Waterboarding
 

I've heard a lot about waterboarding but didn't understand until I was sent this. I don't recommend trying this at home. http://content1.clipmarks.com/conten...4-3A07CF501B7C

Very effective. When it comes to captured terrorists, they should be doing this 24x7 to get all the intel they can.

It has been proven as an ineffective means of torture. Thousands of hours have been wasted as a result of chasing bogus leads given by those subjected to waterboarding.

...With no proven results of preventing any attacks.

Then they should waterboard and not ask any questions.

Or how bout just put em under water. :)

I would spill my guts if I was getting it, but it would be whatever they wanted to hear... not the truth at all

Like that episode of always sunny, Mac asks Frank if waterboarding works and he says something like, "You bet your ass, I got Dee to admit to things she never even did..."

Nice simplistic approach there fellas. Good think our security is not up to you. ANY information you get is subject to being a lie. Of course any information you get from someone is going to be a lie at first. It is just like when the cops lock a person in a room because they busted them. The lies come out first. Then after repeated questions and more isolation and more counter lies, the truth starts to reveil itself. You look for inconsistant information. You look for other sources of the same information. The goal is to introduce high stress to break down your thought processes so you can not keep a lie in tact. Only things that will hold up is if you actually lived the facts to such a detail that they are ingrained in your sub conscience.

Wow, Hoosier and I 100% agree! IMO waterboarding is very effective reasonably humane way of extracting information. For me it is similar to the tazer for the police, no good that they need to use them but at least it is way better than the available alternatives and is effective.

I don't why there is so much controversy about it. That's nothing compared to what happens in some countries in order to gain information.

My dad was a cop back in the 50s and 60s (before Miranda rights), There was one fellow cop that used to beat the sh!!t out of suspects he wanted to get the truth out of. More often than not he said they would tell him anything to stop the beatings, to me it makes total sense. The other cops who were more subtle, were the ones that got the most information. Our discussion about this came about after all the waterboarding isues.

It seems to me, as Nick said, I'm going to tell my captor anything to get him to stop waterboarding me.

The people who seem to speak the loudest about it not being torture are the ones who have never had it done to them. I am still waiting for that giant wimp Sean Hannity to be water boarded who said it wasn't torture, and was offered to get a first hand demonstration, but just can't seem to find the time. Typical Chicken hawk.

Of course you can beat someone until they tell you what you want to hear. That is not the purpose. The purpose is to put stress on you so you can not think of what to say but say what is really in your mind. It is not a one time deal. They keep the pressure on you and they look for information that adds to other information. It is not a dirty cop beating you for one made up piece of information to throw you into the slammer for a few years. You obviously have no concept. Many would consider the fact that they had to give up information that they did not want to give up as being torture. Why do they put our special forces through that kind of training? Are we torturing our on service members? The reason special forces are treated that way is to put stress on them to get them to quit. On the assertion of Sean Hannity. SO WHAT. Of course he could not take it. You could not either. Just like a vast majority of humans on this earth could not handle the first 2 days of SEAL training. Does that make it torture? At the end of the day, are those people unharmed with all function? No cuts. No bruises. No drug damage. Is that torture?

The problem with Sean Hanity is that he has a lot of followers who think he knows what he's talking about. Plus he's like many conservative Chicken hawks, they like to talk tough, but when put to the test their the biggest wimps, nothing more. I do beleive that when we start torturing people (which many military people beleive waterboarding is) then we as a country are no better than the countries who torture on a regular basis.

Oh and Someone Else so when were you a Navy Seal. Would you be willing to have it done to you? Then you can say it's not torture (if that's what you think) or do you believe like Sean Hanity?

So, Scott, our special teams personnel should offer terrorists ice cream and cookies while holing their hands in order to gain information?

I can see this discussion is starting to move around a little.

First, you are ignoring the point of putting stress on an individual to gain information. Either you are ignoring it or you have conceded that I am correct. I assume the later.

