Cruz and Trump: Maniacs Я
Us
Updated (April 11, 2016):
Donald Trump back on same subject but now
with some sort of crazy-ass vengeance aimed at the Director of the CIA, John Brennan,
and saying: “The CIA director is
ridiculous on waterboarding.”
Donald
Trump took on Brennan on torture after Brennan said on NBC News Sunday (April
10, 2016) that he would not allow enhanced interrogation tactics, including
waterboarding, even if a future president ordered it.
Trump struck at Brennan saying: “I think his comments are ridiculous.” (Naturally Trump
said that on FOX News Monday). “I mean, they chop off heads and they drown
people in cages with 50 in a cage, in big, steel heavy cages, drop them right
into the water drown people, and we can’t water-board and we can’t do anything.
And you know we’re playing on different fields. And we have a huge problem with
ISIS, which we can’t beat, and the reason we can’t beat them is we won’t use strong
tactics, whether it’s this or other things.”
Reminder
from previous post: Joe Navarro, one of
the FBI’s top experts in questioning techniques, told The
New Yorker: “Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected. You don’t
want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to
have grotesque other problems.”
Also,
Trump and Cruz both spewed on this subject previously saying:
TRUMP:
“I’D DO WATERBOARDING AND MORE…” CRUZ: “WATERBOARDING IS NOT ILLEGAL.”
That
view differs from UN Convention against torture,
which was ratified by the U.S. in 1990. Here is their definition: “Torture
means 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… when such pain or suffering is
inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a
public office or other person acting in an official capacity.”
The International Committee of the Red
Cross and many others all contend
that torture falls into the above definition without doubt.
Federal law (18 USC Section 2340)
defines torture as something that is:
“Specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering”
— plus and the U.S. Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Former Army JAG, Major General Thomas
Romig said: “There is no way any
competent and knowledgeable attorney can say that waterboarding is legal under
the Geneva Conventions, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or the Convention
Against Torture.” (Wall
Street Journal in 2014 interview).
Cruz was
obviously referring to the controversial 2002 document known as the “Bybee
Memo” written by Jay S Bybee, who as the time was the head of the Office
of Legal Counsel (OLC) under President George W. Bush. At the time, that memo
advised the CIA and DOD that techniques such as “waterboarding” might be
legally allowed under an interpretation of the president’s
authority during war time. The memo said the only pain equal to that
produced by organ failure or death qualified as torture. But it is worth
noting that this definition has since been widely criticized and
subsequently disavowed.
Jack
Goldsmith, who served as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal
Counsel in 2003 to 2004 (under Bush), put a temporary halt to the use of
waterboarding as a technique after he raised questions about this type
of interrogation and the law.
Let me be clear on this point: “Waterboarding is often described as a simulated
drowning or a technique to convince the detainee or prisoner that he or she is
drowning.” There is no way to simulate the lungs filling with water without water entering the lungs to start the actual drowning.
Views in favor of accepting torture in
emergencies: Alan Dershowitz, a
prominent American defense attorney, surprised some observers by giving limited
support to the idea that torture could be justified. He argued that human
nature can lead to unregulated abuse “off the books.” Therefore, it would be
better if there were a regulated procedure through which an interrogator could
request a “torture warrant and that requiring a warrant would establish a paper
trail of accountability.”
Torturers,
and those who authorize torture, could be held to account for excesses.
Dershowitz's suggested torture warrants, similar to search warrants and phone
tap warrants, would spell out the limits on the techniques that interrogators
may use, and the extent to which they may abridge a suspect's rights. In
September 2002, when reviewing Alan Dershowitz's book, Why Terrorism
Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge, Richard
Posner, legal scholar and judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the
Seventh Circuit, wrote in The New Republic:
“If
torture is the only means of obtaining the information necessary to prevent the
detonation of a nuclear bomb in Times Square, torture should be
used--and will be used--to obtain the information.... No one who doubts that
this is the case should be in a position of responsibility.”
Views in favor of torturing the
relatives of suspects: In February
2010 Bruce Anderson wrote a column for The Independent, arguing
that the British government would have not just the right, but the duty, to
torture if there was a ticking bomb, and that they should torture the relatives
of suspects if they believed that doing so would yield information that would
avert a terrorist attack: “It came, in the form of a devilish intellectual
challenge: Let's take your hypothesis a bit further. We have captured a
terrorist, but he is a hardened character. We cannot be certain that he will
crack in time. We have also captured his wife and children. So, we torture the wife and children.”
Views rejecting torture under all
circumstances: Some human rights
organizations, professional and academic experts, and military and intelligence
leaders have absolutely rejected the idea that torture is ever legal or
acceptable, even in a so-called ticking bomb situation. They have expressed
grave concern about the way the dramatic force and artificially simple moral
answers the ticking bomb thought-experiment seems to offer, have manipulated
and distorted the legal and moral perceptions, reasoning and judgment of both the
general population and military and law enforcement officials.
They reject the
proposition, implicit or explicit, that certain acts of torture are
justifiable, even desirable. They believe that simplistic responses to the
scenario may lead well-intentioned societies down a slippery slope to legalized
and systematic torture. They point out that no evidence of any real-life
situation meeting all the criteria to constitute a pure ticking bomb scenario
has ever been presented to the public, and that such a situation is highly
unlikely.
As
well, torture can be criticized as a poor vehicle for discovering truth, as
people experiencing torture, once broken, are liable to make anything up in
order to stop the pain and can become unable to tell the difference between
fact and fiction under intense psychological pressure. Additionally, since the
terrorist presumably knows that the timer is ticking, he has an excellent
reason to lie and give false information under torture in order to misdirect
his interrogators; merely giving a convincing answer which the investigators
will waste time checking out makes it more likely that the bomb will go off,
and of course once the bomb has gone off, not only has the terrorist won, but
there is also no further point in torturing him, except perhaps as revenge.
Others point out that the ticking-bomb
torture proponents adopt an extremely
short-term view, which impoverishes their consequentialism. Using torture — or even
declaring that one is prepared to accept its use — makes other groups of people
much more likely to use torture themselves in the long run. The consequence is
likely to be a long-term increase in violence.
This
long-term effect is so serious that the person making the torture decision
cannot possibly (according to this argument) make a reasonable estimate of its
results.
Thus
the decision-maker has no grounds for certainty that the value of the lives
saved from the ticking bomb will outweigh the value of the lives lost because
of the subsequent disorder. He or she cannot arrive at a successful accounting
of consequences.
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