So, I’m back from the BBC. I was invited on to the William Crawley hosted “Sunday Sequence” show to discuss the issue of water-boarding. My opponent was the local Shamnesty International Supremo. Patrick Corrigan. I am on at 1hr 25mins. I took issue with how the debate was set up by the host and objected to the “so-called war on terror” as William put it. To my mind, that very introduction belies bias. The discussion was very short and came to a quick end as I sought to discuss Amnesty’s support for the Taliban, as revealed by an Amnesty employee here (Now an ex-Amnesty employee). I find these discussion perplexing – the BBC agenda seems clear; Provide a forum for hard leftists like Amnesty to smear the US President and call for his arrest, then try to paint anyone who supports the battler against the Jihadi as an extremist, and then sit back and bathe in smug liberal contentment. It’s in their genes.
IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST…
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That smug laughter from the Amnasty individual is infuriating, denying that for which you have documented proof. Well done yourself though.
Demon
Yes, the hollow laughter of an idiot. Meanwhile, the Taliban kill our soldiers, torture and murder innocents and AI do nothing.
Hi DV, I’m glad you gave succint reproval to William Crawley on his use of the term “so called war on terror”. Apart from that though I didn’t detect any particular bias on his part. In fairness to him he had announced that the debate was drawing to a close when you used your little remaining time to point out Amnesty supports the Taliban via its endorsement of Mohammed Begg’s pro-Taliban group ‘Caged Prisoners’. Come to think of it, joining in the snortle of Mr Corrigan at your allegation could be construed as bias as well. I think saying, ‘Well, that’s a very strong allegation, maybe we can explore that on another day” would have been apt, but I wouldn’t want to be too generous to him by calling it a lapse instead of impropriety after the wantonly biased phrase he used to frame the debate.
It’s so intriguing how Amnesty Al Qa’eda propagandists like Mr Corrigan strain at the leash to convince anyone who will listen that torture never saves lives and there’s never any moral justiication for it. When people like him, and the Al Qa’eda terrorists and their MPAC front man who appeared on Sunday Live a few months ago, do their utmost to convince us that we shouldn’t use torture against captured Al Qa’eda I can’t think of any stronger argument in its favour.
As far as I’m concerned DV, water-boarding is undoubtedly a form of torture. I can understand why for tactical reasons you want to downplay it as such, but unfortunately, to me the neutral listener will have sympathy if your interlocuter uses the w,ord ‘slippery’ to describe efforts to disasociate the term from the word torture.
President Bush’s waiver on facing trial is that he was following his lawyers’ advice that water-boarding wasn’t torture, and one can appreciate the desire to avoid tedious, circus like proceedings that will distract from who the enemy is. In law, after all, I think there could be a case for charges, but I think any reasonable person in the prosecutors’ office would decide it’s not in the public’s interest to bring it.
However, there was Mr Corrigan champing at the bit to put Bush on trial, when there is a far stronger argument for putting Amnesty on trial for aiding and abetting the enemy at time of war for the succour it gives to Al Qa’eda’s propaganda operation in the UK ‘Caged Prisoners’. Now that would be something that would be in the public interest.
Maybe worth putting in the next TUV manifesto David? I’m sure you’d be more than happy for a rematch with Mr Corrigan on this.
Oh, and as ever DV, kudos for going once more into the lions den. You have more gonads than the lot of us here put together.
h-p
The smear the BBC wants to perpetuate is that “waterboarding” is torture, the US used, ergo the US are torturers.
Personally, I disagree with your contention that it IS torture. So do many others. And so did the legal advice tendered to the President.
Besides which – it appears that waterboarding was hardly ever used – except in extremis, specifically in the case of KSM, a really senior Al-Q member, who then provided info that appears to have blocked serious terrorist attacks.
That “background” is hardly ever provided by the BBC. Much better to leave the impression that Bush was some kind of war criminal. Arrant bloody rubbish in my book.
What I found interesting in GW’s interviews about water boarding is his statement that waterboarding gave KS the excuse he needed to start cooperating with the evil yankee sons of the devils.
