San Diego Housing Bubble News and Analysis

Well, no, I don't really care. Jack Bauer might be a fictional character but there are many things that happen in order for you to live in relative peace. If you are outraged by something that doesn't amount to much more than fraternity hazing, then the more they hide it from you the better off you will be. I hope you never find out about what really happens in wars or intelligence gathering.

My advice, just avoid reading these stories, these things have to happen, have always happened and always will happen, no sense in getting upset about it, just avoid it if it bothers you.

It's the same advice I'd give a church going conservative woman about porn. These things have to happen, have always happened and always will happen, just avoid it if it bothers you.

It would be much more fun to chronicle the discussion I once had with a very conservative woman who posed the question "why do men watch porn" and my rebuttal began with "are your sure that women other than youself don't." Yes, that would more fun and funnier but it would be even more off topic.

I read the link, Obama said he wouldn't have any of the CIA agents prosecuted that tortured the 28 terrorists. That's not enough of a check and balance, he is arguably the most liberal president we have had in decades and he has the liberty of reding the entire book that you can only see a few excerpts from. Is it possible that the info gleaned from those interrogations saved some city in the u.s. from an attack? Did the ends justify the means for him? Probably so. So let it go, just understand that people will get tortured, people will be killed and there are probably at least 40 sexual acts you have never heard about and don't want to.

Outstanding summary TG.

Thanks brother, you should have read it before I edited it for prime time, it was priceless.

"Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck
The same can be said about waterboarding...

The U.S. has laws against torture. What was done is clearly torture. The U.S. has, as a matter of policy, labeled those techniques as torture when describing other countries that engage in them (like Indonesia).

Whether you're pro-torture or anti-torture, we're a nation of laws. The fact is, GW was too much of a coward to admit what he and Cheney authorized was torture and was illegal. If he wanted to engage in these things he should have asked Congress to change to the laws and we could have had the national debate over it.

OR, in the bullshit fictional Jack Bauer world of "ticking time bomb" (no such scenario is presented in the memos, btw) Bush could have argued that he needed to order the torture in e moment of haste to "save millions" of lives. Then he could have let the Congress decide whether or not to impeach him for his lawbreaking. But he never did that. He came out and stated, matter-of-factly, "The Unites States doesn't torture." He broke the law, and then lied about it.

If you think the U.S. should use torture, then argue for it to be legalized. Create the "Torture Manual" for the DoD and run with it. But if you think it's okay for a President to just go breaking the law because "he" happens to think it's ok at the time, then you really are someone who believes in tyranny - that the government can do whatever they want, whenever they want, just because a handful of elites authorize it and they never have to suffer the consequences.

Well said SanDiegoDave.

I'm no expert on torture, but it seems to me that if I was being tortured I would tell the torturers whatever they wanted to hear in order to get them to stop -- whether it is truthful or not. What if I didn't know the answer? Wouldn't I tell them anything to get them to stop?

Have there been studies done on the validity of information gained via torture? It seems to me that torture is a low percentage proposition.

An evil exists that threatens every man, woman, and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland.
-- Adolf Hitler, proposing the creation of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany

They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither
-- Ben Franklin

Have there been studies done on the validity of information gained via torture? It seems to me that torture is a low percentage proposition.

This torture has never been about gaining intelligence. It is about setting the precedent that the government can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to whomever it wants. It is meant to give any political opposition pause before opening their mouth. It is about display of ultimate power, nothing more.

CIA officers, military and law enforcement officials and even the Army's own manuals state that torturing doesn't produce good intelligence. So anyone who tells you otherwise is just covering up the horrible truth. It's about power, that's it.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/
In the overblown, self-regarding prose that has become his trademark, Obama lauds himself and his administration for their fealty to the "rule of law" in releasing the memos. But of course, the "rule of law" also dictates that those who have planned, ordered and committed torture be prosecuted. The law has no special dispensation for crimes that might be "too disturbing" to prosecute. And so his ringing conclusion -- "we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again" -- rings completely hollow. How will failing to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes deter any future perpetrator in high office? The latter will know that their crimes will be "too disturbing" to prosecute -- in much that same way that the biggest fraudsters on Wall Street today are "too big to fail," and must be allowed to escape the consequences of their actions.

The old crimes are being written off; the new crimes keep going on.

CONCHO: I had this very argument with Casca on another thread. You're absolutely correct. I spent three years in Central America during the 1980s with an Army advisory team and saw both torture and interrogations (there is a clear difference between the two).

