It’s one thing to be in a war with people who are evenly matched and therefore hold your own in a contest. It’s another thing to be in a position of thoroughly unequal power, where you can push a person around at will, shackle them into painful positions for days at a time, almost drown them over and over, slam them against walls… and they are so restrained they can’t even stop themselves from smashing their face into the floor when they fall.
Either (a) this will bother you very quickly or (b) you make up all sorts of internal rationalizations or (c) you enjoy being a bully and sadist. This is a problem, and why so many of (c) end up being prison guards or policemen where they power over others. The (c) types you really don’t want in your army. They end up pulling Abu Graib behaviour unless restrained.
This reminds me of the rational for building gas chambers - that the German army squads rounding up and shooting Jews en masse on the eastern front suffered from “low morale”, the men complaining they signed up to fight, not to slaughter helpless unarmed women and children. Some people are moderately human. Others are not.
Can we expect to see a thread any day now where medically untrained people give advice to surgeons as to how to perform operations based on what they personally think, or what they’ve heard from a friend who’s dad knew someone who had once lived next door to someone who went to the same bowling club as a medical doctor ?
Many people are alive today because of harsh treatment to people who have openly admitted to, bragged in fact about it, carrying out random mass murder on complete strangers, ostensibly for religious reasons, more often because they’re sociopaths, and guess what ? there seems to be a larger proportion of minor criminals in Al Quida then is the statistical norm for ME cultures.
Before they were murdering innocent people for the “cause”, they were torturing and murdering innocent people to make money.
This is a recurring theme with terrorists of all nations, and all persuasions.
When returned home for questioning where their own people have no illusions about the BS that these murderers spout, unsympathetic treatment does actually bring forth genuine and useful information .
It has to be cross referenced with knowledge already possessed and against other people blabbing their hearts out.
I would guarentee that there are people on these boards, or relatives of such, who are only alive today because of the tactics they like to get all high and mighty about, thinking that they’re safe from any of the bad stuff happening to them, being used.
Ivory towers are all very well until someone sets light to the one you’re in.
What if the doctor is cutting off someone’s leg because they have a cold? The people on the sidelines are qualified to call out something that is wrong when it is wrong. What makes us qualified? We’re US citizens and we have the right to say “We don’t do that.”
Most people who do interrogations disagree with the use of torture techniques, find it counterproductive, and find normal methods to bring much better results. Often, after getting information for a while then introducing torture, the detainees stopped talking.
Exactly. See this video featuring former FBI interrogator Jack Cloonan on Three Torture Myths. Skilled interrogators view torture as “that Alpha Male bullshit”. From what I understand they were getting useful intellegence from KSM before the torture started, and it dried up after it began.
The United States previously managed to defeat another huge, evil, multinational that thought nothing of killing innocents in pursuit of their aims - the Mafia. They never tortured Mafia informants. All they did was talk to them. Find out what they need, offer a way out of the organization, play on grudges they might have, use their egos…a whole universe of techniques.
Torture defenders remind me of H. L. Menchen’s claim that “for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.”
Who are you snarking at? Please direct your snark specifically.
I posted a clip of of a retired FBI interrogator stating unequivocally that torture does not work. There are plenty of longer interviews with him on YouTube, as well as a debate between Cloonan and a torture advocate.
I believe I have a valid point. The Mafia had no problem with killing their own members, witnesses, judges and innocent bystanders. They had a code of silence, and violating it carried a death sentence. And they have been very successfully crushed and the FBI never had to use inhumane methods. They didn’t avoid them because they are some type of wimps, but because they simply don’t work, and are usually counter-productive. And, as they have found, torture makes prosecution for crimes much more difficult due to the information being “the fruit of the poisoned tree”.
I love the Dope, but the most annoying aspect of it is this:
You score a direct hit - like for instance, producing an interview with a skilled FBI interrogator, a man who has spent his career successfully extracting information from bad guys - and the other side just disappears.
There was an opinion piece in the Washington Post recently by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., who was the Director of the National Clandestine Service at CIA. He has an ax to grind and this is op-ed rather than factual reporting, but it is interesting to take his point of view into account. His thesis is that although Obama made the final decision to raid Bin Laden’s retreat, the intelligence that formed the foundation of the raid was developed during the Bush administration.
He says that an (unnamed) al-Qaeda terrorist taken to a secret CIA prison and subjected to some “enhanced interrogation techniques," though not waterboarding, when he told them about al-Kuwaiti. He does not describe those techniques, only that they were authorized
Is he describing what you and I would call torture? Hard to say.
The most important part of all this is that evidence obtained by torture is not admissible in court. The case against KSM has been hampered by the fact that they have had to eliminate all evidence obtained via waterboarding or other inhumane methods.
