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As the hosts of the West Wing Thing podcast frequently note, in the seventies a lot of Democrats in Congress were opposed to the CIA’s existence, and today a lot of Democrats in Congress used to work for the CIA. And that’s the “nice” side of America’s ruling class.
So although can never know for sure how much these agencies’ existence is justified, we can be pretty sure they never have to justify themselves. And everything we do know about them paints them as dimwitted scum. So I would put the odds of them being heroic in secret as “not high”.
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I would advocate a policy where the agents train on each other since supposedly nothing that they do could be called torture.
There was coverage of CIA torture while it was going on—no one stopped it until the neocons lost political support years later, and no one has punished any of the perpetrators
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Some of them are still proud of it
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I have never understood the defense of “we asked some shady lawyer if this was legal, and he said yes” - here’s looking at Yoo, John.
I do like that if you put ‘torture lawyer’ into a search engine, you get that scum.
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America’s worst walk around with impunity, and have for some time. Henry Kissinger will die of old age, to pick one egregious example. Edward Gallagher was pardoned of war crimes by the previous President. He’s child a butcher.
There’s John Yoo, the torture lawyer.
And who can forget our own personal American Putin: G.W. Bush, who’s lies have lead to the death of over 100 thousand people in the middle east and the destabilization of the entire region.
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If I mentioned that Ammar al-Baluchi was almost certainly instrumentally involved in the 9/11 attacks, and bears as much responsibility for them as any person alive, would that change anything?
I’m certainly opposed to mistreatment of prisoners both in principle and as a matter of policy, but there’s also a part of myself that says if he burned in hell for 20,000 years, it wouldn’t be unjust.
No human being should ever, under any circumstances, be subjected to that kind of treatment. Period.
If he was a terrorist, then let him rot in prison until the world forgets him and he forgets himself. That is real punishment.
The afterlife is outside of our purview.
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That is a very reasonable position Jesse and I mostly agree with you, but I also remember watching live on television as people threw themselves out of the Twin Towers to their death, rather than be burned alive.
I know how you feel. And it is okay to feel that way and fantasize about bad people coming to harm. But there is a line that must not be crossed in the real world. That line exists for a reason, and the people who cross it do so at the cost of a good part of their humanity.
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Secondly (because first is always that this shit is evil in the first place) it literally cannot work that way. Torture does not work.
And it cannot work. Well, unless your goal is to “save someone’s soul” by making them confess and believe their own confession as would have been the case with christian torture. Or the Cardassians on Picard (see also Arthur Koester’s darkness at Noon and Orwell’s 1984 for more realistic appreciations of what torture does on cognition than modern liberal democracies’ popular texts).
The CIA did something better than leaking such a success though, they have 24 making people believe that is how it works and then they fund films to push that story through. And then people like Michelle Obama hand out the Oscar awards for intelligence funded films while people in the US laugh at Iranian state censorship.
And war crimes prosecution is a meaningless threat to anyone while John Yoo not only walks free but is rich and feted.
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It isn’t about what he did. Nobody “deserves” it.
It is if you allow torture for one person then you have allowed it for another, and another, and another and before long the reasons for the torturing get weaker and weaker and the only real result is fear, pain and a version of Hell right here.
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This is not about who the detainee was. It’s about who we are as a nation and a society when we let such things happen in our name.
If it was revealed that the CIA had conducted a secret program teaching agents to be more effective rapists and had practiced by raping suspects detained in American facilities then the appropriate response wouldn’t be “yeah OK that sounds bad but keep in mind the guy they raped was really evil.”
Rape is wrong in all circumstances. So is torture. If we allow either to take place in our name we become a society less worthy of being defended in the first place.
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So which Americans do you think “deserve” to be tortured for their role in the million deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan?
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I mean, it’s essentially like saying that if so and so did a certain thing, they deserve to get a forced lobotomy.
No thank you. 
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Pluck in any venue, metal disdain for ratios and ‘centrality of reporting’ notion, okay.
Not as expensive as changing it to Central Sidebar Intelligence Agency (which confutes some things) or Sidecar Central Intelligence Agency (We’re not SCIS) either.
Could clarify what foreign functionality we’re making easier out there to prove out worth.
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Even besides who the detainee was (we have plenty of examples of completely innocent people mistakenly kidnapped and tortured as part of these programs), completely leaving aside the issue if anyone “deserves” to be tortured, there’s a whole other problem - the US government decided that it was completely cool to torture people, and a bunch of its employees did a bunch of it, without much concern about who they were doing it to. That’s not just an ugly precedent, it’s institutions getting used to doing something and being ready to do it again; it’s now an accepted part of institutional memory and culture.
Except it isn’t really even saying “if you do X, you deserve Y” because it only applies to certain people in the first place. It ultimately becomes “they deserve Y because they are Z,” where Z is an outgroup. 9/11 was horrible, but it’s impossible to argue it was worse than every other instance of civilians being killed in bombings and acts of war; if the “rule” was being applied consistently, it would apply to a fuck of a lot of Americans…
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No, it doesn’t. At all.
Do you feel that way about those who carried out American war crimes?
Today is the 54th anniversary of Mai Lai, BTW… in case anyone is interested.
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