Torture, Virtuous Equivocation, and Guy Fawkes
J.A. Eddy
Two interesting articles I encountered today that are only tangentially related (They both reference Guy Fawkes):
The first is a post from Armed Liberal at Winds of Change discussing his position on torture, opening with the following:
I've wrestled and wrestled with the issue; torture is obviously bad, but what is it about torture that is so expressly bad - why is it worse than the death and suffering that comes in war, or in the daily violence police officers do as a part of their jobs?
In large part, it's the fact of violence against captives; against the helpless, the unarmed, those incapable of resisting. But that didn't get to the heart of what cleaves torture as an issue from violence as an issue. And why I - as someone who is decidedly not nonviolent - am so decidedly against and uncomfortable with issues of torture.
I came to an answer, as I usually do, in an unplanned realization while reading a book.
The ensuing article and the comments themselves are well worth your time.
Second, via Instapundit I found Dave Kopel’s 2001 article Virtue in Equivocation where he references Guy Fawkes and the Gun Powder Plot as an introduction to the concept of virtuous lying, where it applies and where it doesn’t. This was in relation to Osama Awadallah, a Jordanian student attending Grossmont College (a college in El Cajon, California, which caters to international students), being indicted by a New York City grand jury for lying to the grand jury about his relationship with September 11 terrorists Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar. He then goes on to explain how the concept of Virtue in Equivocation doesn’t necessarily apply to Islamic radicals. In the process he also sheds light on the question of the rights of jurors and the concept of jury nullification.
All in all, two very interesting takes on the assorted subjects.
excellent articles. can't wait for armed liberal's part II. but what are YOUR opinions on the subjects?
It's admittedly a "no, but..." answer, but faced with a crisis situation I just can't say what my call would be. The default decision is 'never', but as they say- "never say never."
I guess that makes me more of a realist and less of a moralist. So be it.
But I’ll see your “no, but…”, and raise it a “but”.
But how the hell do we define torture? Especially in the legal sense.
If we’re going to ban it, we need to define what we are banning. Put a line in the sand, so to speak.
Or from the other angle, if we are going to allow something close to it, we need to set limits too.
It’s a messy, muddy, topic.
You say that like it's a bad thing ;-P .
Seriously, though, that's a quite acceptable resolution of the conflicts involved. Agents of the State should indeed be forbidden from condoning or institutionalizing or otherwise officially classifying torture as legal State behavior, let alone actually engaging in it.
However, they should likewise not be forbidden from using, in order to fulfill other legal responsibilities of the State such as providing for the common defense, the information produced by such criminal actions by other State agents.
It seems to me that if we cannot produce enough men and women who are willing to take the responsibility for breaking the law and the consequential risk of losing some of their rights as a result in order to prevent mass destruction and death, then perhaps we don't deserve such prevention ITFP.
Okay; according to Wikipedia: "Torture, according to international law, is 'any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.'"
Seems good enough for a starting place to me.
Jailing someone is, arguably, an act 'by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.'
I don't find the definition helpful.
Yours,
Wince
A good example, are the horses that sought survival in the canyons of San Diego county during the recent fire. The lead stallions broke out of their barns with the other horses following and were led to a safe escape. They would have stampeded right over anything or anyone that impeded that progress.
Humans are not less aggressive in that department, except, perhaps, Mahatma Gandhi, who as the paragon of non-violence resistance once suggested that the jews during WW II accept their fate as a form of suicide rather than violate the principle of ahimsa.
Like, if someone is coming to blowup your house and your family, gee, I guess I’ll just sit here and follow my special rule of being a non-violent person.
It seems to me that it’s a long way to paradise if one accepts complete non-violence.
One of the really, really big problems in current politically correct thought (lessness) and in the Department of Defense that five star General Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t have was 10,000 lawyer sucking up all the main issues. But he did know how to win wars, like really big ones.
