Senate Report Says CIA Misled Government About Interrogation Methods 207
mrspoonsi sends this news from the Washington Post:
"A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques. The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document. ... At the secret prison, Baluchi endured a regime that included being dunked in a tub filled with ice water. CIA interrogators forcibly kept his head under the water while he struggled to breathe and beat him repeatedly, hitting him with a truncheon-like object and smashing his head against a wall, officials said. As with Abu Zubaida and even Nashiri, officials said, CIA interrogators continued the harsh treatment even after it appeared that Baluchi was cooperating."
So Arrest Them (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's obvious they were assaulting people without cause, why haven't they been arrested, prosecuted and thrown in jail?
Re:So Arrest Them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So Arrest Them (Score:5, Insightful)
if Congress wants people to stop lieing to them
Just strap the CIA director to a table before the congressional committee and pour water on his face until he tells the truth.
What's good for the goose ....
Re:So Arrest Them (Score:4, Interesting)
I will gladly contribute money to the election campaign of any otherwise-electable congressional candidate who makes this one of his or her campaign promises.
Re:So Arrest Them (Score:5, Insightful)
if Congress wants people to stop lieing to them
Just strap the CIA director to a table before the congressional committee and pour water on his face until he tells the truth.
What's good for the goose ....
This is exactly what they want! If you do this, you follow their frame, their method, and you (or congress) approve of it. If congress approves of this, they don't have to hide it anymore. Mission accomplished! And thanks for your helpful suggestion!
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Assuming that by 'pour water on his face' we are referring to waterboarding, you have forgotten an important detail: CIA directors, like most people, really don't like being subjected to drowning torture.
We'd see an end to this waterboarding isn't torture bullshit awfully quickly.
Re:So Arrest Them (Score:5, Insightful)
I have made the open offer before that anyone who thinks waterboarding isn't torture is welcome to explain to me why that is, as long as they can do it while being waterboarded until I am satisfied with what they are saying is the truth.
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Let's see: Jesse Ventura, a Navy SEAL, was waterboarded, and says it's definitely torture [thinkprogress.org]. Apparently [howstuffworks.com] the SEALs used to use waterboarding in their counter-interrogation training, but stopped as the inability of anyone to tolerate it was damaging morale. The linked article says the mean-time-to-failure was 14 seconds.
Hitchens was waterboarded, [vanityfair.com] and said it's definitely torture.
Rather uniquely, Oliver North claims to have been waterboarded and says it's not torture. [cnsnews.com] Personally I'd like him to spend a few seco
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Congratulations on completely missing the irony in GP's post.
So why is it modded +5 insightful? These kind of comments are taken seriously by many - just see the other comment on it (and don't tell me that's sarcasm too). If it is sarcasm and if it's not clear - then (s)he should have added a sarcasm tag.
Re:So Arrest Them (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is the crux of the point. Congress does *not* want people to stop lying to them. It serves Congress' best interests to have the CIA, NSA, lobbyists, major corporate executives, etc to lie to them because it allows Congress to set the lie as a truth in the Congressional record. At the same time, it's the irrelevant and small that are attacked (Martha Stewart, steroids in baseball, etc) because it's the low level fodder that a few Congressmen can get behind as lamenting while pretending the system they're part and parcel of is good and acceptable.
Because last I checked, neither the NSA nor the CIA fall under the purview of the Constitution* and their blackhole budgets seem an obvious target for defunding, regardless of how honest and good they were. I mean, look at how much effort is meant to cripple Medicare, Welfare, Social Security, etc. Rampant fraud and abuse? Sure, that's the calling card of the NSA/CIA. But at least they feed people, treat them of injury, and provide them shelter and necessary living expenses when old. Nope, the NSA/CIA is the killing foreigner business.
