The main question is: At what point after crossing the rubicon into Grayhat SEO can you justifiably (or morally) limit yourself to various grayhat techniques and not go full swing into Blackhat SEO? Follow the background into how I came upon this before I go into the darker areas of SEO.

Background

I ran into one of my friend’s church friend the other day (or rather he recognized me) and we chatted for a little bit. I asked him what he was doing standing there by himself and he mentioned he was doing a survey. He invited me to try out what he was doing at the mall via asking questions and picking which pictures best represented the question (kind of a psychological test).

At the end of the questions, I asked what my results were and he said there were none, it was just to generate a conversation. I was disappointed as I have done surveys before and unconsciously called him out on his tactics by noting that he did not have a piece of paper or survey papers or anything to truly conduct a survey. Basically I implicitly called “BS” on his survey line and that his real goal was trying to convert people to his religion or to his church.

 The SEO Rubicon

As such, this got me into thinking about the similarity within SEO: At what point after crossing the rubicon into Grayhat SEO can you justifiably (or morally) limit yourself to various grayhat techniques and not go full swing into Blackhat SEO?

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Investigation time for the CIA and where it could lead–read Glenn Greenwald and Emptywheel for superb details.

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Read the NYT’s article about the CIA torture tapes and weep for how America is falling.

Then read the post by Scott Horton and feel ashamed for what’s transpired.

I believe in the transparency of democracy and how evil men will be found out and punished (most of the time) for what has been done to sully America’s name, but I wonder how long and how will it happen (if at all).

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Brent Brudowsky at The Hill’s Pundit Blog says it all:

As I write these words on the morning of Wednesday, Dec. 19, high- and low-level officials of the Bush administration involved in torture, and the destruction of the torture tapes, are consulting their criminal lawyers as The New York Times reports that highest-level lawyers in the administration had discussed the destruction of the tapes.

I predict there will soon be new stories about more torture tapes that were destroyed and new stories about more high-level officials that were either tainted or corrupted by this scandal, and others who opposed this travesty who will ultimately testify about who they approached to attempt to prevent it.

Washington and America will momentarily ask once again: What did the president and vice president know, and when did they know it?

In an administration facing an ocean of scandal on multiple and multiplying fronts, this scandal above all will be the Watergate of our times because it involves extremely probable crimes of torture, extremely probable obstructions of justice, and a steady stream of revelations that will only escalate until the inevitable special prosecutor is named.

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Plain and simple question to those noting that waterboarding is torture (which it truly is): What legal actions can be taken against them considering what we know so far?

• We know already as I’ve stated from my earlier post that the CIA destroyed interrogation tapes and that a CIA agent admitted to using waterboarding.
• We know that there was extraordinary rendition to other countries as through secret flights (whether through NATO, other countries, or just American flights is still to be seen)
• The US has court-martialed men who used waterboarding during the battle in the Philippines (speaking of which, why can’t the media ever reference these cases? Are they really that lazy and dumb that they cannot go out and do some Google searches or go to a library and study up before they ask our Attorney General?)
• The US has executed former Nazis for the use of “enhanced interrogations” (see previous lazy/dumb media comment
• A military spokesman in front of Congress could not even say whether Iranian military using waterboarding on American troops was torture! (What more do you need of how wrong America has turned these days and how no one f-in care–note how few American religious leaders have spoken out publicly on this)
• Worst is the implicit and tacit acknowledgment now from the President’s spokeswoman that all interrogations done by the US were legal. (She won’t go into whether waterboarding was legal, but follow the simple reasoning: If CIA agent A says he did waterboarding and Prez spokeswoman B says all interrogations were legal, then it goes to follow that waterboarding done by Administration C is not considered torture).

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Whether intentional or not, one of the CIA’s own men went on national television and actually admitted that he water boarded (ie: tortured) a man under the CIA’s custody. The BBC has more info:

John Kiriakou told US broadcaster ABC that “water-boarding” was used when his CIA team questioned suspected al-Qaeda chief recruiter Abu Zubaydah.

He said it might be torture but that it “broke” the detainee in seconds.

I think what bothers me more is what he says afterwards:

“Like a lot of Americans, I’m involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that water-boarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the water-boarding technique. And I struggle with it.”

Excuse me? We as Americans signed onto the Geneva Conventions because we already intellectually, humanely, and morally believed that torture was wrong. Heck, the CIA even said such a thing back when the USSR was the ‘evil empire.’

Calipygian raises an interesting point:

 In effect, this guy has admitted to breaking the law, possibly even committing a war crime. Will he finger his superiors now? And remember - the Nuremburg defense didn’t save anyone after World War II.

but forgets one thing first in my opinion: How long until someone files a war crime suite within or outside of the United States against him?

All that of course should be tied in together with the White House refusal to comment and infamously state that this is an ongoing criminal investigation over the destruction of those tapes with the following takeaway by David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo:

 The key takeaway is that the White House counsel, presumably at the direction of the Department of Justice, has ordered the preservation of all White House documents pertaining to the CIA tapes.

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More and more information is coming out about the Bush Administration’s foray into torture by almost any means necessary in order to get acquire any information possible after 9/11.

Sadly, this is not confined to the US at this point as information previously came about about the use of foreign airports in Europe with likely permission of the respective governments and as of yet no inquiries or legal cases into finding out what was agreed upon, who knew what and why.

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How low our nation has gone with few outbursts of indignation from moral, political, or institutional leaders–Isthatlegal.org has information about how the the 1926 Mississippi Supreme Court considered water cure (also known as water boarding) torture and threw out a conviction against a black man confessing to killing a white man after being water cured (remember this was the pre-Civil Rights South):

Here’s the court:

The state offered . . . testimony of confessions made by the appellant, Fisher. . . [who], after the state had rested, introduced the sheriff, who testified that, he was sent for one night to come and receive a confession of the appellant in the jail; that he went there for that purpose; that when he reached the jail he found a number of parties in the jail; that they had the appellant down upon the floor, tied, and were administering the water cure, a specie of torture well known to the bench and bar of the country.

Fisher relied on a case called White v. State, 182, 91 So. 903, 904 (Miss. 1922), in which the court took — as I understand history in those parts — the unusual step of reversing the murder conviction of a young African-American male, charged with killing a white man (it appears), because his confession was secured by *the cure*. The court said:

. . . [T]he hands of appellant were tied behind him, he was laid upon the floor upon his back, and, while some of the men stood upon his feet, Gilbert, a very heavy man, stood with one foot entirely upon appellant’s breast, and the other foot entirely upon his neck. While in that position what is described as the “water cure” was administered to him in an effort to extort a confession as to where the money was hidden which was supposed to have been taken from the dead man. The “water cure” appears to have consisted of pouring water from a dipper into the nose of appellant, so as to strangle him, thus causing pain and horror, for the purpose of forcing a confession. Under these barbarous circumstances the appellant readily confessed . . .

Truly a shameful time in our history that will take many decades for us to cleanse our soul (if ever possible) from.

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