May 13, 2014
By J. F. Minneapolis
...Yesterday (click here) the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), a criminal-justice research and advocacy group, released a report and chart that draws on various data sources to present a fuller picture of precisely who is behind bars, and for what reason. It's not happy reading. PPI reckons the United States has roughly 2.4m people locked up, with most of those (1.36m) in state prisons. That is more than the International Centre for Prison Studies estimates, but it's in the same ballpark....
That is a lot of people, but, more than that it is a lot of police work to move people from freedom to incarceration. I am not going discern the quality of prison time and/or the guilt or innocence of that many adults in custody in the USA; but, that is whole lot of police work.
There are approximately 148 prisoners at Guanta'namo. (click here) I say approximately because I don't know if the ACLU has deducted the six prisoners recently sent to Uruguay.
The point is fairly simple. The CIA swears there was movement made with torture to learn about unknown operatives that otherwise would have not been known to the USA. Okay. But, there were 19 that carried out the murders of September 11th. Another one was already in custody and later convicted in a USA court and imprisoned. There are prisoners in the USA prison system that acted against the country in murdering people in attacks in 1993 I believe it was.
The USA moved on the rat's nest in Afghanistan to stop the activity occurring there and find Osama bin Laden. That never happened as it should have. Instead, the forever war in Iraq was substituted for a thorough change in Afghanistan and securing a future away from hatred of the USA.
There is also FBI involved internationally. There is the cooperation with Interpol. They have offices in the USA and they don't hide that fact. On any given day there are a lot of people all over this country and all over the world putting the pieces of the puzzle together. They are doing it to protect their homelands.
It makes no sense to debate whether the information obtained out of torture would have been found out anyway by other methods, there were no other methods employed. There is no way of measuring that.
The question about the report is not whether it is important to carry out this exercise. The report is a vital exercise of the USA and it's democracy and how it conducts itself going forward.
Bush opened up that huge new building with state of the art computers and all kinds of monitoring with agents carrying out all sorts of investigation. We are told it is best and necessary to have such a facility for the safety of the people of the USA.
The use of torture is finite in it's effectiveness simply because it is done to a prisoner. As soon as the prisoner is taken off the battlefield they are irrelevant to the future of the war. The knowledge is limited to what they DID know about operations and perhaps they might know something about what might transpire. But, the idea torture will result in productive information for an extended period of time is nonsense. It is nonsense by the simple fact the prisoner doesn't know what tomorrow will bring or what a week from today will bring or what a month or year will bring. The only information they have is what has happened and possibly what was planned.
You'll excuse me, but, wasn't there a PDB that told of the attack that was to come within three months? Was that gotten by torture?
No, it wasn't.
By J. F. Minneapolis
...Yesterday (click here) the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), a criminal-justice research and advocacy group, released a report and chart that draws on various data sources to present a fuller picture of precisely who is behind bars, and for what reason. It's not happy reading. PPI reckons the United States has roughly 2.4m people locked up, with most of those (1.36m) in state prisons. That is more than the International Centre for Prison Studies estimates, but it's in the same ballpark....
That is a lot of people, but, more than that it is a lot of police work to move people from freedom to incarceration. I am not going discern the quality of prison time and/or the guilt or innocence of that many adults in custody in the USA; but, that is whole lot of police work.
There are approximately 148 prisoners at Guanta'namo. (click here) I say approximately because I don't know if the ACLU has deducted the six prisoners recently sent to Uruguay.
The point is fairly simple. The CIA swears there was movement made with torture to learn about unknown operatives that otherwise would have not been known to the USA. Okay. But, there were 19 that carried out the murders of September 11th. Another one was already in custody and later convicted in a USA court and imprisoned. There are prisoners in the USA prison system that acted against the country in murdering people in attacks in 1993 I believe it was.
The USA moved on the rat's nest in Afghanistan to stop the activity occurring there and find Osama bin Laden. That never happened as it should have. Instead, the forever war in Iraq was substituted for a thorough change in Afghanistan and securing a future away from hatred of the USA.
There is also FBI involved internationally. There is the cooperation with Interpol. They have offices in the USA and they don't hide that fact. On any given day there are a lot of people all over this country and all over the world putting the pieces of the puzzle together. They are doing it to protect their homelands.
It makes no sense to debate whether the information obtained out of torture would have been found out anyway by other methods, there were no other methods employed. There is no way of measuring that.
The question about the report is not whether it is important to carry out this exercise. The report is a vital exercise of the USA and it's democracy and how it conducts itself going forward.
Bush opened up that huge new building with state of the art computers and all kinds of monitoring with agents carrying out all sorts of investigation. We are told it is best and necessary to have such a facility for the safety of the people of the USA.
The use of torture is finite in it's effectiveness simply because it is done to a prisoner. As soon as the prisoner is taken off the battlefield they are irrelevant to the future of the war. The knowledge is limited to what they DID know about operations and perhaps they might know something about what might transpire. But, the idea torture will result in productive information for an extended period of time is nonsense. It is nonsense by the simple fact the prisoner doesn't know what tomorrow will bring or what a week from today will bring or what a month or year will bring. The only information they have is what has happened and possibly what was planned.
You'll excuse me, but, wasn't there a PDB that told of the attack that was to come within three months? Was that gotten by torture?
No, it wasn't.