Meanwhile back to the discussion. I could not ignore your references re: Guy Fawkes and the gentleman who wrote: “And why I - as someone who is decidedly not nonviolent - am so decidedly against and uncomfortable with issues of torture.”
And that lead to some mental recall of the statements of the current Archbishop of Canterbury who in 2003 made a few incredible statements:
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, yesterday urged America to recognise that terrorists can "have serious moral goals".
He said that while terrorism must always be condemned, it was wrong to assume its perpetrators were devoid of political rationality.
"It is possible to use unspeakably wicked means to pursue an aim that is shared by those who would not dream of acting in the same way, an aim that is intelligible or desirable."
He said that in ignoring this, in its criticism of al-Qa'eda, America "loses the power of self-criticism and becomes trapped in a self-referential morality."
Presumably, one would not want to lose the power of being trapped in a self-referential morality.
“Okay; according to Wikipedia: "Torture, according to international law, is 'any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession,”
Thats prety good, but the rest is complete bullshit, IMO, and undermines our entire justice system..
Take this example. It meets all the requirements past the first claim above:
torture claim
'Severe mental distress', what's that? Again, it's a subjective judgment on the part of the sufferer. Some people take enormous distress as part of their ordinary jobs--cops and EMTs who deal with brutally killed children, for example, deal frequently with a level of distress that most would find intolerable.
Definitions are going to have to be arbitrary. That means they will never be perfect. A place to start would be to catalog forbidden practices. As loopholes are discovered, they can be added to the list, realizing that some new loophole will always be on the verge of being discovered. Laws can only be retroactively complete.
I'm all for the creation of a list that is imposed globally, but acknowledge that it will never be perfected.
However, unless and until you or someone else actually does argue it, who's supposed to care, and why? Without that, your observation is functionally irrelevant. Merely asserting the potential for arguability of something is. . .well, rather less than helpful itself, Wince.
Jaymaster's comment suggests a possible means of resolution: that one can still forbid agents of the State to commit certain acts without necessarily having to classify them as 'torture'. It also gets prepucectionists off the hook; I'll readily admit it -- I'm an intactivist, not a fanatic, after all.
I think, however, that a good definition should have room to include certain kinds of abuse of people for the personally sadistic purposes of the abuser. I think it's wrong to not classify certain things as torture simply because they're done out of fetishistic insanity rather than rationalized interrogation.
I suppose one could classify the screaming and howling and other expressions of pain and suffering as 'information' themselves in that context, though. But it strikes me as poor reasoing and worse jurisprudence.
I'll argue that: jailing someone is, inarguably, an act by which severe mental suffering is intentionally inflicted on a person for the purpose of punishing him for an act he has committed. Ergo, by the Wikipedia definition, jailing is torture.
I would not have been suffering; I would have been experiencing sublime contentment.
So, no, it's not inarguable; in fact, it's anything but. Even apart from my own relatively absurd personal case, if the intention is not to punish the jailed but to protect others from her, the wikipedia definition certainly doesn't apply, and there are more than enough satisfactory examples of that already, from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy murder moms to, oh, say, Aileen Wuornos.
No, in the end the definition of torture is a personal one, all legal wrangling aside. For me the definition is a simple corollary to The Golden Rule:
I admit that for a guy who stated he's a realist, not a moralist, this is a rather moralist definition of torture, but it works for me and I'm willing to bet that it's essentially how others define the practice as well, should they think about it. The legal definition of torture is useful in a court of law. The personal definition is the only one that counts in a crisis situation.
Lacks way too much context. I would not tolerate having those I care about shot at. That doesn't mean that military personnel shooting at our enemies are committing torture.
Therein lies the problem- the immediate situation and the individuals involved ARE the context. This is why legal definitions, etc. are meaningless at the moment of decision.
Understandable, but irrelevant. We are talking about deliberate infliction of pain (defined as physical or psychological) upon a helpless individual, not soldiers in combat. You might be unwilling to tolerate your wife or child being arrested for failing to pay back parking tickets, but in that context it hardly constitutes torture, and remedies are easily applied (pay the fines).
