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Everything You Need to Know About Torture
Here is a succinct executive summary of everything you know about torture:
Yes, Waterboarding IS Torture
- President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Malcolm Nance (an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence), Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples
(the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency) and many other
interrogation experts and high-level politicians say that waterboarding
is torture
- The United States has always considered waterboarding to be a crime of torture, including when the Japanese did it in WWII (and see this)
- Everyone claiming waterboarding is not torture has changed their tune as soon as they were exposed to even a small dose of it themselves. See this, this and this
It Wasn't Only Waterboarding
- Major General Antonio Taguba: Photos Show Sodomy, Rape and Sexual Assault With Wire and Various Blunt Instruments
- "The
Sexual Humiliation Of Iraqi Prisoners…Was Not An Invention Of Maverick
Guards, But Part Of A SYSTEM Of Ill-Treatment And Degradation"
Children, Too
No, Torture Does NOT Make Us Safer
- One of the Military's Top Interrogators Says Torture Cost Hundreds 'If Not Thousands' Of American Lives
The Insanity of What Actually Happened
- One
of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured
Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO
READ
- 9/11
Mastermind: "During ... My Interrogation I Gave A Lot Of False
Information In Order To Satisfy What I Believed The Interrogators
Wished To Hear"
- The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) - who led the 9/11 staff's inquiry - recently said: "The CIA tapes of the interrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened"
Other Relevant Facts
- Former Navy Judge Advocate General Admiral John Hutson said that "Torture is the technique of choice of the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough"
Should We Prosecute?
»
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G.W., the moment you mentioned the waterboarding done by the Japanese during WW-2 and compared it to modern day American waterboarding I stopped reading.
You sir are ignorant.
Yes... I understand you don't KNOW you're ignorant... but if you'd do just the minimal research on waterboarding as practiced by the Imperial Military Forces during WW-2...
(*SHRUG*)
Better luck with your next contribution.
BILL
Washington Post:
BillyBob:
Yup... those fucking Japs... No good bastards!
Wonder where they learned The Water Cure?
1902:
Senator George Hoar demands an investigation as evidence mounts of U.S. war crimes in the Philippines.
Theodore Roosevelt resists Hoar’s demands and growing public opposition to the racist, imperialist war against the people of the Philippines and persistent reports of war crimes, atrocities and torture by American troops.
Sergeant Charles S. Riley testifies about entire villages being burned by U.S. forces and described the "WATER CURE" torture carried out by U.S. troops against Filipinos.
Private William L Smith corroborates Sergeant Riley's testimony and admits that he had assisted in the complete destruction by burning of the town of Igbaras, a town of ten thousand people. Sergeant Edward J. Davis related other incidents of torture by U.S. forces and the burning of another town of twelve thousand people. Other witnesses recounted similar incidents.
By a strict party vote, the Committee refuses to call other proposed witnesses, calling witnesses instead from a "safe" list created by the U.S. War Department.
The attempt to hide the truth of what the U.S. is doing to the Filipino people backfires when the veterans on the safe list begin lecturing the anti-imperialist members of the Committee on the need to shoot and/or burn all Filipinos because of their "inability to appreciate human kindness."
Yup... them damn slant-eyed...er...rag-heads.
Keep hittin' 'em where it hurtz DP.
+++
"E pur si muove"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pur_si_muove!
GW, sincere thanks for this, i am going to share it.. your work, as always, is very appreciated..
GW, I was water-boarded in training for the real torture that I would face if captrued by an adversary, and I still contend that in the great scheme of things is does not rise to the level of torture. But is was indeed unpleasant.
Who gets waterboarded for training? I've seen claims in the tens of thousands. I think one such source was from Sean Hannity who also claims that he allowed himself to be waterboarded. The only reason I would bother quoting him is because he is one of the most visible and most scrutinized people in the country, so he can't get away with much. Can anyone confirm or deny?
Sorry, but this whole article is fucking stupid and nothing more than a pointless listing of dead end opinions from the lefty blogosphere and unsubtantiated allegations. I mean, wtf ZH? No wonder you guys are developing the rap for being way too fringe even for the fringe......
Sorry, but this whole article is fucking stupid and nothing more than a pointless listing of dead end opinions from the lefty blogosphere and unsubtantiated allegations. I mean, wtf ZH? No wonder you guys are developing the rap for being way too fringe even for the fringe......
