Conservatives (still) love torture

November 30, 2007

At Wednesday’s night debate for Republican presidential candidates, one of the more notable exchanges pitted Mitt Romney and John McCain on the issue of torture. Romney, flustered, struggled to explain his position on waterboarding. McCain, confident, claimed the high ground.

“I would hope that we would understand, my friends, that life is not 24 and Jack Bauer. Life is interrogation techniques which are humane and yet effective. And I just came back from visiting a prison in Iraq. The Army general there said that the techniques under the Army Field Manual are working and working effectively, and he didn’t think they need to do anything else.

“My friends, this is what America is all about. This is a defining issue, and clearly, we should be able if we want to be commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces to take a definite and positive position on, and that is we will never allow torture to take place in the United States of America.”

The crowd in the auditorium applauded. The collection of undecided Republican voters GOP pollster Frank Luntz assembled for a focus group was far less pleased. Time’s Joe Klein sat in and was amazed.

Now, for the uninitiated: dials are little hand-held machines that enable a focus group member to register instantaneous approval or disapproval as the watch a candidate on TV. There are limitations to the technology: all a candidate has to do is mention, say, Abraham Lincoln and the dials go off into the stratosphere. Film of soaring eagles will have the same effect. But the technology does have its uses. […]

When John McCain started talking about torture — specifically, about waterboarding — the dials plummeted again. Lower even than for the illegal Children of God. Down to the low 20s, which, given the natural averaging of a focus group, is about as low as you can go. Afterwards, Luntz asked the group why they seemed to be in favor of torture. “I don’t have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11,” said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly.

Have I mentioned lately that the Republican base is a scary facet of American society?

McCain wasn’t the only one to come up short by striking a compassionate-conservative tone.

In the next segment — the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee’s college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants — I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, “After all, these are children of God,” the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s). These Republicans were hard.

Obviously, this was just one focus group, which may or may not be representative of the party, but the results were disconcerting.

The members of the group were overwhelmingly white. There were two Latinos. They seemed nice, concerned, relatively well informed and entirely intolerant citizens. This level of anger … seems likely to be exploited disgracefully by the Republican candidate in the general election campaign, especially if it’s Romney. I hope the nativists lose, as they almost always have in American history. But I’m worried that they may not.

The party will come to its senses after losing a few more election cycles, right? Right?

It will be interesting to see if the Repug party can be wrested from the hands of real extremists. People who were derided (even by ‘moderate” Republicans) as racists, lunatics, dolts, religious nuts, and fascists back in the late 60’s have spent decades gaining control of the party. I doubt that they’ll relinquish control, resulting in most rational people joining a broader based Democratic party that will spend a great deal of time involved with infighting.

  • When I attended Sunday school at a mainline Protestant church several decades ago, I learned and often sang a song that included the following lines: “Jesus loves the little children / All the children of the world / Red and Yellow, Black and White / They’re all precious in His sight / Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

    Apparently these Republicans who participated in Luntz’s focus group don’t agree with the sentiments expressed in that song.

    What’s going on here? Do our nation’s fundies believe that the only children God recognizes as his own are the children of born-again American parents?

  • I think it is a bizarre psychological defense mechanism to gilded-class guilt about never serving their country. It makes them resent those who do, and particularly those who use that military experience to “trump” the individual Rethug’s unearned wealth. This nicely explains how this allegedly “pro-military” party did what it did to Max Cleland and John Kerry, and to prove the psychosis is more personal than partisan, they now are devouring McCain even on a subject where he should be a sumpremely sympathetic figure.

  • What’s going on here? Do our nation’s fundies believe that the only children God recognizes as his own are the children of born-again American parents?

    In a word… Yes.

    Compassionate they aren’t. Period.

  • Well, I hope this post gives some of the more idealistic among you some much-needed insight into Republicans.

