More evidence of the US supporting torture in its backwards client regimes. This evidence has piled up for years and years, starting from well before the School of the Americas.
On the topic of schools and supporting torture in client regimes, remember that someone had to both negotiate with the UAE in order to convince them that it would be in their best interest to do as the US says on the topic of torturing foreigners, as well as teach UAE's security forces how to torture in the US-approved way. That way, when someone the US wants information from comes along, they can be tortured by the UAE so that US can keep its PR.
Think about that for a minute. The US is teaching third parties how to torture effectively on its behalf because it wants the torturing done to the proper standard and because it is afraid of the backlash that will occur when torture is exposed. From this thought, we can say that the US has extensive internal standards regarding what methods of torture are acceptable and useful for clients to know, which are likely influenced by how bad and how directly attributable these torture techniques will look when exposed.
A speculation: the US still tortures people directly in addition to third party torture. They already have the secrecy, infrastructure, training, standards, incentive, and targets in hand.
There is always the impulse to torture suspects for any law enforcement agency. We need to act as citizens to ensure that torture and the outsourcing of torture are treated as the grand criminal matters that they are. Anyone in the chain of command who participates in or tolerates torture needs to face charges.
Is there any depth to your assertion? Or is it just a passive-aggressive swipe to denigrate Europe(ans) while derailing deeper discussion about critiques of the United States?
I will give you credit for acknowledging the "backward"/"modern" difference. The most important difference is that in the European "client regimes" (to use your language), they at least purport to maintain a semblance of democracy and human rights standards for their constituents. In that respect, call the convergent evolution towards the American-style government policy, a "client" or "vassal" state type of relationship if you'd like, but at least it's one in which (at a minimum) a superficial level of fairness is maintained (i.e., in contrast to sharia law countries).
Poland jumped to my mind as well, but at least there is some public pushback on the issue within European states and in the European Union. [1] The United States government itself, and the Middle Eastern countries that are on their "friends list" have been quiet about it, as far as I've seen.
1. Torture isn't a gray area. It's unethical and unreliable. Consistently. It turns out, people will tell you whatever they think will make you stop hurting them, if you hurt them badly enough.
I know, right?!
2. Many of those "plots" are so laughably unrelated to actual acts of terror it's a wonder that USGov hasn't edited the Wiki page to remove them. (The NYPD seems to be fond of that approach...)
Not only is it unethical and unreliable, you remove any hesitation from opposing countries from doing the exact same thing, if slightly worse. Its called increasing the stakes and is one reason why there are international laws against it.
Torture works. In many circumstances the unreliable information provided by torture is the best you can get. It is, of course, very unethical to today's standards, especially when done to innocent citizens.
But the reason it is increasingly becoming unethical today, is because we are getting better at acquiring information through other means, like better monitoring technology and wiretapping laws.
No, it doesn't. All available research shows that torture is one of the worst ways to get information.
The best way to get information is to befriend the person being interviewed. Put them in an open room. Wide windows. Light colors. Talk to them. Treat them like people.
The comments from the American WWII interrogators are telling. The one I recall was "I got more out of the germans over a pool game than the guys in Guantanomo bay did waterboarding people"
Torturing people isn't just unethical. It's that it doesn't work.
Yet despite everyone knowing that for decades, the US still spent enormous effort at torture. Killing people. Raping people.
Why? My best guess is a mideaeval sense if justice. KILL THE BASTARDS. RAPE THEIR WOMEN. BURN THEIR VILLAGES.
Modern society is a thin layer over an animal instinct.
That's horrible. I can still understand people having unethical opinions about torture, but making light of an innocent man being tortured? I'm all for "edgy jokes," but this is just vitriolic.
I think this is the worst thing I've read on HN.
(By the way, if you had exposed an email, I would have asked you about this in private. I don't mean to embarrass you in a public forum. Perhaps you weren't thinking.)
It was a cynical remark. I did not intend that reaction, I hold no opinions on torture.
As an aside, what I said was factually accurate (it's in the article - he gave them the information they wanted), yet people think it was wrong for me to say it. I don't think I'll ever understand that.
I do. Some of it is obvious trolling, and some of it is ranty nonsense. But torture of the innocent is where I draw the line. It struck a nerve with me.
