Waterboarding

Perhaps I should clarify:

I can tell you from personal experience...it is perhaps the most humane way; outside of long term phycological conditioning, of effectively breaking a prisoner in a short period of time.

Long term efforts of course lead to better results.

A trainned individual however can still give false information and or mislead his captors in a wide variety of ways.

We train certian critical assets (meaning important personel such as pilots etc) in our military to do this very thing.

It is called resistence trainning.

Those of us that have had the previlage to instruct such training don't mince words.

We call water boarding what it is: torture.

Thank-you for that.

It is, as you say, torture; and torture is illegal throughout most of the world.

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Originally Posted by Maximilien Robespierre

The first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.

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Or, to paraphrase Foucault, 'Punishment can be moderated only in so much as it is certain'. The more likely that someone can escape punishment, the more terrible it need necessarily be. This is visible in retrograde in most modern societies; as the percentage of murders that are left unsolved goes down, societies tend to relinquish capital punishment.

When one detonates an explosive belt, they guarantee they will not be punished. For this reason, they are nearly impossible to deter; you can put mechanical obstructions which prevent them from reaching their target (though all you're really doing is forcing them to choose different targets), or you can capitulate to their demands (in which case you have reinforced the maxim that 'war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means'), or you can confront them at a morally equivalent level. If every suicide bombing was answered by dropping a carpet of incendiaries on the home town (or some arbitrary town in their nation) of the suicide bomber, societies would do everything in their power to prevent their people from engaging in these sorts of attacks.

Are the people that would be killed in retributive attacks responsible for what they are being targeted for? Certainly not! If the Israelis announced that the next time Hezbollah mortared Sderot, they'd make Beirut look like Dresden, would it stop Hezbollah? Certainly not! Most people seem to expect that civility is a handicap that cannot be set down. I do not think it would take many examples to convince the poor and weak of this world that the wealthy still maintain the will and the power to keep them poor and weak though.

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Originally Posted by Virulent

Or, to paraphrase Foucault, 'Punishment can be moderated only in so much as it is certain'. The more likely that someone can escape punishment, the more terrible it need necessarily be. This is visible in retrograde in most modern societies; as the percentage of murders that are left unsolved goes down, societies tend to relinquish capital punishment.

When one detonates an explosive belt, they guarantee they will not be punished. For this reason, they are nearly impossible to deter; you can put mechanical obstructions which prevent them from reaching their target (though all you're really doing is forcing them to choose different targets), or you can capitulate to their demands (in which case you have reinforced the maxim that 'war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means'), or you can confront them at a morally equivalent level. If every suicide bombing was answered by dropping a carpet of incendiaries on the home town (or some arbitrary town in their nation) of the suicide bomber, societies would do everything in their power to prevent their people from engaging in these sorts of attacks.

Are the people that would be killed in retributive attacks responsible for what they are being targeted for? Certainly not! If the Israelis announced that the next time Hezbollah mortared Sderot, they'd make Beirut look like Dresden, would it stop Hezbollah? Certainly not! Most people seem to expect that civility is a handicap that cannot be set down. I do not think it would take many examples to convince the poor and weak of this world that the wealthy still maintain the will and the power to keep them poor and weak though.

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I'm not sure I get your point here. On the one hand you seem to be advocating massive retaliation against innocent civilians for acts of terror (thereby committing another act of terror) while on the other hand you seem to be stating the futility of doing so. And it would, indeed, be futile, adding fuel to the fires which forge these insanities.

No, the only way to stop such things is to remove those who advocate and support them. If a man straps a bomb to his chest and blows up a school, it's not necessarily his village or even his family who should be held responsible, but those who built the bomb for him, and those who paid for that bomb, and those who preached to him that he would receive his reward in some mythical afterlife after committing an act of madness and murder.

The way to stop Hezbollah, or any other radical terrorist organization, is to stop their financing. If they cannot pay for weapons, cannot pay for bomb builders, cannot pay to train their suicide bombers, then they will slowly die off. But this cannot be done passively. It must be handled aggressively and, in many cases, illegally. Bin Laden would quickly lose his power in the terrorist world if the civilized world seized and confiscated his wealth. The money is there, in banks around the world. Probably some of it even here in the US. Find those banks, seize those assets, and use them to compensate the victims of his madness, and see how quickly that madness grinds to a halt. And if a foreign nation decides to finance him in some way, then seize their assets as well. Take the war on terror out of the streets where innocent civilians are being killed and maimed and move it into the boardrooms and throne rooms of the wealthy and powerful. Instead of letting them become even more rich and powerful, make them pay the real price for their greed and stupidity.

Would it be futile? I suppose it depends on your goal. If you're trying to eliminate terrorism, then you can't do so by committing terrorism. If you're trying to prevent a particular group of people from engaging in terrorism, then I disagree - I think that killing them indiscriminately is probably expedient and effective.

