YOU TO DO IT!
And GODLY George W Bush gets his orders DIRECTLY from JESUS!
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foilwoman says:
Let me see: how stupid can he be? Violet, he can be so stupid, my twenty-three month old seems like a paragon of rational thought and understanding of consequences. He’s so stupid, he doesn’t know he’s stupid. But of course, at some level he does and this whole endeavor is him doing his “my half-inch dick really is bigger” routine. If he says his half-inch dick is bigger enough, it is, right? It’s like the people who tell you they are honest (or, for that matter, good lovers). The very fact that they say it and repeat it really does mean “flee now.” Oops, I’m ranting. We really don’t need to write about the guy. Your topic heading “Just Impreach the Stupid Freak” really says all that needs to be said. Except we need him impeached and convicted.
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will says:
I have almost ceased to be surprised at what comes out of Bush’s mouth.
It continues to surprise me how many people continue to say “Well, these muslims want to kill us so we better do it to them first.”
Senator Warner looks more and more reasonable every day. I am not sure if that is a good thing.
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Mandos says:
You know, for a while I’ve been mourning the endless series of Nothing Weeks coming from Fafblog, but now I realize, what would they write about?
I mean, the Medium Lobster *did* this one. Several times. Fafblog is supposed to be our limit of bizarre. OK, so Bush surpassed The Onion. That was shocking, but well, all-in-all, the Onion *is* trying to simulate reality in a skewed way. Fafblog wasn’t. And it has still been beaten.
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Mandos says:
Manuel trackbackez:
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ginmar says:
I was an interrogator. Thank God I had the sort of commander who had morals and….all that stuff that no one cares about. I never sent anyone to Abu Ghraib, but I did save someone from it.
The commenter who said these guys are already dead was right. The ones you can reach, you can reach in the wrong way—you will turn them into terrorists, and that is a hard, long process. Torture shortens it by a good long way. Let them think you are weak; they don’t think that after battle. For myself, I found that what worked was very simple, very complicated, very devious:
“Hey, you want some coffee? You like Gummy Bears? You want some water?”
Being human works.
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spynverzyon says:
Leave it to the liberal mind to offer multiple false analogies, contradictions, and self-defeating attempts at hyperbole – all at once, and without the slightest sense of irony! To wit, some liberal logic:
- blowing up innocent children or flying a civilian airliner into a building is comparable to sexual impropriety among 16th Century English gentlemen, so aggressive interrogation techniques are no more justified for the former than they are for the latter.
- the idea of Islamic extremists using their own kids as suicide bombers, plotting to wipe the Middle East’s only functioning democracy off the map, or scheming to get nuclear weapons that might exterminate a few million American liberals in places like Boston or New York is about as believable as the idea that people flew on broomsticks or greased their way through keyholes, so confessions about the former are no more credible than confesions about the latter.
- 16th Century physical torture techniques (the rack, thumb screw, the iron maiden) are morally the same as psychologically based current techniques that rely partially on the illusion of physical danger but actually cause no lasting bodily harm, since everyone knows that fear, insults, and humiliation are just as scarring as having your spinal column slowly pulled apart.
- people driven by religious zeal are invulnerable to torture, and at best provide false confessions, so it’s clear that if Zubaydah gave up bin al Shib, and the two of them together gave up KSM, and KSM gave up Khan, and Khan gave up Hambali and Zubair, and Hambali and KSM revealed the Indonesian J-I cell that was planning the 9/11 sequel, then all of this happened because CIA agents, who know less about extracting information from terrorists than do liberal feminist historical linguists interested in Indo-European culture, just got lucky even though they were using the wrong techniques.
- people driven by religious zeal consider themselves already dead, are willing to die for their cause, and would rather die than betray their cause, but they will tell the truth and reveal details of their organization’s genocidal plans if you give them Gummy Bears.
- people driven by religious zeal are prepared to die, and will falsely confess to spurious capital offenses in order to further their group’s genocidal objectives; therefore, these capitally self-incriminating confessions, whether extracted by devious Gummy Bear, polite request, or outrageous name-calling, should not be used in court, as they are motivated not by such reliable impulses as fearful self-preservation or honest contrition, but merely by genocidal religious extremism, which automatically invalidates any statements the suspect might make in regard to such capital offenses as murder, genocide, or terrorist conspiracy.
- while it is impossible to verify the actions and intentions of a Middle Eastern terrorist affiliated with a group whose public pronouncements call for the death of Iraelis, Americans, and citizens of other Western democracies, it is possible to know that George W. Bush is following orders from God and Jesus to murder and torture, although he has never said anything of the kind.
- the rights of a non-uniformed combatant captured during a firefight in Mazar al-Sharif to be secure against being really cold or feeling like he might drown trump those of a busboy from Staten Island who ends up jumping out a 95th story window because it’s less horrible than being incinerated alive in a monumental cauldron of burning jet fuel.
- George W. Bush’s strategy to forestall further terrorist attacks against the US included the invasion of a terror-sponsoring, militarily aggressive country oppressed by the autocratic despot Saddam Hussein – a tyrant who, like Stalin, Hitler, and Idi Amin, murdered and tortured legions of his own people, exported violence and death, threatened and attacked his neighbors, and flouted the moral and legal sanction of the civilized world – so Bush’s strategy, in particular the removal of Hussein from power and the unflagging pursuit of terrorists and their sponsors, shows that Bush is just like Stalin, Hitler, and Idi Amin.
