RightWingers...If Torture Techniques Are Truly Responsible

[QUENTIN]

And there are many more who do not bash the process, say it does work, or proclaim it to be torture...

You love to bring up individual opinions on it, or blogs, or statements from loonybin thinktanks... as long as it supports your view... you have no consensus, just because you say you do

I can sit and post links from various sources that have statements from individuals or groups or studies that says it does work... but that is of no consequence to you... but at least I don't try and proclaim some 'consensus'

Please do. It is of consequence to me. Clearly based on how quickly you're responding, you're not actually reading through the sources I'm citing that make such a compelling case.

I've seen nothing from any informed, worthwhile, reliable source (like a top military interrogator) to indicate torture works.

I've provided ample evidence it doesn't. If you truly have lots of sources and beneficial information from experts (rather than politicians, pundits, etc.) that demonstrates or compelling argues torture is worthwhile, I'd love to read it.

In all these conversations over the years on this subject though, I've yet to see anyone post such information and I've never come across it despite studying the subject quite a bit.

 

[QUENTIN]

Here's an interview with Forbes with a top interrogator of high-value detainees in Afghanistan who offers his thoughts on the subject:

Senior U.S. Interrogator: Torture Talk Puts Troops at Risk - Osha Gray Davidson - Edison 2.0 - Forbes

A top United States interrogator in Afghanistan says that torture played no role in locating Osama bin Laden, and that claims to the contrary by former Bush administration officials recently amount to “propaganda [that] degrades our intelligence operations more than any other factor I can think of.”

Echoing what Matthew Alexander has long argued, he also talks about how torture not only doesn't save American lives but is one of the major contributing factors to the loss of it:

Such talk also creates blowback -- unintended consequences -- that can be deadly, he added in an interview. "Simply the idea of our interrogators using torture or coercion recruits jihadists, facilitators, suppliers, supporters, and even suicide bombers, against us and our allies," he said.

...

On the subject of blowback, he continued:

I cannot even count the amount of times that I personally have come face to face with detainees, who told me they were primarily motivated to do what they did, because of hearing that we committed torture. Even the rumor of torture is enough to convince an army of uneducated and illiterate, yet religiously motivated young boys to strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up while killing whoever happens to be around - police, soldiers, civilians, women, or children. Torture committed by Americans in the past continues to kill Americans today.

When everyone who knows what they're talking about, not from theoretical and abstract study, but from years of personal firsthand experience feel one way about a subject and you with little or likely zero firsthand experience with the subject feel the opposite, 99 times out of 100 it means you're wrong. 100 times out of 100 it means you should really consider what they have to say with an open mind and force yourself to look at the evidence and see what conclusions it suggests.

When it comes to torture/waterboarding, the case for it is based on conjecture and supposition.

The case against it is based on centuries of historical evidence, decades of study, and years and years of firsthand practical experience.

I understand there are people out there who just hate terrorists and want them subjected to all matter of pain, but that's an issue of vengeance not intelligence, an emotional response, not a rational one, and refusing to use waterboarding/torture is not an issue of going easier on detainees but utilizing a more effective (and also unequivocally legal and moral) technique at extracting valuable intelligence without exacerbating our problems the way torture does.

Again.. because YOU say they know what they are talking about... because they happen to agree with YOUR preconceived opinion... yet if a person with a similar or same background states the opposite of what YOu want to hear, you'll dismiss it

You're a real piece of partisan workmanship

No, this is merely what the experts say.

If you find a person with a similar or the same background who states the opposite, the floor is yours, link me to him.

This is how productive conversations occur, with both sides presenting evidence to make their case. So far there's precious little of that on your end, but I'd genuinely like to read the opinion of an equal or similar expert who comes to the opposite conclusion.

As far as I can tell so far though, and barring evidence to the contrary provided, they don't exist.

 

[QUENTIN]

And I have known many fellow individual soldiers that have individually spoken against many things... whether it be policy, training methods, PT exercises, the CIC, or whatever else...

1 single person's vision, does not make your case, quentin

This isn't one single person's vision. It's not the vision of some random individual who knows a little something from serving.

This is the professional opinion of the singular individual with more success and experience as an interrogator of Islamic militants in the war on terror than anyone else in history, the foremost expert in the world on the subject of interrogation, and the professional opinion of an individual who didn't just go through waterboarding at SERE but was the chief of training at SERE school, one of the world's most foremost experts on the subject of waterboarding. Their firsthand experience and knowledge is essentially unparalleled and though their opinion doesn't necessarily equal fact, I've yet to see anyone offer an argument for why listening to people who know substantially more than any source that disagrees with them isn't the smart and rational thing to do.

And, of course, it is not the opinion of even just these two remarkable informed and experienced individuals.

There is a general agreement among experts at large that torture doesn't work:

Top Interrogation Experts Agree: Torture Doesn't Work

This is just a sampling from that link which provides links of its own to each statement:

the top interrogation experts all say torture that doesn't work:

* The military agency which actually provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects warned the Pentagon in 2002 that those techniques would produce "unreliable information."

* Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1 says:

"Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

* A declassified FBI e-mail dated May 10, 2004, regarding interrogation at Guantanamo states "[we] explained to [the Department of Defense], FBI has been successful for many years obtaining confessions via non-confrontational interviewing techniques." (see also this)

* Brigadier General David R. Irvine, retired Army Reserve strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner interrogation and military law for 18 years with the Sixth Army Intelligence School, says torture doesn't work

* The CIA's own Inspector General wrote that waterboarding was not "efficacious" in producing information

* A former FBI interrogator -- who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects -- says categorically that torture does not help collect intelligence. On the other hand he says that torture actually turns people into terrorists

* A 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks, says:

“The administration’s claims of having ‘saved thousands of Americans’ can be dismissed out of hand because credible evidence has never been offered — not even an authoritative leak of any major terrorist operation interdicted based on information gathered from these interrogations in the past seven years. … It is irresponsible for any administration not to tell a credible story that would convince critics at home and abroad that this torture has served some useful purpose.

This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work — it doesn’t — but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.”

* The FBI interrogators who actually interviewed some of the 9/11 suspects say torture didn't work

* A former US Air Force interrogator said that information obtained from torture is unreliable, and that torture just creates more terrorists

* The number 2 terrorism expert for the State Department says torture doesn't work, and just creates more terrorists

* A former high-level CIA officer states:

Many governments that have routinely tortured to obtain information have abandoned the practice when they discovered that other approaches actually worked better for extracting information. Israel prohibited torturing Palestinian terrorist suspects in 1999. Even the German Gestapo stopped torturing French resistance captives when it determined that treating prisoners well actually produced more and better intelligence.

* The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously found that torture doesn't work.

When you couple the unparalleled professional experience of the two experts I named with the consensus among people who practice, teach, and study interrogation and add to it the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's direct, clear, and simple assertion that the intelligence that led us to bin Laden was extracted during normal interrogation utilizing uncontroversial and not "enhanced" techniques, and the CIA's timeline that demonstrates it was four years between when their detainees were waterboarded and when they gave up the information we needed, it makes absolutely no sense, there is absolutely no rational basis, for continuing to believe waterboarding is a worthwhile technique.

