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Talk:Waterboarding


Latest comment: 6 years ago by Phoenix and Winslow in topic RFC: Should this article define "waterboarding" as a form of torture in the first sentence of the lead, or not?
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Former featured article candidateWaterboarding is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination was archived. For older candidates, please check the archive.
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December 20, 2007Good article nomineeNot listed
March 17, 2008Featured article candidateNot promoted
Current status: Former featured article candidate


Torture was ‘the norm’ in the North[ern Ireland], says university lecturer

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/torture-was-the-norm-in-the-north-says-university-lecturer-1.3185382

Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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Dry drowning doesn't exist, apparently?

Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Just reading and cross referencing some articles. Apparently dry drowning is medically discredited[1][2] - I suggest perhaps adding a snippet in there, as the drowning article it links to includes the statement that the concept is non-existent in the very lede. When two articles are inconsistent with one another on such a crucial element such as the reality of a claim it's probably best we bring them both in line with each other. At present it appears this article is protected, and as I'm on a public computer I can't login, so here's hoping someone who sees this will make the requisite changes and include the two links provided on the Drowning page, as I have included above and will again here [1][3] 121.210.33.50 (talk) 15:44, 12 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

References

  1. ^ a b Hawkins, SC; Sempsrott, J.; Schmidt, A. "Drowning in a Sea of Misinformation: Dry Drowning and Secondary Drowning". Emergency Medicine News. Archived from the original on 7 August 2017. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  2. ^ Szpilman, D; Bierens JL; Handley A; Orlowski JP. "Drowning". New England Journal of Medicine. 10 (2): 2102–2110. doi:10.1056/nejmra1013317.
  3. ^ Szpilman, D; Bierens JL; Handley A; Orlowski JP. "Drowning". New England Journal of Medicine. 10 (2): 2102–2110. doi:10.1056/nejmra1013317.

A fresh look: is the question of 'is waterboarding torture' really a settled question?

Latest comment: 6 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion

First of all, no court of competent jurisdiction, anywhere in the world, has officially ruled that the CIA's waterboarding of three Al-Qaeda detainees was in fact "torture." This is the threshold we observe and firmly enforce when writing about living persons. And Gina Haspel is a living person.

Second, there have been many developments and new articles written since this question was addressed. All of the sources I've read, which are not clearly biased in favor of the left, describe this as "enhanced interrogation" or "harsh interrogation." The fact that it is "controversial" is always mentioned, and "some experts believe that the CIA waterboarding technique is torture" is the sort of third-or-fourth-paragraph way to address the issue that I have consistently seen. Only intensely biased sources come right out in the first sentence and say "Waterboarding is torture," period, full stop.

The nomination and successful confirmation of Haspel as CIA director has generated a fresh wave of articles on the subject. I've conducted an extensive review and this is what they're saying: "Waterboarding is enhanced interrogation. It's controversial. Some legal experts insist that it's torture."

Don't pretend that the current lede sentence identifies a settled question. Wikipedia has pretended this is a settled question for 11 years. It isn't. And it never was. Only by focusing on a group letter signed by 115 left-wing law professors, most of whom are experts in patent law or family law or criminal defense, and treating it as 115 separate sources were the editors of 2007 able to pretend that a "consensus of experts" had been reached, as if that matters.

The Obama Justice Department, whose leadership was hand-picked by Barack Obama after he had campaigned on a "waterboarding is torture" platform, refused to discipline John Yoo and Jay Bybee for providing legal opinions that CIA waterboarding is not torture. The Justice Department refused to refer the matter to the state bar disciplinary commissions where Yoo and Bybee were licensed. In other words, Barack Obama's DOJ officially determined that Yoo and Bybee had not engaged in professional misconduct in advising the CIA on the legality of waterboarding.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/30/AR2010013001411.html

This is as close as we're ever going to get to an official determination on the matter, and it flies in the face of those who claim "waterboarding is torture." I hope that we can have a civil conversation about this and reach a conclusion that establishes Wikipedia as a completely unbiased source on the matter. Phoenix and Winslow (talk) 16:18, 22 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