Apples and oranges. Good defense is a good offense, which is why I always random groin kick strangers. Please excuse me if my mumbling of incoherent nonsense somehow makes sense to you and seems justifiable. Because we all know the only ones keep the nukes out of the US are the NSA/CIA...except the ones we have...and that none of the other major powers really want to actually use a nuke and face retribution...and all the smaller groups don't have the resources to build a nuke from scratch..and none of the major powers want to hand over nukes to nut jobs because they're just as likely to be a target. Not to mention that eventually a nuke is going to be stolen/built and used (well, presuming we don't kill ourselves off some other way) and we're just going to have to life with the fact that the genie is really out of the bottle. Nope, the CIA/NSA aren't anti-genies. They're just assholes.
*Most of their actions if part of the military amount to continuous acts of war against other nations, which clearly violation Congress' unique power to declare war and really gives plenty of justification for just about *everyone*, including terrorists, to launch attacks against the US. Outside that scope, the major mechanism for international actions of the sort the NSA and CIA engage in would fall under scope of "Letters of Marque", but that too really wouldn't apply as part of the US government and would be of an on-going basis if done right to be handed out to individuals which Congress itself is unwilling to invest the time into. It's easier to bitch and moan a lot and not do anything real.
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ah but you are forgetting one very important fact. Countries treat each other like 7-10 years at recess treat each other. Look at my shiny toy, no give me that, don't pull my hair I am warring you, give me your money, eww billy's got cooties, etc.
watch the UN some day and replace all the adults with children. the actions are so close it isn't funny but turns into a sad comedy.
until countries grow up and start acting like adults none of this will improve.
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Turns out that democracy is just as rubbish as dictatorship.
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Which is the crux of the point. Congress does *not* want people to stop lying to them. It serves Congress' best interests to have the CIA, NSA, lobbyists, major corporate executives, etc to lie to them because it allows Congress to set the lie as a truth in the Congressional record.
All of this is also a get out of jail free card for congress. They're doing their best to distance themselves now from an agency they've been fellating all along.
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Start jailing a whole bunch of people for purgery.
Which is...what exactly? It sounds like criminal misuse of prescription laxatives. I didn't know that was a major social issue these days.
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The guy makes valid points and you ignore those points to grammar troll him. What a wonderful person you are.
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Re:So Arrest Them (Score:5, Insightful)
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Obama is the only President to have admitted to ordering the assassination of American citizens.
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Obama is the only President to have admitted to ordering the assassination of American citizens.
They all did it. It became more obvious over time due to technology. Party politics plays no part in any of this.
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Agreed arresting them would be the just thing to do. But like all of the actions from that period their orders originated from the highest levels of the executive ...
That thing in the Constitution about rising up and revolting ... Does that include shooting your politicians? You'd think that would be a good place to start. Is anybody doing anything about that?
If someone did, would the media tell you that they did? If the media didn't, how would you know?
And if the Media did, how would they portray that person? Would they describe them as a legitimate revolutionary, or as a freedom-hating terrorist? Besides, who knows what would happen after we started shooting politicians? I'm not sure it' a good idea.
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If someone did, would the media tell you that they did? If the media didn't, how would you know?
The government no longer has all sources of information by the throat. If they did there would be no Wikileaks.
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If it's obvious they were assaulting people without cause, why haven't they been arrested ...
Why were they hired? Who hired them, who managed them, who laid down their ground rules? Who did their performance appraisals? Who signed their cheques?
Those people can always find flunkies to do the work (need money feed family|patriotism|...). Go after "Those people."
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Which has enough juice to quash your investigation and make your life very uncomfortable for trying.
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You want better results? Hold "politicians" accountable for the act of entities over which they have oversight... then these people might act as if they are/were accountable. Otherwise these "hearings" are nothing more than a PR opportunity.
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Exactly.
This committee is acting like they were never informed of the "enhanced interrogation technique" program from the get-go. It's total horseshit. This committee knew it was happening, and they gave their approval right up until the New York Times (or whoever) published the first public reports of it.
Then come the public hearings where they excoriate CIA lawyers rather than the senate confirmed administrators and directors. Oh, and when they purposefully ask questions with classified answers in open
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Can't get them for torture as they were enemy combatants. Can't get them for violating POW rights and policies as they were enemy combatants.