My observation is that roughly 10% of people have a deep and true sense of human decency. Another 10% are depraved and vicious sociopaths. The 80% in the middle can sway back and forth and twist and turn based on circumstance and self interest.
The trick to building a decent society is to somehow install the first 10% in power and let them build a system of governance that helps keep the middle 80% more on the decent side of the scale.
The problem is this: once the depraved lower 10% gain any degree of power they will claw and fight and manipulate until their power is unassailable. They will do this by perverting and twisting the middle 80%. This process is irrevocable until the system disintegrates under the weight of it's own evil.
We are in this stage now. Much like Nazi Germany in the late 30s or the Soviet Union in the 70s there is no turning back. It's flat out impossible to uproot the twisted psychotics who hold power in this country. All we can hope for is, when the great disintegration takes place, that we can hold things together at the local level and rebuild something better.
http://pixel420.com/pixel420/stateless/
We DO NOT need Govt anymore, because NO ONE should have (or be entrusted with) any power over another!
And of course you and yours are in that special 10% that should rule. How Progressive of you.
I tell you now that when the lights go out bitch all of you fuck wads with "W" stickers still on your cars will have the life expectancy of a fart when I see you.
Quote me.. I am not George, I hate you baptist fucks.. I cant fucking wait.. I jerk off just thinking about kicking you idiots off my planet.
now, tell me how left I am... you dumb fucks seem to forget... the polite letfy wussies get to talk most of the time becuase people like me detract from the message "do unto others".. but aside from that, you.. your kids, your whole fucking gene pool! off my planet! buh bye bitch.. clock is a tickin!
Live on the Upper East Side do you?
Torture, that is so 2008!
I've noticed that on week-ends in the recent past Tyler has allowed some A-hole....any A-hole to post an inflammatory story. I don't know if this is his sociological experiment or he is just trying to create "hits" for this site. Call me disillusioned but I personally find it degrading to everything I thought ZH stood for.
maybe you will now define what it stands for?
Waiting.
Freedom, right to private property, increasing prosperity for ALL mankind?
Have NOT seen any of these ideals lately, anywhere in the World.
Is that anything like what the definition of is, is??
Is is jizz TL.
didn't think so , too busy with someone's a-hole i guess.
clown fail.
Haaaaaaaaa......Junked in 30 seconds...I obviously hit a nerve with some A-hole..........Haaaaaa......Notice that I didn't mention anything about this Thread/Story or any person but the A-holes keep stepping up to the plate!
i mean, let's talk about how silver just breached $36????!!!!??????
If you weren't a troll, you would have been on that very thread at this time, dumb ass:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/gold-surges-hits-new-all-time-high-1437
proof is in the pudding. click some links and you'll see that most either go to dailykos or some remote german blog. agreed: this is just to build traffic and actually, is kind of pathetic.
Really? Everything I wanted to know? :-)
OK. I want to know how many different people the government admits to having waterboarded at Guantanamo and other locations, how many times, when, how many were prisoners, and how many were receiving training either for their job or voluntarily.
I agree that if the world perceives the US to be an egregious torturer, then that will harm US interests, so I also want to know what the rest of the world believes about US torture, and why they believe that. For example, who is trying to convince the world that the US is such an egregious torturer, and why?
I'm working from the hopeful assumption that you genuinely want to identify and solve the real problems wherever that may lead you. What I can see is that you want to persuade people, and especially people who disagree with your conclusions. In that case, it will be helpful for you to know that when you quote a "respected source", you are not actually persuading anyone unless they already respect that source anyway. Otherwise you are just arguing from authority - a logical fallacy. How effective do you think it would be to say that we should believe Al Gore or Barack Obama because they won the Nobel Peace prize?
Quoting a source who admits they were wrong can be persuasive if the reader believes that the source had been a sincere champion of his original position and also believes that the source now sincerely believes he has been wrong. A corollary is quoting a source who is reluctantly saying something against his own best interests - assuming the reader believes that it is truly against the source's best interests and not actually supporting some unknown/hidden interest.
If you provide a link, you are not actually persuading anyone unless that link has directly incriminating audio, images, or video.
Providing logic a reader may not have thought of yet, but which is based on knowledge the reader already possesses, is also persuasive. That is generally the technique I use at www.EndOfInnocence.com.
