Open letter to Dean Esmay and all his little torturekins:
Oh yes, it's "worked" every time. Yes, it's been "very productive." How the fuck has it worked? What has it produced? If you're telling me that pouring water over someone's face for a few minutes while screaming "ARE YOU A TERRORIST?" provoked the highly useful response "YES, YES, I'M A TERRORIST, PLEASE STOP DROWNING ME!", I have exactly three things to say to you: 1. you are an idiot, 2. you are a fascist, 3. fuck off and die.
Amnesty International is confused and dishonest. I say it works, and who are you going to believe: some random right-wing blogger, or an international organization like Amnesty?
Feel free to edit my comment to insult the appropriate fascist idiot.
That argument rests on an awful lot of empirical claims which I don't buy at all. Waterboarding infallibly produces accurate information in two minutes or less, at no risk of injury to the subject? Magically, it is both true that no one can possibly stand up to it and that it's not a bad thing to do. And we're taking Barnett's word for this because?
Funny, I was emailing with someone a few days ago, and wound up writing this:
Look, if it were you and I discussing whether KSM should have his sleep interrupted, that would be one thing. But it's a bunch of people pushing a bill that says much worse can be done for less cause, and that the courts can't say a thing about it. I could agree with every bit of your email, and the bill currently under consideration would still be an abomination.
And when I try to think of where I'd draw the line, there are too many safeguards I'd want (we know, about as well as we can know, that KSM has valuable information--how often is that the case, and how can we know it, and what kind of oversight would that require?) before I'd be willing to sign off even on sleep deprivation. I just don't see any *practical* way to allow it and still keep it under control.
How long before YouTube has clips of teenagers trying some homemade waterboarding?
Right. It's not inconceivable (although I don't think it's well established enough to admit even for the sake of argument) that torturing someone might not make them give useful information in the hope of not being tortured further. But we can't use torture at all without becoming torturers -- once it's permitted, it will spread.
But it is fascinating. The Right just decided to declare, as far as I can tell, that waterboarding works and isn't harmful. I'm sure we're going to be treated to this "fact" over and over.
Also, Labs's point about signal to noise in the linked post is critical, and they never address it.
At the end did they say "And the same goes double for denials of habeus corpus!"?
The Powerline quote would be powerfully persuasive for someone who believed that Powerline knew whether his assertions were true or not, or cared. He's making shit up, as per usual.
I thought I'd made that point too. Here it is. It's nice that we don't have to come up with any original content anymore.
How long before YouTube has clips of teenagers trying some homemade waterboarding?
One of the things that was striking about the pictures of the waterboarding apparatus linked on CT is that you'd only need one trip to the hardware store to make one.
Can anyone tell me where I just saw a painting of someone being waterboarded by the Khmer Rouge, in a museum of their atrocities? Some blog had it up in the last day or two. These are the people we're modeling ourselves on? I can't wait for the pyramids of skulls.
8: how long until YouTube has clips of us trying some waterboarding? Who's first?
Ah. I think 14 is w-pwned by 13.
Crooked Timber, LB, reposting David Corn (?). Here.
How long before YouTube has clips of teenagers trying some homemade waterboarding?
I'm sure it will be in Jackass III.
Also, I appreciate all the work you smart people are doing to point out what's wrong with these arguments, but I wish it were enough to provide Strasmangelo's response.
Also, at the end of the thread linked in 12, ogged uses an emoticon in a seemingly unironic fashion.
Hey, wait a minute. Ben aren't you supposed to be out with Megan right now?
18: I think I disagree with this pretty strongly. I understand that in political discussion we can't have any kind of involved discussion, so I don't really blame, say, members of Congress who say things like "torture [broadly construed] is always wrong everywhere" as if they were obviously true, and I also understand that saying "ah, well, in certain cases, assuming certain empirical claims..." in certain parts of the public sphere is to say, more or less, "please roll me," but that is not to say that the questions are settled.
ogged uses an emoticon in a seemingly unironic fashion
They made me do it.
21: Boy, I'd feel awfully comfortable saying that any rule which permits torture under circumstance X is an evil rule. Given the possibility of Belle Waring's awesome powers of stipulation coming into play, I couldn't say that any instance in which one person tortures another is necessarily a wrongful act (e.g., if super-powerful aliens will otherwise send the Earth spiraling into the sun), but I'd be interested in seeing a defense of any rule allowing torture (and by rule, I mean, something applicable in the real world -- not "When we know the subject has vital information.") by someone who wasn't entirely lacking in credibility.
Hey, wait a minute. Ben aren't you supposed to be out with Megan right now?
I'm so gay I turned her down to go to a wireless-equipped bathhouse in the Castro.
What I hate about the current state of political discourse in America is that the worst kinds of would-be thugs and sadists and psycho-sexual fuckups (I say "would-be" because these armchair warrior types mostly want to do it, or to have it done, I suppose, by proxy) can now pass themselves off as normal. As better than normal, even. As totally mainstream, but with a clear-eyed, hard-nosed realism that vastly surpasses the muddled pre-911 sentimentalism that is now supposed to characterize the understanding, or lack thereof, of the rest of us.
21: But there are several issues here. Right off the bat, there's a difference between using torture and sanctioning torture. There are all sorts of ancillary effects, like normalizing torture for the rest of the world. Surely the first question should be, "Do we need to torture to remain safe?" For the level of safety I need, there's no evidence that we do.
You want video? We have video. At least the water is clean.
"torture [broadly construed] is always wrong everywhere"
But, barring ludicrously unrealistic stipulations, I think this is true. When is torture not wrong?
(Er, pwned by 23, but since you were addressing me in the first place, I'm going to appeal for a dispensation.)
23: Whose awesome powers of stipulation?
23: (The devil will be in the details of what's permissible as a "real world" scenario, or else I'd appeal to the rule that permits torture just in case an evil demon..etc., that is, a rule designed to cover exactly the one case you admit is permissible. But that's just for fun.)
Are we classifying waterboarding as torture? If so, imagine a rule that permits waterboarding when we have good reason to believe (a) that the suspect has valuable & important information, (b) that less horrible means of interrogation will not succeed in producing that information while it's still useful, and (c) that there are no other means of obtaining it, e.g. from other sources, and that the evidence for (a)-(c) has been examined by some competent tribunal that's suitably constituted and suitably independent. ("The Torture Board.") Furthermore, build in medical safegaurds and other sorts of oversight.