Re:So Arrest Them (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't get them for torture as they were enemy combatants. Can't get them for violating POW rights and policies as they were enemy combatants.
The US government's designation/use of this term "enemy combatant" to refer to POWs — POWs generally being captured "enemies" engaged in "combat" — for the purpose of skirting international law — is tantamount to my getting out of a speeding ticket by telling the judge I wasn't speeding, but engaging in "enhanced-velocity travel" or some such bullshit. If we (as a supposed "nation of laws") are to accept this ridiculous, ongoing wordplay, we may as well resign ourselves to fully embracing the concept of a US government-produced "American Newspeak [wikipedia.org]" vocabulary, and the degradation of our ability to engage in meaningful dialog that such acceptance would entail.
I'd be interested to see a list of the "American Newspeak" euphemisms coined for various war crimes and Constitutional violations over the years, categorized by US presidents' administrations. I'm willing to bet that this American Newspeak's vocabulary size has been expanding at an increasing rate during the past few administrations, much like we've witnessed the accelerated expansion of other facets of a totalitarian police state: mass surveillance; militarized police forces; world-record incarcerations (and the rise of the private prison industry that lobbies for draconian laws and sentences (and increasing the slave-labor workforce beyond pre-Civil War numbers); persecution/prosecution of whistle-blowers; over-classification of government documents (often to hide unconstitutional activities and war crimes); government infiltration of peaceful/law-abiding groups; mass arrests at peaceful protests; mass deportations (without regard for the families shattered); undermining the critical function of the free press; and so on...
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Orwell wrote an essay about this mangling of language, Politics and the English Language [orwell.ru].
Quoth,
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
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This isn't so much a war on terror; its a war OF terror. Where the americans arrest, torture and release their possible enemies.
Sadists, enabled by our government.... (Score:3)
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Enabled? Did you miss the part about the lying?
Re:Sadists, enabled by our government.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Enabled: Have you missed the part where no one ever is held responsible?
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Diud you miss the part about how the CIA is part of the government?
Re:Sadists, enabled by our government.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pfft the committee doesn't care about the lying, that goes without mentioning. The report is just retaliation for being spied on. Tit for tat. Nothing will come of it. Yes, we are the enablers.
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Our government, enabled by the voters
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What's not really democratic about that?
That's a shocker (Score:5, Insightful)
This shakes my world view to its very core.
Also, whoever decided to auto-play audio on Slashdot should be fired.
Re:That's a shocker (Score:5, Funny)
Also, whoever decided to auto-play audio on Slashdot should be fired from a cannon into a brick wall.
FTFY.
Re:That's a shocker (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFY
Re:That's a shocker (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, whoever decided to auto-play audio on Slashdot should be fired from a cannon that was loaded with 3-inch nails, and then with them, into a brick wall and then slid from the brick wall into a vat of boiling acid.
FTFY.
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And whatever slashdot user decided to browse a webpage without NoScript must be new here.
WaPo still won't use word "torture" (Score:5, Insightful)
Cowards. They're not willing to call it what it is, because they're still the Establishment Media, and don't want to lose access to the government people who are their big information sources.
At least National Public Radio has the excuse that they're directly funded by the government (and "viewers like you", and grants from Exxon, Archer Daniels Midland, some recent movie, etc.) - it was 10 years after Gitmo before I first heard them use the T-word in a news story; before that it had only been guests on Terry Gross's interview shows (and Terry herself.)
Don't let the right-wingers tell you that either of these are "liberal" media.
Re:WaPo still won't use word "torture" (Score:5, Insightful)
Wish I had mod points. This was the first thing I noticed as well. Lots of mentions of "harsh treatment" or "excruciating interrogation methods" and yet they can never bring themselves to admit that it was torture. The closest they come is in saying "methods that Obama and others later labeled torture."
Re:WaPo still won't use word "torture" (Score:5, Insightful)
Also the 'T' word: Terrorism.