Hi @Phoenix and Winslow:, thanks for your post, which has given me the opportunity to re-review some of the more recent reporting and scholarship. The consensus at the top of the talk page (based on Talk:Waterboarding/Sources) is that "waterboarding is a form of torture." When a U.S. court evaluates waterboarding, this will be taken into account and may be grounds to re-evaluate this consensus; however, international courts, NGOs, legal scholars, etc. may continue to disagree. Absent a U.S. court decision, we will continue to rely on published analysis by legal scholars and other reliable sources, the balance of which currently assert that waterboarding is torture. It is perhaps worth noting that several U.S. courts have been blocked from examining these questions by the state secrets privilege; the U.S. government invoked national security concerns to block lawsuits from proceeding, such as here (2010) and here (2017).
Regarding your second point, there is a section on Enhanced interrogation techniques#Decision not to prosecute exploring the Obama administration DOJ's decision not to prosecute, which is attributed to political considerations (avoiding backlash from the CIA/NSA/military) and not to unanswered questions over when pouring water into a shackled human's airways crosses over from ill-treatment to torture. As the article mentions, specific rationale not to prosecute other torture cases (including the cases of Rahman and al-Jamadi, who died while being mistreated in custody) has not been disclosed. As to the legal opinions permitting waterboarding: the Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury memos have all been attacked as "cherry-picking" and flawed legal reasoning (i.e. starting with a pre-determined conclusion and working backwards, while excluding precedents to the contrary), in particular for Yoo and Bybee. These criticisms were present in the OPR's report. The subsequent decision (at odds with the OPR's conclusions) not to refer Yoo & Bybee to their respective bar associations for disciplinary review was not made by a judge, but by David Margolis, a DOJ career official (not a political appointee).
(Margolis's report and his actions were examined by Scott Horton writing for Harpers. He argues that the decision to allow Yoo and Bybee to avoid potential disbarment or criminal prosecution was made to evade accountability for the DOJ, stating Margolis's report does not adequately address the merits of the OPR's complaints. Similar conclusions were reached by David D. Cole (now-director of the ACLU) in two separate pieces for Georgetown Law and New York Review Books, who went further, and by David Luban at Slate.)
As argued on the EIT page by a former member of the Obama transition team, the Obama DOJ did not prosecute for political reasons, and not because waterboarding was established as not being torture. Absent any cases adjudicating waterboarding, we must rely on RSs and current legal scholarship. The lack of consequences for Yoo and Bybee are attributed to one DOJ official; updating the consensus to "waterboarding is (possibly) not torture" based on his report would be to grant him undue weight compared to the rest of the source list.
My conclusion: For the aforementioned reasons, I don't think the absence of prosecutions is grounds to re-evaluate the current consensus, which states that "according to the sources that exist, the phrase 'waterboarding is a form of torture' is an accurate assertion, supported by an overwhelming majority of sources."-Ich (talk) 11:42, 5 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