I'm not endorsing this rule, but I am claiming that it's not obviously morally impermissible, to a degree that serious discussion of it displays some grave character failing.
What would be sufficiently valuable, FL? And how often are we going to be doing it if we need to create a bureacracy to monitor it?
But aren't (a) and (b) pretty fundamentally unverifiable? (I am neither a lawyer nor a philosopher, so please don't hurt me.)
Musing on, I suspect that 28 suggests a moral standard that rules out many (admittedly quite dubious) actions of apparently just wars. I mean, Barnett has a point about Dresden and Hiroshima.
33: There's a scene in the MacNamara movie in which MacNamara says that his superior during WWII thought that if the US lost the war to Japan, he and MacNamara would be properly tried as war criminals. So might makes right a lot of the time. As we're by far the dominant power in the world, I'd suggest that we really ought to worry about what we do, because whatever we do is going to end up being "right" for all relevant questions.
Keep in mind that the post argues against our actual policies, etc.
31, 32: we can set the lines in a variety of places, and there will be issues with vagueness, but these aren't worries unique to this case. They arise in criminal justice all the time, for example. But there are going to be cases, I say boldly from my armchair, where we have someone like KSM (that is, someone we strongly suspect knows interesting things). Whether waterboarding is worth the cost is something I won't say with any confidence because I have no idea what its success rate is. I'm skeptical of the Barnett extreme and the "it really doesn't work ever" extreme, but it's not like there are a lot of big studies from noninterested parties on this.
15. I'll build it. Who wants to be strapped to a board by me*?
*You can't deny better me than Ben.
But there are going to be cases, I say boldly from my armchair, where we have someone like KSM (that is, someone we strongly suspect knows interesting things).
Right. I think I'm denying this, pending evidence. What did we get from KSM? And how many lives saved?
Musing on, I suspect that 28 suggests a moral standard that rules out many (admittedly quite dubious) actions of apparently just wars. I mean, Barnett has a point about Dresden and Hiroshima.
I should also add that I'm not sure I have a problem with this.
I have no idea what we got from whom, of course. But now I'm puzzled by your position: do you think we're never in a position to say with confidence that a particular person has knowledge of, say, pending terrorist attacks? If we know something about the organizational hierarchy of the old-style al Qaeda, it's not farfetched to think that we might capture, say, the COO of Airliner Plots, Inc., and if we did, I would think that it's reasonable to believe that this person has some important information. The degree of warrant for this depends on the warrant for our beliefs in the structure claim, the identity of the person we have, and so on, and I acknowledge that knowing is hard. But I also think that "we never know!" is as implausible as "waterboarding: works every time."
You want video? We have video.
Wow, thanks. I think.
Is the objection similar to the one against capital punishment? Sometimes we can be reasonably sure we got the right guy, but there are people who nevertheless oppose capital punishment because even one "false positive" is too many.
it's not farfetched to think that we might capture, say, the COO of Airliner Plots, Inc.
Haven't we already captured about five of him?
42: yes, that's a similar case. There too I think that whether the existence of false positives is enough to scuttle the practice depends on the goods it provides. If I believed in a sufficiently large deterrent effect I might think CP is ok in spite of the inevitability of error. Here, if I believed in the efficacy of waterboarding and the reliability of IDing people worth waterboarding, I might conclude that WB is ok.
(And I think people who say, "the rare wrongful execution is not enough to show that CP is unjust" are not *obviously* wrong. Christ, Ernest van den Haag made a career of saying this in roughly ten billion uninteresting articles.)
confused look
If they're describing waterboarding properly (which I'm not sure they are), then someone 'breaking' in 2 1/2 minutes seems awful, awful lame. ('Breaking' could merely mean struggling - not actually confessing.)
Something's off. How does this differ from forced submersion?
max
['Methinks they exaggerate their successes and the awfulness.']
do you think we're never in a position to say with confidence that a particular person has knowledge of, say, pending terrorist attacks?
I'm saying that I doubt we're ever in a position in which the normalization of torture will be worth the lives saved. I admit it's theoretically possible, but I'd need to see a few "but for..." cases before I believed it such plausibly described the world we live in. Short of the ticking time-bomb scenario--which I assume we're excluding--I have a hard time coming up with a set of circumstances in which we need to waterboard.
I'm such a fool. 30 should have appealed to the rule permitting torture in all and only cases in which LB thinks torture is permissible. That would have been cuter.
"if super-powerful aliens will otherwise send the Earth spiraling into the sun"
Set My Controls For the Heart of the Sun
Is this ridiculous argument intended seriously? I think if we take a look at the records of the Inquisition and the confessions of the numerous witches tortured and executed in the War on Evil it will give an excellent indication of the general value of information obtained through torture. The only reason we don't know that KSM anointed himself with the fat of Christian babies and flew through the air to Al Qaeda meetings is that no one thought to ask him.
Tim, if Barnett were here he'd totally have my back. Torture: safe, legal, and rare.
Honestly, I'm not sure what we're arguing about, since the core issue really involves facts neither of us know, for example, what sorts of information we have about who we capture. While I take seriously the danger that things will get out of hand, I also can't bring myself to believe that we're never in a position where it makes sense. How often we find ourselves in that position will determine whether the blanket ban is the best all-things-considered policy.
If they're describing waterboarding properly (which I'm not sure they are), then someone 'breaking' in 2 1/2 minutes seems awful, awful lame. ('Breaking' could merely mean struggling - not actually confessing.)
That ABC article from end of last year seemed to indicate most people don't last very long.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1322866
While I take seriously the danger that things will get out of hand, I also can't bring myself to believe that we're never in a position where it makes sense.
Right. My default position is exactly the opposite. I'm willing to be convinced, but I'll need the flowers, the movie, and the dinner, first.
Truth Serum ...Kevin Drum discusses Indian methods of truth serum and Brain-Mapping.
Waterboarding? Technology will make that obsolete as soon as the CIA gets the scientists working. Electrodes mapped to pain-centers in the brain;forced nightmares and hallucinations; catscans and mris;any number of non-intrusive "non-destructive" methods will soon be available.
Combined with surveillance,the world of 50 years from now does not bear thinking about. You stop this now with screaming absolutism or your grandkids...
The Constitution is a suicide pact. 48 was meant pretty seriously.
Tim, the question each of us must face is: where do you throw the towel?
