Torture and College Life

[PoliticalChic]

“Now we are engaged in a great [civil] war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
And the best defense against the possibility of another 9/11 is a mélange of distresses that every college student goes through, voluntarily.
According to the NYTimes, this is it:

NYTimes outline of “torture techniques”
Interrogation Techniques - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com

And below, is pretty much the way I remember the ‘torture.’

1. Walling: "A flexible false wall will be constructed. The individual is placed with his heels touching the wall: The interrogator pulls the individual forward and then quickly and firmly pushes the individual into the wall. It is the individual's shoulder blades that hit the wall."

Anyone who’s been at a concert, or a sale at Nordstrom’s has been through this one. Any permanent injuries?

2. The Facial (or Insult) Slap (Bybee memo, August 1, 2002)

"With the facial slap or insult slap, the interrogator slaps the individual's face with fingers slightly spread. The hand makes contact with the area directly between the tip of the individual's chin and the bottom of the corresponding earlobe. The interrogator invades the individual's personal space.”

This one is a toughie, since women today will put up with any behavior, but you guys who have gone out with ladies, may have had to contend with this ‘torture.’

3. Cramped Confinement & insects Placed In a Confinement Box (Bybee memo, August 1, 2002)

"You would like to place (Abu) Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. …place a harmless insect in the box."

There was the time we took a cabin in the woods. Yes, I was exposed to this horrid torture!

4. "With respect to the small confinement box, you have informed us that he would spend at most two hours in this box ... For the larger box, in which he can both stand and sit, he may be placed in this box for up to eighteen hours at a time ..."

It’ s also known by it’s alternate title: the dreaded ‘college dorm room!’ In one of the dorm rooms in Columbia, you actually had to have the door open to fit the bed!

5. Dietary Manipulation (Bradbury memo, May 10, 2005)
"This technique involves the substitution of commercial liquid meal replacements for normal food, presenting detainees with a bland, unappetizing, but nutritionally complete diet."

Now, this is torture. I remember after the first two weeks of staying up until 3 in the morning and eating nothing but junk food I was already 10 pounds heavier. You know what came next: the living hell of NutriSystem!

"Medical officers are required to ensure adequate fluid and nutritional intake, and frequent medial monitoring takes place while any detainee is undergoing dietary manipulation."

Plus, I didn’t get any medical officer, although there was this cute pre-med soph…

6. Nudity (Bradury memo, May 10, 2005)

"This technique is used to cause psychological discomfort, particularly if a detainee, for cultural or other reasons, is especially modest. When the technique is employed, clothing can be provided as an instant reward for cooperation... Interrogators can exploit the detainee's fear of being seen naked."

No details here, but I will tell you that at Vassar, we had co-ed bathrooms and showers.


7. Abdominal Slap (Bradbury memo, May 10, 2005)

"In this technique, the interrogator strikes the abdomen of the detainee with the back of his open hand. The interrogator must have no rings or other jewelry on his hand. The interrogator is positioned directly in front of the detainee, generally no more than than 18 inches from the detainees. With his fingers held tightly together and fully extended, and with his palm toward the interrogator's own body, using his elbow as a fixed pivot point, the interrogator slaps the detainee in the detainee's abdomen. The interrogator may not use a fist, and the slap must be delivered above the navel and below the sternum.”

Dreadful! Why, this is almost as bad as Dodge Ball!

8. Water Dousing and "Flicking" (Bradbury memo, May 10, 2005)

"Cold water is poured on the detainee either from a container or from a hose without a nozzle.”

Do you have an older brother? Need I say more?

"… You have also described a variation of water dousing involving much smaller quantities of water; this variation is known as 'flicking.' Flicking of water is achieved by the interrogator wetting his fingers and then flicking them at the detainee, propelling droplets at the detainee."

This can’t be serious.

9. Sleep Deprivation (more than 48 hours) (Bradbury memo, May 10, 2005)

I get the heebie-jeebies just thinking of those No-Doz days, and nights.

"… In lieu of standing sleep deprivation, a detainee may instead be seated on and shackled to a small stool. The stool supports the detainee's weight, but is too small to permit the subject to balance himself sufficiently to go to sleep…

I’ve been in college lectures in similar situations.