Leon Panetta, Hayden and several others have verified it works....Twisting the words of Rumsfeld does not help your case, anymore than blatantly trying to twist Panetta's words.

Waterboarding worked...It's a non-torterous tool that should always be in the box......PERIOD!

I'm concerned with american lives. I could care less about bleeding heart loony liberals and their abject loony nonsense.

Here is the direct quote of exactly what Rumsfeld said on the subject in full, with no twisting possible:

Asked if harsh interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay played a role in obtaining intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts, Rumsfeld declares: “First of all, no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay. That’s a myth that’s been perpetrated around the country by critics.

“The United States Department of Defense did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone. It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.”

Hayden and Panetta, far from claiming the intel used to find bin Laden was gleaned during waterboarding, instead both mention when asked that the intel came from high-value detainees (KSM and al-Libbi) who "had been" and "were held" at places where they were subject to enhanced interrogation. We know KSM was waterboarded in 2003, that's public record they're verifying, but quite clearly neither of them claims the information that the CIA says it first got in 2007 was from those waterboarding sessions.

Removed from the sexy "confirms waterboarding led to Osama" headline used in right-wing press right now, the actual quotes don't do that.

Here's what Panetta said on the subject:

WILLIAMS: I'd like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was -- as a result of water boarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after Bin Laden?

PANETTA: It-- you know, Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information and that was true here. We had a multiple source-- a multiple series of-- sources that provided information with regards to the situation. Clearly some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees but we also had information from other sources as well. From Sigent intelligence, from imagery, from other sources that we had-- assets on the ground. And it was a combination of all of that that ultimately we were able to put together that led us to that compound. So-- it's-- it's a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.

WILLIAMS: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was, in part, among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?

PANETTA: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I'm also saying that, you know, the debate about whether-- whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always gonna be an open question.

WILLIAMS: So finer point, one final time, enhanced interrogation techniques -- which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years -- that --

PANETTA: Right.

WILLIAMS: -- includes water boarding?

PANETTA: That's correct.

Here's what Hayden said on the subject:

ZAKARIA: So you took news of this courier in to President Bush many years ago, right?

HAYDEN: We did. I think it was about four years ago, in 2007. We - we had built up sufficient lead information on the name of the courier that we thought it was ready for presidential primetime. So we briefed it to the president, not as something eminent but as our most promising lead to track down Bin Laden because, frankly, Fareed, the trail had been quite cold for a - a long period of time.

ZAKARIA: And why had it been cold, General? Because you had these huge bounties out on his head, and one of the things that people used to always say to me in the region was, gosh, this guy must inspire fanatical devotion and loyalty. The Americans are willing to pay $25 million and nobody turns up to - to claim the reward.

HAYDEN: Yes. Well, a - a couple of thoughts on that.

Clearly, he was concerned with his own operational security. Those people who knew where he was was a very small group of folks. $25 million translates very well into an American or European context. Frankly, Fareed, we learned that those kinds of numbers really don't have the same kind of meaning in the - in the tribal region of Pakistan.

And, most importantly, he went off the grid. And by that I mean the - the telecommunications and electronic grid, which has been a very powerful tool for us for such a long period of time. And it was - it was that absence from electronic communications that convinced us we know he's communicating. He must be doing it through human beings. We need to find and follow the couriers. And that was the hypothesis with which we went into this four years ago or so.

ZAKARIA: So this is classic human intelligence? You had people on the ground. They talked to people. They developed relationships. Is that right?

HAYDEN: It is. But it also came out of detainee interrogations.

One - one of the more prominent leads we had at the beginning of this exercise was partial identity information that came out of detainees that we were holding in our so-called black sites. And then, from that point, we used all the tools of intelligence.

I can't go into detail, but, I can assure you, it was signals intelligence and imagery intelligence and human intelligence that allowed us to build this. And - and Fareed, this wasn't done one brick at a time. This was actually done one pebble at a time. This is classic analytic work.

ZAKARIA: Tell us for a moment about that issue of interrogation, because, you know, there's something of a debate here about whether the extraordinary methods, the ones that have aroused so much controversy, that people like Colin Powell and John McCain came out against, were those methods crucial to getting information that has led to Bin Laden?

HAYDEN: Well, let me put it to you this way, Fareed. First of all, I'm proud to be a citizen of a country that feels it needs to debate these kinds of issues. But, as we debate them, the debate has to be fact-based. And the lead information I referred to a few minutes ago did come from CIA detainees, against whom enhanced interrogation techniques had been used, not to elicit specific bits of information, but move them from their initial air of defiance into a zone of cooperation.

So the facts of the matter are people against whom we used these interrogation techniques provided us at least one of the strings of information that led to last weekend's events.

ZAKARIA: There are people who say, though, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the - kind of - one of the chiefs, one of the planners of 9/11, perhaps the chief planner, denied even knowing the courier. And actually that's what tipped some of the interrogators off, that it wasn't some extraordinary methods.

HAYDEN: I think the actual - the actual facts are that he gave us some - some very partial lead information at the beginning. As we developed the information, we went back to him, and he and another detainee were so demonstrative - atypically demonstrative in rejecting knowledge of this individual, that that in itself turned into lead information.

And I'd have to suggest, Fareed, if - if he had not been largely cooperating with us, this would not have been anomalous behavior. And so it's all of a piece.

Pay attention to precisely what they say.

That they used enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, against some of these detainees is all that either confirms. That the people who gave us the intelligence had those methods used on them at some point. We know that. We know KSM was waterboarded and we know he was a source. He doesn't say the waterboarding led to the information and especially not that the information was acquired during waterboarding, something Rumsfeld explicitly denies. He doesn't say the waterboarding in 2003 produced the intel we didn't acquire until 2007 because that defies logic and the forward progression of time.

Hayden even admits that in the period between when KSM was waterboarded in 2003 and when they got the intel in 2007, the "trail had gone cold" and been cold for "a long time." That rather obviously suggests that whatever KSM said in 2003 during waterboarding isn't what led to bin Laden, but rather it was new information years later without the waterboarding, otherwise they'd have had the courier's name four extra years (which NO ONE claims and all evidence says is not the case) and the search for bin Laden wouldn't be "cold." Even in his best efforts to justify the torture/waterboarding of which he is a major proponent, he states that the "enhanced interrogation" did not lead to any specific bits of information like a courier's name, only that he thinks it made him compliant, but 4 more years of keeping the courier's name a secret doesn't sound much like compliance.

Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, and the CIA all agree that they got the name of the courier in 2007. The last time KSM was tortured was 2003, the last time waterboarding was used, was 2003. So he didn't tell them the name of the courier that led to bin Laden during waterboarding, he continued to not tell them for 4 more years, and only during normal interrogation in 2007 did he give up the intel we'd been looking for all that time.

These are just factors which none of the people involved dispute.

Now in addition to the fact that neither Panetta nor Hayden say waterboarding/torture is how we got the intel, and the CIA timeline has KSM being waterboarded in 2003 and not giving us the courier's name until 2007, there's the fact that Hayden and Panetta as people who authorized and oversaw waterboarding (which is now, as it had been for decades prior, defined as a torture technique and thus illegal) have a pretty obvious ulterior motive for wanting to depict waterboarding as effective as a means of justifying why it was done. Even with that motivation, neither actually makes the claim that the intel came from waterboarding.

