CIA torture report

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/world/senate-intelligence-committee-cia-torture-report.html

I have to say that I'm not quite as shocked about this as some others seem to be. I never believed the program was as limited in its use as the agency claimed.
Why would you create a hazy legal ground for it if it was being employed so very rarely?

The most interesting thing I've read is that the nature of the program disgusted other agency officials so much that some genuinely contemplated putting the CIA operatives under arrest.

All you'll hear in response is "it saved a lot of lives!" Of course, there's no way of really proving that, so it's a brilliant excuse.

Here's a funny video of tough-guy George Tenet, former director of the CIA, telling Scott Pelley "we don't torture people". Pelley, now the lead anchor of the CBS Evening News, had the honor of airing the clip last night after covering the CIA torture report. He's quite professional and offered no comment, but his face said "told you so."



Slimy prick.

You know what's really disturbing to me? That America actually employs any number of characters who were/are/still are absolutely willing to go through with this. One or two sadist freaks you can probably find in any big organization. But whole platoons with a Gestapo fetish inside a intelligence service where they can live out their freak side and get paid for it? Guys who get off on the things they do for the greater pic? Christ, that's far out. And they can even claim they only followed orders. The old milk snatcher once warned how fast the Germans can revert to barbarism, looks the Germans are not the only ones. Course, none of the responsible guys is going to face a trial. Thanks, I'll pass on this one.

Islamic State goes for your head, the CIA goes for your arse. This probably means something, but I don't know what.

Campbell4 wrote:

You know what's really disturbing to me? That America actually employs any number of characters who were/are/still are absolutely willing to go through with this. One or two sadist freaks you can probably find in any big organization. But whole platoons with a Gestapo fetish inside a intelligence service where they can live out their freak side and get paid for it? Guys who get off on the things they do for the greater pic? Christ, that's far out. And they can even claim they only followed orders. The old milk snatcher once warned how fast the Germans can revert to barbarism, looks the Germans are not the only ones. Course, none of the responsible guys is going to face a trial. Thanks, I'll pass on this one.

Well the Germans specifically looked for individuals who would gladly carry out such acts of barbarism.

I'm pretty sure you don't have to look too far in any society to find enough sociopaths to run such an operation.

Salomé wrote:

Campbell4 wrote:

You know what's really disturbing to me? That America actually employs any number of characters who were/are/still are absolutely willing to go through with this. One or two sadist freaks you can probably find in any big organization. But whole platoons with a Gestapo fetish inside a intelligence service where they can live out their freak side and get paid for it? Guys who get off on the things they do for the greater pic? Christ, that's far out. And they can even claim they only followed orders. The old milk snatcher once warned how fast the Germans can revert to barbarism, looks the Germans are not the only ones. Course, none of the responsible guys is going to face a trial. Thanks, I'll pass on this one.

Well the Germans specifically looked for individuals who would gladly carry out such acts of barbarism.

I'm pretty sure you don't have to look too far in any society to find enough sociopaths to run such an operation.

In a society sure. Any society has those. But actually finding them already in place inside a crucial agency hat is supposed to help defend the freedom of this society, that's rich. That's throwing freedom right out of the window. Right or wrong, my country all too easily becomes my honour is loyalty. Since this is not likely to lead to proper trials it's going to fester. The approach to rectify torture with the results is also not going to wash. What good are values when we give them up at the first chance and resort to Nazi habits? Nor is the lack of results a good argument against torture, it implies we'd be happy to torture the s**t out of anybody if it just helps our cause. That's not so much better, is it?

I read some of the torture was outsourced to a private company built for the task, millions of taxes burned on two freaks who didn't even have qualification with normal interrogation, didn't speak any relevant language of their victims and didn't even have intelligence qualifications. Wow, good work.

Somehow the lawyers' role in all this is more disgusting than the actual thuggery.

They never heard of Robert H. Jackson I bet.

Erica Ambler wrote:

Somehow the lawyers' role in all this is more disgusting than the actual thuggery.

I think the doctors' role is unfortunate and shameful at best as well.

We have arrived at a quite surreal point in time, where a former vice-president of the US can be seen defending the use of torture and rape against prisoners in a public TV interview.

If he admitted to wrongdoing, it would probably open himself up to some kind of prosecution, be it civil or criminal. So long as he continues to make himself out to be righteous and the people who suffered the enemy of the people, he can hold out for as long as need be.

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/cia-torture-report-memes/

Some torture report memes, for a generation that's more interested in the latest Marvel comic film adaptations and less about their country committing crimes against humanity.

Oh, wait. They saved "thousands of lives". I forgot.

It's alright, Good Guys™ did it.

Now let's go back to wagging fingers at Putin et al. They're waiting intently on the next lecture on human rights.

