Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) force-fed under standard Guantánamo Bay procedure – Video

if a person thinks they are first, but is really last, maybe they are just standing in a circle?

yr right, i never thought of that

So this is how I understand you.

Person A voluntarily subjects himself to torture or a torture-like experience. In doing so, he raises awareness about Gitmo. However, he also likes wealth and fame.

Person B does nothing to raise awareness about anyone.

Person B is better than Person A?

I'm not saying people don't go overboard with the ego thing, but c'mon, aren't you being overcritical?

What Mos Def is doing gives this problem a face and helps it become more easy to relate to than just a persuasive essay. It generates interest, a hand reaching out to people. You can watch violent news stories all day, but the full impact of someone being shot to death before your very eyes is a different thing altogether. There's nothing disingenuous about what he's doing. Nobody would do that unless they felt very strong about it. I guess what I'm saying is a bit of a no-brainer, but I felt the need to with the skepticism. Chalk it up to another dysfunctional institution that inhibits progress and feeds on itself. Did Obama really want to shut down Gitmo? Probably, but it doesn't matter what the president wants when there's a river of money flowing in the opposite direction.

a river of money perhaps, but I think in Obama's case (and in Pelosi's, and any other Dem who has supported this kind of nonsense) their biggest fear is being called "weak on terrorism." They just don't think they can afford it, politically. Shame they don't have more backbone.

Twice a day for two hours and these men are still on hunger strike. I can respect that.

well as a president he is supposed to represent those who didn't vote for him either, and it seems like there's a big chunk of americans who are totally cool with gitmo and torture and stuff. so basically it's just the ways of a functioning democracy

watched a really good talk called "Confronting our Legacy of Torture" last night. speakers are Joshua E.S. Phillips (who wrote "None of Us Were Like This Before") and Ian Fishback, a soldier who has regularly spoken out about the state of the torture program in the US military. really shed some light on the topic for me.

http://archive.org/details/scm-315294-joshuaesphillipsianfishbackco

At around the twenty minute mark, Phillips makes the point that during investigations into detainee torture and abuse, Alberto Mora (former general council of the Navy) admitted to have learned from discussions with flag ranked officers that the number one and number two greatest sources of insurgent recruitment in Iraq (and therein, coalition deaths) were the images of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, respectively.

Had to repeat that bit, it sorta blew my mind. On top of all this, we apparently know as a scientific fact that torture doesn't work effectively to gain valuable intelligence; the primary detainees who will give up information are those with nothing to give, while "high level" targets are far more likely to resist and never give up their information, or indeed to have been trained in torture resistance.

It's all pretty maddening. Really informative talk though.

  On 7/9/2013 at 4:07 PM, luke viia said:

we apparently know as a scientific fact that torture doesn't work effectively to gain valuable intelligence

no such scientific fact exist. maybe in some particular situations it doesn't work, in some others it might, maybe a combination of techniques do provide results, etc. there's really nothing remotely close to scientific conclusions in regards to torture efficacy as far as i googled, and it's understandable given the subject.

I think with torture you can get nearly any Information out of someone. Even Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessed the beheading of Daniel Pearl under the torture of waterboarding.

I didn't make that bit up; it was the main focus of the talk I was referring to. Watch it if you'd like to know more about where I'm coming from. Torture is, according to the speakers, not at all effective, and our beliefs that it is are based on myth, conjecture, and most unfortunately, media.

@eugene: To make this more streamlined for both of us, I'm going to ask that if you want to contest this point any further, bring literature that shows that it works (source me bro) or please don't boggle my points down to the level of minutiae stew of what is and isn't a "scientific fact." See my post on the first page about semantic bog-downs. The point here is that torture is not nearly as effective as our government believes it is. I'm willing to drop the semantic end of it if you can clearly see that point.

The more interesting point from that talk was the first one I mentioned, by far. The number one and number two insurgent recruitment tools are images of American torture of Iraqis. Without even going into how that's affected our soldiers, it's clear to me that we are making matters worse with these techniques and fueling the war we keep pledging to end.

Ramadan is a side-issue. Force feeding is almost always an act of violence and torture.

PS, not watching this video. Anyone with anything approaching a conscience knows that force feeding is violent torture, and that this makes it bad - unfortunately this seems to rule out quite a few of you pure evil replicators of pure evil.

I don't think your Government is interessted in stopping any war, sorry.

  On 7/9/2013 at 4:05 PM, eugene said:

so basically it's just the ways of a functioning democracy

LOL if you think we live in functioning democracies.

  On 7/9/2013 at 4:32 PM, CJM said:

I don't think your Government is interessted in stopping any war, sorry.

Probably not, but they pay extreme amounts of lip service to the idea.