Torture was used to send a psychological message (Psyops) and was NOT used to gather or glean intelligence. That was what interrogations were for. You would be amazed what sitting down with someone over a period of hours or days can produce in terms of useful intelligence.

You subject someone to excruciating pain and they will tell you anything to get the pain to stop. The US Army and CIA did extensive research following the Vietnam War on the various "tells" or "leads" a questioner would provide a torture victim and how the torture victim would then answer questions trying to satisfy the questioner.

All that being said, you also have to create a dividing line between what constitutes an interrogation and what is genuinely torture. Sleep deprivation, threat of punishment/pain, etc are all valid interrogation methods. Take a close look at waterboarding and you tell me if you think that is torture or not.

Forgive me if I am wrong, but didn't Saddam reveal some stuff to his guards after months of being buddy-buddy with them? What we should do with suspected terrorists is throw back a few beers with them, play some Lego Star Wars, break the ice, and shoot the shit -- who knows what they might reveal.

Take a close look at waterboarding and you tell me if you think that is torture or not.

"Waterboarding" sounds like an extreme sport. Let's just call it "drowning" which is what it is. As for whether it's torture or not, I'll take Christopher Hitchens' word for it.

Afx: I'm not suggesting being "buddy buddy" with them. There are plenty of effective techniques that can be used, and most of these incorporate perfectly legal methods. For instance, we used to interrogate "platoon" style, meaning we would question prisoners in teams, and each team would go for 6 to 8 hour stretches. It was extremely effective and this same technique is used by US law enforcement, including the FBI.

Another technique would be to sleep deprive someone for a period of days, while playing tapes of a "victim" screaming in agony (supposedly while being tortured) during that period. The prisoner would then be led into a room with a single chair in the middle, torture implements on a table to the side, and blood on the floor. The blood was pig's blood, the tape was actually one of us screaming and the torture implements had never been used. The prisoner, however, didn't know any of that and was generally happy to help us in any way that he could. The mere threat of punishment and pain, combined with the sleep deprivation, was hugely effective.

CONCHO: Anyone that's been through SERE School or E&E (Escape and Evade) can tell you all about waterboarding. I'd definitely consider it torture, but many don't (especially those that have never had it done to them).

My point is, where do you draw the line? I know what I consider torture and I saw all manner of horrible things done to others and nearly all of it with the tacit approval of the US government. This was well before 9/11 and Gitmo and well after Vietnam.

The government will do whatever it deems necessary and, more importantly, whatever it can get away with, in pursuit of it's goals (which aren't always OUR goals).

Maybe Sadaam after some time...saw the humor in being portrayed as Satan's gay dom in the South Park movie. Apparently the marines played it for him a lot.

College Frat boys routinely participate in various forms of torture including sleep deprivation. Torture is in the eye of the beholder. Many of you are truly naive when it comes to dealing with evil. You must be religious because you are so willing to refuse to sink to the level required by the extreme threat to your country. Your meekness is interpreted as weakness by the enemy, not adherence to a rule of law. They are playing by different rules and they are playing to win. Apparently you have not figured that one out.

Even the Nazi's knew this was the most effective form of gathering useful information from a prisoner. Their best interrogators never used torture, nor did they threaten the use of torture. They essentially used the Copenhagen Syndrome to get the prisoners to tell them willingly what they wanted to know, and ALL of what they wanted to know. A cooperative prisoner is much more useful than an uncooperative one.

Over a prolonged period of time, I don't even think the most radical extremist would be able to hold out under this method. You can essentially "deprogram" them at your leisure. And I'm pretty sure that any extremist hard core enough to resist this would be equally difficult to break via torture.

Using torture is counterproductive. The prisoner being tortured is constantly reminded of why they despise the torturer (and by extension the country employing them), and will simply tell the torturer enough to get them to stop - and that will be whatever the torturer wants to hear - not the truth, and certainly not the whole truth.

The only situation I could see torture being even remotely useful for is in the "Ticking Time Bomb" situation - and even then, it's only because there is no time to do anything else - it's not because the information gained is reliable. And frankly, I agree with the people above - in that incredibly rare scenario, you might be able to justify breaking the law, but it doesn't justify crafting the law around that scenario and assuming that that scenario is a common one (frankly, I don't know if that scenario has ever actually occurred).

Has it actually occurred? I don't know. Funny thing is how much time is spent on debate as compared to fact finding.