Then there's the fact that Donald Rumsfeld, someone else with the same clear motivation for wanting to justify the use of waterboarding since he too authorized and oversaw its controversial use, despite that motivation and how much he'd love to be able to justify torture by saying waterboarding got the intel says directly in unequivocal terms that the information was gleaned from specifically not enhanced interrogation techniques but during normal interrogation many years later (as numerous other sources agree).

What you come away with is no proof or evidence waterboarding got the intel and a mountain of it that it didn't.

Again, all the facts are on one side of this equation, all pointing to the same clear conclusion.

 

[ClosedCaption]

For getting the intelligence that led to the discovery and killing of Osama Bin Laden, then...

a.) What SPECIFIC information was it?

and

2.) WHY wasn't it done 6 or even 4 years ago?

What you people want us to buy is that somehow, some kind of VERY important information was garnered from beating the living snot out of some Muslims that is just NOW baring fruit.

Anyone who would actually believe that should have their head examined.

Can you enlighten the rest of us?

You're a fucking fool. The last waterboarding (that has been admitted to) was in 2003, it led to the information that EVENTUALLY led to Bin Laden.

No it didnt. You have the burden of proof. I say it was Obama being president that eventually led to Bin Laden. Prove me wrong!

 

[yota5]

And I have known many fellow individual soldiers that have individually spoken against many things... whether it be policy, training methods, PT exercises, the CIC, or whatever else...

1 single person's vision, does not make your case, quentin

Very well said Diamond Dave. Very well said indeed.

Claudette, you wish to kill all of the dirty little bastards is moving along. You may enjoy the following article. I wonder if the terrorists fear the drones more then the water board?

"DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan -- U.S. missiles killed three alleged Arab militants Tuesday in a tribal region along the Afghan border, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

The officials said two drone-fired missiles hit a vehicle in the Baghar area of South Waziristan, an area that has been used by militants to cross into Afghanistan, where many are involved in fighting U.S., NATO and Afghan forces.

The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. The official said local informants and intercepted satellite phone conversations indicated that the militants killed were Arab.

Tuesday's strike was the second drone attack since U.S. Navy SEALS conducted a raid on May 2 that killed Al Qaeda chief Usama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a garrison city that also lies in the country's northwest.

The American raid on bin Laden's hideout heightened tensions between the two nations, but the United States has generally continued missile strikes even during sensitive times."

Read more: Pakistan: U.S. Missile Strikes Kill 3 Militants in Tribal Region - FoxNews.com

 

[QUENTIN]

Another of the most successful and experienced interrogators in the war on terror has, unsurprisingly, similar thoughts on the subject.

He's responsible for getting through interrogation the intel that led right to where Saddam Hussein was hiding and here's what he said:

Information from U.S. military interrogations led to the capture of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2003 and to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born instigator of a campaign of suicide bombings and beheadings, in a 2006 airstrike inside Iraq.

The two interrogators who were most responsible for sealing those most-wanted fugitives' fates explained on Friday, April 24, to a Melnitz Hall audience how they did it and why torturing the people in their custody would never have gotten the same results.

In the national debate on whether the tactic of torture is warranted for the sake of national security, the experiences of the two former interrogators underscore the argument that torture is not an effective tool for unsealing secrets and getting at the truth.

Over five weeks in Tikrit, Army Staff Sergeant Eric Maddox, who has interrogated hundreds of Iraqis, identified and followed an enemy chain of command that led up to Hussein and ultimately to his underground hideout on Dec. 13, 2003. To get information at each link in that chain, Maddox said he had to win the trust of a detained informant and to convince that person that the interrogator would protect his loved ones.

"For him to trust me, imagine if I tortured the guy," said Maddox, adding, "Under no circumstances would torture work."

Glenn Carle, a 23-year veteran CIA interrogator working in the Directorate of Operations who led the interrogation of one of the high-value detainees involved in the hunt for bin Laden was similarly emphatic.

Former CIA Interrogator: Painstaking Intelligence Work, Not Torture, Responsible For Bin Laden Capture

A fellow principal interrogator in the FBI, a department that refused to use waterboarding and other torture techniques defined as "enhanced interrogation", who has interrogated many al-Qaeda detainees, argues the same while adding his voice to the chorus that America's use of torture is a principal recruitment tool for al-Qaeda.

FBI interrogator: Torture doesn't work, breeds jihad

DiamondDave, I actually found those additional expert opinions while searching for an opinion anywhere from any interrogator who argues that waterboarding or other enhanced interrogation technique works.

I wasn't able to find a single one, instead, all the results relate to interrogators adding their voices to the consensus that it doesn't work.

You claim you can provide links from various sources that support the conclusion that torture does work, suggesting the possibility of a person with a similar or same background as these interrogators and interrogation experts who feel the opposite as the endless list of interrogators I've provided.

I very genuinely would love to see them, would give them their due consideration and weigh their arguments, but barring that there is currently no indication from those who actually interrogate these people for a living that any form of torture works so there seems to be zero basis for the conclusion that it does.

 

[Wicked Jester]

This isn't one single person's vision. It's not the vision of some random individual who knows a little something from serving.

This is the professional opinion of the singular individual with more success and experience as an interrogator of Islamic militants in the war on terror than anyone else in history, the foremost expert in the world on the subject of interrogation, and the professional opinion of an individual who didn't just go through waterboarding at SERE but was the chief of training at SERE school, one of the world's most foremost experts on the subject of waterboarding. Their firsthand experience and knowledge is essentially unparalleled and though their opinion doesn't necessarily equal fact, I've yet to see anyone offer an argument for why listening to people who know substantially more than any source that disagrees with them isn't the smart and rational thing to do.

And, of course, it is not the opinion of even just these two remarkable informed and experienced individuals.

There is a general agreement among experts at large that torture doesn't work:

Top Interrogation Experts Agree: Torture Doesn't Work

This is just a sampling from that link which provides links of its own to each statement:



When you couple the unparalleled professional experience of the two experts I named with the consensus among people who practice, teach, and study interrogation and add to it the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's direct, clear, and simple assertion that the intelligence that led us to bin Laden was extracted during normal interrogation utilizing uncontroversial and not "enhanced" techniques, and the CIA's timeline that demonstrates it was four years between when their detainees were waterboarded and when they gave up the information we needed, it makes absolutely no sense, there is absolutely no rational basis, for continuing to believe waterboarding is a worthwhile technique.

Leon Panetta, Hayden and several others have verified it works....Twisting the words of Rumsfeld does not help your case, anymore than blatantly trying to twist Panetta's words.

Waterboarding worked...It's a non-torterous tool that should always be in the box......PERIOD!

I'm concerned with american lives. I could care less about bleeding heart loony liberals and their abject loony nonsense.

Here is the direct quote of exactly what Rumsfeld said on the subject in full, with no twisting possible:



Hayden and Panetta, far from claiming the intel used to find bin Laden was gleaned during waterboarding, instead both mention when asked that the intel came from high-value detainees (KSM and al-Libbi) who "had been" and "were held" at places where they were subject to enhanced interrogation. We know KSM was waterboarded in 2003, that's public record they're verifying, but quite clearly neither of them claims the information that the CIA says it first got in 2007 was from those waterboarding sessions.

