Koochers Psychopathic Kooks: GangStalking Terrrofication and Torture for Fun and Profit
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From: Linda on 7 Apr 2008 19:42 X-No-Archive:Yes http://technocrat.net/d/2008/4/7/38916 Torture for Fun and Profit Thomas Lord Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:24:52 EDT About Technocrat.net Subtitle 1: "But the President told me to." Subtitle 2: "My experts told me it was necessary." Subtitle 3: "Torture performed in good faith isn't torture." -- Yoo (paraphrase) As many of you probably know, the famous torture memo as been made public. The basic administration legal defense is simple enough: The security of the state is paramount so the president has broad authority in war. Actual torture is only "the really rough stuff" but "giving someone a hard time" isn't. Heck, if you wind up really hurting someone that's ok because, just like when your mommy had you tied to her apron strings, all is forgiven as long as it was an accident. Now, frankly, that's a good defense in the case of freak accidents when people like interrogators, guards, etc. are acting "in good faith" and are doing things that reasonable people would not have a problem with. Here is an example from imaginary testimony: The prisoner was uncooperative with interrogators and had taken to throwing his soup at the guards. We said, like the famous sit-com character: "No soup for you!" We began serving him a flavorless but nutricious mush, instead. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to us, the mush's manucturer had recently moved operations to a factory where peanuts are also handled. The prisoner has a severe allergy to peanuts. By the time we realized that something was wrong, the second day, the prisoner had suffered organ damage. Perhaps (if not probably) in such a case, there are defendents with liabilities there, at least civil and possibly criminal negligence. After all, the state has seized complete control over the prisoner's diet and, therefore, has responsibility to excersize all of the care that a reasonable person would exercise over their own diet. Even if the prisoner did not disclose his peanut allergy, it is a common- enough condition and it is standard best practice to avoid peanuts and other common allergins when in doubt like that. Nevertheless, the withdrawl of privilege ("No soup for you!") is a standard best practice, well researched, as a way to begin to bring recalcitrant prisoners into a more cooperative state. It is a way to say, "Oh, you wanna be that way? Well, what's it worth to you?" My arm- chair psychologist understanding is that the privilege extension and withdrawl game is successfully applied with criminal prisoners, with mental health prisoners, with prisoners in rehab facilities, and in jump starting children whose early pedeagogy set them off on a bad foot. The full form goes: "No soup for you. But make your bed for the next three days and you'll get your soup back. It's just three days. It's up to you." Because the peanut incident was an accident in pursuit a reasonable and humane discipline (at least if applied to a legitimate rather than merely political prisoner), the behavior of the officials of the prison would at least not rise to the level of an international crime against humanity. And that's a correct application of Yoo's argument. Here are some incorrect uses for that argument: Some internal CIA memos said this was really the best way so we took to grabbing and twisting his balls, trying to follow the guidelines in the papers about the appropriate amount of torque. Unfortunately, that was hard to guage. We probably should have stopped after the first bruises but nobody suggested we should and we had our orders. The documentation was unclear. We weren't certain we were doing harm until it was too late. ....and of course the speaker wasn't aware because they were incapable of observing the facts directly before them. They did not see a prisoner but a piece of valuable inventory to be handled according to procedures. Another example: The guys in the camp are always trading gallows humor among themselves so it didn't seem like such a bad idea -- kinda funny really -- to try to put the fear of god in him with the dogs. I don't understand why he's been catatonic since but I don't think it was our fault because our COs were smirking the whole time when they could have stopped and, really, we just thought it was kind of funny and would all be over in a few days. ....and of course the speaker feels innocent. He's got the support of a whole group of "his kind" and therefore is unconcerned with observing the facts dierctly before him. And this brings me to my points today: hypocrisy, the "reasonable person," and making a profit by causing the suffering of others. Some people, it is my impression, read a memo like Yoo's like some of us might read an employment contract. Find the rules and within those rules, find your defenses up front. Know your rights and use them. For example, some rules of thumb: before threatening a prisoner with dogs, get your CO to confirm that that's policy before taking to twisting the prisoner's balls, save a copy of that CIA paper someplace safe so that you will be able to point out the basis of your good faith. That is hypocrisy, of course. Nothing justifies the dogs or the ball twisting (or any real world cases like dogs and water boarding). No actual person believes that such things do not fit the definition of torture. What we have here instead is a set of people who think they can make a case in court that they had an excuse. "Reasonable person" has two meanings in our society. On the one hand it is a legal construct: a set of assertions and rules-of-reason found in case-law, legal references, legislative texts, congressional debates, etc. On the other hand, a "reasonable person" is just something we all know when we see it. And in the case of torture, at least internationally, it is my firm belief that that second definition prevails. I learned the lesson of the true meaning of "reasonable person" as a hacker, back in college. By "hacker" I mean "playful, exploratory technologist". Following a long tradition (e.g., MIT "pranks") we young'ns definitely stretched the rules. Ok, no, we flat out broke rules. We stole liquid nitrogen from the physics department to play with. We released (almost harmless) computer viruses on very early campus networks. We picked locks to storage rooms. We broke into steam tunnels. We hacked some campus publications through illegitimate access to the publishing office computers. It was all giddy fun. None of our hacks were particularly safe or wise. Their best virtue was that we picked those hacks with some subtle encouragment from our elders, precisely because they knew we would get quietly busted, pretty quickly. Once busted, the calmer, older ones could let us off the hook with a stern dose of embarassing us by pointing out how badly they could easily have gone wrong. And that was a reminder that lasts a lifetime because we knew all along that we were "being bad" -- it just didn't feel like it, since it was such giddy fun. Once you get busted in that state, having giddy fun and then confronted with the great harm you might have caused if you continued down that path, you wise up. Another example: if you are in the habit of tearing down the highway at dangerous speeds on your motorcycle, a few good slaps can turn you into the guy who drives the truck that goes and helps clean up accident scenes. You may never (nor might any of us ever) achieve some state of enlightment where, forevermore, all of our actions are "reasonable" -- but you at least know the stakes and knowing the stakes, you make your choices: reasonable person or giddy fun? With grown-ups, like CIA and contractors at Abu Ghraib, or like CIA and regular army at Gitmo, it's a different story. They aren't playing for giddy fun, anymore, although (judging by the pictures) that is part of the bonus package. They're playing for money. I've made the three points: "torture", "for fun," "and for profit." Here is a postscript: What do we do as a nation, now that these things have happened? Today is the first day of the rest of our lives, they say. What next? What I sense is the Bush thought is a Carter-esque exit plan: a presidency that stays the course for what remains of the last year, trying just to keep things from going non-linear. A January swearing in and, next day, the closing of Gitmo and the first 100 days spent trying to make gestures of ammends and reconciliation. That doesn't satisfy me. It's more of the same. It's just a way to protect the profits made so far. There's no reason for reconcilation not to start today. Save the nation, not your asses. Oh, and, with hypocrisy goes cynicism: starting reconciliation today may make it a lot easier for a heck of a lot of high-brow people to travel in Europe without too much fear of a tap-on-the-shoulder and taking-into-custody.
From: Larry Hoover on 8 Apr 2008 09:52
Who cares, you hypocrite kook. Go away. If what you ramble on and on about has validity, I can't imagine why you're worried about Usenet posters, but not the people you're maligning. |