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Care to refute any of it...? Or are you just going to continue to waste bandwidth with your mindless regurgitation of right wing talking points? No need to answer...it's a rhetorical question, tool
refute what? some UN "resolution" like that holds any weight?
There have been multiple posts with links saying that the interrogation techniques used at Gitmo resulted in credible information. The NYT article described all the techniques used at Gitmo. I do not consider them torture, you do.
It seems that you are fond of an expanded definition that includes "mental pain" as if that can somehow be quantified, where a mere threat of violence is considered torture.
As I said before, mere incarceration can then be seen as torture because of the mental pain it causes.
So this is Bully Pulls It's idea of an interrogation
BULLYPULLSIT: Tell me where you are storing your dirty bomb materials.
TERRORIST: No
BULLYPULLSIT: Thank you for your cooperation. You are free to go.
Guess what numbnuts...? The UN Convention Against Torture is NOT a resolution. It is a treaty to which teh US is a signatory. As such, the Constitution gives it the full weight and force of US law. Get over it. And speaking of US law, I'm thinking you're looking at Title 18, Chapter 113C of the US code as some meaningless bit of fluff. As for your links, they're op-ed pieces which present nothing in the way of verifiable evidence that "actionable intel" was obtained through torture. They have only say-so of the Bush administration and its apologists.
Dismissed.
WASHINGTON – President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.
“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.
Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
refute what? some UN "resolution" like that holds any weight?
There have been multiple posts with links saying that the interrogation techniques used at Gitmo resulted in credible information. The NYT article described all the techniques used at Gitmo. I do not consider them torture, you do.
It seems that you are fond of an expanded definition that includes "mental pain" as if that can somehow be quantified, where a mere threat of violence is considered torture.
As I said before, mere incarceration can then be seen as torture because of the mental pain it causes.
So this is Bully Pulls It's idea of an interrogation
BULLYPULLSIT: Tell me where you are storing your dirty bomb materials.
TERRORIST: No
BULLYPULLSIT: Thank you for your cooperation. You are free to go.
Guess what numbnuts...? The UN Convention Against Torture is NOT a resolution. It is a treaty to which teh US is a signatory. As such, the Constitution gives it the full weight and force of US law. Get over it. And speaking of US law, I'm thinking you're looking at Title 18, Chapter 113C of the US code as some meaningless bit of fluff. As for your links, they're op-ed pieces which present nothing in the way of verifiable evidence that "actionable intel" was obtained through torture. They have only say-so of the Bush administration and its apologists.
Dismissed.
Only because Obama won't declassify the entirety of the documents. Gee I wonder why he won't.
And is Obama's own man a Bush apologist?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22blair.html?_r=1
WASHINGTON President Obamas national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.
High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country, Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.
Admiral Blairs assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
dismissed.
When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him. - Washington Post
Guess what numbnuts...? The UN Convention Against Torture is NOT a resolution. It is a treaty to which teh US is a signatory. As such, the Constitution gives it the full weight and force of US law. Get over it. And speaking of US law, I'm thinking you're looking at Title 18, Chapter 113C of the US code as some meaningless bit of fluff. As for your links, they're op-ed pieces which present nothing in the way of verifiable evidence that "actionable intel" was obtained through torture. They have only say-so of the Bush administration and its apologists.
Dismissed.
Only because Obama won't declassify the entirety of the documents. Gee I wonder why he won't.
And is Obama's own man a Bush apologist?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22blair.html?_r=1
dismissed.
When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him. - Washington Post
And, there's this...
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvsvO9kvSdo]Three Torture Myths[/ame]
You lose...again.
Sorry none of your "evidence" amounts to anything. Why? Because it remains the fact that NO extreme pain was administered to anyone using the 10 methods listed, further since NONE of them are specifically banned or were not until much later after their use, No illegal activity occurred.
For the slow stupid and insane amongst us. The definition from the UN, if taken to its supposed conclusion by Bully would mean you could not threaten anyone, you could not imprison anyone, you could not even hold someone or take them captive in anyway at all. You would have to politely invite them to join you for a cup of Tea.
The law was not broken. Ohh and by the way? What happened to that " the Civilians control the military" now you want to claim cause some Military lawyers said it, it makes it illegal. All their claims do is provide THEIR opinion on the matter. The Military did not run the interrogations so it does not matter what the military thought about a legal matter that had nothing to do with them.
All one need do is claim " I am in great mental pain" and according to bullydumbass that would mean it was torture.
Come on find for us a specific cite before water boarding was used in the method we used it that forbade its use. Ohh and the entire leadership of Democratic Congress will be going down as they APPROVED it's use right along with those pesky Republicans.