I never was a recruit for the military but they followed around a BUDS class on the military channel for a few weeks. Pretty brutal and they spoke directly to the point of what they were trying to do to the recruits. The first few weeks is all about trying to get you to quit. They do that by putting you through stress and break you down. They had the hardest individuals dropping left and right. One can also assume of all the crazy crap they filmed that there was even crazier crap that they did not want to show the cameras.

I would drop the chicken hawk mem. That was used by others on the board about 2 to 3 years ago. You know, the same time all you folks were bitching how the republicans got us into war all while ignoring the democrats vote. Then even continuing to believe in your fairy tales all while the democrats got control of the house and senate in 2006 by promising to get us out of Iraq and Afgahnistan. Then deciding one war was fine then the other was completely lost. Point is, your sides arguments are completely void of the truth. Meaning you overlook complete facts in the face of child like emotions. To bring this back to the chicken hawk mem, don't convince yourself that conservatives are to be screwed with.

Regarding many service members would consider the seal team training to be torture. I considered 2 a days in football to be torture and I considered everyday in wrestling practice to be torture. Vast majority of a high school would not even last the first day of those practices. Just like the service members who say it is torture. To them it may be. Did they ask every service member? I bet many do not. Just like you are reading and thinking the no way does football or wrestling practice constitutes torture. I bet you will find many on those teams who would call it torture. Have you ever been ran so hard that you threw up and then kept on going? Have you been ran so hard that you thought you were going to die. We had one game where we had two or three guys on our football team that were getting into fistacuffs with the other team. The next practice our coaches made us do the regular torturous practice and the kept the whole team for a good ol fashion beat down. Everyone thought they were going to die. OUr basketball teams pre-season conditioning was so hard that most of the members of the team decided to join the cross country team because the running was less than the pre season conditioning for basketball. Is that all torture?

At the end of the day, just because you think you are going to die and are stressed out does not mean you are going to die. Just because no one wants to go through it does not mean it is "torture". Heck, call it torture if you want. The fact remains because someone labels it that does not make it that. It is all a point of view. I would not go through those practices again in a million years but I am not harmed from them. To answer your question, no I would not want to go through waterboarding just like I would not go through wrestling practice again or just like the vast majority of the kids in high school would not go through the torture of football conditioning.

Also, have you seen the brief series they do for pilot escape and avoidance training?

Let me ask this. Would it be ok to put terror suspects in a room of tear gas and make them do physical activity or answer questions? Would that be torture?

My father in law is a navy commander he had to be waterboarded for some type of training he claims it is VERY effective. He also thinks we should use it whenever needed.

John McCain would disagree with your father-in-law. If you want to ellicit a false response from a waterboardee, than yes it is effective.
The guys being waterboarded feel they are being drowned and will say anything to save their life. Does a private in the US Army know all of the critical information on the workings of the military? Why would some low-level terrorist know all of the workings of al queda?

Wow.

Again you are choosing to ignore the rational for applying stress to a person who has information. Are you ignoring the reasons that they do that to people? You also make uninformed statements about the content of their confession. Then you are making false arguments of who they are doing this procedure too. I can play along if you want. In a time of war, even a low level private can give away important details of where they were and why they thought they were there. Number of members, methods of communication and so on. Then the captors put that with other information a develop a the big picture.

Do you guys really want to stay with this very short sited notion that our intelligence officers are morons but you know better?

Would John McCain like to be kept in small cage again? I bet not. Would John McCain want to have to live a daily life of going in the gas chamber like he did in boot camp? Does John McCain want to do grassers until he hurls? I doubt it.

At the end of the day, these scum bags have the right to give the information that they are asking. It is that simple. They have a choice. Also, they have the ability to tell if you are lying BTW. There are people that make a living by documenting visual cues of liars and they do have a little think called a polygraph test and they usually have supporting information. They are not idiots. You can stand by the notion that you don't like it, but, try and insult us by saying that they are not getting the information they are after and don't insult us by saying they were actually harmed by the ordeal. They were not.

