The Smoking Gun

[xoxoxoBruce]

Most of you have seen stuff from a website called The Smoking gun. You may not have known it, but that's where most of the arrest booking pictures of celebrities come from.

Here is something different from them.

MAY 24--In a recent raid on an al-Qaeda safe house in Iraq, U.S. military officials recovered an assortment of crude drawings depicting torture methods like "blowtorch to the skin" and "eye removal." Along with the images, which you'll find on the following pages, soldiers seized various torture implements, like meat cleavers, whips, and wire cutters. Photos of those items can be seen here. The images, which were just declassified by the Department of Defense, also include a picture of a ramshackle Baghdad safe house described as an "al-Qaeda torture chamber." It was there, during an April 24 raid, that soldiers found a man suspended from the ceiling by a chain. According to the military, he had been abducted from his job and was being beaten daily by his captors. In a raid earlier this week, Coalition Forces freed five Iraqis who were found in a padlocked room in Karmah. The group, which included a boy, were reportedly beaten with chains, cables, and hoses. Photos showing injuries sustained by those captives can be found here.

This statement is followed by 12 pages of the drawings and pictures of the implements and victims that were still alive.
Do you need a warning?

[Yznhymr]

The pics of the torture victims makes it more real...I wonder how bad it was for the ones that didn't survive. Gitmo seems so tame in comparison (not to excuse anything going on there).

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Oh, go ahead and excuse it. Gitmo shows our nature; this shows theirs.

Defeat them. Accept no substitute for victory.

[Aliantha]

UG, do you think gitmo is a good example of american nature?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Oh, go ahead and excuse it. Gitmo shows our nature; this shows theirs.

Defeat them. Accept no substitute for victory.

We did not torture anyone like this at Gitmo or at the Abu Ghraib prison... But the peace loving members of this group of Arabs gets a pass.

[Undertoad]

Hopefully this display of actual torture will be helpful to those Dwellars who label waterboarding and other such fraternity hazing-level activities as torture.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Hopefully this display of actual torture will be helpful to those Dwellars who label waterboarding and other such fraternity hazing-level activities as torture.

I think this is a classic case of desensitization. You look at blowtorches to the skin, and suddenly waterboarding seems harmless, almost quaint. It isn't. Any fraternity that tried it would find it's members doing 5-10 for assault.

Waterboarding consists of immobilizing an individual and pouring water over his face to simulate drowning, which produces a severe gag reflex, making the subject believe his death is imminent while ideally not causing permanent physical damage. "The threat of imminent death" is one of the legal definitions of torture under U.S. law [2].

Emphasis mine on ideally. One of the advantages of someplace like Guantanamo and 'secret prisons' is if a fatal heart attack does occur, a discreet disposal of the body is possible.

Some torture is REALLY bad, so ours isn't torture any longer? NOT!
Stupidest argument I've ever heard.

[Undertoad]

"Ideally" in that context sounds like a wiggle word, and I can't resist noticing that the "ideal" result of an eye gouging is, well, an eye gouged out. Hands up all who would rather be "ideally" water boarded over being "ideally" eye-gouged.

Neither is ideal.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by rkzenrage

Some torture is REALLY bad, so ours isn't torture any longer? NOT!
Stupidest argument I've ever heard.

Lesson #34, online debate: if you can't poke holes in a point, change it so that it's wrong, and then harshly disagree with it. Maybe nobody will notice!

Keep sayin' it... tap your heels together three times too.... perhaps that will work.

[wolf]

I think this is what happens to cultures whose religions don't allow representative art.

[piercehawkeye45]

From what I understand this type of torture is just a different form of torture with different results in mind than the one's used at Gitmo so comparing them would be invalid.

Physical and psychological torture are two very different things and one is not worse than the other even though the outside effects may be very different.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I think the difference is psychological torture has different effects on different people. Some crack right away and some may take years to crack.

Physical torture has the same physical effect on everyone.