President Barack Obama has reinvigorated the critics of George W. Bush's antiterror policies by opening the door to prosecuting or sanctioning those who crafted interrogation policy in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. These critics -- including the president -- are laboring under numerous misconceptions. Many of them have no experience with or understanding of military or CIA interrogation, the purpose of which is to gain actionable intelligence to safeguard our country. The recently released memos by lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel were written to assist interrogators in that critical mission. The memos cannot be fairly evaluated without that mission in mind.
Military and CIA interrogators are trained to use creative means of deception, and to play on detainee emotions and fears. This can be a nasty business. People unfamiliar with it, therefore, might even view a perfectly legitimate interrogation of a prisoner of war that is in full compliance with the Geneva Conventions as abhorrent by its very nature.
But military interrogation is not akin to a friendly chat across a conference table -- nor is it designed to gather evidence in a criminal trial, as an FBI interview might be. There is a fundamental distinction between law enforcement and military interrogations that we ignore at our peril.
Second-guessers can also fail to appreciate the increased importance of interrogation (and human intelligence in general) in the post 9/11 world. We face an enemy that wears no uniform, blends in with civilian populations, and operates in the shadows. This has made eliciting information from captured terrorists vital to the effort of finding other terrorists. As interrogation has become more important, drawing out useful information has become more difficult -- because hardened terrorists are often trained to resist traditional U.S. interrogation methods.
Fortunately, aggressive interrogation techniques like those outlined in the memos to the CIA are effective. As the memos explain, high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11, and Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden's key lieutenants, provided no actionable intelligence when facing traditional U.S. methods. It is doubtful that any high-level al Qaeda operative would ever provide useful intelligence in response to traditional methods.
Yet KSM and Zubaydah provided critical information after being waterboarded -- information that, among other things, helped to prevent a "Second Wave" attack in Los Angeles, according to the memos. Similarly, the 2005 report by Vice Adm. Albert Church on Defense Department interrogation policies, the "Church Report" -- of which I served as the executive editor -- documented the success of aggressive techniques against high-value detainees like Mohamed al Kahtani, 9/11's "20th hijacker."
The aggressive techniques in the CIA memos are also undeniably safe, having been adopted from Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training used with our own troops.
I have personally been waterboarded, put into stress positions, sleep deprived, slapped in the face. While none of this was enjoyable, I am none the worse for wear.
While such techniques are used in U.S. military training, some apparently consider them too brutal, too abusive, too inhumane -- in short, too much like "torture" -- to be used on fanatics like KSM who are bent on the mass murder of innocent American civilians. And if legal advisers such as Steven G. Bradbury, Jay S. Bybee and John Yoo are to be prosecuted for having sanctioned their use under careful controls, who's next? Every commander who ever implemented a SERE course?
Many critics also play the Abu Ghraib "trump card": The abuses of prisoners at that facility in Iraq allegedly "prove" the Bush administration's supposed policy of abuse, first codified in its legal memos. This ignores all relevant evidence.
As the Church Report concluded, after a thorough review of all Defense Department interrogation policies, the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bore no resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater. The 2004 Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations -- whose four members included two former secretaries of defense under President Jimmy Carter -- also stated that "no approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities."
Similarly, the critics like to default to Guantanamo as a symbol of the kind of abuse that Mr. Bush's antiterror policies allowed. Yet, at the time of the Church Report, there had been more than 24,000 interrogation sessions at Guantanamo and only three cases of substantiated interrogation-related abuse. All of them consisted of minor assaults in which military interrogators had exceeded the bounds of approved interrogation policy. Notably, the Church Report found that detainees at Guantanamo were more likely to have been injured playing recreational sports than in confrontations with interrogators or guards.
Mr. Bush's advisers were public servants with the memory of 9/11 still fresh in their minds, doing their best to give legitimate legal advice in a murky, largely undefined area of the law. Is this the stuff of which federal prosecutions, or even sanctions, are made?
As a former federal prosecutor, I know a good case from a bad one. I know a case based on solid evidence and even-handed application of the law versus one based on scoring political points. Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have professed their desire to take politics out of the Justice Department, to restore integrity to a department that they believe had gone astray under Mr. Bush. Their recent actions, however, speak otherwise.
The bottom line is that any attempt to prosecute or sanction lawyers such as Messrs. Bradbury, Bybee or Yoo would be a fool's errand. And whatever our new president and his attorney general are, they aren't fools. Or at least I don't think they are. For the good of the country, I hope they don't prove me wrong.
Mr. McSwain, a former scout/sniper platoon commander in the Marines and assistant U.S. attorney, was executive editor of the 2005 Review of Department of Defense Detention Operations and Detainee Interrogation Techniques (The Church Report). He is an attorney in private practice in Philadelphia.