Removed from the sexy "confirms waterboarding led to Osama" headline used in right-wing press right now, the actual quotes don't do that.

Here's what Panetta said on the subject:

WILLIAMS: I'd like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was -- as a result of water boarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after Bin Laden?

PANETTA: It-- you know, Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information and that was true here. We had a multiple source-- a multiple series of-- sources that provided information with regards to the situation. Clearly some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees but we also had information from other sources as well. From Sigent intelligence, from imagery, from other sources that we had-- assets on the ground. And it was a combination of all of that that ultimately we were able to put together that led us to that compound. So-- it's-- it's a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.

WILLIAMS: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was, in part, among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?

PANETTA: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I'm also saying that, you know, the debate about whether-- whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always gonna be an open question.

WILLIAMS: So finer point, one final time, enhanced interrogation techniques -- which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years -- that --

PANETTA: Right.

WILLIAMS: -- includes water boarding?

PANETTA: That's correct.

Here's what Hayden said on the subject:

ZAKARIA: So you took news of this courier in to President Bush many years ago, right?

HAYDEN: We did. I think it was about four years ago, in 2007. We - we had built up sufficient lead information on the name of the courier that we thought it was ready for presidential primetime. So we briefed it to the president, not as something eminent but as our most promising lead to track down Bin Laden because, frankly, Fareed, the trail had been quite cold for a - a long period of time.

ZAKARIA: And why had it been cold, General? Because you had these huge bounties out on his head, and one of the things that people used to always say to me in the region was, gosh, this guy must inspire fanatical devotion and loyalty. The Americans are willing to pay $25 million and nobody turns up to - to claim the reward.

HAYDEN: Yes. Well, a - a couple of thoughts on that.

Clearly, he was concerned with his own operational security. Those people who knew where he was was a very small group of folks. $25 million translates very well into an American or European context. Frankly, Fareed, we learned that those kinds of numbers really don't have the same kind of meaning in the - in the tribal region of Pakistan.

And, most importantly, he went off the grid. And by that I mean the - the telecommunications and electronic grid, which has been a very powerful tool for us for such a long period of time. And it was - it was that absence from electronic communications that convinced us we know he's communicating. He must be doing it through human beings. We need to find and follow the couriers. And that was the hypothesis with which we went into this four years ago or so.

ZAKARIA: So this is classic human intelligence? You had people on the ground. They talked to people. They developed relationships. Is that right?

HAYDEN: It is. But it also came out of detainee interrogations.

One - one of the more prominent leads we had at the beginning of this exercise was partial identity information that came out of detainees that we were holding in our so-called black sites. And then, from that point, we used all the tools of intelligence.

I can't go into detail, but, I can assure you, it was signals intelligence and imagery intelligence and human intelligence that allowed us to build this. And - and Fareed, this wasn't done one brick at a time. This was actually done one pebble at a time. This is classic analytic work.

ZAKARIA: Tell us for a moment about that issue of interrogation, because, you know, there's something of a debate here about whether the extraordinary methods, the ones that have aroused so much controversy, that people like Colin Powell and John McCain came out against, were those methods crucial to getting information that has led to Bin Laden?

HAYDEN: Well, let me put it to you this way, Fareed. First of all, I'm proud to be a citizen of a country that feels it needs to debate these kinds of issues. But, as we debate them, the debate has to be fact-based. And the lead information I referred to a few minutes ago did come from CIA detainees, against whom enhanced interrogation techniques had been used, not to elicit specific bits of information, but move them from their initial air of defiance into a zone of cooperation.

So the facts of the matter are people against whom we used these interrogation techniques provided us at least one of the strings of information that led to last weekend's events.

ZAKARIA: There are people who say, though, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the - kind of - one of the chiefs, one of the planners of 9/11, perhaps the chief planner, denied even knowing the courier. And actually that's what tipped some of the interrogators off, that it wasn't some extraordinary methods.

HAYDEN: I think the actual - the actual facts are that he gave us some - some very partial lead information at the beginning. As we developed the information, we went back to him, and he and another detainee were so demonstrative - atypically demonstrative in rejecting knowledge of this individual, that that in itself turned into lead information.

And I'd have to suggest, Fareed, if - if he had not been largely cooperating with us, this would not have been anomalous behavior. And so it's all of a piece.

Pay attention to precisely what they say.

That they used enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, against some of these detainees is all that either confirms. That the people who gave us the intelligence had those methods used on them at some point. We know that. We know KSM was waterboarded and we know he was a source. He doesn't say the waterboarding led to the information and especially not that the information was acquired during waterboarding, something Rumsfeld explicitly denies. He doesn't say the waterboarding in 2003 produced the intel we didn't acquire until 2007 because that defies logic and the forward profession of time.

Hayden even admits that in the period between when KSM was waterboarded in 2003 and when they got the intel in 2007, the "trail had gone cold" and been cold for "a long time." That rather obviously suggests that whatever KSM said in 2003 during waterboarding isn't what led to bin Laden, but rather it was new information years later without the waterboarding, otherwise they'd have had the courier's name four extra years (which NO ONE claims and all evidence says is not the case) and the search for bin Laden wouldn't be "cold." Even in his best efforts to justify the torture/waterboarding of which he is a major proponent, he states that the "enhanced interrogation" did not lead to any specific bits of information like a courier's name, only that he thinks it made him compliant, but 4 more years of keeping the courier's name a secret doesn't sound much like compliance.

Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, and the CIA all agree that they got the name of the courier in 2007. The last time KSM was tortured was 2003, the last time waterboarding was used, was 2003. So he didn't tell them the name of the courier that led to bin Laden during waterboarding, he continued to not tell them for 4 more years, and only during normal interrogation in 2007 did he give up the intel we'd been looking for all that time.

These are just factors which none of the people involved dispute.

Now in addition to the fact that neither Panetta nor Hayden say waterboarding/torture is how we got the intel, and the CIA timeline has KSM being waterboarded in 2003 and not giving us the courier's name until 2007, there's the fact that Hayden and Panetta as people who authorized and oversaw waterboarding (which is now, as it had been for decades prior, defined as a torture technique and thus illegal) have a pretty obvious ulterior motive for wanting to depict waterboarding as effective as a means of justifying why it was done. Even with that motivation, neither actually makes the claim that the intel came from waterboarding.

Then there's the fact that Donald Rumsfeld, someone else with the same clear motivation for wanting to justify the use of waterboarding since he too authorized and oversaw its controversial use, despite that motivation and how much he'd love to be able to justify torture by saying waterboarding got the intel says directly in unequivocal terms that the information was gleaned from specifically not enhanced interrogation techniques but during normal interrogation many years later (as numerous other sources agree).

What you come away with is no proof or evidence waterboarding got the intel and a mountain of it that it didn't.

Again, all the facts are on one side of this equation, all pointing to the same clear conclusion.

Thanks for further proving, using Haydens words, that waterboarding DID get the ball rolling.....It worked........Case closed, period!

So, where's that mountain you speak off?

Face it, Panetta let it be known that waterboarding led to the initial info.....He's the big dog with full access to the info. I trust him far more than any interrogators who are not privy to all the information.