10. Waterboarding (Bybee memo, August 1, 2002)
"Finally, you would like to use a technique called the 'waterboard.’ “..air flow is slightly restricted for 20 to 40 seconds."

Here is the biggie, waterboarding, or as we called it, Chug-a-Lug:

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Wow, kind of reminds you of that line from &#8220;Pulp Fiction,&#8221;
"You hear me talking, hill-billy boy? I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'ma get medieval on yer ass."

Is it possible that we have defined &#8216;torture&#8217; down to this level? I think not. Those claiming it&#8217;s torture are simply the same anti-war, America-hating liberals with Bush Derangement Syndrome, hiding behind some feigned righteous indignation as a strategy to impede the success of American policy, in the hopes of another Viet Nam debacle.

Winston Churchill famously said &#8220;We sleep soundly in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf."

Little did he suspect that we would, instead, become a nation of girly-men.

 

[Pyrite]

Usually your arguments are deserving of more respect than this one, but this post is contemptable.

Drinking a lot of something is not waterboarding, being deprived of sleep for a week or more is not the same as your college all-nighters.

Not every technique on this list is a problem for most opponents of torture. To act as if they were is disengenuous. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and "walling" are what most of us take issue with.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Usually your arguments are deserving of more respect than this one, but this post is contemptable.

Drinking a lot of something is not waterboarding, being deprived of sleep for a week or more is not the same as your college all-nighters.

Not every technique on this list is a problem for most opponents of torture. To act as if they were is disengenuous. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and "walling" are what most of us take issue with.

Just so that I can judge which is actually contemptible, girl-man, please provide a list of the terrorists who were treated with these techniques and subsequently died, were permanently maimed, and/or spent time in intensive care.

 

[Nik]

Usually your arguments are deserving of more respect than this one, but this post is contemptable.

Drinking a lot of something is not waterboarding, being deprived of sleep for a week or more is not the same as your college all-nighters.

Not every technique on this list is a problem for most opponents of torture. To act as if they were is disengenuous. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and "walling" are what most of us take issue with.

Just so that I can judge which is actually contemptible, girl-man, please provide a list of the terrorists who were treated with these techniques and subsequently died, were permanently maimed, and/or spent time in intensive care.

Dilawar and Habibullah. Oh wait, they weren't terrorists tho, just Arabs who got swept up in the US dragnet.

The Armed Services Committee traced the murder of Dilawar and Habibullah’s to interrogation policies at Bagram that were first proposed by Pentagon officials in October 2001, just days after the U.S. launched an attack against the Taliban government.

Senate Panel's Report Links Detainees' Murders to Bush's Torture Policy

Still think its all fun and games, dipshit?

 

[Iriemon]

Yep. And to think we convicted all those poor Japanese fellows after WWII for a bunch of college pranks. What were those hard assed guys on the military commissions thinking?

Waterboard? You mean a chugging contest?

Cigarette burning? Who never played "hold the roach" ha ha.

Bamboo shoots? I mean, like you never got a paper cut? They're like so wicked.

Rape? Heck there was lots of sex going on in college.

Too bad for the Japanese we sentenced to years of hard labor or death we didn't have the enlightened view we have now.

 

[Newby]

Too bad that you continue to use the bogus Japanese arguement after myriads of people have explained the differences to you.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Usually your arguments are deserving of more respect than this one, but this post is contemptable.

Drinking a lot of something is not waterboarding, being deprived of sleep for a week or more is not the same as your college all-nighters.

Not every technique on this list is a problem for most opponents of torture. To act as if they were is disengenuous. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and "walling" are what most of us take issue with.

Just so that I can judge which is actually contemptible, girl-man, please provide a list of the terrorists who were treated with these techniques and subsequently died, were permanently maimed, and/or spent time in intensive care.

Dilawar and Habibullah. Oh wait, they weren't terrorists tho, just Arabs who got swept up in the US dragnet.

The Armed Services Committee traced the murder of Dilawar and Habibullah’s to interrogation policies at Bagram that were first proposed by Pentagon officials in October 2001, just days after the U.S. launched an attack against the Taliban government.

Senate Panel's Report Links Detainees' Murders to Bush's Torture Policy

Still think its all fun and games, dipshit?

Now, now, girly-man, watch your language, after all you're not talking to your mom.

So you contend that the interrogation techniques listed in my college-prank post caused the deaths that you note?

