Torture report - CIA out of control?

davekc

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It appears this type of torture has been stopped. Now we just use drones. :rolleyes:
 

Turtle

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The CIA has been out of control for a while now, pretty much since Allen Dulles took over and laid the cultural foundation for what we see in the Congressional Report. The report only focuses on one small area and timeframe of CIA activities, and likely barely scratches the surface of the onion. The brutal torture in the report is the same surface layer that the NSA's phone metadata collection is. Peel the layers and you'll find a lot more. The report is just the executive summary. There are still at least 6700 classified pages which we're not seeing.
 

cheri1122

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The conservative response "It endangers Americans!" to releasing the report is a lot like the response to rape: it doesn't seem to occur to them that prevention of the reprehensible behavior [ie: teach people that such behavior is intolerable] would be a better way to promote the safety of Americans than lying about it.
I almost said "teach men", but I believe some of the CIA operatives are women, caught up in the machismo attitude of "Kill them all & let God/Allah sort it out." This is not progress, people.
 

RLENT

Veteran Expediter
Yep. It strongly supports what Europeans and Canadians have been saying about Americans for years: we're just fat and stupid.
It's just another indication of a nation that has lost its moral compass ...
 

cheri1122

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It's just another indication of a nation that has lost its moral compass ...

Not disagreeing with that, [the race to the bottom for working people proves you're correct], but polls cannot be trusted anymore than the people who respond to them. Since we know nothing about those individuals, why should we believe they're being truthful?
That's if they're not being manipulated by the phrasing of the queries, which is a real big IF.
 

cheri1122

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I just love​ that people felt qualified to determine whether the torture provided results. They know this because?
 

muttly

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Retired Expediter
Not disagreeing with that, [the race to the bottom for working people proves you're correct], but polls cannot be trusted anymore than the people who respond to them. Since we know nothing about those individuals, why should we believe they're being truthful?
That's if they're not being manipulated by the phrasing of the queries, which is a real big IF.
From article linked previously--
How do you spin that if you’re on the other side of the issue and invested in the idea that Americans can’t support an idea you’ve deemed the epitome of un-Americanness? One way is to focus on the question’s wording. By mentioning 9/11 and using the word “interrogation” instead of “torture” or even “enhanced interrogation,” Pew’s arguably stacking the deck here. But then, YouGov omitted 9/11 and did use the word “torture” in asking last week whether torturing suspected terrorists to gain intel on future attacks was ever justified. Even there, 48 percent said torture was at least sometimes justified versus 42 percent who said it was rarely or never justified. If you include the “rarely” crowd with the first group, fully 66 percent say that torture is justified in at least rare occasions.
Going forward, EIT opponents might be better off avoiding the baseline “justified or not?” question altogether and focusing instead on specific practices that the CIA engaged in. YouGov found much more opposition to those than it did to the idea of torture in the abstract; among nine different methods they listed, only two were deemed more acceptable than unacceptable by respondents. Reminds me of ObamaCare in reverse, ironically: In that case, majorities support some of the individual provisions, like guaranteed issue for people with preexisting conditions, but disapprove strongly of the law overall. With EIT, the opposite is true — strong approval of the program overall but sharp disapproval of most of the components.
 

Turtle

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I just love​ that people felt qualified to determine whether the torture provided results. They know this because?
They watch movies, and they're fans of Jack Bauer from 24, where they saw him get astonishing results from torture. Every time he tortured somebody (which was every week, or, literally 24 times a day) he got the answers he needed. Every time. Torture works! And because the knowledge the terrorists possessed was always critical to saving lives, the torture was always justified.

This, despite the fact that the world has know for thousands of years that torture is ineffective more than 99% of the time.
 

RLENT

Veteran Expediter
They watch movies, and they're fans of Jack Bauer from 24, where they saw him get astonishing results from torture. Every time he tortured somebody (which was every week, or, literally 24 times a day) he got the answers he needed. Every time. Torture works! And because the knowledge the terrorists possessed was always critical to saving lives, the torture was always justified.

This, despite the fact that the world has know for thousands of years that torture is ineffective more than 99% of the time.
I'd imagine that Jack probably never ended up getting the wrong guy (a non-terrorist) and putting him thru the wringer either ... :rolleyes:
 
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