The Glade 4.0

Do you suppose we haven't had a serious attack here in the last 13 years purely by accident or lack if desire on the part of our enemies.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Sometimes this is true.

Other times, not so much.

In World War 2, American, Canadian, and British forces that were captured by Nazi Germany received fair and human treatment at the hands of those oh-so-most-evil Nazis. Why? At least in part because of the way we were known to treat our own captured PoWs. German soldiers captured in WW2 by the western allies were treated very, very well. This had so many good effects - yes, it meant they gave us the same respect back when we were captured. Also, it meant that the enemy was more likely to surrender when the battle was lost, reducing the loss of life on both sides.

If you look on the eastern front, in the same war, no such respect existed between the Soviet and German forces. They fought to the death. German soldiers knew they'd be summarily executed if captured by the soviets (assuming they bothered to capture them), and Soviet forces ended up acting the same as the Germans would send them to be tortured and killed in their own concentration camps.

These are principles we should remember, but with that said, this is not an analogous situation, I admit. The enemy the free world now faces is not an issue of politics or greed for power or land. This is a jihadist holy war, in which their eventual goal is to kill every last man, woman and child who does not submit to the will of Allah. They will accept no less, it will never end until one side or the other is exterminated. (Sadly, they understand this, and we do not. As bad as Hitler was, Nazi Germany was not nearly as villainous as our current foes.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That, plus we don't even have a reasonable definition of torture in the first place. As I pointed out when this came up 2-3 Glades ago, the definition of torture is so broad that handcuffing someone could be "torture". Not letting them watch their favorite TV show could be torture.

According to the report, the program that was briefed to the President was not actually followed - by a significant degree. The program that he approved was based on techniques approved for use in training our own personnel - i.e. that were safe to use without risking harm to people whose training is expensive and valuable.

I find it absurd that any technique that can be used for training could rise to the level of "torture". If we are talking about unapproved techniques, then the entire problem comes down to the CIA's apparent inability to control its own personnel.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There is an analogous situation in World War II. It's Japan.

The Japanese were crusading holy warriors who were going to fight until the last man. We accepted their conviction and fought them on the terms they proposed: to the death. We showed them that they could be eradicated to the last man.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

That has always been the case - it's the price of being the "good guys" by comparison, as you keep pointing out - and yet our major enemies of the last century or so (the Nazis and the Communists) lost their conflicts with us, despite (and, in the case of the Cold War, in large part because of) our greater levels of self-restraint and aspirational morality.

This is another lesson we could stand to learn for dealing with radical islam.

Don't torture prisoners -- take no prisoners.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Again, I think you underestimate exactly how the United States has maintained its power base for the last two and a half centuries. In the case of the Cold War, we were simply better at not getting caught with our pants down. Some of our retaliatory actions were disproportionate to the offense, and with great effect.

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Oh, I have no illusions about the US being all shiny and clean, believe me. My point, however, is that our opponents were notably more unrestrained by moral sentiment, and yet we still won. Indeed, in the Cold War, our superior moral standing was a key strategic asset, not a liability.

A lot of this was really that they just had a different attitude towards Americans and British than they did Russians.



Most of which had nothing to do with the treatment of either side's prisoners by the other. The Germans had adopted the Nazi attitude towards Slavic people in general that Hitler had given them and would have behaved the way they did regardless. The Soviet treatment of their prisoners could hardly be expected to be better given who was in charge there.

This should be viewed as opposed to Soviet prisoners of the Finns, who were not treated particularly harshly. Most deaths among those prisoners can be attributed to A) the cold environment of that theatre, B) the poor harvest and C) Finnish unpreparedness for the volume of prisoners, rather than any deliberate maltreatment.

While Soviet treatment of Finnish prisoners was generally better than they treated Germans, it was still vastly inferior to Finnish treatment of Soviet prisoners and involved exactly what we'd expect from the USSR of that time - forced labor camps, and very poor food and medical treatment. Furthermore Finnish prisoners were subject to being shot on the spot by partisans.

Finalnd's signing of and attempts to adhere to Hague IV had little, if any, effect on Soviet treatment of their personnel.



Nazi Germany was pretty much just as bad as anything we face now. Differences in capability make any evaluation of "how villainous" they are pretty much impossible to conduct objectively.

The simple fact is, however, that even if we accept the idea that we shouldn't conduct torture or enhanced interrogation because we don't need to, or its not worth it, or its not effective, there's still the fact that A) it happened and B) bad things do happen. Real life good guys are not Disney good guys. We do not need to act as if this is some horrendous stain on our lily-white honor.

