[sanjuro]

I heard about this Op-Ed on Countdown last night: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802242_pf.html

We're told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations -- and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.

This is from a senior interrogator whose team caught Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

I think there is a brainless, gung-ho attitude from weekend warriors, but this is very relevant information about why places like Gitmo do not work.

 

[$tinkle]

gitmo =/= torture

many bonds were formed tween handler & guest which directly led to valuable & timely intel.

 

[ohio]

gitmo =/= torture

gitmo was also not mutually exclusive with torture.

 

[Westy]

gitmo =/= torture

many bonds were formed tween handler & guest which directly led to valuable & timely intel.

Who knew prison ghey could be so patriotic.

 

[Samirol]

gitmo =/= torture

many bonds were formed tween handler & guest which directly led to valuable & timely intel.

the horrible thing is that I can't tell if you are trolling or not because the Bill Kristols of the world believe this

 

[$tinkle]

dear rm forum:

"As she stood in front of him, she slowly started to unbutton her Army blouse. She had on underneath the Army blouse a tight brown Army T-shirt, touched her breasts, and said, 'Don't you like these big American breasts?'" says Saar. "She wanted to create a barrier between this detainee and his faith, and if she could somehow sexually entice him, he would feel unclean in an Islamic way, he would not be able to pray and go before his God and gain that strength, so the next day, maybe he would be able to start cooperating, start talking to her."

makes the baby allah cry, no?

 

[jimmydean]

dear rm forum:makes the baby allah cry, no?

You are quoting Penthouse Forum now? Awesome.

 

[Samirol]

dear rm forum:makes the baby allah cry, no?

you didn't post the rest!

According to Saar, during the next encounter, the soldier went a step further.

"She started to unbutton her pants and reached and put her hands in her pants and then started to circle around the detainee. And when she had her hands in her pants, apparently she used something to put what appeared to be menstrual blood on her hand, but in fact was ink.”

Sarr also added that the interrogator later told the prisoner she was “menustrating right now” and wiped the ink on the prisoner’s face.

 

[$tinkle]

You are quoting Penthouse Forum now? Awesome.

so hopefully you'll also appreciate my tag

 

[Defenestrated]

Guantanamo Bay might not be torture but it is a mockery of the constitution. The executive branch has no place establishing a court system and corresponding penitentiary, these powers are enumerated to the legislative branch.

 

[$tinkle]

so...who exactly is entitled to protection under the u.s. constitution, and who is not?

 

[Defenestrated]

Even thought the question is irrelevant due to the fact that (as indicated) Guantanamo Bay was not created with constitutional authority, it is unclear. However from an ethical / internationalist standpoint, no person should be discriminated against based on citizenship. This also satisfies a basic principal on which our nation was supposedly founded (although often ignored outright), that all men are created equal, no one being entitled to more rights than another.

In context this phrase was a rejection to the concept of a divine birthright which was used to justify the positions of royalty and monarchs. Be that as it may, I see little difference between the concept of divine birthright and citizenship, both are man made titles with the purpose of forcefully (and sometimes arbitrarily) categorizing individuals.

 

[ohio]

so...who exactly is entitled to protection under the u.s. constitution, and who is not?

Are we not bound by the treaties we've signed? Pretty sure the constitution says something or other about treaties...

 

[DirtyDog]

It worked on my brother growing up.....

 

[$tinkle]

However from an ethical / internationalist standpoint, no person should be discriminated against based on citizenship.

i would sure hope i'd receive unfair treatment if i checked into my local embassy. but since you're (presumably) angling for the treatment of detainees, yes, we would expect the specter of looming rendition in return should not taint our treatment. i don't know if john walker lindh was treated the same as his combatants, but expect he was, fwiw

In context this phrase was a rejection to the concept of a divine birthright which was used to justify the positions of royalty and monarchs. Be that as it may, I see little difference between the concept of divine birthright and citizenship, both are man made titles with the purpose of forcefully (and sometimes arbitrarily) categorizing individuals.

so if citizenship is arbitrary, then should guests at gitmo forgo repatriation? personally, i find high value in allegiance to one's country, most notably in this case military service. perhaps these detainees are citizens of the nation of islam?

 

[Samirol]

Binyam Mohammed was the gitmo detainee who allegedly got his dick cut up in Morocco

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/aug/02/terrorism.humanrights1

They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel. I was naked. I tried to put on a brave face. But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they'd electrocute me. Maybe castrate me.

They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. At first I just screamed ... I was just shocked, I wasn't expecting ... Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn't want to scream because I knew it was coming.

One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. "I told you I was going to teach you who's the man," [one] eventually said.

They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists. I asked for a doctor.

Doctor No 1 carried a briefcase. "You're all right, aren't you? But I'm going to say a prayer for you." Doctor No 2 gave me an Alka-Seltzer for the pain. I told him about my penis. "I need to see it. How did this happen?" I told him. He looked like it was just another patient. "Put this cream on it two times a day. Morning and night." He gave me some kind of antibiotic.

I was in Morocco for 18 months. Once they began this, they would do it to me about once a month. One time I asked a guard: "What's the point of this? I've got nothing I can say to them. I've told them everything I possibly could."

"As far as I know, it's just to degrade you. So when you leave here, you'll have these scars and you'll never forget. So you'll always fear doing anything but what the US wants."

Well, today, CSM came out with an article

A major battle is brewing in federal court here over the well-established legal requirement that the government must turn over any exculpatory evidence it has uncovered to an accused criminal it is seeking to imprison.

But what if that person is a suspected terrorist being held as an enemy combatant at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba?

