Dogs used to rape prisoners at Bagram?

Cue coward or paid troll (I’m not sure which he is) Jeffy-boy to defend the “dog show” in 5…4…3…

Alfreda Bikowsky “is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.” This agent, “dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/unidentified-queen-torture

Hmmm…apparently the CIA felt she deserved a promotion and higher pay, rather than a firing squad. ..this cruel idiot working @ the CIA helped the 911 hijackers by not doing her job and then misled the agency with evidence purportedly extracted from torture.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/19/senior-cia-officer-center-torture-scandals-alfreda-bikowsky/

@jeff
Glad you are back.
So people torturing people is OK, even if sometimes, in extreme situations and all that. But using dogs! Heaven forbid. How can you use those poor pooches. They are so innocent and cute.
Really? Bad photo op too.
And we will ignore the last part of the quote, ‘They would have even said that they killed Kennedy without even knowing who he was.”
I don’t care if you are a paid hack. If you are paid I do not know what the ROI could possibly be. You certainly have an entertainment value on this end so thanks.
And btw, I am Canadian since you seem to care. And I worry about my current government and its abuses on the environment, democracy, parliamentary traditions, ….

The reason psychologically healthy people are horrified by this is because knowing what happened makes it more real. And psychologically unhealthy people simply find the whole thing thrilling and justifiable.

Imagine if we lived in a world in which the ticking time-bomb were the depravity eventually unleashed by incessant idle speculation over ticking time-bombs. Who do we torture to defuse *that* ticking time-bomb, I ask you?

While I have no doubts of human’s ability to commit depravity; I find this information/accusations somewhat incredible.
Dogs fucking prisoners? That goes solidly against common sense, IMO.
I seriously doubt this as fact.
The rest; I have no to little doubt and condemn it soundly.
Heads need to roll…

@ JPD

Yeah, I call bullshit on this as well.
I’m a little more than surprised Ian ran this piece…

I have worked with victims of torture. All of you people who say that the tortures described “go against common sense”, or “is pathetic”, or any of your other excuses for disbelief in the light of the many other well-proven allegations would seem to me to be either willfully ignorant . . . or worse. What proof would you accept? Video or it didn’t happen?

I have no difficulty believing that US soldiers (and CIA and FBI and licensed American psychologists) got up to this. After all, mere domestic US cops can freely murder men and children on camera, with guns or even using their bare hands, with no repercussions.

@hairhead,

I would recommend you either stay out of America entirely or leave immediately given that we all face a clear and present danger from our murderous, barbaric police department.

Or maybe you get your f…..g head examined. Perhaps both.

well, dogs are at least mammals, so I guess we can be happy with that.

@hairhead

My goodness? Cut the wimpy crap.

Hiding behind a passive aggressive post while insulting American law enforcement is not only disingenuous but really, really boring. Say what you want about me, but I am honest and consistent. What you said about police murdering people with impunity is far more repulsive than recommending you get your f…..g head examined, which I reiterate.

Jeff still thinks the internal and external security forces are his protectors, rather than his overseers.

I expect he has the same pale pink skin tone which I have.

He thinks the only people the Blue Gestapo torture and murder will be nonwhites and “trashy” whites, DFHs, and the like, not good patriotic white sheeple like him.

He hasn’t yet realized that in the New Slavery of Global Capital, “white” skin will not protect anyone from enslavement, as it did not protect anyone in ancient Rome.

He, and so many other of my fellow palefaces who share his worldview, will soon face a rude awakening.

I don’t believe this one because although I wouldn’t put anything past the CIA or FBI or the military NSA guys, I don’t believe it would be easy to find even one dog, much less multiple “fighting dogs” willing to pull this kind of thing off. Dogs humping is common. Dog on human rape sounds like an improbably urban legend.

@Jake,

What happened to Gardner was wrong, tragic and inexcusable, fyi. That cop should have been indicted.

Not so in Ferguson.

@Jeff

When an entire community rises up, that is not because of a single incident, and examining it in isolation will produce no lasting value. Which is just fine for those who don’t want to see systemic change. What happened to Eric Gardner was murder. What happened to Michael Brown should have been left to a jury of Mr. Wilson’s peers to decide. What is happening to too many police forces is that they have simply because legalized gangs, collecting fees for the city because corporations don’t want to pay taxes and confiscating property that won’t be returned even if a person is found innocent (consultants now make a living instructing forces how to do this). As is often the case, good men and women continue to work within the system, but the overriding trend towards militarization is disturbing. In defense of the police, the system itself is so corrupted and rotten (as Patrick L. Smith notes, when the judiciary goes, which ours has done, it’s a serious problem), that choices to act with conscience are fewer and far between.