It isn't the first stain, and everyone is stained. Most nations much worse. Those few that are less have the luxury of not being worth the effort to threaten. This report is essentially pornography. It's purpose is so that people can preen at how offended they are at the whole affair, and talk about how right they are about the Bush administration, and conveniently ignore the uncomfortable problems Khross has pointed out.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Had we gone with my preferred course of action - nuclear strikes on Afghanistan if they did not hand over Bin Laden within 72 hours - we could have avoided all this torture business.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Our industrial power and geographical position were key strategic assets, not our moral position in WWII. The Sovietts were hardly morally better than the Nazis - numbers and strategic depth won for them, not moral superiority. Socialism was making inroads in much of the Third World prior to its spectacular collapse, as it had better propaganda and a more seductive social justice message to the uneducated.

Even among our allies, our "moral position" was of little use to people unwilling to face reality. I remember plenty of angry protests of US missiles that hadn't even arrived yet - the Pershing II - but strangely no howls of outrage about the SS-20s that were already pointed at them. But had we not fielded those weapons, we would have had the same concerns of the earlier Cold War - "Are the Americans really committed to our defense?"

America was willing to risk the vaporization of Chicago and Los Angeles to prevent it from happening to London or Paris, yet we got the same moralistic outrage directed at us as now.

Superior moral standing in the abstract has no power. The way in which we got that standing - the rights of the individual - led to material advantage, with a stronger economy, more technological advancement, and greater individual comfort and success. Morality got results.

Abstract moral principle for its own sake is worthless. This is the mistake most so-called ethicists make; worrying about abstract concepts at the expense of real effects. Even religion isn't exempt; it has to promise a reward in the next world. If you don't want to be religious about your morality, you better be able to get results in this one. People need their lives to be bettered by morality, not just "be moral".

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

See, I agree with these two paragraphs in their entirety. In fact, the eventual merits of any given moral philosophy will only be decided based on the outcome - the advantages or disadvantages such philosophies have in contributing to the survival or extinction of any society which adopts them en masse.

Where I think we disagree, is that I believe that following those moral principles about the way we treat captured enemies has been and will continue to be an asset, while abandoning those principles in favor of pragmatic need of the moment will end up being detrimental. I believe that the principles themselves - even if they do not help in the immediate moment, contribute something to society that helps it flourish in the long run. (Which makes it even more important, if we're going to do this crap, at all, to hide it very well under a black ops budget and severely punish anyone caught doing it, even if it's only to keep up appearances. We have to, as a society, at least believe that we're above such things.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

This combined with Moose's


Pretty much sums it up for me.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

While this may be generally true - if for no other reason than to prevent incidents like this report being used for political purposes, or avoiding providing grist for enemy propaganda, I don't think it can be said that this will ALWAYS be the case.

[/quote]

I don't think that we necessarily do. In fact, I think that these principles themselves become problematic. People want to believe we're "above" any unpleasant reality they don't want to deal with.

Take the mid-1980's nuclear protestors I discussed. Many of them would probably insist that they did not want the U.S. missiles because they invited Soviet threat, while completely ignoring the fact that they already were under threat. If pressed on that point, they would no doubt make the excuse that the Soviets only felt threatened by our "aggression", while refusing to admit that this idea works both ways - we also felt threatened by their aggression.

Furthermore, from hindsight while it's fair to understand that the dual invasions of WWI and WWII and the simple fact of our capability made the Soviet fear understandable, it still wasn't founded in any real ambition of the West to start a war, whereas the Soviets engaged in all kinds of bellicose rhetoric the made it reasonable for the West to think they would start a war, not to mention their own aggression against their neighbors in the early parts of WWII.

Nevertheless, this reality simply could not be allowed to intrude on the mentality of the protestor. To the protestor, there simply is no getting past the mental image of mushroom clouds appearing over Western Europe and the accompanying consequences, and they would grasp at the leanest straw of just maybe if only the American missiles would just go away then somehow the Soviet ones would too - and they focused on us because deep down, they knew what would happen to a protest by East Block citizens against Soviet nukes.