How am I insulting you? Are you in the intelligence field? I take the word of a US senator, a former POW, and a guy that you entrusted enough to vote for as the top position of the country that says it is torture and the US should not be doing it. The only thing we have gotten is bin Laden's limo driver, sounds like waterboarding is working like a champ.

Good opinion on it...

http://theamericanscene.com/2009/04/...s-and-strategy

Let’s assume arguendo that torture works in the tactical sense that I believe has been used so far in this debate; that is, that one can gain useful information reliably in at least some subset of situations through torture that could not otherwise be obtained. Further, assume that we don’t care about morality per se, only winning: defeating our enemies militarily, and achieving a materially advantaged life for the citizens of the United States. It seems to me that the real question is whether torture works strategically; that is, is the U.S. better able to achieve these objectives by conducting systematic torture as a matter of policy, or by refusing to do this? Given that human society is complex, it’s not clear that tactical efficacy implies strategic efficacy.

When you ask the question this way, one obvious point stands out: we keep beating the torturing nations. The regimes in the modern world that have used systematic torture and directly threatened the survival of the United States – Nazi Germany, WWII-era Japan, and the Soviet Union – have been annihilated, while we are the world’s leading nation. The list of other torturing nations governed by regimes that would like to do us serious harm, but lack the capacity for this kind of challenge because they are economically underdeveloped (an interesting observation in itself), are not places that most people reading this blog would ever want to live as a typical resident. They have won no competition worth winning. The classically liberal nations of Western Europe, North America and the Pacific that led the move away from systematic government-sponsored torture are the world’s winners.

Now, correlation is not causality. Said differently, we might have done even better in WWII and the Cold War had we also engaged in systematic torture as a matter of policy. Further, one could argue that the world is different now: that because of the nature of our enemies, or because of technological developments or whatever, that torture is now strategically advantageous. But I think the burden of proof is on those who would make these arguments, given that they call for overturning what has been an important element of American identity for so many years and through so many conflicts.

We can always have bin Laden over and talk about how unfair life is over for a beer. If I'm not mistaken, there is a level of national security that is not made available to the public, but invading Iraq was under the advice of Gen. Rumsfield. At the time of the invasion, Al-Qaeda had training camps there. The military personnel I know say it was a necessary invasion. What about when the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor? Would that generation of leaders sit back and worry about the rights of terrorists? And what if they had done that? Sometimes, you have to do what is necessary to protect yourself.

1. Rumsfeld was not a General
2. Pointing out that the war was a result of the advice of Rumsfeld in no way is helping your argument...

Jeremy, you sure like to make illogical leaps of faith.

First, we have more than Osama's limo driver and on top of that, I am pretty sure they don't exactly announce who they have. They only put out what they want you to hear. I am not in the intelligence field. Also, I did not say you were insulting me. I said you were insulting the intelligence community in thinking they are not smart enough to tell that people are lying but you think you know who, what and where they are getting information.

Second, you are making a very big assumption of who I voted for and what I voted for.

Third, you are still missing the point of why you put stress on someone.

Fourth, you are missing the point that these people are not being hurt one bit. Just because they feel they are going to die does not mean it is real. They just get really stressed at having to deal with it, so they become compliant. It is not like they are shoving knives in their knee caps or cutting off eye lids like they did to our people. Again torture is in the eye of the beholder. Is it torture to put someone in a tear gas filled building and make them to physical tasks or make them answer questions before they are allowed to leave the tear gas filled building?

Ron. Manzo has a point bud. You can point out the never ending quotes of Al Gore, President Clinton, Hillary, Sen. Kerry, Albright and others making the case for taking Saddam out and laying out how dangerous he was and also include those people's votes on giving the president the authority to invade Iraq in the name of the American people.

"Is it torture to put someone in a tear gas filled building and make them to physical tasks or make them answer questions before they are allowed to leave the tear gas filled building?"

Dude, I was in the Navy and subjected to the tear gas training. Did it suck, yes, but it was not torture. We were monitored by about six trained specialists to make sure nothing went wrong. I also knew prior to enlisting in the USN that I would be subjected to extra physical training, less sleep, and the gas chamber, that was part of it. But there wasn't one time while I was inhaling the tear gas that I thought I was going to die. I think you are making a bad comparison.