Everyone already knows that most powerful people will do anything they can get away with, so try focusing on the ability to get away with it, such as a reduction in transparency.
George W: Thank you for the reminder of who we are as a nation: torturers.
Let all those who support torture speak their piece. You're ignorance and avarice is obvious.
The definition of torture is much broader than the US media will discuss. It is also depriving people of sleep, making them cold with hosings and low temperatures, and with the wonderfully documented, photographed "stress positions"--people tied up for days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_and_the_United_States#.22Stress_and...
After the US dismissed United Nations concerns about torture, one judge observed 'America's idea of what is torture ... does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations'.[1]
You just tortured me.
Apparently, you think denial only flows through Egypt...
If billed as advertised it would be everything I needed to know about torture and not a slam the US with every piece of fact and fiction ever created about the US torturing people in the last 10yrs.
Stories from 1939 now, awesome material, so I guess the violent video games and free porn et al are immaterial.
Don't have to go back so far: pay people to not work and they don't, promote high birth rates amongst those least able to parent and they will give birth to more children. Water down education standards and it lowers achievement, don't enforce a real penal code and more will commit crimes. The torturous social science experiments are taking place right now.
BTW the lack of relativity is likewise in addition to fabricating a traditional trait of the hate America mongers.
Blaring loud music and sleep deprivation are forms of torture.
Not quite on the same level as electrocution though.
But make sure to use the same brush to paint that wall.
You seem to glory in your rank ignorance.
Perhaps prisons are not the growth industry that they seem.
Possibly a little torture would teach those not in prison a lesson.
"Stories from 1939 now, awesome material,..."
1951:
The U.S. Army contaminates the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia with several types of infectious bacteria.
The experiment has nice racist overtones: at least one of the strains of bacteria is chosen because blacks are thought to be more susceptible than whites.
The Army doesn't restrict itself to infecting servicemen. Later in the year, the Army releases bacteria at National Airport in Washington, DC.
The bacteria used will later be linked to food and blood poisoning and respiratory illness.
Doctor Albert Kligman who, strangely enough, was spirited out of post war Germany by Allen Dulles, conducts a series of scores of grotesque and dangerous medical experiments on thousands of prison inmates in Pennsylvania worthy of Dulles' team of Nazi scientists.
Kligman is quoted as referring to Pennsylvania's Holmesburg Prison as "an anthropoid colony" ideal for conducting medical experiments.
Secret funding for the experiments is provided by the CIA and the U.S. Army's Special Operations Division at the Fort Detrick chemical and biological warfare facility.
On behalf of the U.S. Army, the CIA, Dow Chemical and Johnson & Johnson, Kligman along with numerous military and federal government physicians subjects the prisoners to...
poisonous vapors,
radioactive materials,
toxic materials applied to the skin,
skin blistering chemicals,
mind control drugs and countless other assaults.
Under the CIA's Project Often, inmates are given drugs designed to create "temporary psychotic states" with the goal of "disturbing a person's psyche" and "inducing violent behavior."
Under Project Often, the CIA succeeds in creating a drug known as "the Boomer" which can simulate a heart attack or stroke in the Agency's victim and creates "delirium lasting three or four days followed by amnesia".
Dow Chemical, the freedom loving manufacturer of napalm and, along with Monsanto, of the chemical warfare weapon Agent Orange, slips Kligman $10,000 to check out the effects of dioxin, a contaminant of Agent Orange, on the Holmesburg inmates.
Dioxin is one of the most dangerous chemicals produced by man, liberally spread over Vietnam and other countries by the United States.
Kligman injects large quantities of dioxin into seventy, mainly black, prisoners who develop severe lesions which are then left untreated for seven months.
Inmates are paid one dollar a day to participate in the experiments and do not give informed consent in violation of the Nuremburg principles requiring fully informed consent to participation in medical experiments.
While the inmates suffer pain, disfigurement and lifelong health problems, Kligman cashes in big time as he uses the Holmesburg inmates in his development of the anti-acne drug Retin-A which makes him a very wealthy man.
In 1966, the Food and Drug Administration bars Kligman from research due to "discrepancies in his data" which Kligman blames on "sloppy record keeping" by prison inmates.
The bastards.
In October 2000, three hundred former Holmesburg inmates will sue the University of Pennsylvania, Kligman and others for injuries resulting from Kligman's experiments. The suit will be dismissed because the statute of limitations has expired.