According to CIA sources, Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, after two weeks of enhanced interrogation, made statements that were designed to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear. Sources say Al Libbi had been subjected to each of the progressively harsher techniques in turn and finally broke after being water boarded and then left to stand naked in his cold cell overnight where he was doused with cold water at regular intervals.
The signal/noise point is important. Wow, I have no new ideas.
Oh hell, another episode of "McMannie Get Your Gun."
FL, the rule you purpose would never actually be adheared to in reality. The Israelies once had rules permiting "aggressive interrogation" in the sort-of ticking time bomb scenerio, and withing a year or so 85% of all Palenstinian detainees we're being "aggressively interrogated". nor will they only used "perscribed methods" plenty of palestians we're seriously harmed or killed in those "aggressive interrogations" even though the rules for those were tamer than what we are implementing in this country.
There are no extant examples of countries that allow torture in "limited" circumstances where it is not really widespread, nor are their historical examples where this was the case.
There are no extant cases of countries that allow limited torture where greater abuse is not wide-spread (see the US), nor are there any historical examples where this was the case.
The United States has not been in the last 5 years, nor will be in the future the first country to square these circles.
It's not just the signal to noise, but also the bleeding of the technique into less and less important investigations.
55:Yeah, yeah FL says:"Well, can't we just have a little teeny bit of torture, for the really bad guys in really special circumstances. I promise it will be controlled."
And I am the crazy one. Well, I am but it isn't always relevant.
You support human rights when it hurts, not til it hurts.
I read one of those books about steroids in baseball. The one by the reporter for the Boston paper. One bit in it that horrified me: When Mark Mgwire's use of the over the counter steroid was revealed, its sales shot up by I forget whether it was 20 fold or 200 fold. When he renounced it, they cut in half -- both actions had a big effect, but the cue that it was ok was bigger.
I say this because all over America 11 year olds are preparing to strap their 7 year old siblings to boards.....
At least they're not IMing
58:Hey, has Foley actually abused any kids? We can find out.
As in the other thread, I think FL is scared of me. In my long shamblings on Skid Row, I found the people scared and bothered by me were the scarey ones. Not to be trusted.
Fuck the flame war or difficult moral questions. I ain't playing tonight.
People, Labs isn't advocating torture, just asking, as analytic philosohers are wont to do, whether we can think of realistic exceptional circumstances where a blanket ban would be the wrong policy.
It's not worth clarifying that 59 is in no way what I've been saying, is it?
57: keep in mind I didn't endorse the rule discussed in 30. Suppose your gloss on the spillover effects is right; I'm happy to take that on as one of the relevant empirical claims. The point of all this is that 18 is bad, so I blame mrh.
I think that some things are extralegal for a reason. And yet there are people who I think I would like and respect who decide to break the law, knoringly and willfully. They do it for a variety of reasons. One of them is because they think the ends do in fact justify the means. Look at it this way. If its important enough to torture for, it should be important enough to break the law for. But making these things legal makes them mundane. ANd that means huge trouble, as opposed to the smaller trouble of extra legal torture that we know happens anyway.
Another way of looking at it is to see one of our most well known fictional torturers, the Dennis Franz character on NYPD Blue, Sipowicz. Do you think he wants it to be legal to allow him to go beat the crap out of handcuffed suspects. I'd bet not.
62:I need the huge gap between the two explained, especially in practice. We had a very real example, in KSM, who very well might have known of a second group of 18 hijackers. Strikes me as a "realistic exceptional etc..." Not a philosopher's game, since the dude was tortured.
Not "having a blanket ban" that is not "advocating torture...sometimes" is not clear to me.
McMannie, the difference is between "advocating" and "trying to think of."
Did Powerline just pull the 'works every time' comment out of its ass?
I'm having a hard time designing a plausible scenario where a) we know with certainty that Prisoner X has information about Horrific Plot Y and b) we know that Horrific Plot Y is going to lead to many lives lost yet c) do not know enough information about Horrific Plot Y to act on it. That is, it seems that if we were to have a maxim that said 'Only torture when you know X,Y, and Z will result if you won't' if we knew X, Y, and Z would result, we wouldn't need to torture.
I'm telling you cala, that kind of thing happens on NYPD Blue all the time.
The thing is, this is all ancient in the blogosphere. The consensus was that we keep the blanket ban, and the agent takes responsibility, including criminal liability, for any exceptions. Old old news.
A state endorsement of exceptions diffuses responsibility to the extent that it empowers the individual agent and removes his sense of his agency. You will inevitably get abu Ghraibs.
67: cala, I agree with you about everything, but that's a bad argument. I might have sufficient warrant that X has knowledge of some plot or other such that...without knowing the details of Y in particular.
I have no idea where this "works every time" thing comes from. Barnett and Powerline talk about it as though it's "snow is white" but there's no source or evidence or anything. Weird.
Ooh, ooh, and Jack Bauer does it, too. And Jack Bauer has magic manbag in which he can pull out any gadget possible and yet it is always flat! CTU developed the Bag of Holding!
So we can allow torture by blonde agents with handbags, but only if it's ten minutes or less to the hour. The other fifty minutes they must be boring.
I think part of the reaction, FL, is attributable to the fact that no one has a very good model of how this all works. Any policy proposal, even from experts, is likely to have a high "out-of-my-ass" quotient. Determinations about the efficacy of this policy are not going to be driven by data--unless things get so out of hand with it that we simply can't stand it. Given how little we know, I don't trust us. We're a nation of wusses. After all, we invaded a random country because we had time on our hands, and that meant time to be afraid. If we start torturing for terrorism, we'll end up torturing for carjackings and WWWA worries.
70:This isn't hard.
FL, we pick up KSM on September 12, 2001. The MAN with the plans.
Would you torture him?
I might have sufficient warrant that X has knowledge of some plot or other such that...without knowing the details of Y in particular.
But in that case we're sort of back to sj's situation in 1; where we suspect someone has useful information, but have no way to verify if what they screech after being waterboarded is true, useful, or just what we want to hear. I mean, I hope we're not going to just waterboard foot soldiers and chase down any fool thing they say; so I'm guessing we have some knowledge of what the guy is plotting, too, so we can judge if the information we get is reliable.
That ABC article from end of last year seemed to indicate most people don't last very long.
Hrmmm. Ok, 1> we got a bunch of wimpy CIA recruits, (not likely true - it's a different thing to get the treatment in training versus getting it from the enemy) and 2> I suspect waterboarding works on the actual 'enemy combatants' because they've been sleep-deprived, frozen, and slapped around for many many hours, and THEN they get the waterboarding. Cracking at that point wouldn't be a surprise. Of course, by that point, they're probably hallucinating.