So not only was it evil, stupid and destructive to the soul of a democracy…it was pointless.
Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr. is doing what bullies always do - protesting their innocence. The only thing worse than engaging in torture and sullying the reputation of the country you presumably love for generations, is to do so for no reason.
Rodriguez has been on a whirlwind pro-torture tour where he tries to downplay how bad the methods were and exaggerate how successful they were. I don’t know if he has mentioned him recently, but Rodriguez has bragged about the information they got from waterboarding Abu Zubaydah. In fact, Ali Soufan, the FBI’s top interrogator, got the information from him with traditional techniques, then the CIA came in with “enhanced techniques” and the information dried up.
It may be worth noting that the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program was built by two hired clinical psychologists with no intelligence or interrogation experience who pretty much took the SERE manual and made it a harder and more perverted. Once the program started, numerous complaints started within the intelligence community that it was amateurish and unreliable, if not illegal. There is still not one proven example of it working. A report after the techniques were banned said the CIA didn’t deem the information it got from enhanced methods to be reliable.
Assuming there was one proven example of “enhanced interrogation techniques” being successful, so what. How many bits of information have traditional methods successfully gathered in the past 10 years? 50,000? 500,000? Non torturers win.
Isn’t he saying that the courier’s name came out during torture, but since they couldn’t trust any of the information obtained that way, they didn’t do anything about it? Anyhow, that’s the way I read it. Or maybe he meant they weren’t even looking for information in the first place and that’s why they didn’t follow up on it. It is hard to tell.
Nothing obtained via torture is worth what it costs, least of all information. If it were, Torquemada was the most successful evangelist of all time. The general rule seems to be that you only torture if you’re not particularly concerned about the answers to your questions.
When I learned about Abu Grhab, I literally threw up. This was NOT something the country I love does!
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It may be worth noting that the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program was built by two hired clinical psychologists with no intelligence…
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If no useful information was obtained through torturing KSM, then the fact that the useless information obtained is not admissable in court is of no relevance. By attributing relevance to the fact that the evidence is inadmissable, you seem to be acknowledging that useful information was in fact obtained.
And in that case, the claim that it was “pointless” is wrong. Information about a terrorist organization has much broader applicability than use in a court of law.
The people doing the torture knew, or should have known if they weren’t utter idiots, that information obtained via torture is inadmissible.
Sorry for not making myself more clear.
No information obtained from a subject being tortured has any validity. There is no place on the human body that you can beat that will turn on some sort of truth switch. No amount of water poured into the human lung will make a subject speak more clearly. And no judge who is not utterly corrupt will allow the results of inhumane treatment be be used.
The reason torture is not allowed is that, even if a subject should tell the truth, unless you have obtained the information by other means, you have no way of validating it. And, if you had the information already, what the fuck are you doing torturing people?
See my earlier statements about the fight against the Mafia. Information obtained via normal, humane methods is always more valuable and trustworthy. Look at the Maxi Trial. Hundreds of vicious killers willing to do anything up to and including public acts of terrorism, murder of judges and corruption of public officials were put behind bars, and no torture was used.
No, his point was clearly that even if *true *information had been obtained via torture, it *still *could not be used to convict him.
Only if you have some objective reason to find it credible, not merely the product of the imagination of a person who’ll say whatever you want to hear to make the pain stop. If you think that’s more likely the case (which it pretty much has to be), then the “information” so obtained is actually *far worse *than useless - it only distracts you from real, credible intelligence. As well as, of course, removing your moral credibility, and enraging and radicalizing people who might heretofore have been not inclined to do anything to you.
I disagree. I can think of lots of things that could be learned while applying torture that would not be very useful (to finding OBL or fighting AQ) but where the inadmissibility of such evidence would be notable.
To use a real-world example regarding KSM, him admitting to personally beheading Daniel Pearl isn’t really all that useful in the fight against OBL and AQ. But not being able to use those statements in court to charge him with Pearl’s murder is a significant drawback.
That’s just the first example I could think of off the top of my head with very limited knowledge. I’m sure there are many even better examples.
I can’t help thinking that the constant yellow-orange-red-orange-red-yellow threat level dance farce of the mid-2000’s was based on how tight the thumbscrews were that particular day…
OK, I know they did not use thumbscrews; I mean, I hope they didn’t… But while subjecting people to “enhanced interrogation” it appears they got enhanced responses that likely had no relevance to reality but allowed the “Let’s do your colours” section of the CIA to keep busy.
I don’t think we can possibly know for sure … just like we’ll never know whether the Admin’s post-kill rush to toot their own horn caused the rats to scurry our of their safehouses before we had a chance to bomb them.