I’ll just offer one example: a few years back, in Los Angeles, 10 late teen early twenty somethings looking like they steeped off Haight Street from the sixties (flower skirts in plentiful supply) decided to protest Deutsche Bank by shutting down Avenue of the Stars, the main thoroughfare for Century’s City high rise office buildings. The LAPD turned out in numbers 20 or more to 1. While a few motorcycle cops circled the kids on their bikes like hunters stalking animals, the remainder of the staged themselves next to my office building with enough fire power to stage a raid on a mid-sized Iraqi city (mind you this is the department that purchased Raytheon’s microwave weapon that the U.S military turned down). I went down to talk to the officers, in particular to ask if they knew that the City of Los Angeles had just sued Deutsche Bank as an absentee owner of foreclosed houses and buildings causing blight across the city. There had been a very good article on the subject some weeks prior, focusing on the difficulty in particular it created for police because neighborhoods were made far more dangerous. Not a single officer was aware, or cared, about the connection, although I couldn’t find anyone active in the Union that might at least have taken it up as a safety issue. No Deutsche Bank official has been before, during or since, hassled in any way remotely like the kids the cops essentially terrorized that day. That’s seriously fucked up. I’m not naive enough to say that the police force doesn’t have to deal with some seriously grim work, but when you treat activists whose work might actually improve your life the same way you might treat a drug dealer or a murderer, something is wrong.

Ian,

Sorry. the natives are getting a little restless and I am clearly the target of their aggression and responding in kind, or maybe the other way around. I will refrain.

Your last post about the the dogs was, well frivolous. Just sayin’.

@Jeff

This depends on how you define violence, and of course, on who keeps the statistics. Stop & Frisk is violent – it may not be physically violent, but it is psychologically so, and that can be as damaging and ultimately as dangerous as physical violence. The collective rage loosed on L.A. in 1992 was much more a response to decades of frustration at the daily slights and injustices suffered by an entire community than to the beating of Rodney King.

As cities’ tax bases dwindle, which happens in no small measure as corporations do everything they can not just to avoid taxes, but to shift ever greater costs on to the tax base (witness the way some corporations get to keep state employee taxes or the way Tesla decides where to build a factory – Dave Cay Johnston is excellent on subjects such as these generally) they turn to other sources of revenue, notably fines.

This makes cops more revenue collectors than protectors of the community. More Sherriff of Nottingham than Officer Friendly. Alex Vitale at Brooklyn CUNY who studies law enforcement has noted that this was a problem in Ferguson, where people are regularly subject to fines for every little infraction, but they cannot pay them and this casts them into a system from which they cannot escape. The conveniently overlooked “upside” of “broken windows” is revenue generation, and, of course, that it helps to drive the undesirable poor out.

Do I hear a chihuahua yipping?

A key problem with using torture in “ticking bomb” scenarios is that usage doesn’t stay contained to that scenario very effectively. The USG adopted coercive means in a panic after 9/11 in exactly that context – those means continued in systematic use until late 2007. Five years in an awfully long time for a bomb to tick.

I have a pretty good idea how long it takes to develop sources against these targets – in my opinion the continued use of coercive means had little to do with “ticking bombs” and much to do with the age old tendency of covert programs to take on lives of their own. The hardest thing in government to kill is a classified program with a sponsor.

We are not here to amuse you with debating hypothetical nonsense, UNrealitychecker.

Ok, RealityChecker, I’ll play.

You say you’re a lawyer, so then change the laws. Specifically, write the law making “ticking-time-bomb-torture” legal. Predictably, I have some questions for you.

Why “thousands of people”? Why not hundreds? Or 50? Or 25? Or 1? And define the evidence required to “know” as opposed to “might know”. Can I use a Ouija board? Is there a time limit on the ticking-time-bomb? 5 mins? 5 days? 5 years? What is it? If you “know” there is a ticking-time-bomb, wouldn’t it be morally responsible of you to assume there’s another one? Wouldn’t shoving coconuts up the ticking-time-bomb-terrorist mom’s ass be the only morally responsible response in this case? Where does the Six Degrees of Separation end? Once you reach Kevin Bacon? What if it’s you that “knows”? Remember, there are X (to be determined) lives to be saved!

You get the idea.

I’m not trying to make light of this, but you’re attempting to draw lines to justify torture. So actually draw those lines. I want to see them. No more hypotheticals since I’m moderately confident that’s what led us to the SSCI report to begin with.

Instead, what I see is you building a strong case against torture under any circumstances. Because you, Jack Bauer, could present to the jury the actual defused (non-ticking, in this case) time bomb and the post-it note with the secret code scribbled on it. Saving X (exact number to be determined) lives in the process. No judge or jury would convict you. Easy.