I say this because all over America 11 year olds are preparing to strap their 7 year old siblings to boards.....
{waves}
As I said, CIA recruits are apparently wimps.
As for legitimacy of torture: hrmph. If I capture and isolate 100 guys who work for the same org, and then I beat the shit out of them, they'll all eventually confess to something. If I collate that information, I may get something useful (i.e. multi-sourced, true, and interesting). And about ten thousand things I don't need (i.e. untrue, just a rumour, or uninteresting).
These loons we have in power seem to be working on the Soviet model - get your charges to confess to anything and then report success, along with everything anybody says. The noise from untrue things sucks up all the oxygen from true things.
The morality eludes me: torture is nicer than summary execution, I think. Not much nicer, but nicer. Beyond that, what? The ticking time bomb scenario ignores the fact that in all likelihood the bomb is going to go off - the odds of successfully extracting correct and relevant and useful information within the neccessary time frame is near nil.
max
['Why am I awake? I should go to bed.']
74: yeah, that's the point I talked about in the linked post.
This is an astonishing conversation to have on a theoretically "good guy" blog this weekend. All the other blogs I visit are grieving and raging, not flirting with the hypothetical oh so qualified analytically deconstructed well-parsed waterboarders.
Bob, you deranged old man, this has always been the blog to take apparently crazy arguments as seriously as possible. If we're "good guys," that's why. You shouldn't mistake that for endorsement or lack of outrage.
78:Go at it then. I have not the heart for it today.
Hey... for all you Democrats out there (and this is coming from a real lefty, not a fake one) here's a quick quiz:
1) Which act did more to cut back on habeas corpus: the detainee act that Bush is about to sign into law, or AEDPA?
2) Assuming you even know what AEDPA is, tell me -- who signed AEDPA into law?
3) Isn't it great that voting for Nader will restore all our habeas rights?
Oh Christ, it's a troll tsunami. Wasn't he the pro-Nader guy? Or the generic Green party guy? I refuse to google.
Something I would like to understand about waterboarding is: Why does it trigger the gag reflex?
As I understand it, you've got cellophane over your face, which they then pour water on top of. But the water isn't actually going into your nose or mouth, is it? I mean, they're covered with cellophane, right? So what makes you gag? And what would happen if the people waterboarding you didn't stop the treatment? Would you actually die, or would you just get terrified that death was at hand? In short, is it a physical torture, or a psychological one with really big, scary-looking props?
"3) Isn't it great that voting for Nader will restore all our habeas rights?"
So you don't even have the intellectual honesty to answer my questions?
You guys can pretend like you care about habeas corpus all you want. But the fact is, AEDPA cut back on habeas about a thousand times more than this latest round of laws.
And yet, you all support the politicians who created it....
Please explain to me how that is not utter and complete hypocrisy.
We need to know that if you waterboard someone who doesn't have information then the waterboarding will reveal that fact. The only way to settle this empirically is to commission a double-blind placebo test, with the placebo being some kind of water-based solution, of course.
I think the answer to (1) is the detainee act, actually, but if I say this I will be waterboarded by the ensuing conversation.
83: I was wondering about that. And apparently it's supposed to work if you know you're not actually going to drown, which makes me wonder why you can't just try your best to stay calm and hold your breath. The descriptions make it seem so bad-ass (14 seconds!) that I know that won't work, but I don't get why.
Biker, you should watch the video in 27. It's not always cellophane. And as I understand the cellophane thing, I imagine that the water would force it to stick to your face such that you can't get any air. (But that's just a guess, and it makes more sense with the cloth, like they used in the video linked at 27, but then that guy held out for 24 minutes, so maybe it's not quite the same.)
"think the answer to (1) is the detainee act, actually"
Then you don't know shit about AEDPA. Because AEDPA has already been used to deprive literally tens of thousands of people (perhhaps hundreds) of the right of habeas corpus.
Talk to anyone who actually practices criminal law - someone who has to deal with AEDPA all the time. Like, say, me...
Clearly, we need more waterboarding videos.
Then you don't know shit about AEDPA.
He set you up, Labs.
He set you up, Labs.
I know, I had no idea that was coming next. For the next seventeen hours we will discuss how to make sense of quantitative analogies like cut back on habeas about a thousand times more until I confess my role in the USS Cole bombing and plead for mercy.
"He set you up, Labs."
Tell me, if you're a lawyer, have you ever had to deal with AEDPA on behalf of a client?
Have you ever had to actually apply AEDPA to someone facing the death penalty, say as a federa law clerk?
Because I have -- in both capacities.
And let me tell you, AEDPA makes the detainee act look like the fucking Bill of Rights.
Don't believe me? Then you've had absolutely ZERO experience practicing criminal law.
So tell me again, who signed AEDPA into law???
My money's on Abraham Lincoln. Abraham fucking Lincoln.
"For the next seventeen hours we will discuss how to make sense of quantitative analogies like cut back on habeas about a thousand times more until I confess my role in the USS Cole bombing and plead for mercy."
NO. REALLY. LET'S TALK ABOUT AEDPA.
After all, why not? Do you have some objection to talking about what federal statutes affect habeas corpus?
Since you guys care so much about habeas corpus, I think you'd be really, really interested in federal laws that seriously impact it.
So why, all of a sudden, do you think this particular topic is no longer worthy of discussion?
Yeah, that sounds like something the ol' rail-splitter would do.
Crap, he used the shift key. I am honor-bound to comply.
He was gay, you know. "Effective Death Penalty" is a bath house term of art.
So why, all of a sudden, do you think this particular topic is no longer worthy of discussion?
Beats me. Use of all caps and multiple question marks usually means "satisfying conversation ahead"
That's what the civil war was about, Ogged. Not many people understand this.
In fairness, it's not shocking that all the "I'll be your slave," "it's time for an effective death penalty" talk has confused historians, most of whom are straight and narrow.
"He was gay, you know. "Effective Death Penalty" is a bath house term of art."
Gee, you're so fucking witty.
So easy to demonstrate you're superior by getting snarky, isn't it? So much easier than actually engaging in a serious discussion, isn't it?
Come one, now: Let's talk seriously. What are you afraid of?