Waterboarding is useless just like the Patriot Act, but Cheney and Bush used them to show their smarts and power when it came to fighting terrorism. I certainly do not feel any safer because of the measures Bush and Co. used while they were in office.

Well I consider going into the gas chamber as torture. If you did it every day for many sessions a day it would be torture by definintion. I know people who are extremely clostaphobic (sp?) and living in a small cage would be extremely torturous. Torture is in the eye of the beholder.

It is OK to submit you to a condition where you can not breath and if left in it long enough you would die and it is OK to do that because you knew about it and there were train specialist there to try and restart you heart if you died? That makes it OK to do? Then I guess, I agree with you. It is not torture and neither is waterboarding then. They are administering the technique with trained specialists as well. They don't want that person to die just like the military did not want you to die. Seems like you all are on equal footing then. Then why are they being tortured and you weren't again? Let me get this straight. These people engage in an activity that theyc know is going to get a cruise missile in their bedroom or a special ops sniper blow their head off but if we catch them and subject them to things that we do to our own military and things that I would argue are just as humane as we do to teens in the name of football practice or name your sport - we are bad?

Your argument is an emotional argument because the facts don't add up. Don't you think that the terrorists signed up for this too? Isn't that your excuse. IF you signed up for it, it is not torture? Heck, these people strap bombs to themselves and fly airplanes into buildings but you are worried if they feel like they can't breath?

The only things you argued are:

Bush started torture - hate to tell you but this has been around way before Bush so you are continuing the Bush delusion of the left.

Patriot act is useless and it was a Bush thing again (more of the Bush delusion of the left) -
is that why Obama has left the patriot act basically untouched and we still have Gitmo and we are getting ready to try the enemy combatants in a military court just like Bush?

Everything is Bush, Bush, Bush. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia. Open your eyes. All the crap you are arguing are exactly the things the democrats voted for too and are still continuing. At the end of the day you have to deduce one of two things. Either they are all out to get you or maybe intelligent people all looked at the same information and come up with the same rational answers. Only difference is you actually believe that your side is different.

My bad, his highest rank was Captain before becoming Secretary of Defense. Eiter wa

I apologize but this new format keeps posting before I'm finished. Either way he was a ranking officer.

But I think the burden of proof is on those who would make these arguments, given that they call for overturning what has been an important element of American identity for so many years and through so many conflicts. (IMHO),Manzo, that's the problem. When attacked, leaders don't have time to have a philosophical debate over human rights, leaders have act in order to save the most lives. It's the same as being tried for shooting a suspected terrorist who may be harboring a weapon or a policeman who is accused of excessive force. All our military personnel and police want to go home at the end of the day. It's easy for us to sit in our comfortable surroundings or in a courtroom and judge, but the persons who should be making these decisions are the ones with the most military experience, not some paid for lawyer.That is why procedures are in place. So, would you feel safer in a country that is being protected by a military who greet people with bombs attached to them with flowers or guns?

You are absolutely hilarious, and you just keep living in your own world. It has always seemed to me the ones who get the most upset by something said, IE someone being called Chicken hawk are the ones that really are Chicken hawk. In my childish manner I wouldn't want to make conservatives mad they might decide to waterboard. Oh and I'm sorry I used the word Chicken hawk. you know like 4 defferment Dick Cheney who would love to waterboard just about every one. Your view of where the political parties stand on WATERBOARDING, is just too funny.

I am not mad. I am pointing out that you are about 3 years behind in your mems. Going to the ol "chickenhawk" card is an emotional argument. It is used to mask a real argument. If you can marginalize the other point of view, you don't have to recognize facts. Ever notice any argument from Bush haters always start with name calling. It did not matter what the facts were regarding votes, previous arguments or even what their own party did that was exactly the same. It would come down to calling Bush and conservatives names. Ever notice most anti conservative blasts posted are usually from a comedy show?