    “I don’t have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11,” said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly

    Well, if it was just pouring water over a guy’s face, it wouldn’t be the subject of a big debate about whether it’s torture or not, and people wouldn’t want to use it to try to compel people to talk. Thinking of waterboarding as like forced sodomy is a little better comparison- it’s unlikely to do any major lasting physical damage, but it’s probably psychologically harrowing. That’s what you want to ask yourself if you’re in favor of, if you’re wondering about where you should stand on water-boarding.

    Waterboarding is something like: 1) strapping a guy to a plank; 2) elevating the foot-end of the plank so the guy is on an incline, head-down; 3) putting plastic-wrap over the guy’s face; and 4) pouring the water over the plastic-wrap. Somehow (my guess it was in the laboratory of college frat hazing) it was discovered that if you do this to a person, it invariably gives them a horrific sensation of drowning, and I think it gives you a gag reflex, too. Water-boarding is said to quickly break most people it is used on (but there’s no way to tell if that’s just a leak to make people think they’re in for a doozy of a situation if they’re ever subjected to it) and it’s also said that it’s used on Navy SEALs to train them to resist torture. If there’s any more to water-boarding than that, I haven’t seen it in the mainstream media descriptions. It’s a lot more complex than having water poured over your face, obviously.

  • I’m not saying I’m for or against water-boarding, here, or for or against it in any specific situation. I just think this is something worth having an honest debate about and that we’re not well-served by letting ourselves brush it off as just “water on the face.”

  • Or think of water-boarding as repeatedly dunking a person’s head in a toilet bowl, except with less danger the person is going to asphyxiate or be injured.

  • If you think they’re scary now (and they are), they’ll be even scarier when they loose in 2008. Try to imagine people this hopped up on adrenaline and testosterone having to cope with their agenda being rejected (hopefully) by the (reasonably) sane majority.

    I can see two things:
    1) Out of this will emerge even CRAZIER candidates who will openly advocate worse atrocities. This will be made easier by the fact sane people won’t want to associate with the Republican party.
    2) Some of the followers will snap and resort to violence.

    They GOP media machine has been ginning up fear and hatred for years. Its to the point where there’s a new Rightwing Freakout every few weeks. This kind of crazy needs to be fed more and more to keep it going at the level people are used to. When you don’t feed it it burns out – or it takes it upon itself to fulfill its Dreams of Crazy, by doing crazy things.

  • My opinion is, in the ticking-time bomb scenario (which hardly ever really occurs), if I have information that I think is 100% reliable that the guy we have in custody is the guy who planted the bomb, or for whatever other reason knows where it is, I’ll be the guy doing the water-boarding, or hitting him with a bat, or whatever else it takes, if no one else wants to do it. Granted, in most interrogations, history has shown that an entirely different approach- a “make friends and gain trust” approach- works best.

    But, I think you have to ask yourself, in a situation where it’s not a ticking time bombs scenario– and your teenaged or college-aged daughter gets mixed up with the wrong people, and doesn’t know they’re into Al Qaeda and planting bombs– do you want investigators who have mistaken information on her, or just a hunch, or who don’t have any reason to suspect her of having any information, are just assholes and want to sadistically push around the hot young white woman they found kind of hanging out with Al Qaeda, or who don’t like liberals and want to “teach her a lesson” (so they lower their scrutiny of what’s good enough evidence to justify it on that basis) to put her through something like water-boarding?

    Right now, it seems like regular people have had far less honest access to where we draw the line, and it’s all been trusted to be out in the hands of “capable investigators.” Right now, I bet there are people who will tell us they know from firsthand knowledge that waterboarding has obtained useful information that turned out to be reliable in terror investigations. But I’m concerned about people who should not have been subjected to water-boarding, and as Abu Ghraib shows us, there have been plenty of people who, while in the hands of our capable wardens and investigators, have been put through a lot of crap that they shouldn’t have been put through. So for now, I wouldn’t say that I’m just never against water-boarding, but I would say it’s definitely something that should have some over-sight and you can’t trust a lot of assholes to treat this tool like it’s just a toy. You want somebody who’s a very rational and sober-minded person in charge of something like this so in never gets applied even in part for someone’s amusement, or applied by a dummy who can’t judge when the evidence is strong against the subject of the interrogation- because those are situations when the technique is most likely to be used against someone who isn’t even a criminal or who otherwise can’t tell us info that could save lives, anyway.