Small Wars Journal:
There is No Debate Except for Torture Apologists
1. Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period. There is no way to gloss over it or sugarcoat it. It has no justification outside of its limited role as a training demonstrator. Our service members have to learn that the will to survive requires them accept and understand that they may be subjected to torture, but that America is better than its enemies and it is one’s duty to trust in your nation and God, endure the hardships and return home with honor.
2. Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.
Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.
Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.
Waterboarding as we practice it is not torture. If volunteers choose to undergo it to demonstrate the technique and then chuckle about it afterwards, it's not torture.
And that's where the slippery slope comes in. As soon as you define "psychological pain" as torture, anything is torture.
Excessive physical pain is torture. Minor physical pain in the course of maintaining order, no: slamming a prisoner into a wall to break up a fight, for example, may be excessive force or not, depending, but it's not torture. Slamming a prisoner into a wall and cracking some ribs to make him talk, that's torture.
Psychological "pain" isn't pain, and isn't torture.
so should we waterboard suspects accused of murder, rape, theft, etc.? why or why not?
Mark,
what if they don't have the information sought?
Then we're back to the usual arguments against torture: That it results in faulty intelligence.
I'm only making the point that the victim is not entirely helpless, and thus the definition contains a flaw. Look, if it was torture for the sake of doing it, like the BTK killer did, then it applies absolutely - but in the case of military/judicial application for information it doesn't.
I might also inquire as to studies - if there are any in the public domain - about which sorts of torture [using the term loosely] are considered more effective than others, and why? How come waterboarding [considered a last resort by us, I think] is used in preference to eye-gouging or finger-breaking, etc? Is it more effective or does it just not leave marks?
I agree- waterboarding is torture.
The sad reality is that torture will happen no matter how honorable we would like to pretend to be. This is because torture is usually instigated by individuals rather than agencies- we can legally define it and prohibit it, but it will happen anyway.
My position is this: if you engage in torture you (the individual) must be prepared to face the consequences of your actions, legal or otherwise. Legal prohibitions with real punitive power will mostly deter those who would like to try their hand at the masochist's art for their own personal satisfaction (though some people are just sick in the head and won't ever be deterred), as well as remove any institutional cover for the practice. For those faced with crisis situations the choice is this: does the need for information outweigh my moral obligations AND the certainty of punishment for my acts?
We can outlaw torture in all conceivable forms, but in the end it is an individual on the spot who will decide what to do. Failure to recognize that point or even admit it exists is pointless.
I give it no more weight than a retired doctor writing a screed stating "There is no debate except for murder apologists. Abortion is murder, period."
Hmmmm Sounds a little like the 'condoms for teens' issue, doesn't it? "Don't do it. But, if you're gonna do it, here's the way you should do it...."
Small Wars Journal:
As a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California I know the waterboard personally and intimately. SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people.
Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.
Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.
Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death.
If you support the use of waterboarding on enemy captives, you support the use of that torture on any future American captives. The Small Wars Council had a spirited discussion about this earlier in the year, especially when former Marine Generals Krulak and Hoar rejected all arguments for torture.
Is There a Place for the Waterboard?
Yes. The waterboard must go back to the realm of SERE training our operators, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. We must now double our efforts to prepare for its inevitable and uncontrolled use of by our future enemies.
Actually, it's a short road to paradise if you announce to the world that no matter what anyone does to you, you will take it with a smile. And you will die poor.
I may be WAY off base here, but to my base way of thinking, self defense is a big justification for the use of force. If it's a life-threatening situation, then deadly force is legally permitted.
If an individual is permitted to take a life in an attempt to try to save his own, should a soldier who holds a prisoner be restrained from anything up to and including deadly force against the prisoner who is an agent of his intended death and witholding information, if such action might save his life by virtue of discovering the information about a pending attack? Is it required to face bullets before the prisoner is executed in the heat of battle?
an individual is permitted to take a life to save his own, but taking lives is still illegal. he must ensure his actions are justified and undertake them with the knowledge that he may not be acquitted later on. that, i think, is the standard most people are arguing for here wrt torture.
zach., once again, you're losing the distinction between criminal investigation and punishment on the one hand and war and military intelligence on the other. As long as you confuse those two, you will remain confused.