I've had clients on death row, and we had to contend with the statutes signed into law by the politicians YOU support. Laws that pretty much eliminated the right of habeas corpus altogether.
You think that's funny? You think that's not worthy of a serious response? You think your half-assed snark puts you above it all?
If not, then what the fuck are you afraid of? Come on, let's rumble, mf. I'm in a real mood tonight.
Oh, and um, for anyone who isn't up on their recent history: President Clinton signed AEDPA into law.
And you goddamned better believe AEDPA was a vastly more substantial impact on habeas corpus. The shear numbers prove it. You want me to quote the statistics?
Rumble!
Don't make me cut you bitch.
Who would I rather knife fight, Ogged or Labs? Labs has reach, but Persians use those blades with the wicked curve. On the other hand, it's easier to find Lab's kidney.
Gah, you're an idiot. First, everyone knows it was Lincoln. Second, the point of talking about quantification is that the "shear" numbers prove no such thing, because it's not the kind of claim that can be demonstrated by numerical comparison. The detainee bill isn't even a law yet, so that's obviously a nonsensical test.
Right. The world's a big fucking joke to you all, isn't it.
Of course, you have the luxury of pretending to be serious when you need to sound progressive (see habeas corpus), then shifting back into joke mode when someone calls you on your bullshit.
Good for you. How clever of you. Clearly, you really enjoy your searing wit, and clearly, anybody who doesn't swallow it is just not kool enough.
Unfortunately there are plenty of people in this country for whom your jokes are fucking useless. A lot of them are stuck in prison because of your own hypocrisy. Some day, it might actually dawn on you...
Pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hands, would you, Ogged?
gswift, keep in mind that Ogged is pretty long-armed, but thin, so there's less to cut. I worry that I'm the one you'd want to stab.
It must have been the "what are you afraid of?" line. Nothing gets to Labs like being called a chicken for not responding to trolls.
I don't think he's allowed to walk away from a rumble. Code of the street or something.
"Nothing gets to Labs like being called a chicken for not responding to trolls."
Right - trolls always want to engage in discussions about constitutional law. It's a dead giveaway.
This from someone who once hurled accusations of narcissism -- while publishing a blog largely devoted to expounding on her own personal life and all the fascinating dramas that surround it.
How rich...
It was 105, I couldn't take the category mistake.
Mahan, you little tease, I actually said something substantive in response to your comments, and now all you can do is complain. Let me know when your reaches rock, ok?
I'm guessing this is not the same Mahan Atma.
Seriously, doesn't 105 offend against human dignity? What statistics could show that a bill that hasn't been signed into law yet has caused (or will cause?) more harm than something signed into law in 1863? It's a blatantly question-begging test. And there's a broader issue of comparing different habeas violations as if they were all of equal weight. This is like the Naderite Hugh Hewitt.
117: wouldn't that be sweet? Or this guy.
Now that I think about it...
At the same time though, I seemed to be struggling with my own self-identity and purpose in life. At the peak I seemed to have delusions of grandeur about myself, considering myself a messenger from God, and sometimes acting like an ass as a result. I was sleeping only 2 to 4 hours a night, and driving my wife nuts with manic behavior of all sorts. I never got depressed though, just plain manic! Life seemed magical and yet I was aware that I was bordering on what might have been described as mental illness, at least from the perspective of an outsider.
Huh.
Your lone substantive response was:
"it's not the kind of claim that can be demonstrated by numerical comparison. The detainee bill isn't even a law yet, so that's obviously a nonsensical test."
Fine. Actually, that sounds more like an argument more favorable for my side (you said the detainee act wasthe more substantial incursion, right?) but let's look at the number of people that it applies to in the future then:
Let's see: AEDPA applies to prisoners regardless of whether they're declared enemy combatants. The pool of persons it applies to is necessarily larger than the detaine act, no?
Come on now -- we're talking about everybody who's imprisoned in the U.S., compared with the comparatively small number of people who will come under purview of the detainee act.
Think about it: For example, AEDPA's one-year statute of limitations applies to EVERYONE in custody. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of people. The federal courts deal with this routinely. Ask any federal judge on the bench.
So damned straight the numbers prove it. If you don't think so, you have no idea how many people run up against AEDPA every day. If you think the number of people who come under the detainee act in the next ten years will even approach that, you simply have no idea what's going on in the world today.
Can we pretend this is him? That would make this even funnier.
I try to adopt an attitude of gratitude prior to the trip, and I usually make an offering of some sort by helping out the local homeless folks with generous gifts of food and cash. Also, the experience of orgasm while tripping, especially after a period of abstinence, is extremely intense and transformative.
Mahan, you're still tripping. The point is twofold: (a) numerical comparsion of, say, people affected by the two bills is nonsensical because of the timeframe problem, but more seriously (b) in order to get the argument of 123 to work you'd need to assume that the way to assess harms is simply to count habeas violations, which is seriously implausible for reasons that I hope are too obvious to need spelling out.
Fuck it. You people don't want to talk about this seriously.
Anybody who supports the politicans who made AEDPA law doesn't know what time of day it is... You're clueless. Completely fucking clueless. Go talk to a federal judge who actually has to enforce that law.
Oh, one more little fact for you: Guess who authored much of AEDPA: Fucking John Yoo.
Don't you just love finding yourselves on the same side as John Yoo?
Come back here and fight like a drugged out mystic! I'm in the midst of constructing a counterexample!
Actually, that law was written by John C. Calhoun.
"Actually, that law was written by John C. Calhoun."
The law was written by a group of people. And one of them was John Yoo - he wrote quite a bit of it. He's really proud ot it in fact; ask him sometime.
And let's set aside a second the question of which law has the greatest impact on habeas -- because you're right, one has yet to act -- even though I think it's pretty bloody obvious.
There's absolutely no disputing the fact that AEDPA has had a HUGE negative impact on the right of habeas corpus. If you don't think so, fine, I'll go dig up the statistics. But frankly, anybody who disputes that knows absolutely zip about criminal law.
So, tell me if this is accurate or not:
A Democratic president signed that bill into law.
The vast majority of you supported that President, and still support his party.
This is a President who signed into law a bill that enormously cut back on the right of habeas corpus.
And you responded how...?
You wrote how many letters or made how many phone calls in response to AEDPA...?
You continued to vote for whom...?
And now you yell about habeas corpus...?
This is not hypocrisy how...?
Long live the Bucktails! Vote the Clintonians out!
