Brace yourself, bcspace, for 4 more Obama years

[_EAllusion]

Picture: totally not torture at Abu Ghraib.

Unfortunately there aren't pictures of some of the worst things that happened.

I recommend Taxi to the Darkside for a great documentary on US torture practices. At the time it was being made, the Bush administration was still officially denying what later was confirmed. The film was right on the money with what was going on despite the shroud of secrecy and denial, which is impressive in its own right.

Anyway, the title gets its name from a innoncent Taxi Driver who was given up to the Americans by a corrupt Afghani contact. He was hung from the ceiling and beaten so badly he died. That sort of thing puts into perspective what you are picturing.

[_Bond James Bond]

Unfortunately there aren't pictures of some of the worst things that happened.

I didn't want to post any of the really bad pictures. Shades doesn't like frontal nudity and the like on his board. But I think drawing blood is enough to be considered torture.

I recommend Taxi to the Darkside for a great documentary on US torture practices. At the time it was being made, the Bush administration was still officially denying what later was confirmed. The film was right on the money with what was going on despite the shroud of secrecy and denial, which is impressive in its own right.

Anyway, the title gets its name from a innoncent Taxi Driver who was given up to the Americans by a corrupt Afghani contact. He was hung from the ceiling and beaten so badly he died. That sort of thing puts into perspective what you are picturing.

I saw this when it came out on HBO. Exactly as you say. There was a documentary about Abu Ghraib (Ghosts of Abu Ghraib I want to say) that dealt with Abu Ghraib directly.

[_EAllusion]

Droopy trying to replace facts with hilariously confident, reality-denying assertions aside, one thing the water-boarding news taught me is that actually drowning must be a horrifying way to die. What happens in water-boarding is just simulated drowning, and that is so psychically damaging that people are mentally torn apart by it. So it stands to reason that actually drowning is a terrible, if ultimately more brief way to die.

[_EAllusion]

http://www.salon.com/2010/03/09/waterbo ... r_dummies/

What the heck. I'll just quote it:

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

“This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing,” said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. “The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.’ It just sounds like lunacy,” he said. “This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine.”

These torture guidelines were contained in a ream of internal government documents made public over the past year, including a legal review of Bush-era CIA interrogations by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility released late last month.

Though public, the hundreds of pages of documents authorizing or later reviewing the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program” haven’t been mined for waterboarding details until now. While Bush-Cheney officials defended the legality and safety of waterboarding by noting the practice has been used to train U.S. service members to resist torture, the documents show that the agency’s methods went far beyond anything ever done to a soldier during training. U.S. soldiers, for example, were generally waterboarded with a cloth over their face one time, never more than twice, for about 20 seconds, the CIA admits in its own documents.

(After this story was published, Salon learned that Marcy Wheeler, the author of the blog Emptywheel, and several other bloggers have written about many of the documents released over the past year.)

These memos show the CIA went much further than that with terror suspects, using huge and dangerous quantities of liquid over long periods of time. The CIA’s waterboarding was “different” from training for elite soldiers, according to the Justice Department document released last month. “The difference was in the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed,” the document notes. In soldier training, “The interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth (on a soldier’s face) in a controlled manner,” DOJ wrote. “By contrast, the agency interrogator … continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose.”

One of the more interesting revelations in the documents is the use of a saline solution in waterboarding. Why? Because the CIA forced such massive quantities of water into the mouths and noses of detainees, prisoners inevitably swallowed huge amounts of liquid – enough to conceivably kill them from hyponatremia, a rare but deadly condition in which ingesting enormous quantities of water results in a dangerously low concentration of sodium in the blood. Generally a concern only for marathon runners , who on extremely rare occasions drink that much water, hyponatremia could set in during a prolonged waterboarding session. A waterlogged, sodium-deprived prisoner might become confused and lethargic, slip into convulsions, enter a coma and die.

Therefore, “based on advice of medical personnel,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury wrote in a May 10, 2005, memo authorizing continued use of waterboarding, “the CIA requires that saline solution be used instead of plain water to reduce the possibility of hyponatremia.”

The agency used so much water there was also another risk: pneumonia resulting from detainees inhaling the fluid forced into their mouths and noses. Saline, the CIA argued, might reduce the risk of pneumonia when this occurred.

“The detainee might aspirate some of the water, and the resulting water in the lungs might lead to pneumonia,” Bradbury noted in the same memo. “To mitigate this risk, a potable saline solution is used in the procedure.”

That particular Bradbury memo laid out a precise and disturbing protocol for what went on in each waterboarding session. The CIA used a “specially designed” gurney for waterboarding, Bradbury wrote. After immobilizing a prisoner by strapping him down, interrogators then tilted the gurney to a 10-15 degree downward angle, with the detainee’s head at the lower end. They put a black cloth over his face and poured water, or saline, from a height of 6 to 18 inches, documents show. The slant of the gurney helped drive the water more directly into the prisoner’s nose and mouth. But the gurney could also be tilted upright quickly, in the event the prisoner stopped breathing.

Detainees would be strapped to the gurney for a two-hour “session.” During that session, the continuous flow of water onto a detainee’s face was not supposed to exceed 40 seconds during each pour. Interrogators could perform six separate 40-second pours during each session, for a total of four minutes of pouring. Detainees could be subjected to two of those two-hour sessions during a 24-hour period, which adds up to eight minutes of pouring. But the CIA’s guidelines say interrogators could pour water over the nose and mouth of a detainee for 12 minutes total during each 24-hour period. The documents do not explain the extra four minutes to get to 12.

Interrogators were instructed to pour the water when a detainee had just exhaled so that he would inhale during the pour. An interrogator was also allowed to force the water down a detainee’s mouth and nose using his hands. “The interrogator may cup his hands around the detainee’s nose and mouth to dam the runoff,” the Bradbury memo notes. “In which case it would not be possible for the detainee to breathe during the application of the water.”

“We understand that water may enter – and accumulate in – the detainee’s mouth and nasal cavity, preventing him from breathing,” the memo admits.

Should a prisoner stop breathing during the procedure, the documents instructed interrogators to rapidly tilt the gurney to an upright position to help expel the saline. “If the detainee is not breathing freely after the cloth is removed from his face, he is immediately moved to a vertical position in order to clear the water from his mouth, nose, and nasopharynx,” Bradbury wrote. “The gurney used for administering this technique is specially designed so that this can be accomplished very quickly if necessary.”

Documents drafted by CIA medical officials in 2003, about a year after the agency started using the waterboard, describe more aggressive procedures to get the water out and the subject breathing. “An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately,” the CIA Office of Medical Services ordered in its Sept. 4, 2003, medical guidelines for interrogations. “The interrogator should then deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water.” (That’s a blow below the sternum, similar to the thrust delivered to a chocking victim in the Heimlich maneuver.)

But even those steps might not force the prisoner to resume breathing. Waterboarding, according to the Bradbury memo, could produce “spasms of the larynx” that might keep a prisoner from breathing “even when the application of water is stopped and the detainee is returned to an upright position.” In such cases, Bradbury wrote, “a qualified physician would immediately intervene to address the problem and, if necessary, the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy.” The agency required that “necessary emergency medical equipment” be kept readily available for that procedure. The documents do not say if doctors ever performed a tracheotomy on a prisoner.

The doctors were also present to monitor the detainee “to ensure that he does not develop respiratory distress.” A leaked 2007 report from the International Committee of the Red Cross says that meant the detainee’s finger was fixed with a pulse oxymeter, a device that measures the oxygen saturation level in the blood during the procedure. Doctors like Allen say this would allow interrogators to push a detainee close to death – but help them from crossing the line. “It is measuring in real time the oxygen content in the blood second by second,” Allen explained about the pulse oxymeter. “It basically allows them to push these prisoners more to the edge. With that, you can keep going. This is calibration of harm by health professionals.”

One of the weirdest details in the documents is the revelation that the agency placed detainees on liquid diets prior to the use of waterboarding. That’s because during waterboarding, “a detainee might vomit and then aspirate the emesis,” Bradbury wrote. In other words, breathe in his own vomit. The CIA recommended the use of Ensure Plus for the liquid diet.

Plowing through hundreds of pages of these documents is an unsettling experience. On one level, the detailed instructions can be seen as helping to carry out kinder, gentler waterboarding, with so much care and attention given to making sure detainees didn’t stop breathing, get pneumonia, breathe in their own vomit or die. But of course dead detainees tell no tales, so the CIA needed to keep many of its prisoners alive. It should be noted, though, that six human rights groups in 2007 released a report showing that 39 people who appeared to have gone into the CIA’s secret prison network haven’t shown up since. The careful attention to detail in the documents was also used to provide legal cover for the harsh and probably illegal interrogation tactics.

As brutal as the waterboarding process was, the memos also reveal that the Bush-era Justice Department authorized the CIA to use it in combination with other forms of torture. Specifically, a detainee could be kept awake for more than seven days straight by shackling his hands in a standing position to a bolt in the ceiling so he could never sit down. The agency diapered and hand-fed its detainees during this period before putting them on the waterboard. Another memo from Bradbury, also from 2005, says that in between waterboarding sessions, a detainee could be physically slammed into a wall, crammed into a small box, placed in “stress positions” to increase discomfort and doused with cold water, among other things.

The CIA’s waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown. “In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks,” the CIA’s Office of Medical Services wrote in its 2003 memo. “Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness.”

The agency’s medical guidelines say that after a case of “psychological resignation” by a detainee on the waterboard, an interrogator had to get approval from a CIA doctor before doing it again.

The memo also contains a last, little-noticed paragraph that may be the most disturbing of all. It seems to say that the detainees subjected to waterboarding were also guinea pigs. The language is eerily reminiscent of the very reasons the Nuremberg Code was written in the first place. That paragraph reads as follows:

“NOTE: In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.”

[_Bond James Bond]

For even more lolz, Maryland is on the cusp of legalizing SSM. Domino effect baby yah.

[_Brackite]

McDonnell says 7 of 10 states with lowest unemployment rates have Republican governors:
http://www.politifact.com/virginia/stat ... yment-rat/

Of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Utah and Virginia have Republican governors. New Hampshire, Vermont and Minnesota have Democratic governors.

[_Bond James Bond]

McDonnell says 7 of 10 states with lowest unemployment rates have Republican governors:
http://www.politifact.com/virginia/stat ... yment-rat/

Of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Utah and Virginia have Republican governors. New Hampshire, Vermont and Minnesota have Democratic governors.

Those states also have very few people and little urbanized area (except Virginia). Farming and energy (oil) jobs are less likely to get outsourced.

[_Kevin Graham]

McDonnell says 7 of 10 states with lowest unemployment rates have Republican governors:
http://www.politifact.com/virginia/stat ... yment-rat/

Was that like the only part of that article you read?

The entire thing is a refutation of the way some folks on the right, like you, are falling for the correlation = causation fallacy. Politifact agrees with the statement but disagrees with the way it is being used by those who suggest this says something about Republican job creation. Here it is:

Let’s start with some basic math: Twenty-nine governors are Republicans, 20 are Democrats and one is an Independent. So under the law of averages, about six of the top 10 states should be run by GOP governors.

Now, let’s turn to the unemployment rates. Tucker Martin, McDonnell’s director of communications, said his boss’s figures came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics listing of state unemployment rates in December 2011, the latest month for which statistics were available.

Of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Utah and Virginia have Republican governors. New Hampshire, Vermont and Minnesota have Democratic governors.

We found that the Top 10 list includes three states where the GOP tenure has been fairly short. In Iowa, a Republican governor took office in January 2011 after 12 years of Democratic governorships. In Wyoming, a GOP governor took office in January 2011 after eight years of a Democratic governorship. Both states were also on the list of 10 lowest unemployment rates in December 2010, when a Democrat was governor.

And in Virginia, McDonnell came to office in January 2010 after eight years of Democratic governors. Virginia had the nation’s 10th lowest unemployment rate in December 2009, its last full month under Gov. Tim Kaine. Virginia still ranks 10th today.

Conversely, we looked at the 10 states that had the worst unemployment rates in December 2011. Under McDonnell’s logic, there should be few Republicans and many Democrats in this tier.

Six states in the Bottom 10 have Republican governors: Michigan, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Nevada. Three have Democratic governors: Illinois, North Carolina and California. One state, Rhode Island, has an an independent governor.

Economists have told us time and again that governors have marginal effects on economies of their states.

Anne Alexander, an economist at the University of Wyoming, largely credited her state’s 5.6 percent unemployment rate to oil and natural gas exploration and tourists visiting Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons. And because more than half of the land in Wyoming is owned by the federal or state government, she said there are many public jobs managing the land and wildlife.

"Generally speaking, as an economist, I tend to think that any particular executive has less influence over the state of the economy than we might like to give them credit for -- either for good or for bad," Alexander said.