The point of the torure and the extra judicial imprisonment beyond the norms of warfare is to spread terror and fear in those who are perceived as enemies. In other words, State Sponsored Terrorism.
It does not keep anyone safe. It creates and breeds more hatred and desire for revenge. It isolates the US from allies. It does the exact opposite of ending terroism. Torture is like throwing gasoline on the bonfire of terrorism.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Re:WaPo still won't use word "torture" (Score:5, Insightful)
It does not keep anyone safe. It creates and breeds more hatred and desire for revenge. It isolates the US from allies. It does the exact opposite of ending terroism. Torture is like throwing gasoline on the bonfire of terrorism.
This.
Something else I find truly and jaw-droppingly shocking is that all the discussion of terrorism remains selectively detached from our own foreign policies. So on the one hand we always hear about terrorism shaping foreign policy, but never about foreign policy shaping terrorism.
"They" don't hate us because of our freedom. And with the possible exception of a very small fraction of true believers, they don't hate us for not being Muslims. Most of them hate us because we've been overthrowing their democratic governments and propping up the brutal dictators in their countries.
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That's a small part of the actual problem, and like it was stated before, only the opinion of a small subset.
Re:WaPo still won't use word "torture" (Score:4, Informative)
I have. You should as well. You will learn where the USA learned the waterboarding torture technique from.
Re:WaPo still won't use word "torture" (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, but evil and greed know no borders. The US's School of the Americas [wikipedia.org] worked diligently to educate others in torture methods they discovered themselves. [youtube.com]
Do not be distracted by the wickedly deformed path that evil takes, for any can use the architecture of aggression for their own twisted ends.
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Funny how I was called a tinfoil hatter for talking about that place in the 1980s.
Isn't that the way it goes though? Those of us interested in the inner and hidden workings of the government will always be considered paranoid, because people still seem to assume that if some spokesperson says it's not true then it's not true.
I don't really understand why anyone trusts the CIA at all with anything anymore. I mean, they have lied so often for their own purposes. Talk about tinfoil hat, I still firmly believe the Company has agents stationed throughout the media to monitor and control th
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Reboot your moral compass.
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Are you saying that we should calibrate our sense of right and wrong using the worst excesses of our adversaries as baseline? That will predictably turn into a race to the bottom with nothing but losers in the end. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" (Ghandi)
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You children don't know what torture really is. Read about how our soldiers where treated in North Korea or North Vietnam. How the captured Soviets were treated in Afghanistan. How North Korea or the old Soviet Union treated dissidents.... Grow up hipsters and hippies. It's a bad, mean old world out there.
How is this relevant to our actions? Do we judge our actions only against those of others, or do we have standards of our own that we should strive to uphold? It is indeed a mean world out there. I'd like to try to make it less that way, rather than contributing to the problem. It's only a mean world because people and nations, including our own, make it that way.
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There is some ridiculously inflammatory "liberal media" out there; make no mistake. I used to read cracked 24/7 until it turned into...well..liberal media.
That being said this is not it! This is a report from people who would know about people we kind of suspected this of for well..ever.
Obviously this is real, and anyone who thinks it's acceptable isn't a conservative - they're a dick. The republicans of today aren't "real conservatives" at least going by the conservative philosophy. Arguably no one is. How
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I guess "harsh interrogation" is what you get when you aren't very good at torture???? The terminology is fundamentally stupid - if you are compelling someone to do something they don't want to do, and continue to do worse things, isn't that torture- whether its sleep deprivation, water-boarding or the rack really doesn't seem important.
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"....says that the DoD termed those involved in interrogation "safety officers" rather than doctors. "
"CIA made doctors torture suspected terrorists after 9/11, taskforce finds" (4 November 2013)
http://www.theguardian.com/wor... [theguardian.com]
Also see the Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS)
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Cowards. They're not willing to call it what it is, because they're still the Establishment Media, and don't want to lose access to the government people who are their big information sources.