Alright, I get the Lincoln joke now. Signed into law by Lincoln? After the Oklahoma City bombing???
wikipedia... WTF???
I'm actually interested, now, in what the effect of AEDPA was; Mahan, if you'd like to actually explain that, I'd read it. (Your explanation has to be more substantive than "drastically cut back on habeas rights", though—you have to say how it did it.)
I'll go dig up the statistics.
You should stop making this mistake; it's painful to watch. The point, for the third time, is that you need something in addition to your often-threatened statistics*, namely, you need some kind of argument that moves us from those numbers to conclusion about relative harms or relative rights violations. Is someone who is denied access to any court at all harmed more or less than someone who had a jury trial but, via AEDPA, was denied habeas rights in some other way? Clearly the way to do this isn't to count persons, but you haven't said anything beyond that about what the relevant metric is. Please don't say something dumb about summing hedons.
*I'm omitting the temporal issue for clarity here.
I know, you really want to talk about how much you hate Abraham Lincoln, which is shameful by itself, since he freed the slaves. But you come in with all this AEDPA vs. DA stuff, and then you fuck up your own argument. It kills the fun.
man, i'm drunk and don't have the patience to read much of this thread, but I think i've got the gist of it, enough so that I can clear up the core debate.
Here goes: of course it would be right for Harry to use the cruciatus curse on Voldemort (or one of his Death Eaters) in order to to get the information of where he/they had sequestered Ginny.
It would be nice if an actual lawyer would appear in this thread to explain what the hell Mahan Atma is talking about. It seems to me that if whatever he is talking about is something that corresponds to an objective reality, there would be at least one conservative blog that might use it as a defense of the recent torture bill. Or maybe it would have been mentioned in at least one news story, or opinion piece, or evenhanded legal blog. But maybe I'm wrong to assume such a thing.
Mahan, if you want to get the word out about your astonishing discovery, you should start by telling people who are already predisposed to agree with you.
It kind of sucked reading the last book before reading Order of the Phoenix.
Ned, it's all going to culminate in Ralph Nader, if that gives you any idea.
Well, plus (and really, it's late Saturday night so I'm only skimming), even if there is some prior law that no one knows any details about that fucked up habeas, being upset about the *new* law doesn't make anyone a hypocrite. It just makes us ignorant of something that happened, what, ten years ago? When few of us were reading blogs? (Emerson excepted, of course.) And the point is, what, that this didn't get covered in the mainstream media and we aren't aware of it, and so none of us are allowed, like, evah! to complain about anything else.
Or like, something. I think.
Oh, right, Nader. Now I remember. Pwned by 138.
And that's just the kind of tired argument I needed to help me nod off. 'Nighty-night, all.
"I'm actually interested, now, in what the effect of AEDPA was; Mahan, if you'd like to actually explain that, I'd read it."
Sure, OK. Basically, AEDPA set up a large number of procedural hurdles that make it extremely difficult for prisoners to get relief via habeas -- even if they're innocent.
First, one of the most significant ways (which goes unmentioned by fucking wikipedia) was the 1-year statute of limitations on filing a petition.
Keep in mind that federal prisoners often have no lawyers, or they have ineffective lawyers. Also, they get moved around a lot, so they miss a lot of their mail. For a very large number of them, a 1-year statute means "no habeas" because they miss out on the ability to file a petition -- either because they couldn't get a lawyer to do it, or they never received the legal papers that would let them do it themselves.
Second, AEDPA codified (and strengthened) a great deal of the case law that cut back on a prisoner's ability to file a habeas petition. For example, one has to "exhaust" their appeals at the state level, and any opinion about federal law the state courts make has to be given a very high level of deference.
Well, that sounds reasonable, until you realize that one fails to "exhaust" their state-level appeal if they miss the deadline by a day, or if their lawyer missed a deadline, or if they lawyer failed to spot an important issue, even if the prisoner has evidence of actual innocence...
Slavery was wrong, B, and Lincoln ended it.
"It just makes us ignorant of something that happened, what, ten years ago?"
Um... yes, it does. That was ancient history apparently, ten years ago, back before there were "blogs".
You know, it could have been much more pleasant had you entered the conversation by saying, hey, AEDPA really undermined habeas too, only not many people pay attention to it. Here's how it works...but no, it had to be all I-will-now-quiz-the-blog and did-you-know-who-signed-it and all of that tired bullshit. This is bad because it involves you in a stupid argument about comparing harms, but mainly it's bad because you look like a tool.
141 makes sense. There's still quite a difference between merely putting nonsensical and cruel limitations on a prisoner's access to the court system, and making it legally impossible to have any recourse at all to habeas corpus.
Searching the internets, it seems that Glenn Reynolds actually wrote some sort of article at the time about how terrible the habeas provision of AEDPA was. Presumably nowadays his opinion of it would be "Heh, Clinton forced John Yoo to add the one-year statute instead of just doing away with habeas entirely, which was the obvious way to prevent another Oklahoma City islamofascist bombing. Well, we're paying for it now. Never forget 9/11, LOL."
Yes, I was going to harp on the de facto/ de jure thing, since it compounds the basic problem, but I thought that I should lay off a bit.
"you need some kind of argument that moves us from those numbers to conclusion about relative harms or relative rights violations. Is someone who is denied access to any court at all harmed more or less than someone who had a jury trial but, via AEDPA, was denied habeas rights in some other way?"
FL... I emphasize the numbers because they're absolutely overwhelming, and it's practically irrelevant to point out the degree of constitutional violation.
Look: Even if you just count the number of prisoners who are denied juries altogether (e.g. because they have lawyers who are too stupid to put on a jury trial), the numbers we're talking about are vastly greater than the number of "enemy combatants" the US has in custody and WILL have in custody for the next ten years and counting.
Dude... go down to fucking Alabama, or Mississippi, or Texas sometime, and WATCH a goddamn capital trial... It isn't hard: There are dozens of them going on all the time... And the vast, vast majority of them end up not one fucking whit better than the military tribunals these detainees are going to get...
No one has said anything about Dershowitz's comments in the video at #27?
Anyway, based on that video, it looks like the guy doing the waterboarding COULD actually kill the boardee if he just held that wet rag in the guy's mouth and nose long enough.
"This is bad because it involves you in a stupid argument about comparing harms, but mainly it's bad because you look like a tool."
OK... Fair enough. I'm sorry I came in with an attitude.
For whatever reason, I'm really pissed off tonight. People get that way sometimes.