 

[QUENTIN]

And I have known many fellow individual soldiers that have individually spoken against many things... whether it be policy, training methods, PT exercises, the CIC, or whatever else...

1 single person's vision, does not make your case, quentin

Very well said Diamond Dave. Very well said indeed.

I have not provided 1 single person's vision though, but that of dozens and dozens of experts, including the very top military interrogators in the war on terror, a current military interrogator in Afghanistan, as well as high-ranking interrogators from both the CIA and FBI and a waterboarding expert who runs the SERE program. Not to mention the CIA's inspector general, the second-highest ranking terrorism expert at the State Department, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who despite being a torture advocate is clear torture was not involved in acquiring the intel that got us OBL.

In addition to all those individuals, there are the official conclusions of entire reputable organizations with many years experience and evaluation of the subject like the Senate Armed Services Committee, the U.S. Army, and the FBI.

To counter this remarkable consensus of experts, DD and the rest of those who support the use of torture have offered no such expert opinions from interrogators, agents with personal experience, or reputable military or intelligence organizations who disagree.

If there is another case to be made, you must make it, as the only one presently available, complete with vertiginous mountains of evidence, concludes torture proponents are dead wrong.

Find me US military interrogators or other respectable and experienced experts on the subject who think torture works. If you can't find individuals and organizations with this level of expertise who think waterboarding is worthwhile then it should stand to reason for all that it isn't.

 

[Wicked Jester]

And I have known many fellow individual soldiers that have individually spoken against many things... whether it be policy, training methods, PT exercises, the CIC, or whatever else...

1 single person's vision, does not make your case, quentin

Very well said Diamond Dave. Very well said indeed.

I have not provided 1 single person's vision though, but that of dozens and dozens of experts, including the very top military interrogators in the war on terror, a current military interrogator in Afghanistan, as well as high-ranking interrogators from both the CIA and FBI and a waterboarding expert who runs the SERE program. Not to mention the CIA's inspector general, the second-highest ranking terrorism expert at the State Department, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who despite being a torture advocate is clear torture was not involved in acquiring the intel that got us OBL.

In addition to all those individuals, there are the official conclusions of entire reputable organizations with many years experience and evaluation of the subject like the Senate Armed Services Committee, the U.S. Army, and the FBI.

To counter this remarkable consensus of experts, DD and the rest of those who support the use of torture have offered no such expert opinions from interrogators, agents with personal experience, or reputable military or intelligence organizations who disagree.

If there is another case to be made, you must make it, as the only one presently available, complete with vertiginous mountains of evidence, concludes torture proponents are dead wrong.

Find me US military interrogators or other respectable and experienced experts on the subject who think torture works. If you can't find individuals and organizations with this level of expertise who think waterboarding is worthwhile then it should stand to reason for all that it isn't.

Nobody was tortured, they were waterboarded

Rumsfeld siad that no waterboaring occured at GITMO, and that militray personnel never waterboarded anybody.....He has said several times this past week in many interviews, that watreboarding occured in secret prisons by the CIA, and that bits of information were gleened that eventually helped lead to the capture of Bin Laden.

So, yes, waterboarding worked. And the future threat of it in the minds of those who were waterboarded in the past, no doubt led to further cooperation by them. It helped break them down.

You can deny it until the comes come home....Fact is, all the liberal's loony hero's out there, including BHO, vociferously claimed that Bush's policies didn't work, nor did waterboarding. They have been proven yet again to be abjectlky wrong on yet another damn issue. And it is driving the liberal apologists friggin' bonkers........GOOD!.....It's about time they wake the fuck up to the realities of the situation. Al qaeda is not going away. They will continue to try and attack us. And all measures necessary must be used to avoid the loss of innocent american life.........I care about my fellow american citizens, and don't give a rats ass what the terrorists, the loony liberal idiots, or rest of the world thinks.

 

[Momanohedhunter]

Hope and pray we are attacked??

What the hell are you smoking dude??

As for there being less. I sure hope so. I hope our military kills every single one of those dirbags.

More S.E.A.L. team 6 should do the trick.

 

[QUENTIN]

Leon Panetta, Hayden and several others have verified it works....Twisting the words of Rumsfeld does not help your case, anymore than blatantly trying to twist Panetta's words.

Waterboarding worked...It's a non-torterous tool that should always be in the box......PERIOD!

I'm concerned with american lives. I could care less about bleeding heart loony liberals and their abject loony nonsense.

Here is the direct quote of exactly what Rumsfeld said on the subject in full, with no twisting possible:



Hayden and Panetta, far from claiming the intel used to find bin Laden was gleaned during waterboarding, instead both mention when asked that the intel came from high-value detainees (KSM and al-Libbi) who "had been" and "were held" at places where they were subject to enhanced interrogation. We know KSM was waterboarded in 2003, that's public record they're verifying, but quite clearly neither of them claims the information that the CIA says it first got in 2007 was from those waterboarding sessions.

Removed from the sexy "confirms waterboarding led to Osama" headline used in right-wing press right now, the actual quotes don't do that.

Here's what Panetta said on the subject:



Here's what Hayden said on the subject:

ZAKARIA: So you took news of this courier in to President Bush many years ago, right?

HAYDEN: We did. I think it was about four years ago, in 2007. We - we had built up sufficient lead information on the name of the courier that we thought it was ready for presidential primetime. So we briefed it to the president, not as something eminent but as our most promising lead to track down Bin Laden because, frankly, Fareed, the trail had been quite cold for a - a long period of time.

ZAKARIA: And why had it been cold, General? Because you had these huge bounties out on his head, and one of the things that people used to always say to me in the region was, gosh, this guy must inspire fanatical devotion and loyalty. The Americans are willing to pay $25 million and nobody turns up to - to claim the reward.

HAYDEN: Yes. Well, a - a couple of thoughts on that.

Clearly, he was concerned with his own operational security. Those people who knew where he was was a very small group of folks. $25 million translates very well into an American or European context. Frankly, Fareed, we learned that those kinds of numbers really don't have the same kind of meaning in the - in the tribal region of Pakistan.

And, most importantly, he went off the grid. And by that I mean the - the telecommunications and electronic grid, which has been a very powerful tool for us for such a long period of time. And it was - it was that absence from electronic communications that convinced us we know he's communicating. He must be doing it through human beings. We need to find and follow the couriers. And that was the hypothesis with which we went into this four years ago or so.

ZAKARIA: So this is classic human intelligence? You had people on the ground. They talked to people. They developed relationships. Is that right?

HAYDEN: It is. But it also came out of detainee interrogations.

One - one of the more prominent leads we had at the beginning of this exercise was partial identity information that came out of detainees that we were holding in our so-called black sites. And then, from that point, we used all the tools of intelligence.

I can't go into detail, but, I can assure you, it was signals intelligence and imagery intelligence and human intelligence that allowed us to build this. And - and Fareed, this wasn't done one brick at a time. This was actually done one pebble at a time. This is classic analytic work.

ZAKARIA: Tell us for a moment about that issue of interrogation, because, you know, there's something of a debate here about whether the extraordinary methods, the ones that have aroused so much controversy, that people like Colin Powell and John McCain came out against, were those methods crucial to getting information that has led to Bin Laden?