In law, you err on the side of protecting the innocent. That means you give the accused plenty of rights in case your accusation is wrong.
In war, you err on the side of protecting the innocents. That means you take extraordinary measures to learn about and prevent attacks, and you're much less concerned about rights.
In both law and war, mistakes happen, and innocents suffer. The world is imperfect. But in law, you bias against one kind of mistake, and toward another. In war, the bias is different, and the sort of mistakes you'll accept is different.
Particularly damning to his case is this statement:
The waterboard must go back to the realm of SERE training our operators, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. We must now double our efforts to prepare for its inevitable and uncontrolled use of by our future enemies.
If we could get al-Qaeda to merely waterboard prisoners, we'd have won a major victory in the war on terror.
You still have the problem that as a part of SERE training, waterboarding is performed on our troops, as pointed out a few days ago.
The problem with people who rely on any given expert for their opinion is as I pointed out with my counter-example, in that your stance is subject to the whims of other individuals. If you don't have the judgement to consider the case for yourself, you don't have the judgement to evaluate the "expert," either.
so what if the police pick up someone suspected of hatching a bomb plot, a timothy mcveigh unrelated to anything happening in the middle east? is that a criminal or military operation?
furthermore, you are making the argument that waterboarding is OK because it doesn't cause any physical harm, and therefore in no way could be constituted as torture. it's just one more interrogation technique at an interrogator's disposal. why, then, is it not acceptable to waterboard suspects picked up in police investigations? after all, they'll just laugh about it afterwards, right? no harm, no foul.
John B,
I haven't made any judgements (for you to criticize) whatsoever, merely reported what he wrote. Is it not germane to the discussion that waterboarding (properly done of course) is pouring pints of water into someone's lungs ?
As they say, on Foxnews:
"We Report, You Decide."
Not at all. Nobody is saying 'here's how you should do it' to anyone. Rather it is 'If you do this you are breaking the law and can expect to be punished accordingly.' Quite a different scenario, don't you think?
This basic argument, as I understand it, is that we shouldn't allow torture of our enemies because then we'd be "no better than they are". That's a fine plot element for a typical episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I think it falls apart pretty quickly in the real world.
First of all, it doesn't help. An enemy that builds a war strategy around televised beheading and blowing up random civilians is not going to abstain from torture out of a sense of fair play. Maybe when the next war comes around and we're fighting against a more civilized bunch of bad guys we can afford to be more genteel.
Second, motives do matter. Do we seriously believe that there was no Allied torture in World War II? And if there was, did that make us "just as bad" as the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese, who routinely killed and tortured civilians and POWs? Does it mean that we lacked the appropriate karma points for a moral victory?
Frankly, in war we've always had torture. For the good guys it's an off-the-books arrangement that's been tolerated and maintained pretty much forever by pretty much everyone. Nobody likes it (except maybe for the scary people we keep around in order to do it for us, because they do it so well) but everyone knows it's occasionally necessary.
Now, for some reason, we're expected to confess our sins and flagellate ourselves until the proverbial noble savages come and put us out of our bloodstained misery. I say we just lie about it like we always have and move on to more productive discussions.
Criminal. There's no Congressional authorization for the use of military action there.
Once again, you're ignoring the continuum of coercive techniques. Waterboarding is coercive, but not torture.
In law, the Fifth Amendment outlaws all coercive techniques. You cannot be forced to intimidate yourself, period. The police may use persuasive techniques to convince you that you want to cooperate; but they may not use coercive techniques to compel you to cooperate.
In war, there's no Fifth Amendment. Investigators may use both persuasive and coercive techniques. If time permits, they should always prefer persuasive techniques. But in a crunch, coercive techniques short of torture should still be on the table.
