So... that torture report

[Fat Cat]

"Horror and moral terror are your friends." - Col. Walter E. Kurtz

[Batboy2/75]

Should the USA torture? No, it's morally wrong and endangers American Military service members. We won't always being fighting unlawful combatants that have no morals or ignore the rules of warfare.

Moving foreword, first define torture. A lot of the enhanced interrogation techniques mentioned that report are not torture. Legally define it, legislate it into law and then enforce it amongst the security agencies entrusted with interrogating terrorists. Also make it illegal to outsource the work of interrogation outside of the agencies to contractors and or other governments.

As for forced hydration, it's not torture and it's only an enhanced interrogation tactic if it's used to humiliate the subject. In reality it's a legit emergency first aid procedure used in the military for treating soldiers with advanced heat stroke. A very dangerous condition in the field. I have personally administered an IV this way to another soldier. You cut the end off of the IV and stick it up their ass and then slowly step or squeeze the bag. The human lower intestine will absorb the IV fluid. The reason this procedure is used is because people suffering from extreme dehydration almost impossible to start an IV with intravenously; their veins will collapse etc. I can only imagine it was used in three scenarios (1) a case where a terrorist refused to eat or drink (2) it was used to humiliate the terrorists (3) it was used to revive a terrorist as a result of the interrogation. If it was scenario 1&2: it's not torture to fucking bad for Mr. Jihad. if it was scenario number (3); yeah it may have been used as part of a torture session.

For those that claim that enhanced interrogation techniques (like humiliation) don't work. You are dead fucking wrong. The British pioneered these techniques during WWII with Nazi prisoners and they were very effective in gathering actionable intelligence.

The funny thing is in all of the arguments you never hear anyone bring up the fact that these terrorists are unlawful combatants. They have no right under the Geneva convention. That doesn't mean we have the right to torture them, but it does mean that we can hang them. If you want to put the fear of God into Osama Ben Goat Fucker, then start hanging them in a very quick manner. By international law, unlawful combatants can be executed after a court martial.

Start hanging fuckers in a quick manner in front of their friends and trust me, they'll be lining up to trade secrets for their lives. Remember, the real nut jobs and retard squad guys are handed the suicide belts and missions. Even the hardest committed Jihadist will think about turning on the cause when they are lead up to the hang mans noose in their PJs.

The fact that we don't have the stones to start hanging terrorists (something allowed by international law) says a lot about how stupid and degenerate we are as a nation.

[johno]

Had the CIA intended to torture KSM & others, why stop at water boarding? It's not like they didn't know some medieval shit.

I believe the US should torture "ticking time bomb" type prisoners where there could be a catastrophic loss of life. The order should be straight from the President, signed & sealed, and available for review at the end of hostilities. Own it, just like the President has to own drone strikes and aerial bombings that kill innocents.

As to the legal rights of terrorists, here's the proper hierarchy of rights & privileges:
US citizen > foreign national > enemy POW per Geneva Conventions > cockroach > terrorist.

[dead man walking]

as i recall, we killed a u.s. citizen employing a drone. could we torture a u.s. citizen?

[Turdacious]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdZ9weP5i68[/youtube]

[johno]

as i recall, we killed a u.s. citizen employing a drone. could we torture a u.s. citizen?

For starters, I would support a law revoking the citizenship of someone at war against the US, with due process.

[johno]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdZ9weP5i68[/youtube]

Can we get a "Would?"

[DrDonkeyLove]

as i recall, we killed a u.s. citizen employing a drone. could we torture a u.s. citizen?

We keep prisoners in the equivalent of solitary confinement for years. We shackle suspects to uncomfortable chairs (mild stress positions) w/o ready access to bathrooms, food, water, or even clocks. LEO lies, to them and psychologically manipulates them during interrogations and sometimes uses sleep deprivation. If they go on a hunger strike, they get a tube with nutrition solved into one orifice or another.

And, the Defense Authorization Act of a few years ago allows the gov't to declare you a terrorist and send you away w/o any access to the criminal justice system - forever.

So, I think the answer is yes if those things count as torture.

[Blaidd Drwg]

What are the seminal works on the efficacy of IET's / Torture?

I've read several papers on the subject but what are the pro-torture crowd relying on as their supportive science?

[Turdacious]

What are the seminal works on the efficacy of IET's / Torture?