  On 7/9/2013 at 4:24 PM, luke viia said:

@eugene: To make this more streamlined for both of us, I'm going to ask that if you want to contest this point any further, bring literature that shows that it works (source me bro) or please don't boggle my points down to the level of minutiae stew of what is and isn't a "scientific fact." See my post on the first page about semantic bog-downs. The point here is that torture is not nearly as effective as our government believes it is. I'm willing to drop the semantic end of it if you can clearly see that point.

no literature exists on efficacy of torture because understandably no such research is possible because ethics and shit. there are not even properly documented procedures of torture and its results. there's really nothing comprehensible on this subject, you could find some examples of it working and some where it doesn't, but all of those are very circumstantial anyway.

No literature huh? And you googled this for a whopping seven minutes?

Let me try to help.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=efficacy+of+torture+in+interrogation&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=ZSLcUbbNA6rKiAKchoH4Cw&ved=0CCwQgQMwAA

Not saying all this research is amazing, but "no research exists" is an even worse claim than my "scientific fact." Now let's drop this precision-speak shit and genuinely try to understand each other's points please.

  On 7/9/2013 at 4:34 PM, Iain C said:

 

  On 7/9/2013 at 4:05 PM, eugene said:

so basically it's just the ways of a functioning democracy

 

LOL if you think we live in functioning democracies.

 

i don't think anything, the point is that there is a pretty wide support for such policies in the u.s. (how those people adopted such views is a different topic).

I think this thread is a pretty good argument for instituting torture on watmm...

or perhaps it's a form of torture in itself...

  On 7/9/2013 at 4:50 PM, luke viia said:

No literature huh? And you googled this for a whopping seven minutes?

 

Let me try to help.

 

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=efficacy+of+torture+in+interrogation&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=ZSLcUbbNA6rKiAKchoH4Cw&ved=0CCwQgQMwAA

 

Not saying all this research is amazing, but "no research exists" is an even worse claim than my "scientific fact." Now let's drop this precision-speak shit and genuinely try to understand each other's points please.

could you at least read my posts properly before replying ?

there's obviously a ton of literature about torture in general, but what we need to deal with this issue properly is a research on its efficacy, not the noise, public opinion and ethics that surround it. in the second article in the google scholar's results you've linked there's this quote "Scientific research on the efficacy of torture and rough interrogation is limited, because of the moral and legal impediments to experimentation." which is exaclty what i was saying in the earlier posts, but hopefully when some guys from google scholar articles say it it's more convincing.

it's also better stated.

  On 7/9/2013 at 4:32 PM, Iain C said:

Ramadan is a side-issue. Force feeding is almost always an act of violence and torture.

 

This, surely. I remember reading about the force-feeding of suffragettes when I was a kid and thinking how fucked up it was. It's insane that it still happens in the 21st century. I always wonder how the doctors involved can be on board with this, in terms of ethics and stuff. It's barbaric.

Err, of course I agree the research is limited; the empirical evidence is still out there and that's where conclusions can be drawn. "Limited" is not at all what you said a post ago (and please keep reading those articles if you can find free ones -- the few I came across make exactly the point I'm making here: it is ineffective as a form of interrogation), eugene, and I hope it's clear that I'm trying to make you realize how stifling this honed-in sort of conversing on insignificant details really is to a conversation. Fucking pedantic arguments on watmm, I swear. No one has even addressed the main point I wanted to make a few posts ago. I repeated it twice already, so I'll just go for the day now. :P

And yeah, back to the main point: this is emotionally upsetting to think about, because it is a human rights violation. I want my government to stop it, I feel helpless about it, and ultimately I am being directed by intuition that this is wrong -- the efficacy argument is just a supplement to that position; if it is ineffective, it furthers my anger that we're doing it globally and illegally and in such an amateur way.

  On 7/9/2013 at 3:54 AM, SR4 said:

 

  On 7/9/2013 at 3:53 AM, jules said:

Maybe I'm being naive but it seems like they should have 2 options:

 

a. give them an iv

 

2. let them starve

 

 

both of these options seem easy. 1 takes 1 person, 1 takes none. too simple?

 

 

i agree with this. but a country of upstanding western moral principles would never allow people to die of their own volition in a prison they were illegally apprehended in

 

Denying someone the right to kill themselves is quite fucked up, at least in these circumstances. A lot of people aren't even thinking of it in that terms, of those even aware of the current state of Gitmo.

Reminds me of this Dead Kennedy's lyric:

We're sorry

We hate to interrupt

But it's against the law to jump off this bridge

You'll just have to kill yourself somewhere else

A tourist might see you

And we wouldn't want that

  On 7/9/2013 at 4:21 PM, CJM said:

I think with torture you can get nearly any Information out of someone. Even Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessed the beheading of Daniel Pearl under the torture of waterboarding.

That's the one example the apologists of water-boarding cited, but that's literally ignoring the hundreds of other torture and "enhanced interrogation" of far more people that yielded false or useless information. Of course it will get information out, doesn't mean it's warranted in pragmatic sense. You can take the moral aspect out of the debate and it's still a very questionable practice.