Like so many of his kind, Kligman will enjoy a life of wealth and prestige, dying in 2010 at the ripe old age of 93, an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
"Don't have to go back so far:..."
You catch one of those bastards that is conditioning children to be suicide bombers, and I don't care what you do to him to find out who and where his buds are.
one of those bastards that is conditioning children to be suicide bombers
I agree. Netanyahoo and the Likudniks need to be locked up for a life of crime.
That is what they're doing right? Conditioning children to be suicide bombers? Showering them with white phosporus, maiming them, killing their parents, driving them from their homes.
Works every time.
What a sadly blind venemous assertion to make.
It looks like you have picked sides. The Jews have gotten fucked over for thousands of years and have decided not to take it anymore. By the way, what do you suppose happened to the Neanderthal?
thank you george for exposing the depraved, cruel, subhuman behavior of the murderous butchers of baghdad - the usa military and cia. this is a shame to human decency. i can only thank god for judgment day. these scum are pure evil.
See my post above and remember, every time you masturbate you might be depriving life to a future torturer. Wank on.
It's been "torture" reading some of these comments.
Maybe the truth does not sit well with the deluded.
But when a generation of morons are brought up on a diet of violent video games and porn it comes as no suprise that torture, sexual humiliation and rape is not uncommon in the US military.
War does that to the minds of "dumb stupid animals" and some end up doing things like gang raping children:
http://wn.com/us_troops_charged_with_rape_and_murder_of_14_year_old_girl...
Well done lads, violent games, porn, torture, rape and murder.
Fucking perverts wallowing in the sewer.
Torture is the dumb stupid way to extract "intelligence" - everybody knows that.
Just go one step further and say US military was raping little children, you know you want to. Say it enough, post it around the internet enough, incestuously link to each other's posts and voila it becomes a fact.
Yes it is obvious that is why you opposed taking out the heinous dictator to begin with.
Preferred he continue to torture his own people and rely on obviously flawed and failed economic sanctions.
The sanctimonious bullshit of the self loathing neo marxist wannabee intellectuals is deeper on ZH than anywhere on earth.
More projection here than at any cinema.
Let's just go one step further and say in the USSA raping little children is a well documented historical fact.
1906:
Devout Christian, corn flake magnate and anti-masturbation campaigner J.H. Kellogg begins ze quest for ze master race by founding The Race Betterment Foundation.
Kellogg was a classic master race proponent, a screaming loony, who put boxing gloves on little boys at bedtime so they couldn't touch their pee pees and considered... a daily enema of several gallons of water to have a beneficial effect in reducing sexual tension. (...in Kellogg or the children?)
Maybe he had a point, the enema was so much fun, you didn't need anything else.
A remedy for masturbation which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision.
The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.
In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.
J.H. Kellogg a true ameriKlan kind of guy!
Contrary to what we have been carefully programmed to believe, the quest for the master race was not a creation of the German Nazis but of the American ruling elite and their minions, following naturally from the racism of the "Founding Fathers" including slave owner Thomas Jefferson who wrote that "blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind."
Kellogg, a staunch advocate of apartheid who believed that the American gene pool would be "contaminated" by immigrants and various inferior races, will soon be joined by the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the Dulles family, the Bush family and many other members of the ruling class and their lackeys who will finance and promote the pseudo-science of eugenics not only throughout the United States but in Germany, leading ultimately to the mass murder of tens of millions of Slavs, Jews, Gypsies and other "subhumans".
Eugenics enjoys rapid growth in America's rich racist soil and becomes an integral part of American culture.
Ministers of the Christian religion are encouraged to make reference to the quest for racial purity in their sermons and are given awards by the American Eugenics Society for their efforts.
American high school biology texts contain chapters on limiting immigration and on sterilization and race segregation in the cause of eugenics.
When the motion picture is invented, eugenics movies are quickly made and distributed.
American children are taught that eugenics is morally right and is the only way to preserve ze "purity of America's gene pool".
"Fitter Family" contests are held at state fairs to determine the "purity" of a family's bloodline.
Losers are sent to the gas chambers. Sorry, just kidding. For the time being, at least.
Ya... I know what you'll say... just more "sanctimonious bullshit".
Torturing children is a well established fact in the good old USSA. Not only foreigner's but our own.