Who used terrorism against the Nazis? To a very small degree, German Jews... but mostly, the Czechs, the French, and German Christians were responsible for almost all of the clandestine internal resistance faced by the Nazis. Why is that? Because Jews are inherently docile? I don't believe that for a second. Rather, I think it was because the Jews were being exterminated, a precondition that makes it difficult to fight back.

Financial restrictions probably work well against well-funded guerrillas... the Iraqi insurgency, or Hezbollah, which are both heavily equipped and funded by Iran would lose a lot of their ability to harass the American and Israeli militaries respectively if their money was taken away... but according to Todd Sandler, a University of Texas "expert in transnational terrorism", a suicide vest costs $150. I suspect that taking away expensive things like explosively-formed penetrators and radio detonators from the Insurgency would just make them go low-tech, at which point they would start targeting civilians more.

To be clear, I don't like State-sponsored anything, let alone violence; I'm a strident anarchist. I do think though that things could be an awful lot worse. The present is actually a fantastic time to be alive (when compared with a non-nostalgic understanding of the past).

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Originally Posted by Virulent

Would it be futile? I suppose it depends on your goal. If you're trying to eliminate terrorism, then you can't do so by committing terrorism. If you're trying to prevent a particular group of people from engaging in terrorism, then I disagree - I think that killing them indiscriminately is probably expedient and effective.

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I disagree. Random killings as you prescribe only serve to help the terrorist organizations recruit new members. True, they wouldn't be from the particular village or town which you've eradicated, but their neighbors, friends and relatives in other villages and towns would be more likely to join their "freedom fighter" comrades than try to stop them.

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Who used terrorism against the Nazis? To a very small degree, German Jews... but mostly, the Czechs, the French, and German Christians were responsible for almost all of the clandestine internal resistance faced by the Nazis. Why is that? Because Jews are inherently docile? I don't believe that for a second. Rather, I think it was because the Jews were being exterminated, a precondition that makes it difficult to fight back.

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They weren't docile, but the Jews in Europe were notoriously non-violent, apparently believing that keeping a low profile would help. By the time they became aware of what was actually happening in Germany it was far too late for armed resistance. There were too few of them left.
In other countries, German attempts to put down "terrorists", or guerrilla fighters, such as the French underground, by executing civilians after any activity, was grossly ineffective. More people were driven to the underground
by these acts than were turned into informants for the Nazis.
In Czechoslovakia, after a high-ranking SS officer was assassinated, the Nazi's murdered all the men and older boys, and sent all of the women and children to the camps. True, none of those people, who'd had little or nothing to do with the actual assassination, were much of a problem any more. But the action did nothing to stop anti-Nazi activity throughout the occupied territory.

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Financial restrictions probably work well against well-funded guerrillas... the Iraqi insurgency, or Hezbollah, which are both heavily equipped and funded by Iran would lose a lot of their ability to harass the American and Israeli militaries respectively if their money was taken away... but according to Todd Sandler, a University of Texas "expert in transnational terrorism", a suicide vest costs $150. I suspect that taking away expensive things like explosively-formed penetrators and radio detonators from the Insurgency would just make them go low-tech, at which point they would start targeting civilians more.

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You are never likely to stop all terrorist activity in an area, regardless of what means you use. Stopping the funding is more than just restricting their ability to create bombs, though. They need that money for recruiting new members, for propaganda outlets which inform the people just how wonderful they are. If you stop the money, you stop those television broadcasts and web sites which can influence so many. Eventually the more rational education systems will change people's attitudes. And you are less likely to have mass attacks such as the 9-11 and London bus bombings, among others.

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The present is actually a fantastic time to be alive (when compared with a non-nostalgic understanding of the past).

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Here we are in full agreement. Advances in science, medicine and technology have made life much more comfortable, for most of us at least. True, they also allow much more dangerous threats, such as dirty bombs and nuclear disasters, but all in all the good outweighs the bad.
I have this image in my head of the first man to "tame" fire, walking into his tribes cave with a burning branch and a piece of cooked meat. Just imagine all the elders and religious leaders gathering around and deciding that the fire is just too dangerous to be used. Too many things can go wrong. We'd still be eating raw meat and grunting, I think. Anti-technology advocates today are just the same, too worried about the possible problems which can be caused to see the real problems which can be solved.

When you say "the Jews in Europe were notoriously non-violent, apparently believing that keeping a low profile would help.", I think we're looking at two sides of the same coin. Were the Jews non-violent because they are/were passive people? Or because they guessed that violence would be useless against unrestrained state-sponsored violence?

Look at what the Janjaweed accomplished in '03-'04 in Darfur. It is now 4 years after the bulk of the genocide, and the indigenous people haven't even formed a substantive militia yet. The Janjaweed, further, are a bunch of cattle-herds on horses with guns. Imagine what a real military force would have done.

I think the reason why so many believe that "violence never solves anything" is because they're used to the modern style of restrained and rationalized violence. If one were to say that "half-measures never solve anything", or "unrestrained state-sponsored violence is horrible and shouldn't be used to solve anything", I would agree with them, but not the former. You can't have problems without people.