You've carefully ignored the WP:BLP issue. Wikipedia policy is the product of a consensus of all Wikipedia editors, not just the ones who have been interested enough to work on the article. You seem to think that in the absence of a decisive court opinion on the matter, in a court of competent jurisdiction, we should leave the WP:BLP violation in place. Wikipedia policy explicitly requires the opposite. Absent a decisive court opinion stating that the CIA waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two others was torture, this WP:BLP violation must be removed. And I urge you to remove it. Phoenix and Winslow (talk) 02:26, 25 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Upon further review, it appears that the actual edit to the article was done by someone named Fold 1997. You popped in on June 4 and did a technical edit. Then Fold 1997 magically popped in on June 5 (for the very first time in eight months) and actually performed the edit to the lede sentence, did nothing else, and departed again. He/she has now been gone for nearly three weeks again. And you, Ich, popped back in on June 5, did another technical edit, and explained to me here on the Talk page why the edit to the lede sentence had to be done. Hmmm. People whose nature is to be deeply suspicious might call that sockpuppetry. Do you know Fold 1997?? Phoenix and Winslow (talk) 17:23, 25 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Hi @Phoenix and Winslow:, if you think there's content further down in the article that violates BLP, I'm happy to discuss it here or on a BLP noticeboard. My focus was entirely on the consensus at the top of the talk page regarding the lede, mentioned in Fold 1997's edit summary and which you proposed reevaluating. Please avoid editing the consensus in the FAQ until more people have had the chance to respond to your concerns. Your first edit didn't mention any BLP-related objections to the content [edit: this was unclear. I mean to say: First, Gina Haspel's name appears nowhere on the page, so having this article as a BLP violation on Haspel is not an obvious connection. The language on her page includes the word torture in plenty of places, but is consistently attached to strong reliable sources, which I think fulfills BLP. Referring to her as a "war criminal" absent a court decision would violate BLP, but referring to waterboarding as torture based on reliable sources does not.], which is why I didn't address that in my prior response. A court decision will not necessarily settle the issue; for example, the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur on torture thinks waterboarding is torture and I doubt a U.S. court ruling will change his minds. The U.S. government has blocked its own courts from adjudicating the issue in the past, so a court decision will likely not be forthcoming. Until then, we must rely on a consensus based on the published reliable sources and legal scholars who have given opinions on this matter. These are discussed at length in the talk archives and on Talk:Waterboarding/Definition. Please don't single-handedly change a previously established consensus without forming a new consensus, which is something that by definition cannot be done alone. For this reason, I would like to put out an RFC request so more people can join in the discussion.
I'd like to ask you to refrain from imputations such as "you've carefully ignored" or "you seem to think ... we should leave the BLP violation in place", as this kind of language neither accurately represents my positions nor engenders civil conversation. Regarding the insinuation about sockpuppetry: As you can see from my contribs page, I make a number of technical edits. I was reviewing my recent edits and saw that the page had changed since my last visit. Fold 1997's edit summary referred to a talk page consensus, which drew me to this debate here. I have no ties whatsoever to User:Fold 1997; the only other account I've ever used was User:Ichvonen, which I created for editing the German Wikipedia in 2012 and have not used since WP:SUL in 2015.-Ich (talk) 19:24, 25 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
I'd also like to point to the consensus established for the lede on Enhanced interrogation techniques which also is clear about EITs being a euphemism for torture; it feels wrong for waterboarding to be listed as an EIT, and in turn the page EIT says "EITs are a euphemisms for ... torture". The style guide WP:EUPHEMISM specifically instructs editors to avoid terms that mask the meaning of words, such as "collateral damage" and prescribes instead "civilian casualties".-Ich (talk) 08:32, 26 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