  • Basically, this shouldn’t be in the hands of idiots and assholes.

    You should have a judge looking over their shoulder, or something like that.

  • I wrote:

    I’ll be the guy doing the water-boarding, or hitting him with a bat, or whatever else it takes, if no one else wants to do it.

    And in that scenario I described in my first paragraph of my comment, I’d do it even if it wasn’t legal, and I think most cops with common sense would do the same thing, too.

  • 6 out of 12?

    (and once you’ve shown you stand with Romney by saying “I’m not saying I’m for or against water-boarding, here” as you did above, you may want to consider the First Rule of Holes: stop digging.)

  • Study after study shows that torture is ineffective. The prisoner will say anything to make the torture stop. So why use it? To intimidate your enemies? Is this nothing more than a game of who can intimidate whom? Terrorism vs Torture a never ending cycle of violence and hate. Too bad the “hard” core Repugs can’t see this.

  • Whether we carry a rifle into battle or not, we are soldiers of Democracy and Human Rights. When three thousand of us died on September 11th, they died in part as soldiers. They died for our freedom and our ideals. That our freedoms have eroded since their death is frightening; that our ideals of human rights have eroded is profoundly sad. Do not ask the instrument of my government whether it is right to torture to save my life. Ask me, the individual, whether that instrument should torture in my name to save my life, and I will tell you no. I will not allow you to sacrifice your soul for my soul, a soul I give freely in the name of Democracy and Human Rights.

  • I think DragonScholar is right about the crazies going even crazier if they lose. Especially if Clinton wins – nothing brings out the frothing rage like an uppity woman. And a big escalation in right wing terrorism wouldn’t suprise me either. These people were far more deeply traumatized by the 9/11 attacks than I at first realized – the reptile brain has taken over with them and no amount of reason will help. At this point, all they know is that they want revenge on THEM. But I very much doubt that there are that many rational people who will move over to the Democratic side. The Republicans were just as crazy in 2004 and they still won. The only hope now is that enough of the idiot vote is unhappy about the war not being a fun war anymore that it will vote for whoever the Democrats nominate.

  • And a big escalation in right wing terrorism wouldn’t suprise me either.

    I think it’s very likely, and it’s one of my biggest fears: a second American Civil War, fought by militiamen and crazy christian cultists living in compounds, against federal forces.

    I remember the 1990’s. And I remember right-wing militias bulking up to overthrow the Gummint. I remember Oklahoma City too.

    They’ve been quiet since the “gummint” has been dominated by their own kind. But once Clinton gets into office, it’s gonna be, um, interesting.

    I think the key will be for Clinton and a Democratic supermajority in House and Senate to immediately move to restore civil rights and “shrink the federal government” in the areas of surveillance, wiretapping, torture, contractors, abuse of executive power, etc. Get the Constitutional scholars like Feingold and Conyers on the job– and quickly, and loudly. Repeal the Patriot Act, undo all of those stupid Executive Orders Bush put in place to expand White House powers, Start prosecuting Gonzales et al. Shitcan telecom immunity. Make public examples of anyone caught abusing federal power or surveillance, whether in industry or government, and punish them, whether their crimes were in the Bush administration or in the years to come.

    I don’t know if they’ll be able to do that, .but they’d better do it fast, before the militias (or ordinary citizens) start feeling like the only way to restore civil liberties is to take them back at gunpoint. That, as Ghostbusters said, would be bad.

  • Nice one, JWK.