That's the issue before US District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is presiding over a high-stakes legal dispute involving allegations that US intelligence agents secretly sent a man to Morocco for 18 months of torture before transferring him to prisons in Afghanistan and then Guantánamo.

Judge Sullivan has ordered the government to turn over exculpatory evidence about the man, but Justice Department lawyers are seeking to narrow the judge's order.

The issue arises in the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born former British resident accused of plotting with American citizen Jose Padilla to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb" in the US. Mr. Mohamed has been held at Guantánamo for four years and has filed a habeas corpus petition challenging the legality of his continued military detention.

He is being held as an enemy combatant on the basis of what government lawyers say are his admissions to interrogators that he attended Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and was involved in a dirty-bomb plot.

Mohamed's lawyers say many of the alleged admissions were coerced and are false. They argue in their habeas petition that because the government is relying on alleged confessions by their client, they must be afforded an opportunity to examine the conditions and circumstances that led to Mohamed's statements.

They present a Manchurian candidate argument, that Mohamed was tortured for two years – from May 2002 to May 2004 – to condition him to later confess to his involvement in terrorism. He was subjected to repetitive abuse until he replied to the interrogators' questions with the answers US officials desired, Mohamed's lawyers charge.

The US government, they add, wanted to use Mohamed as a witness against top Al Qaeda leader Khaled Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind. In reality, the lawyers say, Mohamed was a "nobody" who was swept up and then chewed up in America's post-9/11 dragnet.
[...]
After Sullivan ordered the government to turn over favorable evidence to Mohamed's lawyers, Justice Department lawyers announced in October that they would no longer seek to use the dirty-bomb plot as evidence against Mohamed. Nonetheless, the judge ordered government lawyers to disclose to Mohamed's lawyers any dirty-bomb evidence suggesting that Mohamed was innocent of involvement.

Mohamed's lawyers say in court filings that there never was a dirty-bomb plot. The allegation stems from a joke website, they say.

and this is in his case filing on PACER http://www.scribd.com/doc/8615476/Habashi-v-Gates-Doc-1032

Binyam Mohamed insisted that discussions concerning a supposed radiological bomb centered on a website that he considered a joke.
[...]
Materials from Pakistan will also help Petitioner prove why the US went to such illegal extremes to force him to talk. CIA agents questioned Mr. Mohamed in Pakistan and found him uncooperative” or “combative”. UK agents questioned him as well and found that he was “a nobody”. Mr. Mohamed’s “failure to cooperate,” combined with faulty intelligence from the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah and a spoof website—“How to Build an H-Bomb”—gave Respondent the notion Mr. Mohamed had something to do with, or knew something about, a planto attack the United States with a so-called “dirty bomb.” The fear engendered by this mythical plot was the provocation for everything that later happened.

A joke website was taken seriously and oops his dick

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="How+to+Build+an+H-Bomb"

 

[Defenestrated]

what the fvcking fvck...

 

[$tinkle]

great, we created another emo

 

[ohio]

That was actually free surgery. "Speed bumps" are the latest thing in the valley.

 

[Defenestrated]

free surgery was the euphemism for torture I was looking for

 

[MikeD]

so...who exactly is entitled to protection under the u.s. constitution, and who is not?

All persons present within the borders of the United States, regardless of citizenship.

All US persons, wherever they may be present in the world. (Obviously only vis-a-vis the US gov and its agents)

Whether non-US persons in the extraterritorial and special maritime jurisdiction of the US have Constitutional protections vis-a-vis the US gov is an issue that seems to be gelling right now in the wake of Guantanamo. However, the courts seem to be saying a pretty definative "yes", which makes sense.

Check around P 34 here; lotsa references in the footnotes.

http://law.vanderbilt.edu/publications/vanderbilt-law-review/download.aspx?id=3281


PS However, if the US or its agents are acting with respect to an alien who is not inside the US special extraterritorial/maritime jurisdiction (such jurisdiction includes places like overseas military bases and embassies), they do not have to act within the bounds of the Constitution. If, say, an FBI agent abroad breaks into a Swede's car without a warrant to gather evidence against him, there's no suppression of the evidence in court if there's a prosecution in US court and/or no ability for our Swede to file a Constitutional tort against the US gov for a violation of his rights. Likewise, if someone is rendered to the US for prosecution--kidnapped, essentially, if done without the consent of the jurisdiction in which the action takes place-- it doesn't change anything with respect to a US prosecution. The flip side, of course, is that the US and its agents can be prosecuted by the jurisdiction in which their actions take place if that jurisdiction can apprehend or otherwise get a physical hold of them and chooses to do so.

 

[Silver]

I love how the ethics of conservative Americans are so useless that the argument isn't about the morality of torture, but rather the efficacy of it.

God Damn America, indeed.

 

[$tinkle]

it's both.

if it weren't, we'd sacrifice millions more babies in poor neighborhoods on the altar of pleasantville

 

[DaveW]

All persons present within the borders of the United States, regardless of citizenship.

All US persons, wherever they may be present in the world. (Obviously only vis-a-vis the US gov and its agents)

Let's see ya try to exercise your right to bear arms while in the average EU country then....... oster_oops:

 

[MikeD]

Let's see ya try to exercise your right to bear arms while in the average EU country then....... oster_oops:

Oh, yeah, well...I guess you feel free to exercise your right, worldwide, to ignore the very same parenthetical statement you quoted, then?

 

[$tinkle]

http://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/misc/torture/21.html

enjoy?

 

[$tinkle]

while it may be argued that torture doesn't work, its long & storied past @ gitmo is keeping a steady pace:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,464686,00.html