Did it? Even if you get actionable information from torture - a very big 'if' mind you - you're also going to get a bunch of specious bullshit that you'll waste time following up. If you arrive at the truth at all, which again is not likely, it will have been after being misled. You will be, by any objective measure, dumber for doing torture, even if you eventually arrive at the truth.
I try to act in such a way that I am made more intelligent, and I believe that governments probably should too (in particular the parts of government that we refer to as motherfucking intelligence agencies). But, to each, his own.
The well-known fact that torture doesn't work is covered in so many places that I find it very unlikely that someone could be truly ignorant of these facts.
Regardless, the utility of torture isn't relevant.
We don't torture in modern societies because we're not ignorant tribal warlords. You don't torture people for the same reasons you don't use nuclear weapons, VX gas, or some sort of weaponized virus: they are cruel, have nasty side-effects, and escalate the conflict.
Also... failure to understand this basic concept implies some sort of inability to empathize properly; in such cases, it may be a good idea to seek the advice of a trained mental-health professional.
> In many circumstances the unreliable information provided by torture is the best you can get.
This seems equivalent to saying 'it is better to have ten wrong hypotheses than none'. Do you see the error?
Even if one of the hypotheses you arrive at after torture ends up giving you enough to go on, to eventually acquire more information by other means and arrive at the truth, it could have happened any of the following ways:
* The subject simply guessed, and happened to be right.
* The subject gave you information you already knew, but hadn't followed up yet. This information was passed to the subject during the torture, either deliberately or through unconscious bias.
* The subject had some actionable information, and torture compelled him to give it to you.
For the most part you, as the torturer, will have no way of knowing which of these it happened to be. In the first two cases, you are dumber after the torture session than before it. In the third case, you are smarter after the torture session, but not as smart as you could have been.
If it was the first case, you would have been better off guessing at a hypotheses yourself and following that up, than soliciting the subject via torture to provide you several hypotheses of his own. You, as the torturer, are not yourself being tortured, and are probably in a clearer state of mind and better able to guess an hypotheses that might be useful.
If it's the second, the subject is only giving you information you already knew, but he's also giving you a bunch of specious information that you're going to waste time following up. You're worse off than before you tortured the subject.
For the third, congratulations! You have successfully extracted some true information from a subject via the method of torture. You won't know for sure at the time, of course, so you'll have to go to extra lengths to be sure of the information, and you're still likely to have acquired some specious information in addition to the truth. So you'll still waste time following up those leads like in case 2. But you did achieve some small victory. Since in the case where the subject does actually know something you want, there are also provably more reliable ways of getting it than torture, you have still created extra work for yourself, but you'll still be able to put on your report that torture 'worked'. You also endangered the lives of fellow citizens abroad, and reduced your government negotiating leverage against other nations and individuals somewhat, but if you don't care about any of that shit, then you can call this a win and go have a beer. You've earned it.
Here's how the system handles ticking time bomb scenarios:
Let's say you think your neighbor has a bomb that's going to kill everyone and you break into his house and shoot him dead.
If it turns out there is a ticking time bomb you either don't get prosecuted, aren't found guilty, or get pardoned.
That doesn't mean it should be legal to break into your neighbor's house and shoot them generally -- if there's no bomb you are looking at a long sentence or execution for murder.
I think it's the same for any crime, I could have left it at breaking and entering. Generally murder is bad, breaking and entering is bad, torture is bad. I don't want the police to be able to torture my family.
If you're going to claim a ticking time bomb scenario is what makes torture ok the same reasoning will make any other crime ok.
Why limit it to terrorist attacks? Let's say someone was just planning a regular murder. Is torture justified? How about child rape? Adult rape? Armed robbery? Tax fraud?
Its not intuitive, its what the entities most responsible for gathering intelligence from captured enemies across much of the world have concluded based on experience (some parts of the US intelligence community, though not all, conveniently backed off that conclusion at about the same time that the previous administration began adopting "enhanced interrogation methods"), that torture is generally inferior to the best available alternatives for gathering actionable intelligence, though its a great way to get people to tell you want they want to hear.
> If it does not work, why do we still do it?
I suspect that the main reasons are:
1) It fits the need to feel that something is being done to bad people that people in the position to inflict may feel, and as a short-term salve over feelings of impotence in the face of danger, and
2) Its very good for getting people to tell you what you want to hear, which, if you have superiors who want information to justify a preconceived course of action (or if you have a preconceived interpretation of events you want to sell to your superiors), is very useful.
