Comments on: Why Don’t They Claim al-Nashiri’s Waterboarding Worked?

By: JGabriel

JGabriel — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:19:10 +0000

What did [Cheney] tell his daughter about its contents, and why is she on tv anyway on these issues?

Dick: C’mon Liz, go on TV for me!

Liz: No, I don’t wanna! Why do you want me to do it anyway?

Dick: Because, when I go on TV, people see Darth Vader. But you, you, my daughter, are young and beautiful. When you go on TV, they see my daughter, they see Princess Leia! Who could be a better defender of our defense of the nation?

Liz: (cups her hands over her ears, in imitation of Leia’s hair buns, and looks in the mirror) Leia, huh? … Ok, I’ll do it.

By: tjbs

tjbs — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 12:19:17 +0000

ONLY 10% of the SERE class is water tortured ,the rest watch.
So maybe we only water tortured 10% of the bad guys?

By: MarkH

MarkH — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 07:13:29 +0000

I think we need to get bin Laden (if he’s alive) and Zawahiri to deprive that militant crowd of their leaders who are most violent toward us. How we might handle them is a mystery because, as a nation, we’re sort of in the middle of considering whether to return to upholding our existing laws wrt this kind of thing.

Two fangs, maybe only one.

By: MarkH

MarkH — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 06:59:54 +0000

As a comedian/sage said recently (I paraphrase), thinking back to 2000, who would have imagined at that time that the next 8 years would have seen so much destruction and criminal behavior and that we would then elect an African-American to clean it up?

These are amazing times.

By: MarkH

MarkH — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 06:50:17 +0000

Bushies might not want people to hear that it was our military presence in Saudi Arabia which spurred these people to attack us. Whether invited or not it would make us appear to be the instigators instead of the victims.

By: rafflaw

rafflaw — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 03:06:32 +0000

Muzzy,
It doesn’t matter if torture works because it is illegal, period. Both under US Law and international law and it has been for years. Besides, the FBI and the Military both say it doesn’t work. John McCain says it doesn’t work.

By: DrZen

DrZen — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:51:11 +0000

“It’s not torture because we do it to our own people.”

What? You keep your own people in isolation for five years, intermittently shackling them to a chair for a week, and making them spend the whole day for weeks on end shackled to the ceiling on their tippytoes? Really?

This SERE thing is going to need pushback. People need to say that even if you waterboard people in SERE, you don’t do so repeatedly and you don’t do it after depriving them of sleep for a couple of weeks. This is like saying that punching someone in the face is not torture because you once had a fistfight.

By: antibanana

antibanana — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 01:17:41 +0000

From the Vanity Fair article:

Both army leaders and military psychologists say that psychologists help to make interrogations “safe, legal and effective.” But last fall, a psychologist named Jean Maria Arrigo came to see me with a disturbing claim about the American Psychological Association, her profession’s 148,000-member trade group. Arrigo had sat on a specially convened A.P.A. task force that, in July 2005, had ruled that psychologists could assist in military interrogations, despite angry objections from many in the profession. The task force also determined that, in cases where international human-rights law conflicts with U.S. law, psychologists could defer to the much looser U.S. standards—what Arrigo called the “Rumsfeld definition” of humane treatment.

President George W. Bush delivers a speech acknowledging the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons such as those where Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed were interrogated, September 2006. Gerald Herbert/A.P. Photo.
Arrigo and several others with her, including a representative from

This is a great starting point for finding out more Mitchell and Jessen.

Haven’t pyschologists always had problems with insurance reimbursements, compared to those with MDs? Did someone promise the APA something?

By: Muzzy

Muzzy — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 01:07:28 +0000

If torture actually worked, would it be legal?

Guess we’ll never know.

By: pdaly

pdaly — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 01:03:11 +0000

i’ll bet Cheney will claim (if forced to explain himself) to have insta-declassified this to miniCheney when Cheney was officially President for a day (Bush underwent some medical procedure iirc).