It's not so much of the techniques used. Though, some are quite sickening and butal, It's more the holding without trial for years at a time. Especially, since the multitude of Bush-ear creepy terrorist laws can be used against American citizens.

Also, you would think the constant harrassment and beatings could only yield so much information after, say, a few months. But after 5+ years it gets a little sadistic.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Full_testi...

I was threatened with rape, attacks on my family in Saudi Arabia, my daughter being kidnapped, and my murder – assassination – by their spies in the Middle East if I went back to Saudi Arabia

They went to a detainee and started beating his head against the toilet rim until he lost consciousness and he could not see for more than 10 hours. He suffered facial spasms as a result. They went to a detainee when he was praying the maghrib (sunset) prayer and beat him severely. That was in isolation block I India. On that same day, they came and beat me.

There were many, many attempts to gouge the eyes of the detainees and to hit them in their private parts. They would beat them when they were ill and would hit them on their injuries.

These soldiers went and beat him very badly in the hospital in front of the doctors and nurses. His injuries were excessive and caused his spine to break. He is now hemiplegic. They are now trying to operate on him but he is refusing out of fear that they will play with his back and make it worse rather than make it better as their operations often do. These kinds of incidents happen often. They would make sending them to the detainees an excuse for incidents in which we would suffer extensive injuries, severe disfiguration and fractures as there was no one monitoring or following up their actions. Rather, their officers and officials gave them the orders. They tortured the detainees in the name of the law. There are too many incidents to mention or even count. Perhaps those I have mentioned are enough because many of these incidents have been mentioned in the media.

She took off her underpants, she was wearing a sanitary towel, and drops of her menstrual blood fell on me and then she assaulted me. I tried to fight her off but the soldiers held me down with the chains forcefully and ruthlessly so that they almost cut my hands. I spat at her on her face; she put her hand on her dirty menstrual blood that had fallen on my body and wiped it on my chest.

Our foreign policy is a morally bankrupt as our financial sector.

But some cynics darkly suspect that scenarios something like the one sketched out above have already been enacted; for instance, in the "new Pearl Harbor" that struck America on September 11, 2001 – one year after a group channeling the views of future Bush Administration bigwigs (including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby and many others) had openly pined for a "new Pear Harbor" to "catalyze" the American people into supporting their militarist agenda, which included an invasion of Iraq – whether Saddam Hussein was in power or not.

But leaving aside for now the ever-thorny matter of divining the varying proportion of connivance, acquiescence, foreknowledge, exploitation, incompetence and fate involved in 9/11, we can say this as an established fact: It is the policy of the United States government to provoke violent extremist groups into action. Once they are in play, their responses can then be used in whatever way the government that provoked them sees fit. And we also know that these provocations are being used, as a matter of deliberate policy, to rouse violent groups on the "Af-Pak" front to launch terrorist attacks.

Man, I think it is pretty warped to compare torture to sex. Sex is between two consenting persons...torture, I'm pretty sure, isn't.

And last I knew, our government wasn't creating porn, but it was torturing.

I really don't want my government creating porn or torture, personally.

Though non-govt-sponsored porn is A-OK by me. Not so with torture.

svelte, it was an analogy, not a comparison. I am warped, but that is not relevent for purposes of this discussion, using an unrelated topic to illustrate how something can be offensive to some and not to others, or offensive but neccesary, made it the perfect choice. There are only a handful of subjects that I use for analogies (wine, women, cigars, porn, sports), and of those five essential keys to happiness, it seemed the most aplicable at the time.

torture -- bad.

torture -- unnecessary.

you waive the right to complain about others torturing americans when you torture your prisoners.

why not just torture people to confess to crimes generally?

Torture = Being trapped on the 99th floor of the WTC confronted with a 2000 degree wall of fire and smoke and choosing to jump to your death instead of getting fried....

No beachlover, I'm not disturbed by it. Evidently these techniques were used on only 3 of the top guys we captured after 9/11. If you think about someone like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, he was someone who definitely did have a lot of information we NEEDED. Whether it's ticking bomb scenario or something where "only" ten thousand or so people die, yeah I'm ok with a little water up the nose. In fact, I think it is our government's JOB to do that.

I agree with Michael Hayden who today said it's not really a good idea to let our adversaries know all the details of what we "might" do.

