Reply #57: Just trying to determine your sincerity

[ozone_man]

in regards to the torture issue. I.e., how you would justify supporting a candidate who openly supports the SOA. If Wes Clark approves of the SOA, isn't that also condoning the methods of torture, death squads, training of military leaders to topple governments in SA? Also belongs to the National Endowment for Democracy, another front organization to bring "Democracy" to the world and countries like Venezuela in particular.

But it is relevant to the OP. Sam Harris makes a key distinction between attrocities like Abu Ghraib and interrogating someone like OBL. I see parallels between Abu Ghraib and some of the attrocities committed by U.S. troops in Iraq with our covert operations in South America in the 80's. This Negroponte fellow seems to have been involved in the death squad operations in Honduras as Ambassador to Honduras and is now head of a large operation in Iraq as Ambassador to Iraq. This is the type of torture culture that needs to stop.

If confirmed Negroponte will head up the largest US embassy in the world, with more than 3,000 employees and over 500 CIA officers. Despite what some would call Negroponte's infamous history in Central America as US ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s, he has come up against almost no Congressional opposition, even from Senate democrats who once criticized him for supporting widespread human rights abuses.

As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. In a 1995 series, the Baltimore Sun detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 3-16, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.

A former official who served under Negroponte says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/28/1449257

One thing I will say about Sam that I don't quite agree on is I think he's been sold on the war on terror a bit too much. He hasn't mentioned the other incentives for this war like oil, though he mentions "interests". The war in Iraq had no connection to the war on terror, until it was made to be so by drawing Al Queda into Iraq. In this sense, I think he is more or less a centrist politically. But I think his rational arguments for the use of torture in isolated instances, i.e., where terrorists have been captured, are difficult to refute, when there are thousands of lives at stake. His contrast with the collateral damage that we never see makes him come up with the "truth pill" analogy to absolve our guilt in the process of torture. It's an interesting ethical argument, not one that has a right or wrong answer necessarily (IMO). But there is a right or wrong answer in regards to SAO or Abu Ghraib. They're both wrong. One can argue that if you allow it in one instance of torture, e.g., to torture an Al Queda terrorist, it can occur in others. Possibly, but look at the collateral damage of war to get some perspective. That is his ethical argument.