Posting Towards Gomorrah

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Spanky
Then why do they hire so many part time workers? Obviously some sort of benefits come with full time work that they are trying to avoid. We just need to make it as expenisve to avoid whatever it is they are trying to avoid.

Benefits -- principally health insurance, but other kinds as well.

Everyone gets at least the minimum wage, but full time workers get benefits, part-tine generally don't (or greatly reduced benefits). My employer in college (a grocery store) did exactly the same thing.

S_A_M

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
how did the "outlaw gay marriage" votes go?

Apparently, fags aren't human.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Spanky
Does anyone else share Ty's opinon on this?

On the "median" issue?

I do share his opinion, actually. [Not that you look like a fool, so much, as on the substance of it.] I just saw that it wasn't worth arguing with you about.

People can always lie about anything in many different ways. That said, I think that the use of "averages" or "means" is often far more misleading than the use of medians.

S_A_M

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by taxwonk
Apparently, fags aren't human.

What about commie fags?

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
What about commie fags?

I thought the Klan and the cracker sherrifs shot or lynched all them back in the 50s and 60s.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

I'll outsource a post to Andrew Sullivan:

The Washington Post homes in on the essential fiction that the president is telling about his position on military interrogation: that he wants "clarity" for interrogators. There already is clarity. What Bush wants is a vague and utterly subjective standard against treatment that merely "shocks the conscience." As we know, what shocks the conscience of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld is not what shocks the conscience of most of mankind. Common Article 3 is not vague. It is crystal clear. It bans what Mr Bush has illegally authorized and wants to continue practising. Money quote:

• Common Article 3, which prohibits cruel treatment and humiliation, is an inflexible standard. The U.S. military, which lived with it comfortably for decades before the Bush administration, just reembraced it after a prolonged battle with the White House. The Army issued a thick manual this month that tells interrogators exactly what they can and cannot do in complying with the standard. The nation's most respected military leaders have said that they need and want nothing more to accomplish the mission of detaining and interrogating enemy prisoners - and that harsher methods would be counterproductive.
  
  Mr. Bush wants to replace these clear rules with a flexible and subjective standard - one that would legalize any method that does not "shock the conscience." What shocks the conscience? According to Mr. Bush's Justice Department, the torture techniques described above - and at least in the past, waterboarding - do not, "in certain circumstances." So Mr. Bush's real objection to Common Article 3 is not that it is vague. It is that it will not permit abusive practices that he isn't willing publicly to discuss or defend.

These people do not even have the courage to demand that the United States withdraw from the Geneva Convention. They want to do so by stealth and by lying. This time, they must be stopped by the Congress. And in November, we must ensure we have a new Congress that will prevent the United States government from committing war-crimes in the future.

The President wants to permit the CIA to torture people, but he doesn't have the moral courage to say so, so he pretends it has something to do with certainty.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Here's more of what the President wants the CIA to be able to do:

• Robert Conquest's classic work on Stalin, "The Great Terror" . . .: "When there was time, the basic [Soviet Secret police] method for obtaining confessions and breaking the accused man was the 'conveyor' -- continual interrogation by relays of police for hours and days on end. As with many phenomena of the Stalin period, it has the advantage that it could not easily be condemned by any simple principle. Clearly, it amounted to unfair pressure after a certain time and to actual physical torture later still, but when? . . . At any rate, after even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable. After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually physically poisoned by fatigue. It was as painful as any torture."
  
  Conquest stated: "Interrogation usually took place at night and with the accused just roused -- often only fifteen minutes after going to sleep. The glaring lights at the interrogation had a disorientating effect." He quoted a Czech prisoner, Evzen Loebl, who described "having to be on his feet eighteen hours a day, sixteen of which were devoted to interrogation. During the six-hour sleep period, the warder pounded on the door every ten minutes. . . . If the banging did not wake him, a kick from the warder would. After two or three weeks, his feet were swollen and every inch of his body ached at the slightest touch; even washing became a torture."
  