Have someone more literate read the report that you link to you, since your hate of America is clouding what abiltiy at comprehension you might have, in a calmer state.

"Indeed, a report into detainee abuse completed in 2004 by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, the former Naval inspector general, who conducted an investigation into detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan at the request of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, specifically cleared Pentagon officials stating they “did not promulgate interrogation policies . . . that directed, sanctioned or encouraged the torture or abuse of detainees."

A declassified version of the 360-page Church report, delivered to Congress in March 2004, said there was "no policy that condoned or authorized either abuse or torture," which critics of the Bush administration believed was a cover-up."
Senate Panel's Report Links Detainees' Murders to Bush's Torture Policy


The operative phrase: "did not promulgate interrogation policies . . . that directed, sanctioned or encouraged the torture or abuse of detainees."

Further, it is telling that 'news' of the deaths of prisoners resulting from the listed techniques appears in this 'pubreport,' or 'impeachbush,' or 'islamicblog,' but not splashed on the front pages of the oh so 'conservative' NYTimes, or the LATimes, or the Washington Post, or the Boston Globe, or even the WSJournal.

Does this not seem odd to you, Nikki, or have you not looked under each and every rock, yet?

I bet the girl scouts could come up with some more serious techniques, but then you'd claim that they were Bush-robot-fascists.

Nicht wahr?

 

[Pyrite]

Just so that I can judge which is actually contemptible, girl-man, please provide a list of the terrorists who were treated with these techniques and subsequently died, were permanently maimed, and/or spent time in intensive care.

Something doesn't have to maim you to be torture. Just because you've taken precautions not to cause permanent damage doesn't mean you aren't still torturing a person.

But still, from the red cross at The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means - The New York Review of Books:

After 18 to 24 hours of continuous standing, there is an accumulation of fluid in the tissues of the legs. This dependent edema is produced by the extravasation of fluid from the blood vessels. The ankles and feet of the prisoner swell to twice their normal circumference. The edema may rise up the legs as high as the middle of the thighs. The skin becomes tense and intensely painful. Large blisters develop, which break and exude watery serum....[12]

This medical observation is confirmed in the accounts of at least two of the detainees in the ICRC report, including that of Khaled Shaik Mohammed:

...I was kept for one month in the cell in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor. Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the handcuffs around my wrists resulting in open and bleeding wounds.... [Scars consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as both ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.[13]

Also, is the name calling really necessary, or do you think you could discuss matters in the manner of an adult?

 

[DiamondDave]

Usually your arguments are deserving of more respect than this one, but this post is contemptable.

Drinking a lot of something is not waterboarding, being deprived of sleep for a week or more is not the same as your college all-nighters.

Not every technique on this list is a problem for most opponents of torture. To act as if they were is disengenuous. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and "walling" are what most of us take issue with.

Wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Go thru some military training and get back to me

 

[PoliticalChic]

Just so that I can judge which is actually contemptible, girl-man, please provide a list of the terrorists who were treated with these techniques and subsequently died, were permanently maimed, and/or spent time in intensive care.

Something doesn't have to maim you to be torture. Just because you've taken precautions not to cause permanent damage doesn't mean you aren't still torturing a person.

But still, from the red cross at The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means - The New York Review of Books:

After 18 to 24 hours of continuous standing, there is an accumulation of fluid in the tissues of the legs. This dependent edema is produced by the extravasation of fluid from the blood vessels. The ankles and feet of the prisoner swell to twice their normal circumference. The edema may rise up the legs as high as the middle of the thighs. The skin becomes tense and intensely painful. Large blisters develop, which break and exude watery serum....[12]

This medical observation is confirmed in the accounts of at least two of the detainees in the ICRC report, including that of Khaled Shaik Mohammed:

...I was kept for one month in the cell in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor. Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the handcuffs around my wrists resulting in open and bleeding wounds.... [Scars consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as both ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.[13]

Also, is the name calling really necessary, or do you think you could discuss matters in the manner of an adult?

Hey, didn't you read the NYTimes list of interrogation techniques?

Name-calling and hurt-feelings were numbers 11 and 12. But, heck, you're not my prisoner, and probably not a terrorist, so I take it back. Kiss,kiss- feel better?

"Something doesn't have to maim you to be torture...' Yeah, it does. Otherwise its enhanced interrogation.

