Training. Time. Out.

I know, it’s hard to say when you’ve got water being poured into your face. However, a SERE trainee knows he/she is in a controlled environment and they can stop the training session. How exactly do you stop the interrogation torture session..?

It’s just false to think of the decisions by individuals in the CIA to follow the legal advice of the OLC as being significantly excused because all they base their decisions on was that advice.

There was, in fact, a long history of the CIA not being able to perform such techniques, and on the ground of their violation of the Geneva Conventions against torture. Certainly this would have been repeatedly reinforced in training. The notion that their decisions to implement this form of torture took place in some kind of vacuum, in which there was no conflicting evidence — and, in this case, of strongly conflicting evidence — is simply a concoction of torture apologists. Just about everything in their previous training would and should incline them to hold such techniques as waterboarding as torture.

And then there is the simply inescapable evidence of their own eyes, which seems, again, to get very short shrift from torture apologists. It’s very hard not to regard torture as being at base the deliberate infliction of pain; it is that pain, and its deliberate infliction, that lies behind the moral objection to it; whether the damage done is permanent or temporary is irrelevant to that determination. And certainly that we might find a way to use psychological rubber hoses to inflict that pain doesn’t in any way imply that that pain is not very real for those made to endure it.

And I should think that, for those who engaged in acts such as waterboarding, or for those who saw the tapes, or, indeed, for those who might simply imagine what it must have been like to extract even desperate, false confessions, the pain felt by the victim could not be more obvious.

What I find really objectionable in much of the discussion I have seen about this is the idea that “legal guidance” might outweigh, and excuse, the immediately and even instinctively felt cruelty of the acts. Those of us who read about those acts and object to them do so because we can see, based on the descriptions themselves, their barbarous cruelty. It is because of that immediate and overwhelming reaction that we demand that the practice stop — as is, presumably, true of Obama himself. How then can “legal guidance” be used as an excuse to engage in those very practices (which is Obama’s own reasoning)? Either those acts are self-evidently cruel and immoral, as we maintain, or, if they can be excused by some legal memo, they are not. We really can’t have it both ways — which is what Obama seems to want to do.

See Teddy’s Oxdown diary about “such blogs as Emptywheel.” It is an effort to downplay and dilute EW’s stellar work, leading the reader to think that many blogs broke the story.

Archduke Ferdinand’s assasins could have been tried in a court of law, so there was no special need to protect that “class” of prisoner from abuse.

Furthermore, our own Federal laws and the UCMJ make it illegal to torture prisoners aside from the restrictions imposed by the Geneva Conventions.

Additionally, the majority of the detainees were civillian non-combatants who were tortured simply because they could be (which abrogates the whole “illegal combatants” argument in its entirety). You can’t simply randomly sweep up entire households of people and torture them and claim “they were illegal combatants” to excuse their abuse, even if you have information that they were illegal combatants (most of which allegations appear to have been coerced as well).

The status of the captives, whether it “worked” or not — still a specious claim— all that is irrelevant.

This means that despite anything else anyone has to say (except if the SCOTUS says otherwise), these acts are torture and are Federal crimes because we signed on to those Conventions. The Geneva Conventions hold the same place in law as a legislatively enacted law. You can’t simply over-rule the Constitution or established law with a memo that says “it really isn’t all THAT illegal, and besides we aren’t going to call it ‘torture’ so it’s okay!”

The argument that they didn’t know we had prosecuted people for these criminal acts after WWII is meaningless (I believe the “official” expression is “ignorance of the law iis no excuse”).

I don’t believe for a moment that anyone involved with these heinouis acts simply didn’t know they were illegal or thought for a moment that they were acceptable. I was in the US Army from 1979 to 1985, and we had regular training on the Geneva Conventions. It included discussions on such topics as “what if the people we are fighting didn’t sign the conventions?” (the answer was “It doesn’t matter. We did, so we are bound by them.”). “What if I’m ordered to violate the conventions?” (how do I handle illegal orders?), and pretty much everything else that these a-holes are trying to use for cover.

They knew it was a crime. They did it anyway. Prosecute them and send them to jail!