Though there was some internal conflict about the use of torture within the CIA, the leadership never really questioned it too hard, and rather sought ideas on how to sell it to the public and to Congress.
The “Israeli example,” in which the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that some types of torture were acceptable in some “ticking time bomb” cases, seems to have been one the CIA General Counsel was particularly fond of.
The counsel went on to insist that even after torture was explicitly banned by the Senate in 2005, it didn’t cover “ticking time bomb” scenarios, and that CIA officers could continue to engage in torture and be assured of a legal defense if they were ever prosecuted.
Which is absurd, as we now know. No one was ever going to prosecute a CIA officer, no matter how much they tortured people. The argument further falls apart on the premise, as the sudden, imminent threat notion of the “ticking time bomb” flies out the window when one is talking about a sustained, multi-year torture campaign involving well over 100 detainees.
What, no Nazi examples, or Communist examples? But then again, the israeli examples kinda summarizes those two.
One day …lets hope, all these lesding World criminals from US and Israel administration will “taste”on their skin all the torture they waged against people “in 4 corners”.
This charade about Words, all these new terms like “humanitarien bombing, killing, suspected terrorist, collective panishment, preventive killing and torture” etc….Now how can humanity even allow to use such a language?
These leading figures including many women! – they all deserve death on the spot!
We trully live according George Orwell novel 1984.
Its sad to see how people change to worse…Pedro
How can you sink lower than using Israeli courts for anything?
I get many accusations of being "anti-Semite", "hater of Israel", etc. Actually, I am proud of being anti-Israel, it is a disgusting country. It is not like I hate the place with knowing nothing about the place – I even have relatives living there (the biggest deadbeat, loud-mouths in the family). Being anti-Israel is to be pro-democracy. A lot of what is going bad in America – the fascist police, the thuggish CIA, the nasty greediness of the 1% comes from our alliance with this putrid place.
I too have relatives in Israel, but they tend simply to be technocrats who see no moral problems with their employment, and to be sort of cavalier about just about everything. It's odd, but their attitude reminds me of both left and right totalitarian cultures, where there are these "blond beasts" or "dedicated cadres" who put the nation or the revolution over everything else. When I once opined that their little children would be safer in the US (where they managed to be born, like their parents, no accident) – I was told that "you just wait – the US will eventually throw out the Jews just like all the others." It struck me as a doctrinal premise of their living in Israel. No matter how much history the US had from its inception with Jewish roots (take New York – please take New York!), to them it was no different than Poland with rude scary peasants ready any moment to stage a pogrom. Therefore, they hunkered down and did the drills, and voted aggressively to deprive Palestinians of human rights.
No, they aren't the most useless or loud-mouthed in the family. Just the most deluded.
When we were growing up, the boogeyman was the specter of Khrushchev banging his shoe on the podium shouting that the USSR would destroy America. It worked, sorta. Unfortunately, the real threat was from one of our so-called allies. What the USSR could not do, the Israelis did. They convinced those we elected to represent us that starting unnecessary and ill-advised wars of aggression in the ME were required to protect Israel from their neighbors – whom the Israelis had been antagonizing for decades. And now we learn that the justification for the morally despicable came from an Israeli court. The Israelis have managed to empty the American Treasury fighting wars that were not needed but they also completely destroyed the American morality we grew up believing in – that we were better than people who tortured others less capable of protecting themselves. They destroyed the soul of America. The Americans (and those with dual allegiances) we elected to represent us and to protect the Constitution and the moral standing of the US willingly followed the plan.
But gentlemen, this is humanity and without honest government, born of an honest society, live can be nothing short of a living hell.
AmeriKa goes to Israel to learn how to treat the Arabs, abusing many from countries not even responsible for 9/11. How'd that happen? Israel has a problem with all of them, doesn't matter where they hail from or how innocent they may be.
Who cares what their courts say? What about our courts?
Like I said in an earlier post, we should have learned how to treat the Arab Muslims of the M.E. from a people with a little less psychotic hatred for them then these Jewish Israelis.
I live in a town in Massachusetts where the chief of police was very proud to have gone on a junket to Israel to learn policing techniques. Chilling, eh?
Israel: 66 years of trying to pound a square peg into a round hole.
Zionists: Short term smart, long term stupid, real stupid.
Yes, well it all depends on whether money trumps demographics. If you can be a minority with a lot of money, insisting on remaining that minority (think British Raj in India, apartheid states in Southern Africa, etc), you are going to have to resort to repression if only to get your swimming pools cleaned and your fruit picked. Somehow this kind of thing has worked a lot better in California, where I grew up, because nobody tells people they cannot rise in society because they are the wrong religion or ethnic group, and the WASPs who conquered California have never been reluctant to shape-shift either ethnically or religiously. But a Jewish state is kind of getting carved into stone, so without fresh influxes of the "right sort" and woman sacrificing themselves to lifelong pregnancy, the demographic will finally tell the tale.