    As for Klein’s conclusion, repulsive as I find the Mittster, I’m not sure he’s angry enough to Bring the Hate with the zeal the Republican base demands. He’s had the same charmed life as Bush, but even Bush had his insecurity/resentment toward “intellectuals” to fuel his anger, plus the dry-drunk angle. Romney, by contrast, thinks he’s the smartest guy in the world, and on some level he probably knows how specious the anti-immigrant argument is. (Not to mention that his corporate buddies love them some infinitely exploitable illegal-immigrant labor.)

    Yeah, he’ll do whatever it takes to win, but I don’t know that he’s a good enough actor.

  • Wikipedia says: Water torture is torture using water, which can take several forms. Because no external marks are left on victims of water torture, it has been a favoured method of torture in various countries and political regimes.

    This would include water induced hypothermia, submerging subjects up to the neck in water for long periods of time, etc….my favorite (not!) was the part about …no external marks are left on victims of water torture.. Anyone who can say with a straight face that this is just dunking someone’s head in a toilet and there being no danger of asphyxiation has there head up their a$$, which, after consideration, might be a great way for someone to demonstrate the terror of suffocation to them…geesh! How can there even be a discussion about something so disgusting. Torture is banned under all domestic laws. If law enforcement tried some of the “techniques” on suspects, some of whom would be very deserving, the public outrage would be deafening. The point isn’t whether someone “deserves” to be treated in an inhumane manner, the point is, is it legal or moral.

  • In the discussion about water boarding and any other kind of torture in general.. the discussion usually ends up about it being humane or not….

    In my opinion:
    – a person who chooses to become a terrorist, and chooses to plant EID’s or car bombs, with the explicit purpose to kill innocent people. And…
    – a person who chooses to become a terrorist, goes out and kidnaps people to torture and/or execute them regardless of the manner,

    –> In my opinion, when those people are captured, they no longer have any human rights; therefore it doesn’t really matter ‘how’ they are treated. As far as I am concerned, get all the information you can get out of them, and when you’re done get rid of them — yes as in kill them. In my opinion, good riddance. Why would they be treated more humanely then the victims they executed or bombed? Don’t they deserve to be treated the same way as what they inflicted on their victims?

    I know … how horrible to think those thoughts as a progressive… I’m not saying to do that to all people, just because someone had a hunch and turned someone in. I’m not saying to do that to ‘suspected’ terrorists. I’m talking to do that ONLY to people that are caught in the act, or there is indisputable evidence proving beyond a reasonable doubt they are involved. I”m not talking about a disgruntled Sunni turning in their Shiite neighbor claiming he’s collaborating with Al Quada.

    The dilemma is: who decides what constitutes ‘real’ evidence or what constitutes ‘being caught in the act’ ? Given that dilemma and knowing how trustworthy the Bush administration is I”d err on the caution of not using it at all.

    Except of course if he ‘really’ really’ did it, kind’a like Bush was so sure the WMD were in Iraq, and the mushroom cloud ‘real’

    Conclusion: as mentioned in earlier postings, Republicans can not be trusted with the responsibility of torture.

  • “…“I don’t have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11,” said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly”

    Get that guys address. I want to waterboard him. By the time I’m done He will have admitted that he was the one who killed 3000 people on 9/11. He’s not innocent and I’ll prove it.

    Most of these deranged people will never come to their senses but they will continue to lose elections for a long time to come. I don’t believe most of us knew just how sick these people are.

  • I don’t have any problem pouring concentrated sulphuric acid on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11

  • Interesting.
    So now we not only torture people to get vital time-sensitive information from them.
    We use it for revenge.
    Since the Bush administration has made short work of other Bill of Rights tenets, why not toss “cruel and unusual punishment” out the window too? It’s “just a G-damned piece of paper”, right?

    While we’re at it, why just do this to multiple-murderers.
    Shall we acid/waterboard pedophiles? Why not? Are we “soft on kid touchers”?
    Why stop at violent crime?
    Why not waterboard thieves so they’ll be afraid to steal? Sharia calls for amputation, surely waterboarding isn’t so harsh. Isn’t it time we stop being “soft on crime”?

    Then we’ll discuss flag-burning.

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