Waterboarding is a generic term for many different techniques. The demonstrations we have seen have not invovled pouring pints of water into someone's lungs.
You judged his screed to be worthy of cutting and pasting, twice now. You judged which sections you would bold.
Is it not germane to the discussion that waterboarding (properly done of course) is pouring pints of water into someone's lungs ?
As waterboarding, "properly done," does not in fact involve water being poured into someones lungs, a serious error on your part apparently mistakenly learned from your "expert," it is not germane to the discussion.
It goes a long way towards destroying both your own and your experts' credibility that you state such as fact, though. It goes back to what I said about judgement.
Waterboarding is a torture technique that simulates drowning in a controlled environment. It consists of immobilizing an individual on his or her back, with the head inclined downward and pouring water over the face to force the inhalation of water into the lungs.
…
Waterboarding's use as a method of torture or means to support interrogation is based on its ability to cause extreme mental distress while possibly creating no lasting physical damage to the subject. The psychological effects on victims of waterboarding can last long after the procedure. Although waterboarding in cases can leave no lasting physical damage, it carries the real risks of extreme pain, damage to the lungs, brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation, injuries as a result of struggling against restraints (including broken bones), and even death.
…
Dr. Allen Keller, the director of the Bellevue/N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture, has treated "a number of people" who had been subjected to forms of near-asphyxiation, including waterboarding.
Keller also stated in his testimony before the Senate that "Water-boarding or mock drowning, where a prisoner is bound to an inclined board and water is poured over their face, inducing a terrifying fear of drowning clearly can result in immediate and long-term health consequences. As the prisoner gags and chokes, the terror of imminent death is pervasive, with all of the physiologic and psychological responses expected, including an intense stress response, manifested by tachycardia, rapid heart beat and gasping for breath. There is a real risk of death from actually drowning or suffering a heart attack or damage to the lungs from inhalation of water.
Now of course, John B, your's is undoubtedly a water-free, lung-free method of waterboarding.
If a journalist, who has no legal right to keep silent on criminal activity, refuses to testify in a court of law to withhold information (like the name of sources) and is jailed until the information is provided...torture?
United Nations Convention Against Torture (Wikipedia)
The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT) came into force in June 1987. The most relevant articles are Articles 1, 2, 3, and the first paragraph of Article 16.
Article 1...in part:
It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
No where in here, BTW, am I necessarily supporting or not supporting waterboarding in specific - I agree with and can support our other measures used against enemy combatants [not regular prisoners] such as temperature variations, stress positions, the gut slap, etc. and I can even countenance threatening with a snarling dog without conceding that these constitute torture, mainly because I've been subject to all of these, either by choice or in boot camp. Enemy combatants are a kind of soldier, so perhaps they can be treated like them.
No, they're not. Soldiers fight in uniform under a recognized command structure, as well as meeting several other criteria that entitle them to protection under the Geneva Conventions.
And swap to wikipedia, whose failures in the realms of politically-charged debate have been well documented.
*sigh*
Any form of effective interrogation is going to have risks. An unlawful combatant essentially accepts those risks as part and parcel of fighting without uniform, hiding among civilians, and other clear and undisputable violations of those selfsame rules whose grey areas lead to so much debate for our side.
Statistically, what are the risks? Of our soldiers waterboarded in SERE, how many have suffered from heart attacks or death? Of the three enemy combatants interrogated through the use of waterboarding, how many suffered from those same real risks? Come to think of it, did this Democratic Underground poster and his brother, in multiple repeated attempts by amateurs, run afoul of any of these risks, besides their apparent brain damage in deciding that something they went back and tried voluntarily multiple times must be "torture?"
2. Whether waterboarding is torture doesn't involve the Geneva Conventions. It either is or it isn't (or if there are varying forms, each form either is or isn't).