People are very good at coming up with imaginary gains if we refrain from actions they don't like, most of which to "our enemies won't like it if we fight them, but if we don't do anything, they'll magically go away." On the one hand, we have assertions like "If we avoid torturing people, our enemies will not be able to use that fact as propaganda against us" which is a clear cause and effect and a tangible, if somewhat difficult to quantify, gain. On the other hand, we have RD talking about our Moral standing" being a "major strategic asset" which..well, it really doesn't say much. At best it indicates confusion over what a strategic asset actually is. At worst, it amounts to inflating the value of morality well above the value of more tangible advantages simply to make the moral case for its own sake.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This report is a product of The Status Quo. Partisan or not, you can bet your *** that its only effect will be to maintain The Status Quo. Or to be less abstract, Congressional reports don't change what Congress thinks/does. How could it? The entity producing the report is the very same that thinks and does.

You won't get what you want. You'll get only the appearance of getting what you want. And there's the problem. Given that torture is going to continue in the US regardless of this report, is it better we believe the practice has been eradicated, or that it hasn't? If you've been given the false belief that your neighborhood is safer than it really is, will your actions change in a way that makes you more safe or less?

Or another parable: in the last financial meltdown, many people were shocked to discover that their investments and financial institutions were not as secure as previously believed on the basis of federal finance regulations and capital requirements. When the smoke cleared, the proposed solution to this problem was more finance regulation. The irony is palpable.

It's not that Khross wouldn't like to see torture abolished; it's that's he believes this report won't affect that change. And under that assumption, it would be better for the report not to exist. Best case scenario, it posed a threat to national security. Worst case scenario, it provides a veneer of respectability that allows more and worse violations to happen in the future because we falsely believe that we've solved that whole torture problem. See? We made this report and sent a few people to prison and everything.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

You know, you make some good points about this particular report, but I also struggle to imagine what steps could possibly be taken that you would NOT regard as simply "defending the status quo." And if such steps could be identified, would they be anything even remotely feasible in actual practice?

Your neighborhood analogy is good in that it illustrates the dangers of a false sense of security. But how does it relate to this? What does it actually matter to the average person whether there is or isn't torture going on? It doesn't, at least, beyond the abstract. The level of crime in your neighborhood affects how you go about your daily business. Some terrorist getting waterboarded somewhere in chilimacistan clandestinely really doesn't.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This has the shape of a truism, but it is demonstrably false. Both self-aware organizations and self-aware individuals are capable of bootstrapping their own changes. I'm not saying it's common, or even likely, but its NOT axiomatic that change never comes from within.

I'm not sure that the U.S. Government constitutes a self-aware organization in that respect.

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It also bears pointing out that a report made by only the Democrats on the intelligence committee is not representative of the Senate, or Congress, as a whole and therefore is not "from the same entity". The events the reports discusses took place from 2001 to 2006 during a period of Republican control; since that time the Congress shifted to complete Democrat control, then to split control, and is now on the verge of going back to the Republicans. There's little reason to believe that Congress has a static thought process that remains the same despite internal shifts - or for that matter, that Congress behaves as a single coherent entity at all. It's made up of 535 members with by design semi-antagonistic internal stresses between its members, who are not all the same members as in 2001 or 2006 anyhow.

Finally, the report is not a report on Congress at all. It's a report by Congress on the CIA which is clearly not the same entity at all, and does not even fall under the same branch. So no, the report is not likely to change what Congress thinks or does, but that isn't its goal. It's goal is to address the behavior of the CIA (however belatedly).

Allegedly, there is a Republican report mirroring this one, but as yet I haven't found the text of that one and it does not seem to be clear if it has been released yet or not.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Why do I give a **** what other people do? We are a nation of laws and should conduct ourselves accordingly. Most importantly, the US Government should not be lying to the US people. If they want to torture people - ok - lay it out for the public and determine if that is acceptable to the public.

I understand all that, and agree for the most part. That said, I don't really care about the politics of this. I don't care who's doing it, or why, or who's complaining about it, or why. ANYONE opposing the immediate cessation of these activities and/or any sort of investigation and/or prosecution, needs to be shot in the face.

We took lots of Japanese prisoners.

Being the "good guys" is indeed a huge asset. First, it's good for morale. Second, it helps with surrenders (see WW2 as an example). Third, it helps with the occupied masses (again, WW2 is a good example - the reaction of the liberated areas in the west versus the "liberated" areas in the east).

Engaging in torture does not provide a substantial strategic benefit, and removes the benefits associated with being "the good guys".

Why should the public be determining how to interrogate prisoners? What business does public opinion have in the question of what's the best way to elicit information from people? It has nothing to do with "wanting to torture people" - no one is interested in doing so for its own sake.

As to being a nation of laws - I have already pointed out, and I pointed out years ago, that the applicable law on this situation is exceedingly vague - probably unconstitutionally so.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville