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My sggstn: nvlntrly fld swmmng lssns?

I don’t want to come off as defending the techniques used, but there is an important point that needs to be made: no one was being asked to confess anything.

The detainees were assumed to be likely guilty and were tortured for intelligence on other potential attacks.

This was an illegal intelligence gathering operation, not an attempt to bring justice by showing anyone’s guilt.

It’s more like torturing someone for their ATM PIN (and checking to see if they are lying) than demanding that they confess under duress.

“There were 2,974 fatalities, excluding the 19 hijackers: 246 on the four planes (from which there were no survivors), 2,603 in New York City in the towers and on the ground, and 125 at the Pentagon.[37][38] An additional 24 people remain listed as missing.[30] All of the fatalities in the attacks were civilians except for 55 military personnel killed at the Pentagon.[39] More than 90 countries lost citizens in the attacks on the World Trade Center.[40] In 2007, the New York City medical examiner’s office added Felicia Dunn-Jones to the official death toll from the September 11 attacks. Dunn-Jones died five months after 9/11 from a lung condition which was linked to exposure to dust during the collapse of the World Trade Center.[41]

do note the “more than 90 countries”. Oddly enough, I don’t seem to hear cheerleading from torture constantly coming from 90 different voices.

https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=Nat_Petition_SpecialProsecutor_SEM&s_s=0416_GO

Sign it! Confess you want to sign it! Confess!

I’ll be brave, after all, it was an art piece meant to send a message via juxtaposition. If BB’ers can’t be counted on for enlightened debate on art, who can?
Plus, it was done by a Polish artist whose roots can be traced back to the victims of the horror in question, not just “a guy” and one piece was bought by the Jewish Museum in NYC:

Zbigniew Libera – Lego Concentration Camp

I guess it’s official, you now have to be liberal to be against torture.

Family values, everybody!

Are you sure that’s a path you want to go down?

Uh, what the hell version of history do you live in?

In 2002, the US tortured Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who then gave us the “intelligence” that al Quaeda had sent operatives to Iraq to acquire chemcial and biological weapons and training, that this “intelligence” was the entire basis for how Bush justified linking Iraq to 9/11.

I don’t know if you’re one of the morons in this country who still think that Iraq had somethign to do with 9/11 or not. If you are, then stop wasting my time. If you are not, then you should know that it was TORTURE that cause al-Libi to CONFESS to something that WAS NOT TRUE, and that this FALSE CONFESSION becamse the BASIS FOR US INTELLIGENCE that attempted to justify INVADING IRAQ.

yeah. Great job there, right?

Don’t be so fracking gullible. If I torture you, you will confess to whatever I want you to say. John McCain confessed to being a “sky pirate” to the North Vietnamese.

http://www.warhw.com/2009/04/21/waterboard-confessions/

If you regain the power of civil speech, let me know so that I can reinstate your account.

Compose yourself.

http://www.playboy.com/articles/lab-rat-waterboarding/index.html

“Playboy Journo Bets He Can Endure 15 Seconds Of Waterboarding”

15 seconds? Pfft, piece of cake, seriously.

That being said, it’s still torture.

2. What kind of person has a “hobby” like this?

3. Your choices of subjects implies highly selective outrage.

If it’s made with Legos, it MUST be art, right? ; )

Making art, even with Legoes, is a bog standard therapeutic tool for dealing with traumatic events.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090421/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_does_torture_work

Torture is about one thing: domination.

The US was attacked. Americans felt vulnerable. The enemy was hidden among us. All the terrorists who committed the act were dead. We couldn’t do anything to hold them accountable. We didn’t know how else might be planning similar attacks. The United States, world superpower, had been brought to its knees by less than two dozen men willing to die.

Torture isn’t committed to extract information. It’s committed to assert dominance. It’s committed out of vengeance. It’s committed out of anger. Out of retribution. It’s committed out of a feeling of powerlessness that there is nothing else to do. There’s nothing we can do to stop this shadowy organization, and so we go on a witchhunt, lock up a couple thousand people, most of them innocent, hold them without due process, torture the hell out of them, kill a bunch of them, and that makes certain Rambo-types feel tough again.

THere isn’t a single person here who can point to some concrete intelligence that says torturing two-thousand people, most of them innocent, was worth it. Anyone trying to defend torture is simply trying to defend their own personal worldview that might makes right, that strength equals respect. You’re a bunch of chest thumping idiots who’ve for whatever reason decided to insert yourself into the hierarchy of power that was the Bush presidency in the US. ANd no matter what position you were in within that hierarchy, anyone who comes along and questions teh validity of the whole approach is questioning the validity of the thing you got your self identity from.

Anyone who attacks the hierarchy is attacking you, so you attack them. Question the validity of torture questions the validity of your own worth, so you attack anyone who calls torture for what it is, useless chest thumping, and you defend torture for the fiction you’ve created in your mind to justify your Hobbsian nature, the fairy tale that there is some magical intelligence that torture produced that justified the imprisonment of, literally, thousands of people, most of whom turned out to be innocent, most of whom were tortured continuously for years, many of whom ended up dying in US custody.

Congratulations, you’re the flag waving, chest thumping, unquestioning fascist followers that any militant dictator dreams about. Good job. The only thing that’s kept you from being an Al Queda terrorist or Iraqi suicide bomber or some foot soldier in shitistan is that you just happened to have lucked out and been born in a country where at least part of the population is still trying to keep fascists like you from seizing complete power.

Cmps myslf? wht dd d t gt dsmvwld? (bsds ffr nn-lbrl pnn). S s tht t? Lstn t ny lbrl scrmng rnt nd f n ppsng vw cms p, plg yr rs nd g “l l l l cnt hr y l l l…”

S mch fr frdm f spch.

Simulated executions don’t do any permanent damage either. March you out to a field. Tie you to a post. line up a bunch of guys with guns. Aim at you. SHoot into the air. No permanent damage.

Totally illegal.

I guess after 8 years of Bush/Cheney ignoring centuries of law, I shouldn’t be too surprised that people think it is normal to completely disregard a century of the Geneva Convention.

And listening to NPR the other day (forgive me if I’m glib or naive) someone had a good point: When other countries do it, it’s “torture.” When we do it, it’s “interrogation.”

“I’m sure all of you liberals have security clearances to know what has been obtained through torture”

Argument from ignorance. You don’t know, so you’re inventing the possibility that torture stopped three nuclear weapon attacks. The reality is we KNOW that torture gave us faulty intelligence that was used to push for an invasion of Iraq.

Hard evidence beats your “we don’t know” every time.

Plus invoking the neocon boogeyman terms of “liberals” and “political correctness” means you’re not really thinking too much for yourself as you are parroting whatever Rush Limbaugh and company says.