3. If things which do not cause permanent (or long-lasting) physical harm are okay for coercion, a lot of things would seem to be on the table. Pulling fingernails, pins under the nails, abrasion techniques, hair-pulling, and a good old fashioned smacking-around all come to mind. We could also force them to eat scat and pig meat.
I repeat: we must remain the "good guys" if we're to have peace in the long run. It's not just about us and the terrorists; there are others watching what we do. We owe it to our soldiers to let them know ahead of time what they may or may not do in interrogations and in warfare.
Also, unless I'm mistaken, SERE training done as "anti-torture training."
Yes, you are still mistaken. SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, and involves training in evading capture, escaping imprisonment, and resisting interrogation.
Part of the reason for the levels of OPSEC the U.S. military employs is to compartmentalize information. If a soldier is actually tortured he's going to sing like a canary, and rightly so. The information rarely does the enemy any good.
Our enemy does not have the cultural background, organization, or resources to conduct a comparable level of training, so the same methods of interrogation that we train our soldiers to resist remain effective against jihadis.
And the lesson they need to learn is Do Not Fark With The U.S.
Trade with us or not, protest us or praise us, it's all good, but do not ever pick a fight with us.
You can't possibly be saying that the terrorists don't have a sufficient grasp of torture to use it effectively on SERE-trained troops.
As for your other point, Machiavelli was wrong. Those who are feared get stabbed in the back. Even more, when America becomes the "bad guy" it loses support from within. Even the misguided views of the "Doves" almost tore the country apart during Vietnam; how would things be if there were legitimate complaints? Various Christian groups have demonstrated a willingness to buck the government in the past (it's why there's a separate system of Catholic schools); I see no reason why they wouldn't do so in the future.
The last sentence is at odds with current political discussion that says torture is illegal, period. The next question in this thread and Congress, "is waterboarding torture." If torture is illegal -- period -- then everyone needs to understand when coercion crosses the line. leading to:
McKiernan:
NOTE: I am guilty as charged, i.e., did not read the whole page.
However, it makes me wonder, what country in the world holds the moral high ground? And why do they think they have the high ground? Maybe Australia &Canada have not transgressed, but the players in the current controversy (particularly every country I can think of in old Europe) have subjected thier citizens to what would unquestionably be called torture in my lifetime under terms of the current discussion. If the loophole is that they had laws allowing it, how about we (the U.S.) outline when and what torture is allowed in law, rather than blanket statments that torture is illegal? Or legally defining what acts or categorizing actions that are not "torture" rather than trying to call everything torture until proven otherwise?
well, I never pretend Dean's World has anything to do with national discussions ;P.
but I'm all in favor of codifying standards in law rather than talking around it and creating great giant misty clouds of uncertainty that invite abuse. But I think you'll run afoul of Martin for suggesting it.
signed
Guido (Fawkes) McKiernan
You're right, I'm not saying that, and I don't know where the hell you got that misreading.
It might come from your insistence on conflating interrogation and torture, when they are separate entities entirely. Or maybe the subject matter is too far outside your experiences.
Um, no, MS; I flatly disproved your assertion. It's wasn't a 'try'; it was a success. You can deny that all you want, but none of it's going to change objective reality in any meaningful way.
As to your false dilemma, it's, well, a false dilemma.
Have you some hands on experience in the current subject matter ?
It was only a "success" if your fantasy view of imprisonment had anything to do with real imprisonment.
Real imprisonment fits Wikipedia's flawed definition of torture. Sorry that undercuts your case, but that's a fact.
You presented a false dilemma. Not only is the wikipedia definition flawed, but imprisonment does not necessarily cause severe pain and suffering, regardless of your own subjective opinion. The two things have effectively no causal link of mutual exclusivity between them.
Think things through more completely before you post, and you'll avoid more rookie errors such as those.
As to my case being undercut -- to what 'case', exactly, are you referring?
Nice try, but you're just dissembling.
Do you?
The definition is excellent for dictionary pruposes, but flawed for legal purposes.
Yours,
WInce
No, just thought I'd ask.
BTW, interesting discussion here and here.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.