Let's just forget it.

What time are the Kardashians on E! tonight?

Kanye is so lucky. I want to marry a fucktape star too.

Control wrote:

Oh, wait. They saved "thousands of lives". I forgot.

When I stop to think about whether water-boarding these terrorists constituted cruel and unusual punishment (maybe even "torture"), and whether America went "too far"...whether maybe we as a country truly did lose our way, so to speak, I always find it helpful to just go back in my memory to the day of September 11th, 2001...and I meditate about what it must have felt like, even for a few seconds, to have yourself drenched in super-heated burning jet-fuel....your skin melting off your body in an instant (I hope they died as quickly as possible with as little awareness as possible)...or to have no way to get down from the 103rd floor...watching those poor, panicked people climbing onto the outside of the World Trade Center desperately trying to cling to the siding, half a mile off the ground, before the heated metal made it impossible to hold on any longer and they fell, resigned to their fate, and the ground rushing up at them at 120 mph as they knew their whole life, every memory they ever had, every relationship with a loved one they ever knew, was about to be over in 10 seconds...people on the planes hearing about the other crashes, knowing what was in store for them....every-time I relieve 9/11 it makes me physically sick.

They didn't have a choice. It was made for them by the very people in Guantanamo today.

So I will say to anyone that asks if I'm bothered about what was in this report: No. I never lose one wink of sleep at night for knowing what the prisoners at Guantanamo may have gone through. I don't care if water-boarding or rectal hydration saved ZERO LIVES. If they are still alive today then they haven't yet gotten the full measure of what they deserve. They get not one ounce of sympathy from me. They are less than animals. They are evil personified. Irredeemable savages. I honestly cannot force myself to care a rat's ass about what happens to these sub-human creatures. The deepest abyss in the Indian  Ocean is too good for Osama Bin Laden.

To paraphrase Batman to The Joker: 'We made you? You made us first.'

And to paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson in A TIME TO KILL: 'Yes they deserved to be tortured and I hope they burn in hell!'

I see the crazy is strong again today.

Not all of the people kept at Gitmo were involved in 9/11.

Not all of them are even terrorists.

Beyond that, it might be good for any nation hoping to maintain the moral high ground not to do things like, you know, torture people. Just a thought.

Control wrote:

What time are the Kardashians on E! tonight?

Ask the CIA. I'm sure they subjected detainees to it at some point.

Salomé wrote:

it might be good for any nation hoping to maintain the moral high ground not to do things like, you know, torture people.

Precisely. Even the Nazis were tried in a court of law. We all know why Bin Laden wasn't.

Makeshift Python wrote:

Kanye is so lucky. I want to marry a fucktape star too.

Never understood the fuss over those recent KK magazine pics ... don't we see Kim's massive arse every time her and Kanye are photographed together?

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

I never lose one wink of sleep at night for knowing what the prisoners at Guantanamo may have gone through. I don't care if water-boarding or rectal hydration saved ZERO LIVES.

They are less than animals.

They are evil personified.

Irredeemable savages.

I honestly cannot force myself to care a rat's ass about what happens to these sub-human creatures.

... 'Yes they deserved to be tortured and I hope they burn in hell!'

Sometimes I'm not sure if you're trolling or actually serious.

If you're serious, then your argument makes about as much sense as saying "they have the same religion and skin color as the 9/11 hijackers, so they deserve to be tortured." To say that people deserved to be chained to floors, fed through their rectums or forced to stand in stress positions on broken feet for never committing a crime is about as un-American as it gets. I'd also guess that it isn't very Christian-like (since we're living in a "Christian nation"), but I haven't gone near a Bible in about 15 years, so I wouldn't really be an expert on that.

Maybe I'm just being a know-nothing, liberal pussy, though.

Salomé wrote:

Beyond that, it might be good for any nation hoping to maintain the moral high ground not to do things like, you know, torture people. Just a thought.

And how high is the moral high ground? 5,000 feet? 10,000 feet? High enough to blow up a building with a drone missile strike? Just kill everybody on the President's enemies list with a drone strike; you'll never have to get into that pesky "should we use torture or not?" conundrum, and you won't have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars bringing them to New York or D.C. to be tried in a federal court. That certainly simplifies everything.

Control wrote:

Sometimes I'm not sure if you're trolling or actually serious.

If you could make it through the first paragraph of my argument and not be sure as to whether I was serious or not, then I honestly don't know what else there is to say. I think I laid it all out on the line there.

Quote :

Maybe I'm just being a know-nothing, liberal pussy, though.

I respect the arguments by those who say that 'we are a better nation than that'; that 'torture does not reflect American values'. I just don't happen to agree with them. I didn't back then, I don't now, and I likely never will.