RFC: Should this article define "waterboarding" as a form of torture in the first sentence of the lead, or not?

Latest comment: 6 years ago15 comments7 people in discussion

Should this article define "waterboarding" as a form of torture in the first sentence of the lead, or not?-Ich (talk) 13:52, 28 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

Should we change the previously established consensus, which is "according to the sources that exist, the phrase 'waterboarding is a form of torture' is an accurate assertion, supported by an overwhelming majority of sources."?-Ich (talk) 19:32, 25 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

(Summoned by bot) This is a malformed RfC. What do you propose changing this to? The current phrasing is inappropriate, but it's not much use asking for community input without a specific proposal. Vanamonde (talk) 04:34, 28 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Vanamonde93: Thank you for your response, I wasn't exactly sure if RFC, WP:DR, or WP:3 would have been the best way to address this. The previous consensus quoted from the FAQ was: ...according to the sources that exist, the phrase "waterboarding is a form of torture" is an accurate assertion, supported by an overwhelming majority of sources. Correspondingly, the previous lede sentence for the article was "Waterboarding is a form of water torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the individual to experience the sensation of drowning."
Phoenix and Winslow (talk · contribs) has changed the lede sentence to "Waterboarding is any one of several methods of enhanced interrogation performed by pouring water over the nose or mouth of an immobilized person, causing the individual to experience the sensation of drowning." From his statements above, my reading of his suggested new consensus is Waterboarding (particularly as employed in the context of the War on Terror) has not been clearly established as torture and should not be directly referred to as torture without "regarded by some observers" or similar qualifiers; directly saying "waterboarding is a form of torture" violates BLP because it indirectly accuses waterboarders of torture. User:P&W cites the absence of prosecution or disbarment under Obama as well as the absence of rulings by U.S. courts.-Ich (talk) 12:20, 28 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
In that case, I would suggest replacing the question above with the question "should this article define "waterboarding" as a form of torture in the first sentence of the lead, or not?" 13:29, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose Because a large section of this article happens to address the controversy over whether waterboarding is or isn't torture, it would simply be inappropriate and inconsistent to label it as torture in the first sentence of the lead. Kerdooskis (talk) 21:35, 28 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
In other words, a Wikipedia article cannot contradict itself. Kerdooskis (talk) 21:37, 28 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose, since the position that it is not torture has some weight (it is definitely a mild form of torture, when defined as such, compared to some other methods). I would also omit the "enhanced interrogation" euphemism out of the lead sentence (these euphemisms tend to change, and this particular one is US specific I believe). The torture yes/nk debate should be presented further down.Icewhiz (talk) 10:45, 29 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
    The whole idea that waterboarding might not be torture is entirely US specific. And I would strongly object to the claim that repeatedly nearly suffocating a person is "a mild form of torture". It is one that does not leave obvious physical marks, but that's the best one can say about it. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:50, 29 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • Of course. That's what it is. --John (talk) 10:55, 29 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • Yes. Reliable sources agree. Some weak self-serving sources disagree. Flat Earth does not get equal time, either. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:02, 29 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose very strongly. Believing that the earth is flat isn't a felony, Stephen. I can't even believe someone reverted the edit and that we're opening an RfC on this without first changing our long standing WP:BLP policy. This Wikipedia policy expressly militates against claiming, in the article mainspace, that any living person committed any crime unless that person has been found guilty of that crime in a court of competent jurisdiction. In this case we're not just claiming it in the mainspace. We're claiming it in the first seven words of the lede. No court of competent jurisdiction has ever ruled that the CIA style waterboarding of three Al-Qaeda detainees was torture. Torture is a hideous crime, with negative connotations similar to sex trafficking or child molesting. No court has ever found anyone guilty of committing this crime against the three Al-Qaeda detainees who are at the center of the modern debate on this topic. Nor has any court issued a declaratory judgment, or any other kind of judgment, announcing that these actions were torture — even without finding any specific person guilty. These accusations are smearing the name of Gina Haspel, current CIA director, and several less well known CIA interrogators and other personnel who was involved in the harsh interrogation program that some human rights advocates and other lawyers, but absolutely zero courts of competent jurisdiction, have described as torture. In particular, these less well known (and in fact, virtually unknown) CIA interrogators are not exempted by WP:WELLKNOWN and therefore WP:NPF applies. These are not public figures. Under the section of policy titled WP:BLPCRIME we find the following word for word quote.

For relatively unknown people, editors must seriously consider not including material—in any article—that suggests the person has committed, or is accused of having committed, a crime, unless a conviction has been secured. A living person accused of a crime is presumed innocent until convicted by a court of law. Accusations, investigations and arrests do not amount to a conviction.