HAYDEN: Well, let me put it to you this way, Fareed. First of all, I'm proud to be a citizen of a country that feels it needs to debate these kinds of issues. But, as we debate them, the debate has to be fact-based. And the lead information I referred to a few minutes ago did come from CIA detainees, against whom enhanced interrogation techniques had been used, not to elicit specific bits of information, but move them from their initial air of defiance into a zone of cooperation.

So the facts of the matter are people against whom we used these interrogation techniques provided us at least one of the strings of information that led to last weekend's events.

ZAKARIA: There are people who say, though, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the - kind of - one of the chiefs, one of the planners of 9/11, perhaps the chief planner, denied even knowing the courier. And actually that's what tipped some of the interrogators off, that it wasn't some extraordinary methods.

HAYDEN: I think the actual - the actual facts are that he gave us some - some very partial lead information at the beginning. As we developed the information, we went back to him, and he and another detainee were so demonstrative - atypically demonstrative in rejecting knowledge of this individual, that that in itself turned into lead information.

And I'd have to suggest, Fareed, if - if he had not been largely cooperating with us, this would not have been anomalous behavior. And so it's all of a piece.

Pay attention to precisely what they say.

That they used enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, against some of these detainees is all that either confirms. That the people who gave us the intelligence had those methods used on them at some point. We know that. We know KSM was waterboarded and we know he was a source. He doesn't say the waterboarding led to the information and especially not that the information was acquired during waterboarding, something Rumsfeld explicitly denies. He doesn't say the waterboarding in 2003 produced the intel we didn't acquire until 2007 because that defies logic and the forward profession of time.

Hayden even admits that in the period between when KSM was waterboarded in 2003 and when they got the intel in 2007, the "trail had gone cold" and been cold for "a long time." That rather obviously suggests that whatever KSM said in 2003 during waterboarding isn't what led to bin Laden, but rather it was new information years later without the waterboarding, otherwise they'd have had the courier's name four extra years (which NO ONE claims and all evidence says is not the case) and the search for bin Laden wouldn't be "cold." Even in his best efforts to justify the torture/waterboarding of which he is a major proponent, he states that the "enhanced interrogation" did not lead to any specific bits of information like a courier's name, only that he thinks it made him compliant, but 4 more years of keeping the courier's name a secret doesn't sound much like compliance.

Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, and the CIA all agree that they got the name of the courier in 2007. The last time KSM was tortured was 2003, the last time waterboarding was used, was 2003. So he didn't tell them the name of the courier that led to bin Laden during waterboarding, he continued to not tell them for 4 more years, and only during normal interrogation in 2007 did he give up the intel we'd been looking for all that time.

These are just factors which none of the people involved dispute.

Now in addition to the fact that neither Panetta nor Hayden say waterboarding/torture is how we got the intel, and the CIA timeline has KSM being waterboarded in 2003 and not giving us the courier's name until 2007, there's the fact that Hayden and Panetta as people who authorized and oversaw waterboarding (which is now, as it had been for decades prior, defined as a torture technique and thus illegal) have a pretty obvious ulterior motive for wanting to depict waterboarding as effective as a means of justifying why it was done. Even with that motivation, neither actually makes the claim that the intel came from waterboarding.

Then there's the fact that Donald Rumsfeld, someone else with the same clear motivation for wanting to justify the use of waterboarding since he too authorized and oversaw its controversial use, despite that motivation and how much he'd love to be able to justify torture by saying waterboarding got the intel says directly in unequivocal terms that the information was gleaned from specifically not enhanced interrogation techniques but during normal interrogation many years later (as numerous other sources agree).

What you come away with is no proof or evidence waterboarding got the intel and a mountain of it that it didn't.

Again, all the facts are on one side of this equation, all pointing to the same clear conclusion.

Thanks for further proving, using Haydens words, that waterboarding DID get the ball rolling.....It worked........Case closed, period!

So, where's that mountain you speak off?

Face it, Panetta let it be known that waterboarding led to the initial info.....He's the big dog with full access to the info. I trust him far more than any interrogators who are not privy to all the information.

Get the ball rolling.....?

So a few things.

First, that is only the view of one man, as many of you have made clear one man's view does not make something so. So you cannot be consistent and attempt to claim that his view is "proof" or that it closes the case.

Second, as is now abundantly and incontrovertibly clear, the intel we got from KSM that got us bin Laden was not acquired during waterboarding and in fact was not acquired until four years after the waterboarding had stopped. He readily admits waterboarding did not acquire "specific bits of information."

He makes the claim that it moved KSM further into a "zone of cooperation" but this is rather significantly belied by the fact that KSM refused to cooperate for four straight years following his waterboarding. If he gave up the intel while the water was being poured, then clearly waterboarding got the intel. If he gave up the intel even that night, the next night, a week later, what have you, then it could certainly be reasonably attributed to the waterboarding. But four years of non-cooperation demonstrates waterboarding was ineffective, at the least woefully inefficient, at securing KSM's cooperation.

This argument he makes, that an event that took place in 2003 must be responsible for final, eventual cooperation so many years later, the one you adopt as "further proof" is actually an example of a logical fallacy.

It's called Post hoc ergo propter hoc, Latin for "after this, therefore because of this, and it fallaciously assumes that if one event occurs after another, then the first event caused the second. It's related to and sometimes misidentified as "correlation does not imply causation." That KSM was subject to waterboarding in 2003 and in 2007 while subject to normal interrogation he revealed vital information does not by any stretch of the imaginable prove or even logically imply that it was because of the waterboarding that he later provided the information or that one led to the other.

As noted, most interrogators actually make the opposite argument, that had he not been waterboarded the information could have been acquired far earlier, but that also is not provable.

Then there's the issue of his bias and personal stake in the matter that provide a motive for justifying his part in what it recognized legally as a crime that the interrogators and groups like the Senate Armed Services Committee, Army, and FBI do not share. If a salesman with a personal investment in his product tells you it works, he may be telling the truth, but the reasonable man will be suspicious given his known motivation. This is why the Rumsfeld denial is so telling, since he shares the same motive and personal stake in the matter as Hayden and would have absolutely no reason to lie in aid of discrediting his own position and the use of a technique he championed, yet he says directly (without the mealymouthing) it played no part. If the same salesman confesses what he tried to sell you is a piece of junk, there's a lot more reason to believe he's telling the truth because there are few other explanations for him working against his own interest.

Finally there's the Panetta issue. Show us where Panetta " let it be known that waterboarding led to the initial info" since I'm looking at the same quote you are and that's not what he said.

Right now, lacking interrogators or experts, you're relying on the word of one man with a personal and political dog in the fight saying something that makes his controversial position look good and ultimately resting entirely on a logical fallacy to make your case.

 

[Wicked Jester]

Here is the direct quote of exactly what Rumsfeld said on the subject in full, with no twisting possible:



Hayden and Panetta, far from claiming the intel used to find bin Laden was gleaned during waterboarding, instead both mention when asked that the intel came from high-value detainees (KSM and al-Libbi) who "had been" and "were held" at places where they were subject to enhanced interrogation. We know KSM was waterboarded in 2003, that's public record they're verifying, but quite clearly neither of them claims the information that the CIA says it first got in 2007 was from those waterboarding sessions.