"Don't want to lose access"? Really? Because Chomsky tells a much different tale of state filtered media for manufacture of consent. [youtube.com]
Not that access can't be leverage, but in my experience no mainstream "journalists" ever really tell the news. You'll realize this once something sufficiently heinous goes down in your neck of the woods and you see how it's reported.
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That's what gave me cold sweats after the Snowden leaks broke. Government spying, general warrants, unconstitutional insanity involving both parties up to the highest levels of government, truly terrifying things, and both CNN and Fox are running stories about how these terrible leaks could have happened and what can be done to stop them. Or maligning Snowden as a "terrorist nerd" with a stripper girlfriend. It was blatantly, blatantly obvious that American media is just a mouthpiece of the state.
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WaPo still employs Mark Theissen as a "thoughtful (in print) opinion writer". The proverbial salesman for "enhanced interrogations". This is printed under the masthead. Really?
[sarc]How wonderfully counter-productive![/sarc] (Score:2)
If the reward for cooperating is torture and more torture, why cooperate? At least keeping silent (or lying in ways not easily checked) can be a form of revenge.
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They're looking for the "big fish", the "kingpins". The focus on catching the "kingpin" works equally badly for informants in drug cases.
Re:[sarc]How wonderfully counter-productive![/sarc (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, just to play devil's (!!!) advocate, because you don't *know* Baluchi is cooperating as fully as he might be.
Ammar Al-Baluchi was unquestionably involved with moving money and goods around for Al Qaeda and was clearly involved with helping many of the 9/11 hijackers. Although that does not necessarily mean he was an active *member* of Al Qaeda or knew exactly what the 9/11 hijackers were up to, he'd have to be remarkably incurious not to know something was up. And he was captured with correspondence that was destined for Osama bin Laden.
So this is a person who, even if he had no specific knowledge of imminent attacks, knows a lot of useful things. But that actually poses a challenge for interrogators. He can give them an impressive amount of useful stuff while holding back even *more* useful stuff.
But one thing is certain: if he *had* known more important stuff, it didn't come out under torture. Nor did torture produce *anything* useful that couldn't be produced using different techniques. And now Americans -- servicemen, agents, and innocent bystandanders -- face an increased threat of torture throughout the world at the hands of people who figure if America does it, Americans should get a taste of it too.
It's important not to be too glib about dismissing torture, because in the future we're going to find ourselves in situations where it seems like a pretty good idea. And the person we're thinking of torturing may be a very bad person -- I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize Al-Baruchi's crimes as "heinous". But if ever torture was going to break the back of an enemy it would have done so with al Qaeda after 9/11.
Well, we tried it and it didn't work. What *did* work was ordinary interrogation and intelligence tradecraft. Which should come as no surprise. We spent the 19th and 20th C perfecting those approaches, and the idea that we could do better by tearing a page out of the medieval playbook should, in hindsight, seem ridiculous.
Re:[sarc]How wonderfully counter-productive![/sarc (Score:5, Insightful)
Torture only works for confessions of things you already knew for sure. Then you can force someone to give up and confess. But as an investigative method, it is just unproductive. If you don't know what the suspect knows, how can you tell if he reveals something of value? And how many not-so-bad guys came under torture because of misleading statements, produced more misleading statements (as they didn't know shit), but when they were released they bore a grudge against their torturers and had firsthand knowledge of their structure, mentality, inner workings and locations?
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I think part of the problem is that there is still a section of American society today who "already know for sure" that all Muslims are terrorists. And around 2002 / 2003 there were many, many more who thought this way.
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And you know for sure they're not?
This is 1400+ years of what Islam is about [youtube.com]
All of them? Yeah, I know for sure that not all Muslims are terrorists.
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It's pretty clear that we don't know who all of the hijackers were. A number seem to have used false or stolen passports (since those people have turned up alive). The FBI seems happy to stick with the story they've got though.
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Request more FBI experts who could help, wanted to help and had years of real US legal expertise.
