[Vision2020] "Harsh" Interrogations -As ye sow, so shall you

[Sunil Ramalingam]

There's no attempt to silence you, Gary. 

This does show the rank behavior you choose to defend. It doesn't need demonization; it's already there.

And it's an easy position for you to take.  Like most of us, you get to go to work safely every day, return home safely to your family. No one's going to arrest you illegally and torture you. It's so easy to take the blase approach embodied in your post yesterday.

Sunil

From: jampot at roadrunner.com
To: ophite at gmail.com
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:42:31 -0700
CC: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] "Harsh" Interrogations -As ye sow, so shall you










And once again you miss the point, attempt to 
attach me to positions I have not taken, hurl invective, and do your best to 
demonize and silence a point of view with which you disagree.You are as 
predictable as a paperboy with OCD. You deliver on time, every time. 

 
g

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: 
  Andreas Schou 
  
  To: g. crabtree 
  Cc: Paul Rumelhart ; lfalen ; bear at moscow.com ; vision2020 at moscow.com 
  Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 10:31 
  PM
  Subject: Re: [Vision2020] "Harsh" 
  Interrogations -As ye sow, so shall you
  
Gary --

>From the FBI report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay 
  under Geoffrey Miller, the general later brought in to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib: 
  

"on several 
  occasions, witness ("W") saw detainees ("ds") in interrogation rooms chained 
  hand and foot in fetal position to floor w/no chair/ food/water; most urinated 
  or defecated on selves, and were left there 18, 24 hrs or more. Once, the air 
  conditioning was so low that the barefoot d was shaking with cold. Another 
  time, it was off so the unventilated room was over 100 degrees, d was almost 
  unconscious on floor with a pile of hair next to him (he had apparently been 
  pulling it out throughout the night). Another time, it was sweltering hot and 
  loud rap music played - d's hand and foot was chained and he was in a fetal 
  position on the floor. Upon inquiry, W was told that interrogators [military 
  contractors] ordered this treatment. Took place in Delta 
  Camp"

The report goes on to substantiate that more than one 
  detainee (d) was brought into the infirmary with hypothermia after an 
  interrogation session. Detainees pissing and shitting all over themselves. 
  Being sexually assaulted by female guards. Forced to stay awake for longer 
  than the human body can stand. Being partially drowned. Being stuck in a 
  coffin with what you're told are scorpions.

These are not conditions 
  you will find any Hilton other than the Hanoi. They are not on the continuum 
  of acceptable behaviors any more than a knife is on the continuum of 
  'comfortable objects' because, like a knife, it's also an object. These are 
  techniques we reverse-engineered from North Korean torture techniques in order 
  to create SERE, and then reverse-reverse engineered in order to create GTMO 
  and the "black sites." This is despite the fact that we -- as in, our country 
  -- prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding, and even Israel, no friend 
  of terrorists, has abandoned it because it produces bad intelligence. Indeed, 
  if I were just a little more cynical than I am, I'd say that that's quite the 
  point: we waterboarded KSM for information on the nonexistent Iraq-al-Qaida 
  connection, and Abu Zubaydah for information on confabulated terrorist plots 
  he had no reason to know about.

You're wrong about the facts. You're 
  wrong about the law. I could go on about that, but I'd just be arguing with 
  the tinny little noises escaping from the echo chamber you pretend will 
  replace journalism. I'm waiting with bated breath to find out why you think 
  the FBI is infiltrated by ACORN or how George Soros is dictating the legal 
  conclusions of Republican appointees at Foggy Bottom. That's just your 
  intentional ignorance, plus arrogance, tribalism, and smug self-satisfaction 
  at your clever turns of phrase. I can tolerate that. 

What gets to me 
  -- why I'm provoked to respond -- is that you're willing, even eager, to sell 
  out our country's honor in order to soothe your rank cowardice. Or maybe it 
  makes you feel like a real man to hear that some punk Afghan teenager with an 
  AK-47 was awake for a week, stewing in his own shit, shackled to the floor. 
  Whatever the impulse is -- tribalism? sadism? fear? -- it's not anything I 
  recognize as American. What third-world tinpot dictatorship did you grow up in 
  that you think this is acceptable?

We consent to abide by certain 
  principles. It's that common consent that keeps our country from being a 
  collection of miscellaneous foreigners on someone else's land. I have 
  disagreements with conservatives about the metes and bounds of those 
  principles, sure. But here you are, disputing whether America should have 
  principles at all.

Americans, by which I mean FDR and Eisenhower, 
  Reagan and JFK, held off the Soviets and Nazi Germany, nations that both posed 
  a dire existential threat to our country, while banning torture, expanding the 
  protections of the Geneva Convention, and abandoning the pretense that it's 
  okay to attack civilian populations. These are tempting tactics. Some of them 
  work. Torture produces words rather than silence. The Geneva Convention bans 
  effective tactics for making war. Killing civilians forces submission. We 
  stepped away from these things. We won. Twice. Over the two most belligerent, 
  technologically advanced, and staggeringly immoral nations ever to exist, one 
  armed with enough weapons to destroy the world several times over.

But 
  then 9/11 made you wet yourself. A crime of unimaginable scale happened to 
  people in New York City; people whom you don't even accord the privilege of 
  being called Americans. The crime was carried out by guys carrying weapons you 
  can buy at Home Depot. Somehow, that uprooted your sense that America stands 
  for anything. But how deep were those roots, Gary, that fewer deaths than 
  those caused by the flu could pull them up?

Our soldiers make a 
  commitment. They tell us they'll uphold the Constitution. But there's a 
  reciprocal side to that commtiment: we tell them that they're the good guys; 
  that they're not just protecting American lives, but American values. That 
  they're fighting for liberty, mom, and apple pie. Because 9/11 made you wet 
  yourself, you're asking those soldiers to sit and play Minesweeper while some 
  dumb Afghan redneck shits his pants in Arctic cold, chained to the ceiling of 
  a lightless cell. If you tell his President to tell our soldiers to do that, 
  you've reneged on our commitment to make our soldiers the good guys. Our moral 
  purpose doesn't come from who we are; it comes from what we do.

I don't 
  know whether there's going to be a reckoning for the people that authorized 
  this. But you're the reason there should be: to put the rudder straight and 
  make people like you -- who actively argues for torture -- too ashamed to 
  speak up in public. Anything you just said should be enough to make any decent 
  person drop their beer, walk out of the room, and go find another locksmith. 
  I'm looking forward to the day when it is.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20090424/a36c01d9/attachment.html