I've read several papers on the subject but what are the pro-torture crowd relying on as their supportive science?

The primary thesis-- that torture has been used by everybody but that democracies try and make it cleaner-- is solid. The secondary thesis-- that it doesn't work, is weak. The research on how well and when it works is probably classified, and probably should be.

[Turdacious]

As a Justice Department lawyer who worked on the legality of the interrogation methods in 2002, I believed that the federal law prohibiting torture allowed the CIA to use interrogation methods that did not cause injury -- including, in extraordinary cases, waterboarding -- because of the grave threat to the nation's security in the months after the 9/11 attacks.

I was swayed by the fact that our military used waterboarding in training thousands of its own soldiers without harm, and that the CIA would use the technique only on top Al Qaeda leaders thought to have actionable information on pending plots.

The United States had just been attacked, with the loss of 3,000 civilians lives and billions in damage; intelligence indicated that more attacks were coming, perhaps using weapons of mass destruction; we knew little about Al Qaeda, and believed only interrogations could reveal the full extent of their plans.

CIA officers have said that they used waterboarding on only three terrorist leaders, and that the interrogations yielded valuable intelligence on Al Qaeda.

I would want to know if they lied to me and other Bush administration officials, as the Feinstein report asserts.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/john ... -1.2039758

[Blaidd Drwg]

I would have to read the thing to understand why you think the second thesis is weak. It has been pretty well accepted throughout history that extreme physical interrogations yield unreliable results.

The better question we should be asking is, "do the broad range of interrogation methods we use now yield better results if they include AIT" As a standalone, there seems to be little in favor of "torture." There may be strong arguments in favor or AIT...or even torture....but if the services are going to submit to the oversight they gotta justify the science. I totally disagree that we shouldn't know and understand what is being done in our name regardless of the intel value.

[Turdacious]

I would have to read the thing to understand why you think the second thesis is weak. It has been pretty well accepted throughout history that extreme physical interrogations yield unreliable results.

The better question we should be asking is, "do the broad range of interrogation methods we use now yield better results if they include AIT" As a standalone, there seems to be little in favor of "torture." There may be strong arguments in favor or AIT...or even torture....but if the services are going to submit to the oversight they gotta justify the science. I totally disagree that we shouldn't know and understand what is being done in our name regardless of the intel value.

As I understand it, the powers for AIT are an extension of wartime and federal police powers-- the oversight is the WH, Congress, and, to a limited extent, the Court. Of coarse, any of the pieces can go amok-- J Edgar is case in point.

Sunlight is a good disinfectant, but not when sensitive info is involved. The rumors surrounding Wikileaks are an example of how complicated it is-- exposing our actions overseas allegedly got people who worked with us overseas killed. They may not have been supplying sensitive information, they may have just been at a meeting about something mundane.

Yoo's article suggested that you are right-- AIT is not a good tool on it's own. Any intel analyst will tell you that single source information is generally unreliable. It must be supplemented with, or support, other information. The information gained has to be useful to be valid. The book doesn't make strong arguments against AIT because the author doesn't have enough information to make his case that it doesn't work. He also doesn't have enough information to say that it does, or how best to apply it.

At the end of the day, for AIT to work, you have to trust that big brother knows what he's doing and will use appropriate restraint. The author of the book suggests that we've made a lot of progress in this area. If Yoo is right, the techniques we use-- sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion, mental games, and waterboarding-- are used regularly on our own military.

Not sure the argument can be truly proven either way-- the people who know best can't and won't talk. You aren't an important 'We.' Neither am I.

[johno]

extreme physical interrogations yield unreliable results.

Standing alone, the above may be true. But irrelevant. Properly used, coercive techniques start with information that the questioner already knows, but the questionee doesn't know he knows. The questioner establishes a baseline, and then ventures into unknown areas.
If you followed the Ferguson case, the prosecutor withheld the facts of the physical evidence, such as tissue inside the cop vehicle, locations of shell casings, and locations of bullet entry wounds (in the front, not back, of Brown). The prosecutor then tested the reliability of witnesses against the known physical evidence. "Oh, you say the cop shot Brown in the back? Why didn't the autopsy show any wounds to Brown's back?" "Next witness."

The better question we should be asking is, "do the broad range of interrogation methods we use now yield better results if they include AIT"

This is the ongoing debate. Intelligence heads under Bush AND Obama say these methods yield some valuable intel.