- boasting about your 23 month old son in reference to the President’s putative lies about his genitalia makes your argument in favor of impeachment seem rational, compelling, and circumspect, since most Americans agree with the liberal view that lying about matters involving one’s genitalia and the younger generation constitutes an impeachable offense.Now that I’ve got all that straight, I think I’ll join the liberals so that I can help them explain the real meaning of their political philosophy to ordinary, plain-thinking Americans.
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ginmar says:
Gee, look, Violet! An incredibly literal REpublican troll, who thinks he can lecture at least one person who fought in the war on terror that he doesn’t know jack shit about. Isn’t that cute? And aren’t they supposed to be trolling Blue Jersey? Did they get lost?
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Violet says:
I don’t know. Yesterday I got a similar troll over on an ancient feminism thread (the faux flame war). Where are they coming from?
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spynverzyon says:
Yes, ginmar, ‘they’ did get lost. ‘They’ were googling “spectacular rack” and happened upon the self-proclaimed randomly pedantic, reclusive leftist counterespionage expert due to her use of that term on another site – number one in the google list for that particular search. She was protesting that she does not have a “spectacular rack,” notwithstanding that men, who negatively correlate breast size with intelligence, “as soon as they met me in person behaved as if I had the IQ of a hamster.” This seems a subject of some mystery to the histo-femi-lefti-linguist, as she believes that these same men, when they “knew me only through my work[,] thought I was brilliant.” By appeal to Occam’s Razor (the simplest explanation is the most likely) ‘they’ hereby solves the mystery: she really does have the IQ of a hamster, which is both why she misinterpreted the initial response to her work, and why she was treated like a hamster in person – an explanation anecdotally confirmed by perusal of her blog.
By now, of course, ginmar will have concluded on the basis of ‘they”s google search that ‘they’ is a Democrat, not, as initially presumed, a Republican. Kudos to ginmar for discerning that both of the two primary meanings of “spectacular rack” point to Democratic affiliation: the term must be either a reference to a woman’s breasts, uttered by a boorish misogynist who indulges in the sexual objectification of women for his own gratification (e.g., Bill Clinton), or a reference to the antlers of a wild animal, made by a posturing, arrogant self-promoter who likes to kill wild animals in the interest of enhancing his tough-guy image and enlarging his sense of his own potency (e.g., John Kerry, Ohio, October 2004).
For the record, ‘they’ takes no offense at ginmar’s presumptuous thinking, and moreover wishes to apologize to ginmar for ever taking liberal rhetoric literally, or even seriously. No sane person would imagine that liberals honestly believe themelves when they say Bush is like Hitler or Stalin (a profound insult to the millions who died at these men’s hands), or that CIA interrogation techniques are like late medieval torture (an insult to the professionals working to forestall the next 9/11, as well as a ludicrous misrepresentation of the causes underlying these actions), or that aggressive interrogation never works (a callous insult to the people who exposed the J-I cell, or who prevented last summer’s planned airline bombings), or that Guantanamo is like the gulag (an outrageous insult to the people Solzhenitsyn wrote about, as well as to Americans working at Guantanamo). Of course liberals don’t mean it when they say such astoundingly shrill and ignorant things! Shame on ‘they’ for taking anything the liberals say seriously! The lingui-Violet-Indo-historical scholar was merely speaking figuratively, in the interest of advancing her bankrupt political ideology! If she and her ilk are reduced to using specious metaphors and vacuous rhetoric in place of facts and logic, it is surely the fault of those literalistic Republicans, who (it’s so unfair) both have command of the facts and understand poetic subtleties (if only literalistically). You need not have studied semiotics and transformational syntax at Harvard to see that: just listen to Chavez or Khatami, or read a bit of Chomsky, or, better yet, surf Ahmadinejad’s blog!
In conclusion, ‘they’ would advise benighted Republicans to go back to Jersey or Utah or whatever unenlightened place you call home west of the Hudson, and just ignore the liberals and their crazy raving. Liberals don’t really mean what they say, and they certainly aren’t amused by the prospect of engaging in intelligent debate.
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Violet says:
Oh, he’s from Trish’s site! I remember that conversation.
Buddy, I feel your pain. There you are, happily searching for “spectacular rack,” when you unaccountably find yourself on a political feminist blog that doesn’t have boobies at all! No wonder you’re upset. Perhaps you should just confine yourself to Hustler from now on. The internet is so complicated.
Ta-ta!
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Mandos says:
I don’t think he’s looking for a single ta-ta.
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ginmar says:
You notice how he didn’t address anything I said It’s so cute.
Can I get him in the box with me? That’s all I ask.
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richard cherry says:
By now, of course, ginmar will have concluded on the basis of ‘they’’s google search that ‘they’ is a Democrat, not, as initially presumed, a Republican.
Republican – Democrat – or perhaps tosser is the word for which we’re groping.
And if those adjectives had been fossil fuels the world would have been flooded by now.
(For the benefit of they, that’s a reference to the left-wing lies about global warming.)
Bring back John Smith.