Many nations tried hard to move beyond legal torture after the 1975 ++ Helsinki Accords. In 2014 the final US gov reports will be historically interesting when released.
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If the reward for cooperating is torture and more torture, why cooperate? At least keeping silent (or lying in ways not easily checked) can be a form of revenge.
It's very digusting behavior given that the formation of English law whence America gets many of its concepts of rights. Torture was recognized as ineffective in the 1300's because it works too well, anyone will confess to anything. Here's an illustrated guide for you and yours [lawcomic.net] demonstrating why the CIA practices can't yield justice. The threat of torture is meant as an example to others who go against the will of the CIA, it is effective as a threat, and those imprisoned are doomed to suffer as examples
It's a "boys club" (Score:4, Insightful)
with people totally disconnected from the consequences of their actions, driven by some idea and illusion in their head doing the "right thing", not to use he term "pervert", which in fact this is coming from.....
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And a lot of those boys in the club are working out their Daddy issues.
Yet another front which the terrorists won. (Score:5, Insightful)
Due to our own actions, the terrorists won yet another round...not a cry I'd championed previously.
The future, scratch that, the present is looking really bleak now that the average civilian can expect to be spied upon, searches and home invasions are being done without cause, due process is ignored, travel is restricted, "Homeland Security" are targeting civilians for desiring sexual contact with minors, and those declared enemies of the state are outright tortured, everything that was considered "evil" about the opposition when I was a child (be it the Third Reich or the Soviet Union) is currently taking place in the United States.
The only thing left is to disarm the populace to prevent revolt, and institute concentration or labor camps.
I never imagined I'd grow up to be embarrassed by my government and everything it stands for. Is fear next?
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To quote Captain America: "This isn't freedom. This is fear."
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The rest of them are out the window, but at least we know the 3rd amendment is safe. Haliburton would be pretty pissed if they lost contracts building military bases because the government started quartering soldiers in people's homes.
Sell your soul (Score:2)
People sold their soul and got nothing in exchange. I'd rather have been the martyr than the inquisitor, and that's saying a lot.
Hypocracy (Score:3)
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I would start with us. Through action or inaction we got the government we deserved.
As Dan Froomkin pointed out... (Score:2)
The Washington Post is still too spineless to call it torture.
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Ask them about their Medical Torture Program!!!!!!
Dear CIA:
What is your opinion of Obamacare?
signed,
A Concerned Voter
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I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony.
I'd like to hold it in my arms
And keep it company.
"Sunshine, lollypops and ..."
rainbows
Why are we still fighting crap like this? "Those guys ..." are not people we associate with willingly, yes? So who's letting them get away with this? Somebody shoot the fsckers already! It's self-defence!
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Where does "Coca Cola" come into it?
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They stopped using cocaine at the beginning of the 20th century. It was still legal to import, and sell at that time.
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I don't think he's a troll, because this is something I've thought about myself.
Maybe not get charged with the same crime, but throwing out evidence is stupid. If we know somebody say, committed murder, letting them go to punish the police for violating the rules is mindbogglingly stupid. No, what you need to do is use the evidence that was gathered to get the murderer off the streets, then you try the officer for violating the rights of the suspect.
I realize that there are some problems with this, mostly r
Re:Evidence is allowed: the violator gets the same (Score:4, Insightful)
If we allow prosecutions to succeed on the strength of illegal evidence, we allow a perverse incentive to continue gathering evidence illegally. It has to be perfectly clear that illegally obtained evidence might as well not exist. Otherwise we end up at a point where your rights get violated at the first whiff of suspicion (however unfounded) and nobody ever pays because it never goes to trial.
Add in that convicting a cop will require at least proof beyond reasonable doubt (presuming the prosecutor doesn't just find an excuse not to pursue the matter). In practice, the police still (for reasons that escape me) still get an extra benefit of the doubt. Because of that, we would see abuses run rampant with practically no convictions.
Public trust of the courts, prosecutors, and cops is already falling fast, If we start letting them profit from criminal activity, it will get worse fast.