The Red Cross is not what I'd call a neutral observer:
"According to a Defense Department source citing internal Pentagon documents, the ICRC team leader told U.S. authorities at Camp Bucca: "You people are no better than and no different than the Nazi concentration camp guards." She was upset about not being granted immediate access shortly after a prison riot, ..."
GayandRight: The Red Cross' bias against the US....

Which leads to this: "... confirmed in the accounts of at least two of the detainees in the ICRC report, including that of Khaled Shaik Mohammed."

This is your evidence and best witness?

 

[Pyrite]

Wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Go thru some military training and get back to me

What, the military training we put our special forces through so they can resist illegal torture if they are captured.

That is what the SEER program was about.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Yep. And to think we convicted all those poor Japanese fellows after WWII for a bunch of college pranks. What were those hard assed guys on the military commissions thinking?

Waterboard? You mean a chugging contest?

Cigarette burning? Who never played "hold the roach" ha ha.

Bamboo shoots? I mean, like you never got a paper cut? They're like so wicked.

Rape? Heck there was lots of sex going on in college.

Too bad for the Japanese we sentenced to years of hard labor or death we didn't have the enlightened view we have now.

You're off your game.

The stretch is too tenuous to be considered to be an analogy.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Also, is the name calling really necessary, or do you think you could discuss matters in the manner of an adult?

I just noticed, you objected to 'girly-man,' but not the appellation that Nik used toward me?

Careful introspection is in your future.

 

[Nik]

Just so that I can judge which is actually contemptible, girl-man, please provide a list of the terrorists who were treated with these techniques and subsequently died, were permanently maimed, and/or spent time in intensive care.

Dilawar and Habibullah. Oh wait, they weren't terrorists tho, just Arabs who got swept up in the US dragnet.

The Armed Services Committee traced the murder of Dilawar and Habibullah’s to interrogation policies at Bagram that were first proposed by Pentagon officials in October 2001, just days after the U.S. launched an attack against the Taliban government.

Senate Panel's Report Links Detainees' Murders to Bush's Torture Policy

Still think its all fun and games, dipshit?

Now, now, girly-man, watch your language, after all you're not talking to your mom.

So you contend that the interrogation techniques listed in my college-prank post caused the deaths that you note?

Have someone more literate read the report that you link to you, since your hate of America is clouding what abiltiy at comprehension you might have, in a calmer state.

"Indeed, a report into detainee abuse completed in 2004 by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, the former Naval inspector general, who conducted an investigation into detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan at the request of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, specifically cleared Pentagon officials stating they “did not promulgate interrogation policies . . . that directed, sanctioned or encouraged the torture or abuse of detainees."

A declassified version of the 360-page Church report, delivered to Congress in March 2004, said there was "no policy that condoned or authorized either abuse or torture," which critics of the Bush administration believed was a cover-up."
Senate Panel's Report Links Detainees' Murders to Bush's Torture Policy


The operative phrase: "did not promulgate interrogation policies . . . that directed, sanctioned or encouraged the torture or abuse of detainees."

Further, it is telling that 'news' of the deaths of prisoners resulting from the listed techniques appears in this 'pubreport,' or 'impeachbush,' or 'islamicblog,' but not splashed on the front pages of the oh so 'conservative' NYTimes, or the LATimes, or the Washington Post, or the Boston Globe, or even the WSJournal.

Does this not seem odd to you, Nikki, or have you not looked under each and every rock, yet?

I bet the girl scouts could come up with some more serious techniques, but then you'd claim that they were Bush-robot-fascists.

Nicht wahr?

Nice job at missing the other reports where it traced it back and found a direct link. The Army Committee report found a direct link between the interrogation techniques and their deaths. By the way, if it all hadn't been covered up, it would have been a lot easier to find records of the connections.

As for why other publications didn't cover news of Dilawars death...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html

'Taxi to the Dark Side' - Los Angeles Times

Down a Dark Road - washingtonpost.com

Oh hey, they did. It was also made into a pretty major documentary. Funny you never heard of it, you been living under a rock somewhere?

 

[Pyrite]

Also, is the name calling really necessary, or do you think you could discuss matters in the manner of an adult?

I just noticed, you objected to 'girly-man,' but not the appellation that Nik used toward me?

Careful introspection is in your future.