North Dakota has the nation’s lowest unemployment rate, at 3.3 percent. Stan Herren, a economist at North Dakota State University, attributed the prosperity to a solid state economy based on energy exploration and agriculture. Politicians, he said, have provided some help by adopting supportive business policies.

"If you want to put a number on it, it (the economy) is probably 90 percent of it and 10 percent is the policies," he said.

Our ruling

McDonnell said Republican governors head seven out of 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates, providing proof that the GOP has a better record on jobs than Democrats.

He’s right on the numbers, but on shaky ground when he insists Republican stewardship has brought those results.

The fact that seven of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates are led by Republicans is hardly evidence that GOP governors Trump Democrats in creating jobs. Three of those seven states, including Virginia, were also in the Top 10 when they were were headed by Democrats a year or two ago.

We rate the claim Half True.

[_Bond James Bond]

Anne Alexander, an economist at the University of Wyoming, largely credited her state’s 5.6 percent unemployment rate to oil and natural gas exploration and tourists visiting Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons. And because more than half of the land in Wyoming is owned by the federal or state government, she said there are many public jobs managing the land and wildlife.

When I lived in Wyoming they thought that their Republican paradise of low taxes (including no state income tax) led to low unemployment, cheap energy, and good infrastructure (seriously if you ever get out to Wyoming people look at the roads, they are wide and kept up insanely well in most places even with harsh weather).

You can't convince the people out there that having one of the most popular national parks in America doesn't help the economy as a whole (from keeping hotels full to the thousands of people who drive and keep the gas stations and restaurants in business). Couple this with the extremely low population means that even menial physical labor intensive jobs (like "roughnecks"=oil field hands) make good pay. Besides that Wyoming is blessed with tons of coal, oil, and natural gas which allows the state to pay for all that infrastructure and allow taxes to be kept low. Truly chance plays a much bigger role in how a state's economy runs compared to actual policy. Low population and tons of natural resources even made Sarah Palin have 80% approval ratings.

[_Droopy]

The incumbent president had the worst approval numbers in the history of them being recorded. That bodes horribly for the candidate running from the same party. It also doesn't help when the country is in an economic collapse that's worse than nearly anyone can remember.

In short, this statement is so far removed from reality it's baffling. The Republicans have almost no shot whatsoever at winning the presidency. It would've taken a dead hooker in the closet at the last moment to defeat whatever Democrat ran.

No telling what it actually is your attempting to argue here. but that's hardly a shock. The country was in no sense in an "economic collapse" when McCain lost to Obama, and even though Bush contributed to the initial poor response, Obama has made a presidential career out of very real economic collapses, which makes sense both because of the economic illiteracy of many in his party, but because economic collapse is itself, a part of his overall governing strategy. He telegraphed this long, long before the election.

Also, the United states isn't located in North America! Yarhg!

Are you lucid, today, Delusion? Here's the definition from the American Heritage Dictionary:

The northern continent of the Western Hemisphere, extending northward from the Colombia-Panama border and including Central America, Mexico, the islands of the Caribbean Sea, the United States, Canada, the Arctic Archipelago, and Greenland.

I can see, ever more, while Daniel Peterson simply gave up talking to you many years ago.

Fortunately for my point, it doesn't matter what sorts of torture you don't consider torture.

Try arguing outside a strict tautological mode of question begging and actually try to construct a logically connected argument that attempts to show something follows from evidence. This would be of immeasurable benefit.

Treaties the US has signed on and played a role in authoring that were pushed by the Reagan administration defined acts the US later engaged in as torture. That includes but is not limited to waterboarding (once known as "the water torture").

Nonsense. The entire thing is legal and was completely vetted legally before it was ever utilized (the vanishingly few times it was). Further, there is no reasonable argument that can be made for calling "torture" something that does no physical damage to the body and causes no lasting harm. Numerous Air Force pilots are waterboarded as a routine aspect of their training as combat aviators. Further, unlike "torture" to extract a confession in a civil criminal case after the fact, or simply to exact revenge, international terrorist operatives and fighters have no rights that any nation is obliged to recognize infer either the Hague or Geneva conventions. They are free floating, globe trotting enemy combatants, and, to paraphrase an old song, "wherever they leave their hat is their home").

They are enemy combatants and, at the same time, non-standard enemy combatants who do not where uniforms of fight for particular nation states who move into your country and start killing civilians. They are warriors and operatives working out of foreign nations (with or without their consent), not civilian criminals.