If you don't want to see murderers go free, hold the police's feet to the fire. If they never violate people's rights, nobody will ever go free because of thrown out evidence.
In cases where a cop plants evidence, he absolutely should face whatever sentence the defendant would get.
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You're missing my point. Violating the rights is a crime, it's not a question of whether it goes to trial. I recognize the practical problems inherent in that, but in my imagined system they would be charged for that. Right now the same incentive exists - if nothing goes to trial, illegal evidence doesn't matter, does it. Hell, there have been news stories here on slashdot about the DEA laundering evidence to hide the illegal nature of its collection.
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The DEA evidence laundering exists exactly because the courts haven't insisted on going back and releasing every last person convicted on laundered evidence. That would put a stop to it right quick. After that, THEN start leveling charges on specific people who can be proven guilty.
Instead, we have the courts pretending they didn't see the news reports and prosecutors, despite the bit of chest thumping they did for show, seem to have no actual interest in filing charges.
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Maybe not get charged with the same crime, but throwing out evidence is stupid. If we know somebody say, committed murder, letting them go to punish the police for violating the rules is mindbogglingly stupid. No, what you need to do is use the evidence that was gathered to get the murderer off the streets, then you try the officer for violating the rights of the suspect.
So we should use the evidence but punish the person who obtained it. At least we won't be sending a mixed message.
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No mixed message at all. Evidence collected about one crime (the violation of rights) can be used in another (murder investigation). Just like the evidence collected about one crime (theft) can be used in another (murder investigation).
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No mixed message at all. Evidence collected about one crime (the violation of rights) can be used in another (murder investigation). Just like the evidence collected about one crime (theft) can be used in another (murder investigation).
I see. So you think if you are falsely accused of murder and the police beat a confession out of you anyway, that confession should still be allowed as evidence at your trial. Interesting.
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Right. Because the police wiretapping you illegally or following your car illegally or entering your home illegally is /exactly/ the same as battery. Thanks for clearing that up.
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Right, in a slightly less sarcastic tone, let me point out that yes, it should be evidence at your trial. "Ladies and Gent of the Juror, here we present evidence that our client was assaulted by police and forced to give an illegal confession. This of course has no legal standing, but shows the incompetence and lack of professional conduct of the prosecutors."
And of course it would figure largely into the officer's trial.
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I disagree with that as well.
We are willing to sacrifice a certain amount of freedom for safety, or we'd all live in Somolia. I don't have the freedom to punch you, or dig up the highway. It's all a question of where we draw the line.
That said, it's not even the point. Even if we value freedom to a very high degree, the information has already been uncovered. I simply think that we should treat it as primarily evidence of the violation of the suspect's rights. And like any other piece of evidence, it can al
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If somebody is willing to throw away their career and go to jail for a few years in order to 'nail' a criminal, I think you need to stop and think long and hard about what person they're trying to hit.
If anybody else broke into the criminal's house and found a bunch of evidence of wrongdoing, we'd accept the evidence. I just don't see why we should treat the police any different.
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We are willing to sacrifice a certain amount of freedom for safety, or we'd all live in Somolia.
You are not referring to fundamental freedoms. If you are, do not say "we." I am not willing to sacrifice fundamental freedoms for safety; that just leads to things such as the TSA, the NSA surveillance, DUI checkpoints, etc. Even if those things were effective, they would still be absolutely intolerable.
That said, it's not even the point. Even if we value freedom to a very high degree, the information has already been uncovered.
It *is* the point. If we want to make it less desirable for the government to break the law, their ability to use illegal evidence must be severely curtailed. Merely punishing them will not prevent the prob
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Look, I don't mind that we disagree on this. I just don't agree with your arguments here. You're jumping from "punish the government (or police) such that they won't break the law" to "You MUST use this method!" You're not actually telling me why you think my method is worse.
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At the least, termination should be considered. After all their job is to catch the guilty legally and if evidence is getting tossed because they violated people's legal rights, they clearly suck at their job.
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Cool
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havent you seen beta?