One of the other main arguments I've read is that "torture" #1 has been ineffective and not given the CIA useful intelligence and #2 strained America's relationship with its allies by lowering its prestige and esteem throughout the world. But what if everyone agreed that torture DID YIELD useful information that helped track down Bin Laden, or helped stopped a massive attack from occurring? Would we still be against it? Does the argument against "torture" that it wasn't leading to any actionable intelligence evaporate into thin air if you get something useful, or is your opposition to it a principled stand that would not change, no matter what the methods yielded?

The problem with engaging people in that part of the world is that it's never a level playing field. There's no ends of the earth that they won't go to to hunt down private citizens, civilians, women, children, etc...and turn them into walking suicide bombs...or behead people and broadcast it on the Internet. They'll draw anyone and everyone into their seething, hate-filled, ass-backward existence: any baby, any mother and father, any grandparents...anybody on a plane, train, skyscraper or ship that they can blow up; people who never asked for any of this; people whose choice to keep on living was denied them on 9/11 or 7/7/05 or 4/15/13.  Every civilian is an enemy as far as they are concerned; every restaurant a high value target; They make no distinction between the military and civilians; everybody, everything is fair game to them. Western intelligence agencies are expected to maintain a code of fighting standards against an enemy that has NONE.

But I'll bring the argument home in a different way. I didn't go over to Iraq or Afghanistan and fight. I'm not a police officer....or a member of The National/Coast Guard. I'm not a DEA operative. I'm not a spy. So, having said all that, I just can't be bothered to arm-chair quarterback, second-guess, and criticize the methods that the men and women who do go over there to protect American lives employ. I can't sit back and enjoy the privilege of being relatively safe while at the same time demonizing the people and the methods that are affording me the same protection. People like to eat the sausge, but would be disgusted by how the sausage is made. Same with national defense. I'd rather not know what it takes to go over to Iraq and Afghanistan or Yemen or Pakistan and fight these animals.

I'm reminded of the famous speech Nicholson gives in A FEW GOOD MEN (and yes, I know he was supposed to be the "villain"); it pretty much echoes my thoughts about what goes on in that part of the world exactly and why I can't bother myself to get upset because a few battle hardened Al-Qaeda/Taliban fighters Girl Scout leaders selling Samoas were accidentally, innocently scooped up and illegally held in prison and "tortured:

Col. Jessup: Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post.

So, you may think I'm trolling; clearly you don't agree with any of what I have to say, but that's okay. You don't have to. Diversity of opinion is a great thing to have. But at least you'll know, even if you can't understand, the reasons why I don't weep salty, bitter tears onto my pillow each night at bedtime for the poor, innocent souls having hummus shoved up their butt in a Gitmo jail cell. They have a choice. They can cooperate with their captors and give them the information they want and the torture will stop. The people they killed don't have a choice; they're still dead today, and they'll be dead tomorrow, and the day after that, because their choice to live their lives in the manner they chose was taken away from them by an evil, sadistic, wicked group of Muslims.

The basis of your reasoning seems to be Hollywood blockbusters. Have you read any history or political theory?

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

So, you may think I'm trolling; clearly you don't agree with any of what I have to say, but that's okay.

Well, I'm sorry I suggested that, especially in a topic that you obviously take very seriously. Sometimes it's hard to tell with you after reading your statements in other threads, like this:

Quote :

Obviously I'm biased towards a rock anthem, and if I had my wish, it would be MUSE or ONE REPUBLIC, but if we're going the ballad route again, might as well go with BEYONCE.

Guess I didn't really imagine you as a Beyonce fan, though.

Control wrote:

Guess I didn't really imagine you as a Beyonce fan, though.

Not a fan of Beyonce. Don't have a single song of hers. But I can recognize she does have talent and she's a huge presence to be reckoned with. If she is selected to sing the song, millions of instant new eyeballs start paying attention to SPECTRE just like Adele bringing many of her fans to the series as well. It would be a win-win for both parties.

I don't understand how you are drawing any conclusions other than the ones I've stated about "torture" or Beyonce. There's nothing particularly irreverent or hidden or secretive or wink-wink about what I've said. Beyonce would be a strategically commercial choice that I would understand, even though I'd like to see MUSE or ONE REPUBLIC get a chance, as my favorite genre of music is ROCK AND ROLL (which is why LALD and AVTAK rate so high with me).

An example of me "trolling" (or, to put it another way: see if people are actually reading my post or merely skimming through it) would be when I said: 'they went with an untested singer for SKYFALL and we all saw how that turned out'. THAT was an example of a wink, a nod, and a Roger Moore arched eyebrow all rolled into one. But when it comes to 9/11 and terrorism, I am deadly serious.