[Blaidd Drwg]

At the end of the day, for AIT to work, you have to trust that big brother knows what he's doing and will use appropriate restraint......


Not sure the argument can be truly proven either way-- the people who know best can't and won't talk. You aren't an important 'We.' Neither am I.

The debate is whether, as a policy, we want people tortured in Our name. We the People is always, and will always be the most important We in question.

The State and its apparatus is an extension of the public will...if the Public Will is that we want to gamble with the security value of specific methods, so be it.

As I've explicitly stated, I'm ok with torture and even far far more direct interventions (Batboy's suggestion to just hang them forthwith is not far off what I'd go for). The degree to which these methods is a critical secondary element of the debate. You can't decide thing one without a rough discussion of thing two.

The fact we use AIT/Torture is not remotely a security question...specific techniques may be...bit if the services have a track record its nearly always to err of the side of covering asses and avoiding oversight and lying about anything dubious, questionable or potentially damaging to your funding source. That's not nefarious, that's life within a government agency.

Nonetheless, how we decide to conduct war is absolutely Public Policy made real. If the nastiest shit we are willing to do to achieve our goals isn't a matter of open public debate, we may not be grown up enough to be making war at all.

[nafod]

One thing that always colors my opinion on any of this stuff is the observation that humans have the ability to rationalize any behavior. Any at all. History backs me up on this.

So I am wary of the arguments around torture that rationalize it by conducting the trade-off analysis, as if you were deciding on a portfolio of stock investments.

[Turdacious]

Nonetheless, how we decide to conduct war is absolutely Public Policy made real. If the nastiest shit we are willing to do to achieve our goals isn't a matter of open public debate, we may not be grown up enough to be making war at all.

People want sausage, they don't want to know how it's made.

[DrDonkeyLove]

The US had many thousands of detainees. Some of them possessed super important information that could save American lives, perhaps many civilian American lives.

Of the group of detainees that had very important information, approximately 100 had a bit of a bad time of it during interrogations. A substantially smaller number experienced some serious unpleasantness, and a grand total of two may have died from the process.

What happened w/the interrogations may be a serious problem but it's not a BIG or technically difficult problem to solve. Tweak the severity of the investigation techniques down a few clicks and that problem is fixed.

Certain groups in the US revel in our failures, or perceived failures. They can't wait for an opportunity to expose to ourselves and the world our awfulness. That's what I can't stomach about Feinstein, the Democrat report, and much of the reporting about it.

[The Venerable Bogatir X]

Another thought: how do we 'can' what actually works, what doesn't, and when a line is crossed?

Any of us with kids of our own would likely agree that a mere crediblethreat to one's family would be more persuasive motivator/torture than accepting physical abuse to ourselves. But does that work on a Muslim religious zealot?

Intentionally simple thinking here but relevant: compelling a 4 y/o hard-headed Rottie that is used to getting its way to lie down on command is a different ball of wax than getting a goofy lab to do the same.

[nafod]

­Twenty-six of the 119 detainees turned out to be innocent.

One of them was a Pakistani or Afghan man named Janat Gul. In July 2004, the CIA seized Gul, acting on a tip from a local informant who claimed he knew of a terror plot. His interrogators subjected him to sleep deprivation, slammed him into walls, and forced him to stand for as long as 47 hours in a row until he suffered hallucinations that he could see and hear his wife and children. He begged to be killed.

Eventually, the informant who fingered Gul admitted to fabricating his story.

Collateral damage?

[The Venerable Bogatir X]

Another thing I find very interesting about how this topic is playing out on this thread is I am fairly certain at least a handful of the thread's participants have been to SERE School and they seem equally divided on the argument.

[Blaidd Drwg]

People may not want to see how sausage is made....and that is at least half of the reason this country is full of entitled soft cunts that are insulated from the choices made on their behalf.

[The Venerable Bogatir X]

To stick with the cooking analogies, many people are also afraid to peel back their favorite variety of news onion be it CNN, MSNBC, Today, FOX, 700 Club. JUst pull it from the ground and shove it down the throat with all its dirt is easier than getting to the sweet spot, which might make them cry in the process.

[Boris]

People may not want to see how sausage is made....and that is at least half of the reason this country is full of entitled soft cunts that are insulated from the choices made on their behalf.

Well said.

[johno]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXoNE14U_zM[/youtube]