This really should never happen, but sadly has happened before - famously to Maher Arar, a dual-Syrian/Canadian citizen who was detained in the US and then sent to Syria to be tortured (rather than returned to Canada, his destination) [1]
It sounds like it was paid for by the Swedish government:
> Sweden paid for a private jet to fly him to Portland five years after he left.
I'd assume the "no fly list" isn't going to apply to requests from other governments to transport US citizens. I don't think the US is worried about friendly European governments shipping terrorists into the US on private planes.
That is not the case. Flights that don't even intend to land in the US can't enter the airspace of the US if they have someone on board that is a member of the no-fly list.
My theory is that someone in a diplomatic role in Sweden called in a couple favors to handle this. Since his request for asylum in Sweden was denied his visa there was likely to expire soon.
> Both TSA officials and FBI Terrorist Screening Center director Timothy Healy confirmed to ABC News last week that the effort to keep U.S. airspace off-limits to terror suspects has not included vetting the passengers and pilots on large private jets such as the one owned by Chagoury, which he has used to shuttle between Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and Europe.
I'd suspect there are similar loopholes for private jets chartered by friendly governments. But you may be right and someone in the Swedish government called in a favor.
Sadly I don't think I can say that it's definitely not true, but this is mostly speculation. UAE could have easily just gotten a memo from the FBI about a terrorism suspect and they decided on their lonesome to torture him.
There are only 500 U.S. citizens on the no fly list, it doesn't appear like it is being used a weapon of coercion on a wide scale.
The US has to share that sort of terrorism suspect list in order to get other countries lists and to make connections.
That said, I'm not sure how the fuck the No-Fly list has survived so long. It is boldly unconstitutional.
> Sadly I don't think I can say that it's definitely not true, but this is mostly speculation. UAE could have easily just gotten a memo from the FBI about a terrorism suspect and they decided on their lonesome to torture him.
True. It's perfectly plausible the FBI would outsource their dirty work in a deniable manner, but equally plausible the UAE would be highly motivated to take extreme measures in interrogating someone circumstantially linked to terrorism entirely of their own accord. Arguably the interrogator volunteering the US and UAE are definitely working together is better evidence for the latter than the former.
Either way the beatings actually add to the suspicion that the approach - joined up or otherwise - was governed more by a "just because we don't have any evidence of your guilt doesn't mean we believe you're innocent" attitude than "we really badly want you to work for us"
>"There are only 500 U.S. citizens on the no fly list, it doesn't appear like it is being used a weapon of coercion on a wide scale."
Well, we can only speculate as to the extent that this list is being used to "intimidate" individuals. Just because there are only 500 on the list, does not mean it hasn't be threatened upon countless other individuals.
It doesn't even have to be directed at you for you to be scared of it. Heck, I'm even scared that some day some random asshole with the same name as me will do something stupid and get himself on that damn list; and I haven't even done anything wrong. I think you'll find a few news articles online about people being harassed because their name hits against the list.
I guess that brings me to the third point. There are 500 unique names on that list, as I'm under the impression that all that list has is name+surname. Unless they include other details, odds are there are many more than 500 individuals that those names match against.
Sure most people can't afford charter jets for day-to-day use, but for an average middle-class person, if you had to make a choice between chartering a jet and never going home again, you'd probably find a way.
Bit of a misnomer then, isn't it? Does that mean those on the no-fly list are just flat-out not allowed to cross borders, whether they're inside the US or not?
Depends on how devoutly religious he is... I could see any number people of catholic, jewish, etc. faith enduring torture vs spying on their own church.
No week passes by without a story like this, against many many governments - something like crazy laws, little to no oversight, torture, illegal snooping etc etc. AT this point, is there any western country who is not doing stuff like this?
I don't know why this was downvoted, it seems like a valid question. I suppose I will get downvoted too, but I think it's worth discussing this now, since it's made the front page even though it probably shouldn't have.
So what evidence is there that the US condoned Fikre's torture? The alleged statement of a torturer? That doesn't seem very reliable. He couldn't prove his story in Sweden, so how will he prove it in the US?
Isn't it possible that the UAE came to find out that Fikre had some involvement with the FBI over the Portland mosque, wanted to know why, and decided on torture on their own? Maybe they suspected that he had been turned into an FBI informant.