Accordingly, I must very strongly oppose the continued presence of these libelous words anywhere in the Wikipedia mainspace. Phoenix and Winslow (talk) 23:56, 30 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Repetition is not making your argument any better. We are not accusing anyone of a felony, we are describing the act as what it is. How absurd your argument is becomes obvious when applying it to Kim Jong-un - alive, never been convicted of a felony, so we cannot talk about Human rights in North Korea? Or so-called extraordinary rendition - we can't call it abduction? Just because the US fell back (in part, hopefully temporarily) into an age of barbarism after 9/11 and historically has refused to prosecute members of the government or most people acting "under orders" (the classical Nuremberg defence), and does not recognise (most?/any?) international courts, does nor mean we have to censor our encyclopaedia of well-known and widely sourced facts. Have you ever looked at (the strongly censored summary of) the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture [1]? Our WP:BLP is there to protect individual people against unproven allegations, not to shield state actors from inconvenient facts. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 05:11, 1 July 2018 (UTC)Reply
You conveniently forget that Kim Jong-un is exempted from full protection under WP:BLP by WP:WELLKNOWN. He is a public figure. Individual CIA interrogators are not. Several war crimes accusations in both the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq have produced prosecutions and in some cases convictions, such as Lt. William Calley. The alleged (and unproven) motive you claim for not prosecuting anyone for this particular claim of torture does not excuse the fact that no one has been prosecuted for, let alone convicted of torture as a result of these three waterboardings. And the fact that no one has been convicted militates strongly against including the unqualified claim "waterboarding is a form of torture" in the lede sentence. The Senate Intelligence Committee's report is an intensely partisan document, thrown together rather crudely by the Democrats a few days before the new GOP majority took control of Congress and the committee. It was intended more to score political points than find facts. Most journalists summarizing it jumped straight to the "Conclusions" section without bothering to read the huge volume of "Amendments," which gutted most of the "Conclusions," resulting in a large amount of inaccurate news stories about it. Phoenix and Winslow (talk) 10:58, 1 July 2018 (UTC)Reply
Where in our article do we even mention individual CIA agents? We talk about the act, not the actors. Notice that we do have articles on other forms of crimes, too. Your WP:BLP argument is hollow on both ends. The number of convictions for war crimes in Vietnam was, of course, trivial compared to the number of openly acknowledged crimes, and nobody in the political chain has been convicted nor, to my knowledge, even been prosecuted for e.g. the bombings of Cambodia and Laos, undeniable and obvious war crimes. Calley was the one fall guy - and he served less than 4 years of house arrest, which seems like a comparatively light price for someone personally convicted of 22 killings, and responsible for an event for which even the US army acknowledges 347 killed, with a couple of mass rapes thrown in for good measure. The US has been historically extremely reluctant to prosecute crimes performed by its agents, direct or indirect. Sadly, it is not alone in that, but that does not make it better. It's also irrelevant to the fact that waterboarding is widely described as a form of torture by experts from a wide range of political backgrounds - including e.g. John McCain, a leading Republican senator, and David Miliband, foreign secretary of one of the staunches US allies, not to mention scores of law professors and judges. And of course there are courts that have decided that waterboarding is torture - e.g. the European Court of Human Rights, which as decided against Poland, Romania, and Lithuania for cooperating in "the CIA's abduction and torture program" [2][3]. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 12:11, 1 July 2018 (UTC)Reply
Your speculation about the "real" reason why nobody's been prosecuted for waterboarding the Al-Qaeda detainees is just that. Speculation. The fact of the matter is that nobody's even been charged with torture, let alone convicted, and that is the fact that Wikipedia policy sees. Your "wide range of experts" are, in effect, accusing several Americans of committing the crime of torture. Or conspiracy to commit torture (with Bush & Cheney as the masterminds of the conspiracy). No one denied that the waterboarding was done. The only missing part is whether CIA style waterboarding is in fact torture. The claims that it is torture are mere accusations, not proven in a court of law. Sure there are a lot of accusations. And they come from people who are well educated in the law. But these people also have a possible bias because they are human rights advocates. They have made human rights advocacy their career choice. The Wikipedia policy is very clear in stating that "Accusations ... do not amount to a conviction." Phoenix and Winslow (talk) 17:02, 1 July 2018 (UTC)Reply
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