NOTE: this my third post of the day, so no more from me until the
morrow. Let the cheering commence! ;-)
On Thu, 23 Apr 2009 06:36:23 -0700, Christopher D. Green wrote:
>Mike Palij wrote:
>> Moral/ethical relativists can have a chuckle at such absurd absolute
>> rules (I'm sure that they will be able to provide situations where
>> torture is perfectly acceptable).
>Well-known moral relativists such as, say, George Bush and Dick
>Cheney, no doubt. :-)
Oh no, they are moral absolutists. But they just show that some
moral principles (e.g., "Might Make Right") are pretty screwed up.
>Bray's memo, far from being definitive, equivocates by repeatedly
>using the term "torture." Why is this an equivocation? Because the
>people who authorized and used the techniques in question argue
>that they do not, legally, constitute torture.
Hmmm, if I say that science is a religion and if it is taught in public
schools, then creation science *HAS* to be taught in order to provide
a balanced religious perspective and not to promote a particular
religion (i.e., science). Some may find such a position absurd but
others might find it a useful argument at the next school board meeting
(after all, isn't science just a bunch of beliefs like any other religion?
who needs science anyway?).
I feel the same way about equivocating on torture: waterboarding
a person six times a day for 30 days is difficult to classify as
"non-torture".
>Whether or not you (or I) personally agree
>with this assessment, the use of this term still opens the way for
>psychologists who have participated in these interrogations to respond
>that they have not violated the APA's "never-torture" policy.
No doubt. There probably are psychologists who feel that having sex
with one's students or therapy clients is a good thing ("it promotes
the process") regardless of what the APA has to say about dual
relationships. Unfortunately, since torture is against U.S. and
international law, one really should get appropriate legal advice
from one's lawyer before engaging in what might be considered
a (war) crime.
>All previous APA missives in this matter have equivocated in precisely
>the same way. The devil is always in the details.
See "duck": walks, quacks, tastes like duck l'orange, etc.
>Perhaps more interesting than Bray's carefully crafted missive, is
>the New York Times article that, in all probability, gave rise to it:
>The Bush Cabinet, including the CIA, did not know that the SERE
>tactics they decided to use in Guantanamo and elsewhere had been
>developed by the US military decades ago explicitly to simulate the
>torture tactics they thought were being used by the Chinese and the
>Koreans.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22detain.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all
>
We surely live in interesting times, with revelations coming every day.
Why, it's almost too much to keep up with. Nonetheless, the consider
the U.S. Senate Armed Service report which just released its report on
when the planning for the use of torture began. Quoting from a Salon
article on this report:
|Bush officials said they only tortured terrorists after they wouldn't talk.
|New evidence shows they planned torture soon after 9/11 -- and used
|it to find links between al-Qaida and Saddam.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/04/22/benjamin/
Further into the article:
|The report details how abusive interrogations began. "In December 2001,"
|the report says, "the DOD General Counsel's office contacted the Joint
|Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Virginia,
|for information about detainee 'exploitation.'"
|
|To set up the torture program, the Department of Defense and the CIA
|reverse engineered something called SERE training, which was conducted
|by the JPRA. Based on Cold War communist techniques used to force false
| confessions, in SERE school elite U.S. troops undergo stress positions,
|isolation, hooding, slapping, sleep deprivation and, until recently,
waterboarding
|to simulate illegal tactics they might face if captured by an enemy who
violated
|the Geneva Conventions.
|
|In either December 2001 or January 2002, two psychologists affiliated with
|the SERE program, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, developed the first
|written proposal for reverse engineering the training for use on al-Qaida
|suspects. Their paper made its way to the Joint Staff. (Salon first zeroed in
|on the pair in a June 2007 article.) The military also then began discussions
|at that time about using the ideas at Guantánamo.
|
|In early March 2002, Jessen began two-week, "ad-hoc 'crash'" courses for
|training government interrogators slated for Guantánamo. The courses therefore
|began before the allegedly uncooperative Zubaydah was ever captured, and
|Zubaydah was the first allegedly high-level al-Qaida operative in U.S. custody
|after 9/11.
The report itself is available at the following website:
http://armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Detainee%20Report%20Final_April%2022%202009.pdf
So, when did the Bush administration "not know" about the torture
program? NOTE: the dates above pre-date the legal memos
establishing the legal argument for distinguishing between torture
and enhanced interrogation. But if these memos came after planning
for the torture program was underway....
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
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