  Conquest quoted a Polish prisoner, Z. Stypulkowski, from 1945: "Cold, hunger, the bright light and especially sleeplessness. The cold is not terrific. But when the victim is weakened by hunger and sleeplessness, then the six or seven degrees above the freezing point make him tremble all the time. . . . After fifty or sixty interrogations with cold and hunger and almost no sleep, a man becomes like an automaton -- his eyes are bright, his legs swollen, his hands trembling. In this state, he is often convinced he is guilty."
  
  . . . Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" . . . describes the experience of prisoner Anna Skripnikova in 1952: "Sivakov, Chief of the Investigative Department of the Ordzhonikidze State Security Administration, said to her: 'The prison doctor reports you have a blood pressure of 240/120. That's too low, you bitch! We're going to drive it up to 340 so you'll kick the bucket, you viper, and with no black and blue marks; no beatings; no broken bones. We'll just not let you sleep.' And if, back in her cell, after a night spent in interrogation, she closed her eyes during the day, the jailer broke in and shouted: 'Open your eyes or I'll haul you off that cot by the legs and tie you to the wall standing up."
  
  Elsewhere, Solzhenitsyn writes: "Sleeplessness . . . befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself, to be his own 'I.' "
  
  . . . [T]he memoirs of former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin . . . describe[] experiencing sleep deprivation in a Soviet prison in the 1940s: "In the head of the interrogated prisoner a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget. . . . Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable with it. . . . I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them. He did not promise them their liberty. He promised them -- if they signed -- uninterrupted sleep!"

link

When it was the Soviets doing this stuff, we could all agree it was wrong. Some conservatives seem to have forgotten what they once stood for.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Here's more of what the President wants the CIA to be able to do:

• Robert Conquest's classic work on Stalin, "The Great Terror" . . .: "When there was time, the basic [Soviet Secret police] method for obtaining confessions and breaking the accused man was the 'conveyor' -- continual interrogation by relays of police for hours and days on end. As with many phenomena of the Stalin period, it has the advantage that it could not easily be condemned by any simple principle. Clearly, it amounted to unfair pressure after a certain time and to actual physical torture later still, but when? . . . At any rate, after even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable. After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually physically poisoned by fatigue. It was as painful as any torture."
  
  Conquest stated: "Interrogation usually took place at night and with the accused just roused -- often only fifteen minutes after going to sleep. The glaring lights at the interrogation had a disorientating effect." He quoted a Czech prisoner, Evzen Loebl, who described "having to be on his feet eighteen hours a day, sixteen of which were devoted to interrogation. During the six-hour sleep period, the warder pounded on the door every ten minutes. . . . If the banging did not wake him, a kick from the warder would. After two or three weeks, his feet were swollen and every inch of his body ached at the slightest touch; even washing became a torture."
  
  Conquest quoted a Polish prisoner, Z. Stypulkowski, from 1945: "Cold, hunger, the bright light and especially sleeplessness. The cold is not terrific. But when the victim is weakened by hunger and sleeplessness, then the six or seven degrees above the freezing point make him tremble all the time. . . . After fifty or sixty interrogations with cold and hunger and almost no sleep, a man becomes like an automaton -- his eyes are bright, his legs swollen, his hands trembling. In this state, he is often convinced he is guilty."
  
  . . . Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" . . . describes the experience of prisoner Anna Skripnikova in 1952: "Sivakov, Chief of the Investigative Department of the Ordzhonikidze State Security Administration, said to her: 'The prison doctor reports you have a blood pressure of 240/120. That's too low, you bitch! We're going to drive it up to 340 so you'll kick the bucket, you viper, and with no black and blue marks; no beatings; no broken bones. We'll just not let you sleep.' And if, back in her cell, after a night spent in interrogation, she closed her eyes during the day, the jailer broke in and shouted: 'Open your eyes or I'll haul you off that cot by the legs and tie you to the wall standing up."
  