So, you have called conservatives and Dick Cheney names at least twice now but how does your name calling (childish) change the argument that waterboarding is a torture that is any different than the tortures we do to our own soldiers or even what we do to our own student athletes.

Just a straw poll here. Which way do you think a vast majority of the armed forces vote?

If we're making generalizations, our new improved liberated system should pay the terrorists for emotional damages then. Another trillion wouldn't matter anyway.

There's a very big difference, the people who are enemy combatants are not told before hand that this won't kill them, our military people are. You don't think this is a big difference? If you don't this is a pointless discussion. Chickenhawk is a deserving name for Dick Cheney, the name fits him perfectly. I'm sorry if you don't like my "childish" description.

I tend to think Colin Powell has more sway, he says it's torture. Good enough for me.

Once again, Chaney may be a Chicken Hawk. I don't know, but they jumped on us first, so I still say the administration did what they thought was necessary at the time to protect our country. Terrorist are a totally different enemy. I know Obama's outstanding military record impresses me and he also is good at borrowing money. I found the below comment on another web page that I found interesting and should be enlightening:

"It doesn't matter what the majority of top military leaders say on the issue because there is a clause in the freedom of speech congressional rule that prohibits the military to speak freely about the president and his policy... Only positive speech is allowed by congressional military rules (military law, UCMJ prohibits negative speech towards the Commander in Chief by active military personnel)

Obama is not on higher ground by saying he will not use waterboarding and claiming waterboarding is torture when the federal Justice Department legal team ruled differently. Obama should keep his to himself unless he has a legal opinion from the US Justice Department that the established policies in the Bush administration were in fact torture."

I am sure you believed the democrats when they said this was Bush's war too, but, that does not make it any more true. Powell or anyone can say it is torture if they want. Question is, is it allowable. Sounds like it is. Like I pointed out. Football practice is torture. Wrestling practice is torture. Putting your own service members in the gas is torture. SEAL training is torture. Probably 90% of Americans could not do the first two items I described and maybe .005% can do the SEAL training. Matter of fact many die each year in doing those activities due to the stress on the body and there is a very high injury rate. SO, I think, in your view, it can pretty well be defined as torture on the technical merits if you did this to a captive.

I think you don't understand the nature of questioning. The combatants that the do this too know they are not going to die either. That is why they are being questioned. We want information. That is why they are not going to talk in the first place. If we wanted to kill them, we would go and put a bullet in their brain. They know they are not messing with china or russia. Here is where the whole argument gets difficult is you must not understand the reason for the procedure. The reason is to induce high levels of stress to the individual. Just like when the people at boot camp constantly put stress on recruits. They are breaking them down and making them compliant. Well, the could very easily do this to a terror suspect by running them to death (just like football practice) and then keep them from sleeping. After a while you can not think straight for yourself. All you do is start focusing on getting through the ordeal on the other side. If they keep it up and you know the only way to get through the other side is by spilling your guts, then that is ultimately what the focus is. Since you can't make these people run until the puke over and over again, they do waterboarding which causes high stress using your own body to keep you from drowning. Both ordeals do nearly the same thing. They both take you to an anarobic state which cause high stress on the body. It is widly regarded that we do this technique to our own people in SERE training.

According to Justice Department documents, the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed provided information about an unrealized terrorist attack on Los Angeles. So, would the people in LA deserve to die because Khalid would not talk?

Also, I just love this business that enemy combatants are not told they won't be killed so it is different. It is not the threat of death dude. It is the stress on the body. You body has not response but to be stressed. It has ZERO to do with the threat of death. I don't know what movies you been watching.

At the end of the day these guys are not uniformed combatants fighting under a flag of a country. They are worst case considered spies and could possibly be put to death. Their country parts strap bombs to themselves and fly airplanes in to buildings. Those are all illegal in the conduct of war. SO, it is OK for them to sign up for that, but, not go with out some air? Did you know the worst thing that happens to these people from this is they pass out right? That is your bodies final response. Just like all the guys watching UFC like to see a good rear naked choke for a win, that is all that happens.