Also, what caught my attention was the differences in approach between GW and the limp wristed wet fish that heads up MI6…I mean in all honesty people, who would you rather have watching your back? A president who would do anything to keep you safe, including being mean to the enemies of your country OR a limp wristed lefty who would rather let a terrorist attrocity be committed on British soil because he thinks water boarding is wrong?
Hipo,
You say waterboarding is torture…Id say there are a lot of ex-WWII POW’s who spent a bit of time enjoying the hospitality of their Japanese captors…some how I doubt water boarding rates high on their list of worst torture techniques. In fact, Id go as far as to say that not a small number of them would have preferred being waterboarded compared to some REAL torture the nips meted out on a daily basis!
What saddens me though is that the left has managed to remove the back bone of Western Society and replace it with soft white mushy stuff.
The only thing that matters to me is that we win the war on terror and how we achieve that I couldnt care less. If that means being mean to people who want to murder people like you and me then so be it.
My heart bleeds purple piss for anyone who thinks water boarding is torture.
Mailman
Good post mailman insofar as it goes, but with regards to the purple livery of your urine, you will have to bleed it for yourself.
“some how I doubt water boarding rates high on their list of worst torture techniques.”
Maybe I’m underapreciating your intended irony, but it seems you are saying that on the scale of torture, yes, water-boarding does get a ranking.
Christopher Hitchens also famously took the line that waterboarding isn’t torture – until he agreed to subject himself to it! The sadism of the Knights of Bushido notwithstanding, waterboarding undoubtedly ranks on the torture scale, and a good job too, that’s how Bush got information that saved lives.
Lets stop genuflecting to the use of the word ‘torture’ the Marxist Left will put it to on behalf of their totalitarian soul brothers in Al Qa’eda, and start concentrating on the use of the word Treason to demand the worst offenders on the Marxist Left are put on trial for it.
If it ranks…it ranks VERY…VERY…lowly.
But as I mentioned earlier, I think I prefer having someone like GW on myside instead of someone like the limp wrist heading up MI6.
Regards
Mailman
ps. Im sure you will be pleased to know that my urine isnt usually purple 😉
Yes, INBBC gives its propaganda support to so-called ‘charities’ which support the same campaigns of support to the Taliban, Anwar al-Awlaki, as does ‘CagePrisoners’, e.g. ‘Amnesty’, ‘Liberty’ (via S. Chakrabarti) and ‘Justice’, etc.
“Top charities give £200,000 to group which supported al-Qaeda cleric”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/8114913/Top-charities-give-200000-to-group-which-supported-al-Qaeda-cleric.html
And:
“‘Amnesty’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Justice’ and Others Form Coalition with ‘CagePrisoners‘”
Great piece in the Telegraph. So the spokesman for the Joseph Rowntree Trust takes the words of Caged Prisoners at face value and chooses to ignore the overwhelming evidence that contradicts them. I strongly suspect that in their pitch to useful idiots like this and the Roddick Trust, was an element of subtle intimidation as to what will happen if the dont get the money they want.
Nice try, DV, but I just don’t see the point of sacrificing yourself over a rigged debate about waterboarding. Well done for busting Crawley on his editorial “so-called war on terror”, though.
You’re obviously aware that you were dealing with people who would, as you cleverly pointed out, take the UN definition of torture to an extreme interpretation and believe that loud music, sleep deprivation,etc., are torture. The AI guy himself said that KSM was not only waterboarded but hit with “a whole other range of techniques of torture”. So it’s rigged from the start.
So we should cede the BBC airwaves to the left because of the bias? That doesn’t sound like a good policy to me. I’m guessing DV chooses not to do so because he is an Ulsterman and has ‘No Surrender’ in his bones. Not only did he put a good case for the moral use of waterboarding to save lives but, as you noted – and so did I – he flagged the bias of the presenter’s intro from the get-go. I think he did a good service to the cause of truth and justice that we should be grateful for. There are few people with his courage. DV, I admire you for the composure and coherence with which you conduct yourself in the lion’s den. It seems there is beginning to mount a steady increase in the number of people willing to raise their voices against BBC bias in BBC studios, and you are leading the way. If ever impartiality is restored to the BBC, it will be because of people like you.