Or? Just stop watching re-runs of ’24’. It’s not a documentary.

I see we have many masters of deflection here (like every blog????), but so far none willing to address my purposely difficult hypothetical on its own terms. Difficult hypotheticals are the time-honored way to explore and test problematic moral and ethical issues. Those of you who are angered by my effort to focus the discussion in this manner should realize that your problem is with Socrates, and not with me.

My hypo does represent the edge, deliberately so. I REPEAT, I agree with all here about all other aspects of the torture debate. ALL OF THEM!!!!!! OK, have I made myself clear now?

The edge is where principles get tested. On this thread, only Trixie seems to have understood at all where I am going with this inquiry, in her recognition that all difficult moral choices entail the risk of becoming slippery slope disasters. She’s right, what if it was only 25 to be saved? BUT, what if it was 10, 000,000?

IMO, an absolutist position cannot be logically or morally adhered to, because at some point there is some number of endangered innocents great enough to justify a departure from the absolutist moral position. I note that none have accepted my challenge, to simply say, “Let all those (thousands, millions, billions, you choose the correct number) die, I won’t compromise my absolutist moral position and hurt this horrible person I have here who has the info needed to save all those lives.” Is that because y’all implicitly recognize that such a statement would itself be immoral? I would hope so, but ask yourselves, why can’t you bring yourself to actually type it out or say it?

When we get some cogent responses to that question, we can move on to the next step (and there is a next step, which is where my deepest interest lies).

JUST FYI, my blog reading list for the past ten years has been Firedoglake, Glenn Greenwald,
Ian, Naked Capitalism, and emptywheel. Never voted for a Republican, only Democrats. I was a daily participant at FDL for ten years, never commented anywhere else. I was many years ahead of FDL in recognizing that the Democratic Party was a worthless corporatist sellout, and also that the electoral system cannot ever get us any significant changes from the path we are on. (And also that FDL has lost most of its interesting commentariat.) Hardly a troll or a right-winger. Just looking for a new place to find SMART FREETHINKERS OF A PROGRESSIVE BENT WHO CAN ALSO BE PRAGMATIC.

I’ve come here in good faith to learn whether this can be that place.

RC, my problem is not with Socrates. My problem is with a JD with an over-developed need for attention. When you need to work through these issues as part of your pre-deployment workup, let me know – in that context I’ll gladly help you test your ideas. Until then, you’re just another guy who thinks the Internet is on-demand moot court.

For the record, principles – particularly one’s own principles – don’t get tested in nice, safe situations like sitting in front of your computer talking anonymously with strangers. Principles get tested when it’s down to you *personally* deciding whether you’re going to take the 3 pound sledge to a subject’s hands or not. Folks’ inability to get the essential “there but for the grace of God, and good officers appointed above me” nature of all this forms the basis of my distaste for the “hang ’em high” post-facto zeal.

@JPD

WTF are you raving about, AND WHY THEN ARE YOU HERE?????????????

Excuse me, but I am a *GALACTIC*-Class Asshole.

And proud of it. :p

@JPD

Perhaps I’m leading up to making a more general point about the undeserved moral smugness that people like to claim for themselves by asserting unrealistic absolutist moral positions, and how lefties need to do less of that if we really want to be better than our various adversaries?

RC, I am no fan of absolutist moral positions. It is apparently not clear from what I have written, but what I have sought to elucidate is a view that is absolutist only in so far that there are lines beyond which rules should not be there to guide one (nor do they entirely apply).

Having over the years extensively weighed the upsides and downsides of various ethical and legal frameworks around the edge scenario you posit, my view is that it is best to not try to codify this and make it “okay”. My view is that every guy or gal that’s faced with that ticking bomb scenario should be making their own decisions without knowing they have an easy “out”. I know what my decision would be and I am comfortable with them making whatever decision they make – and society may have to punish them for whatever it may be (and that one could well go either way, frankly). If folks don’t think that’s “fair” then I guess my primary response would be that they should be glad that there are other folks still willing to do those jobs.

tl,dr: Worry less about coming up with a system of rules that makes sense to you and more about choosing the right people to deal with ambiguous circumstances.

@Trixie

Sorry, but that’s just incoherent. As is the buck-passing maneuver embraced by JPD.

Thanks for playing, folks, but I guess I’ll have to search for my intellectually stimulating commentariat elsewhere.

Carry on.

What JPD said.

Although, JPD…how do we know he’s not already employed by an intelligence service?

(Hey, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t necessarily mean all of your enemies are imaginary.) 😉

Awww, why didn’t I think of this earlier?

I’m terribly, sorry, Mr. RC, but this is Abuse. Arguments are next blog over. 😆

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y