Graner guilty in Iraq prisoner abuse case

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I recently read that three top ranking members of Zarqawi's insurgent force have been captured...

Does anyone know how the information leading to their arrests was obtained? I could not find it...

(Lawyers will chastise me for asking a question I do not know the answer to...)


Edit...

That kind of misanthropy is useless Jac...and the point made is certainly not true.

 

~Panem et circenses!~

Probably as old as the world itself.

 

@ Chev

Quote: Panem et circenses!

Please translate Chev...I'm a typical American monoglot. It's starting to hurt me too. My coworkers all speak Indian and my dorm-mate and his friends all speak Japanese...I have probably missed so many opportunities at great jokes!

 

Bread and Games (fights).
All you need to provide the common people with in order to keep them happy. Food and violence.
The Roman's solution.

 

Oh, that is so arrogant...although I do like food...and I like sports...oh no!....

 

Most people who hear this quote today assume it was uttered by a senior officer of the Bush administration.

Instead, it comes from one of history's greatest mass murderers, Rudolf Hoess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz. Such a confusion demonstrates the depth of the United States' moral dilemma in its treatment of detainees in the war on terror.

http://www.startribune.com/dynamic/story.php?template=print_a&story=5206785

EDIT:
Discussing this post with my flatmate I found it adequate to elaborate a little further. Of course, one cannot equal Auschwitz and Abu Ghraib - the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany are of a completely different scale than the maltreatment in Abu Ghraib.

That said, I have to add it is beside the point. Comparing the justifications brought up by the perpetrators, however, is both instructive and sobering because they are so very much alike.

The problem with rationalising in the attempt to find a justification for cruel and degrading treatment for the enemy is that it defies a central moral imperative: That civilised people don't do that because it violates all basic human rights and human dignity.

That was why nazi officers faintly trying to justify their actions based on supreme order were hanged anyway. That's why Keitel, who claimed the Geneva Conventions were obsolete, was hanged anyway.

The simple reason for it is that their actions cannot be justified. Just like the US violations of the spirit of Geneva and the Convention against Torture cannot be justified.

It was easy to condemn the nazi crimes as what they were - crimes - eventually the nazis were evil.

What the current administration does, probably with good intentions and aiming on a 'greater good', is just as unjustifyable - because it is still morally wrong to piss on human rights and violate human dignity, not even but especially for the good guys.

It is hard to swallow that when you have faith in that "WE are the good guys!"

The good guys aren't allowed to do bad things - they don't do bad things.

[ January 31, 2005, 14:12: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

Some acts are unworthy of a human being. It may be licit to tolerate lesser evil to avoid greater evil, but it is not good to do evil so that good may come out of it. Evil is intrinsically tied with good understood this way; this is to say that all evil relies on doing something which is contrary to the good moral standards and natural law in order to achieve the good of an individual or a group. In this sense, even a murder for pleasure is committed with some good in mind, as pleasure is of its own a good thing.

It is debatable whether torture is inherently evil or one of the acts which become evil if they are marked by evil intent. Sometimes, we are forced to kill the enemy (self defence is one example), and torture doesn't always lead to death. If the information is extracted in order simply to gain advantage, it's closer to the classical "the ends sanctify the means" example than if it's extracted in order to save innocent lives. Torture is an act, so it cannot be construed as tolerating, while saving lives may be construed as avoiding evil rather than aiming for good per se. That's why it's slippery ground.

However, Abu Ghraib torture doesn't really look like extracting immediate information. First, it was a generalistic preparation for further investigation. Second, the methods employed were characterised by unmerited violence and, let's call things their real names, contempt and desire for domination, if not hatred. Ultimately, the pleasure and probably even sheer boredom of the torturers played an important role, as well as sexual satisfaction was often the aim, not just a factor influencing the coice of methods.

To illustrate the above, let me bring it up again that, as I have pointed out a couple of times, there is no justification whatsoever for a sex crime.

Considering all this, it must be concluded that torture in Abu Ghraib and related cases typically involved the torturers doing evil in order to achieve pleasure, it being good from their point of view, or doing evil for typically evil purposes (to inflict pain or humiliation).

As such, it was (or, unfortunately, possibly still is) unworthy of a human being. Consequently, approval or acceptance of it is unworthy of a human being, with the reservation of immediately applying torture in order to prevent a planned attack or murder of hostages, but the successfulness of that is highly doubtful, with the testimony being hardly reliable and the subject not probably knowing much.

This leads to the conclusion that we are considering a dangerous case of putting oneself above the values one is protecting, if no action is taken. This compromises the said values and likely violates their essence. Again, if no action is taken. I hope action will be taken.