1939:
Another shining example of how the U.S. takes cares of its veterans and their families is acted out in Davenport, Iowa.
Twenty-two children living at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home are the victims of an experiment to induce them to stutter.
The experiment is designed by one of America's most prominent speech pathologists, Dr. Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa, in order to test his theory on the causation of stuttering.
The orphans, divided about half and half between stutterers and non-stutterers, are subjected to intense psychological pressure by Johnson.
His theories prove correct and the stutterers get worse and the non-stutterers begin to stutter.
The children's academic grades plummet, they become shy and non-communicative, some run away from the place which is supposed to shelter and care for them. Many are made stutterers for life.
The University of Iowa will proudly name its Speech and Hearing Center after Johnson but details of his Nazi experiments will remain largely suppressed until the mid-sixties.
In 2001, the University of Iowa will apologize to Johnson's victims, calling the experiment "regrettable". In 2007, Johnson's surviving victims will receive one million dollars in settlement of a lawsuit.
1940:
Boys institutionalized at the Fernald School in Massachusetts are fed radioactive materials in cereal so researchers can record the effects on them.
The parents, as well as the children, are told they are being fed a diet rich in iron. The "research" is sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
About sixty thousand American troops are used as human guinea pigs when they are deliberately exposed to two chemical warfare agents, mustard gas and lewisite (blister gas) by the U.S. military. Most of the troops are not informed of the nature of the experiments and never receive medical follow up.
The troops are threatened with imprisonment if they discuss the experiments with anyone, including their families and their own doctors.
For more than half a century the Pentagon lies about the chemical warfare testing, resulting in decades of suffering for U.S. troops whose health was damaged.
It ain't torture when we do it.
The U.S. Public Health Service launches the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Four hundred poor, uneducated black men with syphilis are identified in Tuskegee, Alabama. They are never told by the Public Health Service that they have syphilis nor are they treated for it. They are, instead, monitored, as an experiment. By 1969, the Public Health Service has stood by and done nothing while one hundred of the men die through lack of treatment.
Predictably, the disease spreads to the men’s families.
But... What The Fuck... Let's just cut to the chase and view some true ameriKlan history in photographs and post cards.
Lynchings in amerika...
http://withoutsanctuary.org/
Now... here be some pride for U'alls to enjoy... them ragheads aint gotten on us. nothin!
David, thank you for the link; I'll cherish it always. Beautiful photography.
Certainly, the Catholic Church should be indicted for the torture its priests inflicted on children and the Muslim faith for its barbaric punishments under Sharia Law. American cavalry soldiers sliced out the vaginas of Indians and hung them over their saddle horns. I could go on and on but man's inhumanity to man is no respector of national origin, creed or race.
1 case ... Fallacy of Composition ...
So by your ability to reason ... all muslims are terrorists, right?
I want video of hundreds of cases ...
"I want video of hundreds of cases ..."
Ok, buy first it would appear you have a simple comprehension problem (stop thinking with your gonades lad). I wrote that rape, torture etc is not uncommon. I didn't write that all of the US military are involved in rape and torture etc. although it would many get off on it, a few object, or are allowed to object.
Unfortunately I can't provide you with any vidoes but I'm sure a perve like you will get your rocks off on this:
http://www.aztlan.net/iraqi_women_raped.htm
No only do dumb stupid porno addicted animals rape innocent muslims, they also rape their own. Apparently as I wrote initially this type of behaviour is not uncommon - so suck on that you pathatic pervert (and stay away from porn lad! - it obviously fucks up your ability to make any sense whatsover).
http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/01/26/13rd-of-women-in-us-military-raped/
"According to NPR, “In 2003, a survey of female veterans found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving. And a 1995 study of female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars, found that 90 percent had been sexually harassed.”
Yes, having read your posts, I imagine you would enjoy watching that.
++
Seriously, Tyler, this smug asshole's non-sensical, link exchange (basically prostituting his shitty blog) posts are not needed on ZH ... add in the fact that he is dishonest in how he posts, redacts, updates, etc., and I'm tempted to tell folks that your whole operation is suspect.
Granted, I do understand why you allow it ... his posts get traffic from people tearing his "opinions" apart, making fun of him, etc. but couldn't you just get Charlie Sheen to blog post once in a while ... it would be better content and while the dude is still drawing a breath, he'd be able to continue with gems like "bi-winning" ...