Removed from the sexy "confirms waterboarding led to Osama" headline used in right-wing press right now, the actual quotes don't do that.

Here's what Panetta said on the subject:



Here's what Hayden said on the subject:



Pay attention to precisely what they say.

That they used enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, against some of these detainees is all that either confirms. That the people who gave us the intelligence had those methods used on them at some point. We know that. We know KSM was waterboarded and we know he was a source. He doesn't say the waterboarding led to the information and especially not that the information was acquired during waterboarding, something Rumsfeld explicitly denies. He doesn't say the waterboarding in 2003 produced the intel we didn't acquire until 2007 because that defies logic and the forward profession of time.

Hayden even admits that in the period between when KSM was waterboarded in 2003 and when they got the intel in 2007, the "trail had gone cold" and been cold for "a long time." That rather obviously suggests that whatever KSM said in 2003 during waterboarding isn't what led to bin Laden, but rather it was new information years later without the waterboarding, otherwise they'd have had the courier's name four extra years (which NO ONE claims and all evidence says is not the case) and the search for bin Laden wouldn't be "cold." Even in his best efforts to justify the torture/waterboarding of which he is a major proponent, he states that the "enhanced interrogation" did not lead to any specific bits of information like a courier's name, only that he thinks it made him compliant, but 4 more years of keeping the courier's name a secret doesn't sound much like compliance.

Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, and the CIA all agree that they got the name of the courier in 2007. The last time KSM was tortured was 2003, the last time waterboarding was used, was 2003. So he didn't tell them the name of the courier that led to bin Laden during waterboarding, he continued to not tell them for 4 more years, and only during normal interrogation in 2007 did he give up the intel we'd been looking for all that time.

These are just factors which none of the people involved dispute.

Now in addition to the fact that neither Panetta nor Hayden say waterboarding/torture is how we got the intel, and the CIA timeline has KSM being waterboarded in 2003 and not giving us the courier's name until 2007, there's the fact that Hayden and Panetta as people who authorized and oversaw waterboarding (which is now, as it had been for decades prior, defined as a torture technique and thus illegal) have a pretty obvious ulterior motive for wanting to depict waterboarding as effective as a means of justifying why it was done. Even with that motivation, neither actually makes the claim that the intel came from waterboarding.

Then there's the fact that Donald Rumsfeld, someone else with the same clear motivation for wanting to justify the use of waterboarding since he too authorized and oversaw its controversial use, despite that motivation and how much he'd love to be able to justify torture by saying waterboarding got the intel says directly in unequivocal terms that the information was gleaned from specifically not enhanced interrogation techniques but during normal interrogation many years later (as numerous other sources agree).

What you come away with is no proof or evidence waterboarding got the intel and a mountain of it that it didn't.

Again, all the facts are on one side of this equation, all pointing to the same clear conclusion.

Thanks for further proving, using Haydens words, that waterboarding DID get the ball rolling.....It worked........Case closed, period!

So, where's that mountain you speak off?

Face it, Panetta let it be known that waterboarding led to the initial info.....He's the big dog with full access to the info. I trust him far more than any interrogators who are not privy to all the information.

Get the ball rolling.....?

So a few things.

First, that is only the view of one man, as many of you have made clear one man's view does not make something so. So you cannot be consistent and attempt to claim that his view is "proof" or that it closes the case.

Second, as is now abundantly and incontrovertibly clear, the intel we got from KSM that got us bin Laden was not acquired during waterboarding and in fact was not acquired until four years after the waterboarding had stopped. He readily admits waterboarding did not acquire "specific bits of information."

He makes the claim that it moved KSM further into a "zone of cooperation" but this is rather significantly belied by the fact that KSM refused to cooperate for four straight years following his waterboarding. If he gave up the intel while the water was being poured, then clearly waterboarding got the intel. If he gave up the intel even that night, the next night, a week later, what have you, then it could certainly be reasonably attributed to the waterboarding. But four years of non-cooperation demonstrates waterboarding was ineffective, at the least woefully inefficient, at securing KSM's cooperation.

This argument he makes, that an event that took place in 2003 must be responsible for final, eventual cooperation so many years later, the one you adopt as "further proof" is actually an example of a logical fallacy.

It's called Post hoc ergo propter hoc[/URL, Latin for "after this, therefore because of this, and it fallaciously assumes that if one event occurs after another, then the first event caused the second. It's related to and sometimes misidentified as "correlation does not imply causation." That KSM was subject to waterboarding in 2003 and in 2007 while subject to normal interrogation he revealed vital information does not by any stretch of the imaginable prove or even logically imply that it was because of the waterboarding that he later provided the information or that one led to the other.

As noted, most interrogators actually make the opposite argument, that had he not been waterboarded the information could have been acquired far earlier, but that also is not provable.

Then there's the issue of his bias and personal stake in the matter that provide a motive for justifying his part in what it recognized legally as a crime that the interrogators and groups like the Senate Armed Services Committee, Army, and FBI do not share. If a salesman with a personal investment in his product tells you it works, he may be telling the truth, but the reasonable man will be suspicious given his known motivation. This is why the Rumsfeld denial is so telling, since he shares the same motive and personal stake in the matter as Hayden and would have absolutely no reason to lie in aid of discrediting his own position and the use of a technique he championed, yet he says directly (without the mealymouthing) it played no part. If the same salesman confesses what he tried to sell you is a piece of junk, there's a lot more reason to believe he's telling the truth because there are few other explanations for him working against his own interest.

Finally there's the Panetta issue. Show us where Panetta " let it be known that waterboarding led to the initial info" since I'm looking at the same quote you are and that's not what he said.

Right now, lacking interrogators or experts, you're relying on the word of one man with a personal and political dog in the fight saying something that makes his controversial position look good and ultimately resting entirely on a logical fallacy to make your case.

Right now, i'm mainly looking at the man who has all the info. The one who let the cat out of the bag. Obama's man, Leon Panetta.

Fact is, the initial bits of info started during waterboarding. Water boarding helped break those scumbags down, and helped make them more pliable. It's been admitted by the top man in the CIA. The man who has full access to ALL information. The information that those interrogators you mention are not privy too. All you have are opinions of different people......Leon Panetta was obviously speaking on more than just opinion.....As was Rumsfeld and Hayden.

 

[MarcATL]

Sorry, Panetta, Gates, Hayden have all said it worked.

If you are that interested file an FOIA request.

For getting the intelligence that led to the discovery and killing of Osama Bin Laden, then...

a.) What SPECIFIC information was it?

and

2.) WHY wasn't it done 6 or even 4 years ago?

What you people want us to buy is that somehow, some kind of VERY important information was garnered from beating the living snot out of some Muslims that is just NOW baring fruit.

Anyone who would actually believe that should have their head examined.

Can you enlighten the rest of us?

Link?

What a GD liar.

*SMH*

 

[QUENTIN]

Thanks for further proving, using Haydens words, that waterboarding DID get the ball rolling.....It worked........Case closed, period!

So, where's that mountain you speak off?

Face it, Panetta let it be known that waterboarding led to the initial info.....He's the big dog with full access to the info. I trust him far more than any interrogators who are not privy to all the information.

Get the ball rolling.....?

So a few things.