It seems a bit far-fetched that the US would be outsourcing the torture of suspected Muslim terrorists to a largely Islamic country, and just waiting for suspects to travel there so that it can happen. And the State Department's statement that they saw Fikre and he seemed ok seems strange if they had anything to hide.
By the standards you've asked, a great many crimes could never be proven. Anyone tortured or raped would never have any evidence other than their word that they had been assaulted. Should they be ignored then?
It seems far fetched to think that the UAE would take a sudden interest in the security of Portland, Oregon but perhaps that's possible. What IS impossible is that a country that's a client of the US would dare to hold, let alone torture a US citizen for a 106 days without the explicit approval of the US.
You think the guy's story is far fetched because he just happened to be in the UAE. Not so much, really. They keep track of the movements of many people (1.5m according to Citizenfour) so they would have known that he was in the UAE. At that point it would only have required one bright bulb at the FBI to come with the idea "hey, why not we get our buddies in the UAE to have a chat with him?"
You're right, I think we should believe him when he says that he was tortured. It's the part where he claims that it was at the direction of the FBI that needs proof.
And I agree, I don't think the UAE cares about Portland. They might care that US security services had taken an interest in this individual though. Are you saying that the UAE security services are totally subordinate to the US and just act as puppets when it comes to US citizens? I would have thought they'd have a bit more independence than that, even if they do cooperate at some level.
If it was a German person making this claim against the FBI, I would be as sceptical as you are. However, this is a US Citizen who was held without charge and tortured. My only claim, and its a reasonable one, is that this sort of thing can only be done with the tacit approval of the State Department or the FBI.
It is possible that they took an interest in him out of the blue, but he had done nothing suspicious in UAE to warrant such brutality. Suppose he had done something suspicious in Dubai, does it seem likely that any client regime would do this to a US Citizen to ask them "who was the bearded man you met with last Thursday?" The story that he was asked about the mosque in Portland is much more plausible.
Sadly, the US exercises enormous influence on small regimes like the one in UAE.
It's of course bad that this sort of thing is happening (assuming it is true), but I cannot say that I have that much sympathy for the guy. He's a muslim. Islam is an intolerant religion (look at how they treat gays etc.). Indirectly, this guy supports the mistreatment of other people.
Why is it bad that this sort of thing is happening then? Now it might just be against muslims, but if this becomes a habit, it could soon start to be used against other people, too.
The HN groupthink is strong in this thread. I wish they wouldn't downvote you just for voicing your (very reasonable) opinions on the matter. Of course, what do you expect when an article like this shows up on a forum for tech startups...
Personally, I agree with you. Without any real evidence I think it's just as plausible something like this could be fabricated for anti-American propaganda.
There is never a time where torture is acceptable, for revenge, for information, for anything. To do otherwise means you are taking into your own hands the humanity of others, to play god. And that would make you a monster.
You assume that you can easily identify who is guilty and who is not. How do you make sure the person in your hand is guilty in the first place? Do you know that "almost half of 212 Afghan prisoners (in Gitmo) either innocent or forced to fight for Taliban"? [1] How many of them tortured for information they don't have?
There are many countries where people suffer from dictators and oppressing regimes. US (and US citizens) shouldn't give those regimes an excuse for their actions by defending torture for any reason. Those dictators are telling people that they torture for the benefit of the society, to save multiple lives etc. Don't be like them.
Would you agree that even in cases as you describe, those doing the torturing should be prosecuted and punished? I would. If it's as important as you say, then the people doing it should be willing to fall on their swords afterwards.
On the topic of schools and supporting torture in client regimes, remember that someone had to both negotiate with the UAE in order to convince them that it would be in their best interest to do as the US says on the topic of torturing foreigners, as well as teach UAE's security forces how to torture in the US-approved way. That way, when someone the US wants information from comes along, they can be tortured by the UAE so that US can keep its PR.
Think about that for a minute. The US is teaching third parties how to torture effectively on its behalf because it wants the torturing done to the proper standard and because it is afraid of the backlash that will occur when torture is exposed. From this thought, we can say that the US has extensive internal standards regarding what methods of torture are acceptable and useful for clients to know, which are likely influenced by how bad and how directly attributable these torture techniques will look when exposed.
A speculation: the US still tortures people directly in addition to third party torture. They already have the secrecy, infrastructure, training, standards, incentive, and targets in hand.