But think of it from my perspective: You all get pissed off at me the same way you get pissed off at someone who votes for Lieberman.
But I see you all voting for people who look a lot like Liebermans to me.
So perhaps you'll afford me the right to get pissy at times.
Otherwise, it's a good blog you have here. I enjoy reading it.
Take it easy, I have to get back to work now.
Mahan, I'm too tired for this routine, and you keep misconstruing my point. I tried engaging with your original question, i.e.,
1) Which act did more to cut back on habeas corpus: the detainee act that Bush is about to sign into law, or AEDPA?
but it's brought me nothing but irritation, since you don't seem to see why that question is confused. As I said above, there's a way of pursuing your agenda that might actually get people interested in AEDPA, but all you've done is acted like a troll. The only way to redeem yourself involves generous gifts of food and cash.
149 is an Unfogged Classic. No, sorry, that right is not afforded. Please just stop.
With all the fussing and feuding, it's like God placed this in the morning paper just for us.
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,650194565,00.html
There was a quotation in the Deseret Morning News that sheds some light on the problems of the world. "Hate is an infernal cancer that corrodes the soul." There are a lot of souls being corroded.Lee Oliver SquiresAmerican Fork
The rest of you only think you have the worst local paper in the world.
The writ of tedious corpus has been suspended.
"You don't seem to see why that question is confused."
I don't think it's confused because I think the answer is obvious regardless of how you meausre "more harm to habeas corpus".
Now, if it comes to pass that the Execuitive Branch locks up 100,000 innocent citizens without trials, then yes, I'll have to reconsider my answer. But, having worked closely with a few federal judges, I have good reason to believe our judiciary will call a halt to it long before then, and that we won't actually end up with 100,000 innocent people in custody w/o trials.
" As I said above, there's a way of pursuing your agenda..."
OK, but please understand that "my agenda" is basically "respecting habeas corpus", which would appear to be aligned with your agenda, should I take you at face value.
So I'm also asking that you do take me at face value (as opposed to being a troll, as some here do).
"The only way to redeem yourself involves generous gifts of food and cash. "
OK, no prob. Just tell me where to send them.
I think that 57 is right. Whatever restrictions are put on torture will have little effect. Once you allow torture at all, it will become routine. I think that in general, you don't violate taboos just a little bit.
I ahve always loved the ability of analytic philosophy to clarify issues to the point they're undecidable. Here's the all purpose analytic philosophy mental experiment.
Once a problem is properly posed, it's insoluble.
At the risk of prolonging something, I'll say that the AEDPA was and continues to be truly awful, that the chances for repeal of this law, even under a Democratic majority, are vanishingly slim, and that the criminal justice system, especially as to appointing counsel in capital cases, is as totally fucked up as the fellow says.
Now from the perspective of a single human locked up, there's a difference between (a) a guy who's locked up indefinitely, maybe for life, never had a trial of any kind, who has a pending habeas case -- the first time there's going to be any examination of his circumstances whatsoever -- and has his pending case dismissed with no right of appeal whatsoever and (b) a guy who's been convicted of a crime, had an appointed lawyer who maybe wasn't all that good, has exhausted his direct appeals, and gets told he has a short window in which to file his one true shot at federal habeas, and -- correct me if I'm wrong -- if he had a pending petition that one slips on through. Still, the system of which the AEDPA is a part is so messed up that for a vast number of prisoners this difference is immaterial.
How to change the law? Create a progressive mass movement that sweeps the states of the Confederacy -- this thing can't be northerners lecturing southerners -- and totally upgrade the criminal and habeas bars. The first has to include the second as an element: not just adequate funding for criminal cases, but paying firms like LB's their full market rates to take capital cases. Or habeas petitions (but don't pay for frivolous petitions).
I look forward to the creation of that movement.
On 'when can I torture' the answer, as Comrade McManus says, has long ago been worked out: if you're right, and you save tens of thousands of people, you can look forward to either a Pardon or a Nullification. If you're wrong you go to jail. And you'd face a civil suit too (as if you'd have any money left after your criminal prosecution).
Choose wisely.
Charley, rather than organize a mass non-Northerner-lecturing-Southerners progressive movement in the old Confederacy, it would be more practical and easier either to go back to Appomattox, unsign the treaty, recognize the CSA, merge with Canada, and build the fence along the Mason-Dixon line.
Or else, as I was going to say, giving away fifty or a hundred million one-way tickets to Saudi Arabia and other suitably conservative places.
I looked in on AEDPA, and while it has an immediate effect on more people, as a precedent it doesn't authorize anywhere near as much as the new law does. I don't get the idea that ARDPA is worse than the new law at all; the new law hasn't even been signed yet, so it has had no effect so far.
If you want me to denounce Clinton for signing that bill, I'd be glad to, and I did so at the time.
If you want me to denounce the Democrats in favor of the Greens or some other splinter party, go fuck yourself. The Greens and the other splinter parties have no possibility of ever accomplishing anything. If the Democrats go down, and they might, America goes down.
Mahan Atma, you just pulled the same trick that the Republicans pull all the time: "Name one person who's been harmed by this new law." Duh.
Same with the PATRIOT Act. It's a bad precedent, regardless of whether it's been misused yet. (My opinion is that Bush has consistently backloaded the effects of the things he runs through, so that government will be completely transformed by the time that the average guy realizes that anything has happened.)
For the record, right now I've got to say: God bless Bob McManus. Over the last week I've come to agree with everything he's said here.
just last night I was freaking out and saying: jesus, this is what mcmanus feels like all the time! I think emerson made the same point, that we were all coming round to their way of thinking.
I always thought being great-soulled involved less pissiness, but my sanskrit is for shit now, so maybe I'm wrong.
158 -- Ten new states would have the desired effect.
But if you must undo Appmx, then please let's make the Potomac the border: she no longer spurns the northern scum.
162 -- I find Dr. McManus to be an expert diagnostician, but have some concerns about filling his prescriptions.