Also, the inconsistency between the policy produced by Alberto Gonzales et consortes and the principles applied by the US military prosecutors in the Nuremberg trial needs to be pointed out and duly considered. The striking similarity between excuses made up by Gonzales and Hoess needs to be considered as well (although I'm not making a comparison between them).

Yet another concern I have is that borders tend to stretched. And stretched. And stretched. The road to great crimes begins with little concessions. Hoess probably started from justifying lesser crimes than Auschwitz.

Once again, however, I need to stress that I am not judging those of the torturers who actually acted in good faith, believing they were immediately saving someone's life. Theorising about abstract philosophical concerns is one, making a moral choice on the spot is a different thing. If I got in my hands an enemy soldier of an army respecting the laws of war, I believe those laws would protect him.

But if I caught a kidnapper and knew that his hostages were going to die, I would personally beat the coordinates out of him with duct tape if there were no other way, following the inadimplento non est adimplendum principle of the international law, which is that there's no obligation to uphold a treaty with regard to a violator. Taking hostages is against the Geneva and Hague convention, even if they aren't civilians, and so is executing POWs or torturing them. With respect to that, the US were not bind by the treaties. This doesn't mean they were totally not bound by any provision with respect to any captive.

Even if legal, question still stands if it would be morally good or wrong. I can't answer. If I were in such a situation, my conscience might be telling me that the good way were to endure the hostages dying and not resort to inflicting what I generally oppose on the evil bastard. My conscience would probably also be telling me that I were not responsible for the result of the evil bastard's actions. However, my reason, logic, compassion for the victims and maybe even the rational side of my sense of justice might be telling me that torturing him for this specific information might be parallel to injuring the assailant in self defence, which is not evil. I don't know what I would choose. I only know I wouldn't employ sex-related methods and I would avoid humiliation and permanent injury so far as possible, if I came to resort to coercion.

Therefore, I am not passing judgement on such cases. But I must speak against torturing for pleasure, applying excessive violence, using humiliating or sex-related methods and torturing innocent relatives to make potentially knowledgeable potential culprits speak. And I must speak against holding people in detention without charges, especially children. I must also speak against all the lying that is being done.

 

Torture is a fundamental violation of human dignity, and therefor it is indisputable wether it might be justified or not - it isn't - it never is. Period.

 

The funny thing is, there's a TV show running in the US called "24" (as in 24 hours; each 1 hour episode represents one hour in a day covered by the 24 episode season) which stars Keifer Sutherland as an anti-terrorist US gov't agent in a future where terrorism is everpresent in the US. The first show this season has Sutherland's character shooting a bound detainee in the leg to get him to divulge time-critical info on the kidnapping of the secretary of defence (or some such) by, you guessed it, Islamist terrorists. Of course, this works to extract the info where the by the book techniques failed, and Sutherland's character goes on to save the day. Naturally, this show was produced by Fox (and features Fox News when ever there's an in-story news announcement...)

 

Yep. There's the myth out there that torture may help get info to defuse 'ticking timebombs' - but something like that happens in Hollywood only.

In practice the bomb would already have blown up when they get the perpetrator. That said, this misperception is based on an unrealistic constellation.

A terrorist uses a fuze that explodes a few minutes after he is safely away, or he just blows himself up. Finally, while terror groups may cooperate, they are smart enough to limit the details of an attack to only those who will carry it out. If one member of the group is arrested or is missing, they will abort the attack anyway.

It is a sad thing that a bellicose America, scared ****less, has forgotten what it stood for and its aggressive post-9-11 attitude greatly contributed to my some three year old deep disappointment with America.

And in addition to all moral problems - torture backfires:

• First there is the well deserved bad press:
  Whenever former CIA Director William Webster was briefed on a proposed covert operation, he would always ask how it will look when it becomes public. Webster knew that most secret operations eventually became public, and the fallout from such disclosures were sometimes more damaging than whatever the operation might accomplish. Wise guy.
  .
• US troops taken prisoner now face the prospect of torture, not just for information, but as payback.
  .
• The intel gained by torture is questionable. First, you need to be sure you have the right guy unless you want to torture everyone by principle - just in case somebody knows something. And then - just take this example: Guantánamo interrogators showed some [detainees] videotapes supposedly depicting them with Osama bin Laden. At first they denied being in the videos, but they confessed after prolonged interrogation under harsh conditions.
  Yet British intelligence proved to the American government that the men were actually in the United Kingdom when the tapes were made

Unlike the muscular, fast approach chosen by the pentagon neo-crazies, policework demands patience and brains - but, as that episode suggests, the results are worth the time and effort.

[ February 01, 2005, 20:56: Message edited by: Ragusa ]