  Elsewhere, Solzhenitsyn writes: "Sleeplessness . . . befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human being ceases to be himself, to be his own 'I.' "
  
  . . . [T]he memoirs of former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin . . . describe[] experiencing sleep deprivation in a Soviet prison in the 1940s: "In the head of the interrogated prisoner a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget. . . . Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable with it. . . . I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them. He did not promise them their liberty. He promised them -- if they signed -- uninterrupted sleep!"

link

When it was the Soviets doing this stuff, we could all agree it was wrong. Some conservatives seem to have forgotten what they once stood for.

we're 5 years into this. if torture hadn't gotten us any information so far, do you think they'd be fighting for the right to keep doing it?

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
we're 5 years into this. if torture hadn't gotten us any information so far, do you think they'd be fighting for the right to keep doing it?

Torquemada was very effective at obtaining conversions and confessions of heresy. Does that make it okay?

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
we're 5 years into this. if torture hadn't gotten us any information so far, do you think they'd be fighting for the right to keep doing it?

Where does W's favorite political philosopher stand on torture?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by taxwonk
Torquemada was very effective at obtaining conversions and confessions of heresy. Does that make it okay?

I'm attacking your other point- that it doesn't work. Arguments are often best attacked from the side. Once we all agree it works, then we can discuss your other concerns.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
I'm attacking your other point- that it doesn't work. Arguments are often best attacked from the side. Once we all agree it works, then we can discuss your other concerns.

I dispute that it works. As Ty's post makes clear and as wonk's post implies, people under torture will admit to anything. A concrete example was provided in Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine." The "travel agent," al-Zipadeedoodah or whatever the fuck his name is, "confessed" under torture that AQ was targeting banks. And shoppiing malls. And power plants. Etc. FBI agents were dispatched, but of course there aren't nearly enough agents to cover all such facilities in the US. Turns out, they weren't really targets -- he just wanted the torture to stop. We just got bogus info and wasted valuable FBI time.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
we're 5 years into this. if torture hadn't gotten us any information so far, do you think they'd be fighting for the right to keep doing it?

(1) What Wonk said.

(2) There seems to be a division between different branches of government over whether this sort of thing is useful. You get "information" but a lot of it turns out to be crap. Zubaydah said a lot of things when tortured, leading to a lot of unnecessary warnings about attacks that weren't coming. The Army and the FBI, in particular, believe more human methods also work better.

(3) It's no coincidence that the President decided to pick this fight now during the fall of an election year. It's like DHS in '02 all over again. Apparently his skills are slipping, and he didn't think he was on the wrong side of Warner and Graham. (I'm pretty sure he was fine with McCain on the other side.)

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
I dispute that it works. As Ty's post makes clear and as wonk's post implies, people under torture will admit to anything. A concrete example was provided in Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine." The "travel agent," al-Zipadeedoodah or whatever the fuck his name is, "confessed" under torture that AQ was targeting banks. And shoppiing malls. And power plants. Etc. FBI agents were dispatched, but of course there aren't nearly enough agents to cover all such facilities in the US. Turns out, they weren't really targets -- he just wanted the torture to stop. We just got bogus info and wasted valuable FBI time.

do you think its possible they got any names and locations and plots that have been kept, you know, secret? because if after 5 years all they got are a handful of lies, I'm sort of confused why they would fight to keep the right to do it. even if your argument is they're sadists, bush/cheney aren't actually in the rooms, are they?

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
do you think its possible they got any names and locations and plots that have been kept, you know, secret? because if after 5 years all they got are a handful of lies, I'm sort of confused why they would fight to keep the right to do it. even if your argument is they're sadists, bush/cheney aren't actually in the rooms, are they?

Is the position that (i) you might have a guilty guy, and (ii) he might know something useful, and (iii) he might tell you this something useful in addition to all other kinds of shit he'll just say in order to get the pain to stop, so let's do "aggressive interrogation," really where you want to go with this argument?