(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
There is a meme being floated by the former VP and future War Crimes defendant Cheney and his daughter that because some of the techniques in the Bush administration State Sponsored Torture program have been used to train our service members, they can not possibly be torture. They always leave out the totality of the techniques which even if each one were in fact lawful would still rise to the level of torture by any reasonable person, but that is not what the Dog wants to talk about.
Every single person who makes this construction is making a false equivalence and the reason for this is a single word; Consent. This argument goes that since we train our service members with these techniques they can not be torture when we do them to prisoners. This fails two very clear tests.
First and most obvious; we train them on resisting these techniques, because they are torture techniques! We know that some of our potential enemies will torture, and since we know that we want to help those who might be tortured to survive it. So, we use the torture techniques which are mostly likely to happen, in rigidly controlled ways, to expose our troops to it.
Which leads us to the next point, if they are being subjected to torture, why aren’t those who do it punished? Consent. The service members who are trained in this way consent to the training, they know what they are getting into in advance and agree to it. They understand it is something horrible, but they also know if they say stop, then it will stop. By enduring, they are actively at every moment of these torture techniques consenting.
There are many things which are legal when you agree to them but flatly illegal when you do not. If you say someone can come into your home and take what they like, no problem. If they do it without your consent, that is burglary. The same goes for tattooing, as long as you consent, it is a business transaction, but if someone did it to you in your sleep, it is assault. Of course the most obvious example is sex, where as long as there is consent many many things are considered okay, but when there is not consent it is always rape.
By their very nature as prisoners, Abu Zabaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammad could not consent at all. Who would consent to be waterboarded 82 or 183 times? The Dog does not know the extent of waterboarding in the SERE training, but he is 100% sure that no one ever is waterboarded even 50 times. This is the point we must hammer home; the techniques used in SERE are only just barely legal because those enduring them consented to do so. If they withdrew their consent and the techniques were continued, then, yes, we would be torturing our own personnel.
The floor is your
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It is the fact that SERE training is an academic exercise that is limited in scope and duration.
Trauma has a cumulative effect, and these prisoners are subjected to consistent traumatic stress for months. And that stress level is cycled from low level discomfort to waterboarding — with a bunch of stuff in between.
But mostly, a SERE student knows the value of his or her life, and has some notion that that life will be protected. A prisoner has no such knowledge. Detainees approach the waterboard in a state of genuine despair in the knowledge that their life doesn’t matter to the interrogators, and they become easily convinced that the next interation will kill them. That trauma is on a whole different level than it is for someone who has even a small hope that they will survive the day if they can just hold on long enough. The key is there.
training, oversight, and boundaries. This diary discussed SERE training and a SERE trainer’s contention that waterboarding is torture.
The diary also quoted the “legal” definition of torture as written by the bush OLC which defined physical and mental torture.
As I questioned in that diary–how could interrogaters possibly be able to determine the exact line between what constitutes “harsh interrogation” vs. “torture” for each and every individual being questioned, and then have the ability and willingness to stop short of “torture”?
The OLC defined physical torture as:
How could even a physician–much less a non-physician interrogater possibly be able to determine each individual detainee’s threshold for the precise degree of pain that would constitute torture? Impossible, IMHO.
OLC describes mental pain in this way:
Again, how can any individual, physician or not, determine the amount of psychological suffering that each individual can tolerate without it causing irreparable harm?
The premise that there are “one size fits all” “harsh interrogation” techniques that could easily be adapted to each individual’s tolerance for physical or mental pain, just short of it being considered “torture”–is ludicrous, extremely offensive, and just a further example of the levels of depravity that people in power can sink to when they have no boundaries, are subjected to no oversight, and are protected from the consequences of their actions.