To CONCHO's comment: I did read the Hitchens article, and here are my thoughts:
* If a journalist (presumably a non-tough guy) ASKS for something to be done to him a SECOND time, after just experiencing it, can it really be called torture?
* If we do it to our own soldiers in training, are we then "torturing" our own troops? Funny how we don't hear about them suing or anything.
* When I was young, my mom used to take me to an Ear Nose & Throat doctor at a fancy place in La Jolla. He used to lean me way back backwards in the chair, and pour vast quantities of water (or something) down my nostrils. It was barbaric. It was very painful. I wanted it to stop the moment it started. I dreaded it on subsequent visits. I don't think it ever did any good. Was I waterboarded in front of my own mom?

Here's my take: If you call pouring water down someone's nose "torture", or you call making someone wear women's underwear "torture", then what would you call say cutting off a finger? I'm quite sure Hitchens wouldn't have requested THAT be done to him again.

Seems to me if you're going to call waterboarding torture then you have disenfranchised the term so much that you would need a new word for REAL torture.

Apparently waterboarding is so effective that we had to do it to KSM 183 times over the span of a month. So does that mean that it's effective or useless?

A great question. You could argue that if it were ineffective, we ourselves would have tired of it and tried something else.

On the other hand, you could argue that after 183 times, KSM certainly knew that he was likely going to survive the treatment, that he was not going to drown, etc, so that it seems likely that it started losing effectiveness.

You know, think about KSM for a moment. Here's a guy who knew for over a year of the plan to take 4 planes full of unsuspecting people, families, etc, and end their lives. He felt he had the right to do that. Not only did he do nothing to stop it, he dedicated his life to facilitating that action. He was also involved in several other operations before and possibly after 9/11.

It was very reasonable after we captured him to expect that he knew of other operations being planned against the U.S. Perhaps some of those would have been even worse than 9/11. Perhaps some of those were stopped by information from one of the 183 sessions.

I'm beyond disturbed when my country violates international law, i.e. the Geneva convention and can somehow justify our actions.

It is interesting on how many people don't read the Geneva convention and then accuse people of violating it. First and foremost, the Geneva convention is written to protect the citizens within the country where the battle is taking place. The protection afforded to the fighting forces is secondary. Parts of the Geneva convention relating to protections for the fighting force are bilateral, not unilateral. For example, we have fighting force 'A' and 'B'. If fighting force 'A' violates the Geneva convention, than fighting force 'B' is no longer bound by it. This is what gives the Geneva convention some of its 'teeth'.

The Geneva convention has prohibition on explicitly targeting civilians.. whuups.. that is exactly what Al Qaeda has done-- multiple times. (Twin Towers and their own people in Afghanistan who disagree with them.. local tribal leaders.)

The Geneva convention prohibits use of civilian shields.. whuups again.

The Geneva convention prohibits fighting forces from concealing themselves with civilian garb (this is to allow the opposing force to discriminate them from civilians and not accidentally hit a civilian).. whuups again.

The Geneva convention prohibits either fighting force from forcing the civilians to conceal or protect them.. whuups again.

This is why, during the whole Al Qaeda and IRAQ scenario, the UN and NATO has been quiet. The Geneva convention is written primarily to protect the civilians.. not the fighting forces, from abuse. It is written because of what Hitler and his forces did to their own civilians.. including forced conscription of children (also against the Geneva convention) into a fighting force.

Torture was inflicted. We've known this for years. It was authorized from the highest level of the previous administration (either GW or Cheney). We've also known that for years.

We need to set policies in place to make sure it never happens again, and move on. Prosecuting the previous administration or those who were just following orders would only muck the country down in more partisan bickering while there are bigger issues at hand (Economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Health Care).

"We were just following orders" was the same argument made by the Nazi's in Nuremberg (aka "The Nuremberg Defense"), and it did not hold up in a court of law.

As for "moving on," when a person commits a crime -- be it murder, theft, whatever -- do you consider it "retribution" or "petty politics" when the lawbreaker is tried for those crimes? No, it is considered enforcing the rule of law. In a nation that is supposedly "a nation of laws" I don't see how we can just say, "well, that was in the past, it's cool man, we're looking forward now. Just pretend it never happened."

If law breakers are not held accountable for their actions, what incentive does it give others to follow the law? None. It sets a dangerous precedent.

I am quite disappointed with the Obama administration on this issue.

What TG said. Sometimes I half-wish the purists on this issue could be dropped off somewhere in the Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan. Then interview the survivors (if any) as they emerge for a TV discussion of human rights. Make sure to get a few Harvard professors of law to grill them on how fair and law-abiding they were to their pursuers.