That’s easy: at the limit it depends on the intent, not the action.
Cutting my hand off isn’t torture, if your intent was to release me from a life threatening situation.
Giving me a plastic spoon to eat a steak is torture, if your intent was simply to fuck with me.
B-b-but Kiefer Sutherland! Don’t you even watch TV??
(To his credit Kiefer Sutherland doesn’t condone torture in real life.)
he just likes to make money off it in his spare time?
I don’t know that I approve of the way that the writers on 24 used torture as a plot device, but I still think it’s a pretty weaksauce excuse when people who should know better confuse that TV show with reality.
Why should they know better?
It’s about how they feel.
Certainly professional interrogators should know better. Rumor had it that some of the folks at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib were watching the show for inspiration. That’s like a forensic investigator watching CSI and thinking “Keen! I didn’t know it was possible enhance grainy footage from a security camera to read a suspect’s fingerprints from across the room!”
As a commentary on the ethical dilemma of the use of torture in interrogation, 24, is crass and unsubtle. However, this still means that it has greater depth of thought on the issue than the next president of the USA, because it at least acknowledges that there’s an ethical issue, before jumping to an obvious but wrong answer. Trump displays no sign of having thought the issue through at all.
We’re living in a world where 24 has more insight into the ethics and usefulness of torture than the next commander-in-chief. Never mind that, we’re in a world where My Little Pony has more subtle discussion of the ethics of torture and “enhanced interrogation” than the president elect.
That isn’t even a joke.
It’s like expecting polygraph “professionals” to know better, sadly.
Quacks are drawn to and created by the role.
That’s because crimes were unauthorized, neither by Rumsfeld nor by his senior officers. Military officers were held accountable for the sloppy atmosphere, but (mostly) not for the crimes of those things you see in the pictures. That’s because the things in the pictures weren’t authorized by anyone (other than the unmuzzled dog). And when those pictures were given by a soldier to Army legal authorities, the crimes were prosecuted. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.
The problem you have is that you’re trying to connect the actual interrogation methods to what you see in the pictures. But the connection isn’t really that clear. It takes a more serious analysis than you’ll get from those fundraising stunts.
The same crimes were taking place at multiple interrogation sites around the world. This wasn’t one or two isolated incidents, it was institutional.
Do I believe that Donald Rumsfeld personally signed off on every act of humiliation and torture that Lynndie England and her buddies pulled at Abu Ghraib? No.
Do I believe he tolerated and even contributed to a culture within the military chain of command that led to widespread acts of abuse and torture? Abso-fucking-lutely.
One example: here’s a memo describing and authorizing some of the “enhanced interrogation” techniques being employed by his subordinates. At the bottom Rumsfeld added a handwritten note inquiring why they couldn’t force detainees to hold a static standing position for more than 4 hours at a stretch because, hey, he was on his feet upward of 8 hours a day! (Which is totally not the same thing BTW.)
My guess: they’ll continue to pretend that all levels were not aware even after this evidence.
Not exactly. Professional interrogators do know better. But professional interrogators don’t often end up in positions where they make policy. Instead you get amateurs and populists, who set shitty pro-torture policies.
Then how do we end up with the professionals torturing?
If it is the amateurs to blame, why is there not a division of authority to perform the acts? Why even call one class “professional” if one is the Nutritionist of abuse?
I mean professional in the sense of “know what they’re doing”, not in the sense of “get paid to do it”.
It’s not hard to find reams of examples of professional interrogators who’ve come out against torture, usually arguing the angle that it flat out doesn’t work (rather than it is de facto a bad idea, or because illegal)
Puh-fucken-leeeeze. trump will get himself waterboarded (as a decision aid) right after pigs fly out of his ass. And he doesn’t hold a candle to Christopher Hitchens (as Hitchens had actual thought, empathy, feelings).
Who cares if it works? Its Fun!!! At least to Drumpf’s Deplorables.
I used Christopher Hitchens as an example because if he can come to that conclusion, then what hope do we have of Trump not deciding the same?
The problem is you’re operating on the assumption that trump would ever consider doing such a thing for any reason (he wouldn’t), or that he’d consider doing it for someone other than himself (he wouldn’t).
That said, I volunteer to be on trump’s “test” waterboarding team and I promise him that it’ll be great.
I guess you can’t ‘gentleman’ somebody if they’re the president-elect
What the fuck?
I can’t even.