First, that is only the view of one man, as many of you have made clear one man's view does not make something so. So you cannot be consistent and attempt to claim that his view is "proof" or that it closes the case.

Second, as is now abundantly and incontrovertibly clear, the intel we got from KSM that got us bin Laden was not acquired during waterboarding and in fact was not acquired until four years after the waterboarding had stopped. He readily admits waterboarding did not acquire "specific bits of information."

He makes the claim that it moved KSM further into a "zone of cooperation" but this is rather significantly belied by the fact that KSM refused to cooperate for four straight years following his waterboarding. If he gave up the intel while the water was being poured, then clearly waterboarding got the intel. If he gave up the intel even that night, the next night, a week later, what have you, then it could certainly be reasonably attributed to the waterboarding. But four years of non-cooperation demonstrates waterboarding was ineffective, at the least woefully inefficient, at securing KSM's cooperation.

This argument he makes, that an event that took place in 2003 must be responsible for final, eventual cooperation so many years later, the one you adopt as "further proof" is actually an example of a logical fallacy.

It's called Post hoc ergo propter hoc[/URL, Latin for "after this, therefore because of this, and it fallaciously assumes that if one event occurs after another, then the first event caused the second. It's related to and sometimes misidentified as "correlation does not imply causation." That KSM was subject to waterboarding in 2003 and in 2007 while subject to normal interrogation he revealed vital information does not by any stretch of the imaginable prove or even logically imply that it was because of the waterboarding that he later provided the information or that one led to the other.

As noted, most interrogators actually make the opposite argument, that had he not been waterboarded the information could have been acquired far earlier, but that also is not provable.

Then there's the issue of his bias and personal stake in the matter that provide a motive for justifying his part in what it recognized legally as a crime that the interrogators and groups like the Senate Armed Services Committee, Army, and FBI do not share. If a salesman with a personal investment in his product tells you it works, he may be telling the truth, but the reasonable man will be suspicious given his known motivation. This is why the Rumsfeld denial is so telling, since he shares the same motive and personal stake in the matter as Hayden and would have absolutely no reason to lie in aid of discrediting his own position and the use of a technique he championed, yet he says directly (without the mealymouthing) it played no part. If the same salesman confesses what he tried to sell you is a piece of junk, there's a lot more reason to believe he's telling the truth because there are few other explanations for him working against his own interest.

Finally there's the Panetta issue. Show us where Panetta " let it be known that waterboarding led to the initial info" since I'm looking at the same quote you are and that's not what he said.

Right now, lacking interrogators or experts, you're relying on the word of one man with a personal and political dog in the fight saying something that makes his controversial position look good and ultimately resting entirely on a logical fallacy to make your case.

Right now, i'm mainly looking at the man who has all the info. The one who let the cat out of the bag. Obama's man, Leon Panetta.

Fact is, the initial bits of info started during waterboarding. Water boarding helped break those scumbags down, and helped make them more pliable. It's been admitted by the top man in the CIA. The man who has full access to ALL information. The information that those interrogators you mention are not privy too. All you have are opinions of different people......Leon Panetta was obviously speaking on more than just opinion.....As was Rumsfeld and Hayden.

Panetta has never remotely said that waterboarding got initial bits of information nor broke the detainees down nor made them more pliable.

Panetta never actually connected the dots between finding Bin Laden and waterboarding. He simply said that some of the detainees who provided key pieces of intelligence had been waterboarded at some point — an obvious fact — without saying that it was the waterboarding that caused them to turn over the information, particularly given the several year gap between the two events.

Rumsfeld has also made no claim that waterboarding led to the intel, he has only said what Panetta did - the known fact that some of the intelligence sources had been waterboarded long prior to them giving up the information during standard interrogation by the military at Gitmo. No one disputes that their information was valuable and no one disputes that they were at one point far before their cooperation waterboarded, but A happened before B does not mean A caused B, that's very basic logic and none of the officials you cite make the same leap into fallacy that you do.

Hayden is the only one who flirts with the suggestion that waterboarding was beneficial, admitting it didn't get us any specific intel, but arguing it made those waterboarded more cooperative or as you say pliable.

In fact, two of the prisoners subjected to the harshest treatment — KSM, who was waterboarded 183 times — repeatedly lied under torture about the critical piece of intel about the courier. He continued to withhold the information for more than four years. Abu Faraj Al-Libbi also misled interrogators about the courier for years.

Those are not the actions of cooperative nor broken down people nor pliable people. If they were broken down or cooperative after being waterboarded, they'd have given us accurate information in 2003 and Osama would have been dead many years ago.

You're putting words in the mouth of Panetta and company and then making a leap into a specific logical fallacy that matches perfectly your reasoning while also ignoring that if waterboarding broke down the detainees, they wouldn't have continued to lie and withhold the information we were seeking, that's the very picture of someone who has not been broken down or become compliant.

Someone was waterboarded in 2003 and then lied about what we wanted to know or refused to tell us for four years straight. Years and years of the waterboarding strategy producing no positive results.
After four years of not being waterboarded, they finally told us what we wanted to know during a regular interrogation.

That you view those events and conclude, "Aha! It was the waterboarding that got us the intel" speaks volumes about how your mind works (or doesn't).

 

[ClosedCaption]

Man, these cons will say ANTHING..

Waterboarding helped get him *no proof*
He was waterboarded not tortured *semantics*

I love how they name the torture but deny it is torture. He was put on the rack, not tortured! Water was dropped on him, not torture!

 

[Wicked Jester]

Man, these cons will say ANTHING..

Waterboarding helped get him *no proof*
He was waterboarded not tortured *semantics*

I love how they name the torture but deny it is torture. He was put on the rack, not tortured! Water was dropped on him, not torture!

Man, I love how these lib's will say anything to avoid the fact that their liberal hero's were wrong yet again on yet another issue. It's a pattern with those fools. Just ask an innocent cop who was wrongly accused.

Waterboarding did help get him. Panetta admitted it. And has not retracted his statement.

He was waterboarded, not tortured. You are absolutely correct on that one.

 

[Charles_Main]

Bush pussied around, talked a lot of trashed and generally botched up the entire thing almost beyond repair.

Obama came in, recognizing what needed to be done, and got it done.

And now....Bin Laden is dead.

Bottom line.

If you can not admit that he could not have gotten Osama with out the Tools he had to use which Bush gave him.

Then you are Nothing but a blatant Partisan Hack, but then we already knew that.

 

[Soggy in NOLA]

Sorry, Panetta, Gates, Hayden have all said it worked.

If you are that interested file an FOIA request.

For getting the intelligence that led to the discovery and killing of Osama Bin Laden, then...

a.) What SPECIFIC information was it?

and

2.) WHY wasn't it done 6 or even 4 years ago?

What you people want us to buy is that somehow, some kind of VERY important information was garnered from beating the living snot out of some Muslims that is just NOW baring fruit.

Anyone who would actually believe that should have their head examined.

Can you enlighten the rest of us?

Link?

What a GD liar.

*SMH*

Here ya go you lazy motherfucker!

FCC Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Home Page

 

[Soggy in NOLA]

Here's a link Marc to this new fangled thing called Google.

Google

 

[Soggy in NOLA]

Marc.. this site's got some neat videos!

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.