The only way one can get to a claim that waterboarding is "torture" is through the massaging of various legal definitions of torture (and relying - the favorite leftist tactic - on definitions outside of U.S. law and jurisprudence) With sufficient intellectual creativity, one can then make going to bed without supper (as American liberals traditionally just love to do when faced with actually dealing with America's enemies, either foreign or domestic and which they have indeed done in the case of Club Gitmo and Abu Ghrab) "torture." This is where the legal standard of "reasonable and necessary" comes into play. While it would never be thought reasonable and necessary to use waterboarding to extract a confession from a gang member for a crime already committed, to to disclose the location of the meth lab, using more intense coercive methods to extract information about clear and present future threats (the planning, financing, and strategy of terrorist plans in progress, the location and composition of an ambush of American soldiers, the rescue of innocents from the clutches of terrorists who will use real torture and hideous forms of execution (such as beheading) on those innocent victims) is another matter, especially when time is of the essence.

The real problem here, as well, is that, looking over the various defintions of torture that can be found (I've found at least 7), these definitions are so vague, in some aspects, that they leave an aggressor so thoroughly protected against intense interrogation that may be necessary to extract critical information needed to protect innocents from harm (and hideous, horrifying harm) or a nation from grave national security risk (such as 9/11), that it amounts to a bit of a mini-suicide pact for democratic, civilized societies (enemies need not, of course, and frequently do not (like the Viet Cong), pay any attention to things like the Geneva Convention).

Further, the Constitution does not prohibit anything like waterboarding or the infliction of physical suffering (which waterboarding does not really do) in cases in which there is immanent risk of death/harm to others, especially on a mass scale. One can use physical force (or intense psychological stress, which is waterboarding's effective technique) to protect/defend the innocent, but not to extract a confession or as a purely punitive measure (cruel and unusual punishment).

One must keep in mind that we are at war (they, in other words, are at war with us) with international terrorism, not in a civilian criminal justice relationship, and the stakes of losing or being outflanked in that war are extremely serious, indeed.

Your deep, unilateral compassion, empathy, and pseudo-moral concern for the avowed enemies of America, who have vowed its utter destruction by an means necessary, a second Holocaust in Israel, and who would slit the throat of my 10 year old (infidel whore) grand daughter without the slightest compunction or second thought is touching, in a morally mealy, decadent, post-sixties leftist way, but sickening in its overall effect nonetheless.

I'm sorry that waterboarding shocks and traumatizes your highly refined liberal sensitivities so. I think another viewing of the Nicolas Berg beheading is the proper prescription for Eloi such as yourself who have not sufficiently studied, absorbed, or taken seriously the lessons of history or the realities of human nature.

The US has a history of prosecuting under torture laws those who have engaged in it domestically and the US has tried members of other nations for warcrimes for having used it.

Yes, like the Nazis, who used it purely as a instrument of punitive vengeance against innocent civilians. Roll the dice again...

Until it became clear that the US was systematically engaging it in,

Now you're just lying for The Cause, Delusion. How typically and decrepitly left-wing of you.

Sickening.

there was no controversy over whether it constituted torture.

Another bald lie. No one without a deep ideological affinity either for our enemies or against America and American national security (anti-anti-terrorism) no matter who the enemy may be, thinks waterboarding can be reasonably construed as "torture." Intellectually serious, reasonable people do not consider waterboarding "torture," just as no intellectually serious, reasonable people consider 9/11 a criminal act (which is just to point out that only ideologically comitted leftists/secular humanists who believe that the fundamental enemy of humanity is America, and who see all America's enemies, whether communism in the past or Islamic Jihadism at present, as having legitimate grievances, and who see no moral difference between America as a nation and a people, broadly speaking, and anti-democratic, totalitarian/authoritarian, barbarous/honor/blood & soil cultures, societies, and forms of government, who think that waterboarding can be reasonably be construed as "torture," or that, even if it was, it would not be justified for the purposes for which it has been used against the kinds of people it has been used against. It is, in other words, the de facto allies of the Jihadists who seek to subvert and dismantle every attempt America makes to defend itself, at every turn, with relentless gusto. Please do not pretend it is concern for the "morality" of the practice. The Left knows no such concept, and "strong," idolatarian libertarianism do not have the intellectual depth or ethical imagination, in all too many cases, to take the concept "moral" seriously, in any authentic sense).