I don't have time to object every time someone on this forum descends into childishness. That would be a full time job.

"Something doesn't have to maim you to be torture...' Yeah, it does. Otherwise its enhanced interrogation.

Odd, because that's not how the law defines torture.

Inter-American Convention

The Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture, currently ratified by 17 nations of the Americas and in force since 28 February 1987, defines torture more expansively than the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

For the purposes of this Convention, torture shall be understood to be any act intentionally performed whereby physical or mental pain or suffering is inflicted on a person for purposes of criminal investigation, as a means of intimidation, as personal punishment, as a preventive measure, as a penalty, or for any other purpose. Torture shall also be understood to be the use of methods upon a person intended to obliterate the personality of the victim or to diminish his physical or mental capacities, even if they do not cause physical pain or mental anguish.

 

[Tech_Esq]

Anybody else just fucking fed up with all this hand-wringing about whether we are close to the line, on the line or two steps over the line?

Fuck it, we should just start piking heads. Much has been written about what kind of society we live in. I'd much rather be in the kind of society that takes its enemies seriously and gives back 10,000% more than it takes, than live in this kind of estrogen OD'd society. I never thought I'd see the day that people actual acted shocked that we annoyed battlefield criminals, illegal combatants under the Geneva convention, by shooting water up their nose. There's already a country for people who think like that, it's called France.

They like to behead people....ok, let's see which side can put more heads on sticks. Let the games begin!

 

[Nik]

Anybody else just fucking fed up with all this hand-wringing about whether we are close to the line, on the line or two steps over the line?

Fuck it, we should just start piking heads. Much has been written about what kind of society we live in. I'd much rather be in the kind of society that takes its enemies seriously and gives back 10,000% more than it takes, than live in this kind of estrogen OD'd society. I never thought I'd see the day that people actual acted shocked that we annoyed battlefield criminals, illegal combatants under the Geneva convention, by shooting water up their nose. There's already a country for people who think like that, it's called France.

They like to behead people....ok, let's see which side can put more heads on sticks. Let the games begin!

Yeah and theres already countries who think like you do. They are states like Burma, and North Korea. Great, lets model ourselves after them.

 

[Tech_Esq]

Anybody else just fucking fed up with all this hand-wringing about whether we are close to the line, on the line or two steps over the line?

Fuck it, we should just start piking heads. Much has been written about what kind of society we live in. I'd much rather be in the kind of society that takes its enemies seriously and gives back 10,000% more than it takes, than live in this kind of estrogen OD'd society. I never thought I'd see the day that people actual acted shocked that we annoyed battlefield criminals, illegal combatants under the Geneva convention, by shooting water up their nose. There's already a country for people who think like that, it's called France.

They like to behead people....ok, let's see which side can put more heads on sticks. Let the games begin!

Yeah and theres already countries who think like you do. They are states like Burma, and North Korea. Great, lets model ourselves after them.

No they don't dumb ass. I'll bet that given enough time I could teach even your sorry ass to act like a man. It wouldn't be easy, but I've done it before.

 

[Pyrite]

No they don't dumb ass. I'll bet that given enough time I could teach even your sorry ass to act like a man. It wouldn't be easy, but I've done it before.

Perhaps you could begin by acting like a man yourself, as opposed to a frightened barbarian.

 

[Nik]

Anybody else just fucking fed up with all this hand-wringing about whether we are close to the line, on the line or two steps over the line?

Fuck it, we should just start piking heads. Much has been written about what kind of society we live in. I'd much rather be in the kind of society that takes its enemies seriously and gives back 10,000% more than it takes, than live in this kind of estrogen OD'd society. I never thought I'd see the day that people actual acted shocked that we annoyed battlefield criminals, illegal combatants under the Geneva convention, by shooting water up their nose. There's already a country for people who think like that, it's called France.

They like to behead people....ok, let's see which side can put more heads on sticks. Let the games begin!

Yeah and theres already countries who think like you do. They are states like Burma, and North Korea. Great, lets model ourselves after them.

No they don't dumb ass. I'll bet that given enough time I could teach even your sorry ass to act like a man. It wouldn't be easy, but I've done it before.

Oh, and by the way...Dilawar wasn't a "battlefiend criminal" he was pulled out while doing the really outrageous act of...driving a taxi. Yeah...real manly, torturing to death individual civilians.