Out for the day, but I'll leave you guys with a song lyric:
Everybody I talk to is ready to leave
With the light of the morning
They've seen the end coming down long enough to believe
That they've heard their last warning
Standing alone
Each has his own ticket in his hand
And as the evening descends
I sit thinking 'bout Everyman
Seems like I've always been looking for some other place
To get it together
Where with a few of my friends I could give up the race
And maybe find something better
But all my fine dreams
Well thought out schemes to gain the motherland
Have all eventually come down to waiting for Everyman
Waiting here for Everyman--
Make it on your own if you think you can
If you see somewhere to go I understand
Waiting here for Everyman--
Don't ask me if he'll show -- baby I don't know
Make it on your own if you think you can
Somewhere later on you'll have to take a stand
Then you're going to need a hand
Everybody's just waiting to hear from the one
Who can give them the answers
And lead them back to that place in the warmth of the sun
Where sweet childhood still dances
Who'll come along
And hold out that strong and gentle father's hand?
Long ago I heard someone say something 'bout Everyman
Waiting here for Everyman--
Make it on your own if you think you can
If you see somewhere to go I understand
I'm not trying to tell you that I've seen the plan
Turn and walk away if you think I am--
But don't think too badly of one who's left holding sand
He's just another dreamer, dreaming 'bout Everyman
All the way back to 29: Belle Waring's awesome powers of stipulation
Now, if it comes to pass that the Execuitive Branch locks up 100,000 innocent citizens without trials, then yes, I'll have to reconsider my answer.
But that's not the point at all. We're supposed to have the protection of habeas corpus, not the protection of a magnanimous and benevolent government, that could at any moment lock up 100,000 citizens without trials, but chooses not to wield that power which they rightfully have but refrain from using out of the kindness of their nature. Then habeas corpus isn't a right, but a blessing granted by a wise dictator.
If you're just pissed off because no one's saying 'but Clinton's worse!111!', this seems a bit wrongheaded. AEDPA was passed in 1996. I don't have a link to my blog comments from then because I was 15 and there weren't any blogs.
One more voice for even though Atma's really annoying, AEDPA is awful, and one of the things Clinton should have been terribly, terribly ashamed of. Nonetheless, there's an incredible difference between a law stating that you only have an incredibly procedurally limited opportunity to have your rights vindicated in court, and one stating that you can never be heard at all.
Also worth noting the number of Green senators who voted against the bill in 1996.
Just got here, and since CC already commented and didn't mention it so I'm assuming I'm wrong, but aren't we just ignoring the existence of state law habeas (however limited and insufficient that is).
From 110: Clearly, you really enjoy your searing wit, and clearly, anybody who doesn't swallow it is just not kool enough.
Can you swallow wit? I mean, even if you could, wouldn't searing wit be a thing to avoid swallowing? It would burn, right?
I believe 165 misses the point of 29.
It's in the realm of possibility that the author of 165 does not know the point of 29, in which case mentioning it again does no good.
I'm not addressing the author of 165.
But it is not forbidden to mention the person mentioned in 29.
163,164:I blush, and get all Sally Fieldish
My political awakening was the election of Ronald Reagan, when the economics just felt wrong. "Bigger and better, forever and ever. And it's free!" So I started studying Marxism.
And then Jonathan Schell wrote:"Fate of the Earth"
A forgotten book? I stopped being an American somewhere around then. Charleycarp, there's your prescription:World Government, based on the conventions and protocols. The end of the nation-state. Europe is in the lead, they tweak and twinge, but the consensus looks pretty solid. I think China & India are buying in, and the added momentum will create a juggernaut.
The reaction is so strong, Islam and Dixie, because the goal is in sight. Nostalgia drove Hitler & Mussolini, it drives much politics (Bush & Osama & a confused Putin) today. But do Chavez and Ahmadjined (the cool Iran dude) or Sistani feel like nationalist or internationalists? A disarmed world is almost available for the asking, when all the warriors will become cops, because there is only one Law. No more War.
Identity is becoming optional, a matter of Choice. Culture is becoming Fashion. Resistance is futile.
Freedom is fun.
Thus speaketh Zarathustra.
Really late to this party, since I've been busy atoning for my sins, but:
63: Hey! Shut up!
Way, way back at 35: I'm skeptical of the Barnett extreme and the "it really doesn't work ever" extreme, but it's not like there are a lot of big studies from noninterested parties on this.
Don't we have reasonably good evidence for "It doesn't work often enough to be worth it," from the Israelis? I'm too lazy to google this up right now, but my understanding is that they used to use coercive interrogation, and they quit because it was being overused and wasn't all that effective. That seems like a strong data point in favor of "it really isn't all that effective".
LB, I too am too lazy to look it up, but the "it doesn't work" claims I heard from Israeli interrogators, CIA types, etc. was pretty coarse-grained; it tended to talk about "coercive treatment" as a broad category without supplying details about what the techniques were, how they were administered, how the results were fact-checked, and so on. And then there are the Larry Johnson types, who aren't much help.
I finally listened to the Wait, Wait track, and while it's very cool that Katherine was cited, it's VERY depressing that the contestent (who presumably is an NPR junkie) couldn't answer the detainee question correctly.
Oh, okay, the constestant is a little daft.
It's hard to figure out what I was talking about out of context but she really seemed fairly clueless.
This will surprise no one, but: The idea that we stopped a suicide attack on the Library Tower by waterboarding KSM is bullshit. There seems to have been a real plot, and we may have got info from KSM after the fact (though some parts of his confession seem dubious to me), but the plot was actually called off over a year before we captured him, not because we waterboarded anyone but because the pilot (Zaini Zakaria) got cold feet and one of the other ringleaders (Masran Arshad) was captured by Malaysia in early 2002.
LB, I didn't see anyone answer your "painting of a guy being waterboarded" question. If you didn't find it, here's the link. (You probably saw it at Crooked Timber?)
The notion that "waterboarding always works" is surely true, if "works" = "utters some b.s. or other."
179: I don't get 'coarse-grained' as a criticism. If knowledgable professionals (Israeli intelligence, CIA) say 'coercive interrogation isn't much use -- we've tried it and gave it up, not only for moral reasons but because we weren't finding it effective,' that's coarse-grained, but seems to cover waterboarding. Someone making the claim that 'Sure, frightening and hurting someone in other ways won't effectively make them talk, but making them think they're drowning is completely different; that really works,' is making a strong claim without any visible support. Why would waterboarding be different than other torture? If it is so effective, why don't the Israeli intelligence forces use that, rather than the other methods that were ineffective?
When you've got a broad statement from a knowledgable source that 'none of these tactics are useful', and someone else who says 'this tactic is different', I think the onus is on the the latter speaker to explain why the first speaker was wrong: he'd never heard of the tactic in question; he's not actually knowledgeable about the subject matter, something. I haven't seen any such explanation of what makes waterboarding different.