The BBC is extreme, as the introduction to this discussion clearly shows.
Sorry to come in at the tail end of the thread – this reminded me of the QT discussion. People are horrified at the idea of torture because they always identify with the person being tortured and forget all about the anonymous folk the torturing could “save”. They seem to think that someone like themselves could be hauled off the street at random and tortured and tortured till they invent some story to ”make it stop”.
Unfortunately there is a distinct lack of faith in intelligence-gathering, but if it was possible to have absolute certainty that the individual in the hot seat possessed vital information, people might argue less stridently against applying pressure to get them to spill the beans.
You’d be left with the ticking bomb scenario, a conundrum even for anti torture fanatics. The theory that torture only produces lies begs thorough investigation and some concrete evidence either way. It’s no good just chanting repeatedly that George Bush is a liar.
There is also the argument about what constitutes torture. Things lean so far towards human rights nowadays that I understand the police are no longer allowed to use coercive questioning; they have to hope for a voluntary confession after a cosy chat.
Discussing the bearability/unbearability of waterboarding, whether it’s really torture, whether there’s a physical barrier over the face, whether it causes lasting psychological damage etc etc is irrelevant to those who won’t admit that anything of value could possibly be obtained by force.
With radical Islam, we are where we are. It’s a war. That’s what we need to get straight, I’m thinking.
People on the left don’t see it, and therein lies the divide.
Amnesty is a disgrace.
Also apologies for coming in at the end.
How long does a bomb tick before information about it is stale? A week, a month?
IMHO waterboarding, sleep deprivation and playing excessively loud music ARE torture. For some reason no one has ever considered that there may be degrees of torture. Perhaps electric current to the genitals is at the high end and sleep deprivation at the low end but they are not intrinsically different as their goal is inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information,or for sheer cruelty. Dictionary.com/Random House Dictionary On this basis the scale seems to be the degree of pain.
It seems that the lower end is used to avoid the charge of torture without sacrificing the results.
Contributors to this discussion may not be happy with the United Nations definition of torture but they should acknowledge that most countries of the world (including the UK and the US) have ratified the Convention Against Torture. This means that the UN definition and rules has become part of domestic law. The only way around it is to withdraw ratification. This is something I hope you will agree is extremely unlikely.
Leaving that paradox aside for a minute. There is no evidence that countries that practise, formally or informally, torture are dramatically safer from terrorism. Iraq and Pakistan are good examples of this. Israel, which used to practise low end torture until the Supreme Court ruled that the intelligence services are bound by the same rules as the police doesn’t seem to have suffered an increase in terrorism as a result. Other factors are more important.
Oops – cutting and pasting 🙁
The paradox I was referring to was the paradox of the ticking bomb.
Bush would disagree with you on the eficacy of torture, but of course, as you rightly imply, for legal reasons he doesn’t call it torture.
I think you woefully delude yourself if you think torture doesn’t work. Do you think Bush authorised the use of waterboarding for entertainment? It got results, that’s why it was used.
David Vance, I echo the sentiments of others here that it was great that you let Crawley know what you thought about his “so-called war on terror.”
Waterboarding is certainly on the less severe end of the torture spectrum. It’s probably fair to say that it is more psychological torture than physical since there is no physical damage.
It’s typical lefty tunnel vision to claim, as that Amnesty idiot did, that torture doesn’t work since the tortured will apparently say anything to stop it. Any information will obviously be checked for accuracy, but lefties can’t think that far.
I didn’t say never. I said decisively.
It’s hard to find credible academic studies on the efficiency of torture. Not surprising because to do such a study would be to admit participation in an illegal act which also is immoral. The best I could find on a short search was: Study says torture doesn’t work I don’t have access to the study but it involves Game Theory which would suggest practical experiments were not made.
Do you have any genuine evidence for or against the efficiency of torture in intelligence gathering?