Was Waterboarding Worth It?

[QUENTIN]

Oh this is gold Jerry, gold.

From NewsMax, well-known diehard conservative news site's exclusive interview with Rumsfeld:

Rumsfeld Exclusive: There Was No Waterboarding of Courier Source

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tells Newsmax the information that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden was obtained through “normal interrogation approaches.”

...

“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.”

So waterboarding led to the phony intelligence that got us into Iraq and was not responsible for helping us capture Bin Laden.

You were saying?

So waterboarding was never used at Gitmo?

the notion that terrorist suspects were waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay is a “myth.”

So when was waterboarding used? If it was never used, why the uproar?

(BTW, let's put this article in perspective: This is Newsmax and this is Donald Rumsfled we're talking about.)

Waterboarding was never used by the DOD and it was never used at Gitmo. You bet it was used, and then admitted by the government and many of those involved to being ordered and carried out, at foreign detainment facilities and black sites by CIA agents and by Egyptians (and possibly other foreign agents) working on their behalf.

The fact that it's Newsmax and Donald Rumsfeld is the perspective. Newsmax is a hardcore conservative news source that has been a cheerleader for torture for years. Donald Rumsfeld is second only to Dick Cheney as the most dedicated and tireless advocate of torture over the last decade. Even they admit that waterboarding wasn't used to coerce these confessions but rather regular, legal, uncontroversial interrogation.

You might expect the Huffington Post and an anti-waterboarding advocate to make this argument. But when even an issue's biggest proponents describe a critical and relevant event as not a win for their cause, even a setback for their cause, you know they're telling the truth because they'd have zero incentive or ulterior motive to make this claim if it weren't true.

 

[xsited1]

A fairy tale thread.

Amusing.

Should be right up your alley.

 

[signelect]

Water boarding does not kill, Bin Laden's action did. I keep thinking of the picture of the person jumping from the 80th floor of the WTC. Did Bin Laden worry about that, it looked like torture to me. I don't like torture but when faced with pure evil, killing Innocent people, you do what you have to in order to stop it.

I also think it is wrong to celebrate the killing of Bin Laden, it was necessary but it is not something to cheer about. Killing never is.

 

[Flagwavrusa]

Torture is against everything that America stands for. I don't give a damn what it accomplishes... it is NEVER right.

We just killed OBL. Seems that is much worse than torture. Are OK with killing OBL? If so, I don't see where torture should cause you a problem. If you are not Ok with the killing, at least there is no hypocrisy with your stance against torture.

Torture is probably not that useful for eliciting general information, ie inflicting pain as part of some fishing expedition when you don't know specifically what you're looking for. Im sure terrorists have probably been trained to divulge disinformation to stymy their captors under those circumstances. Its probably more useful in the long run to employ long term psychological techniques to turn the bad guys to give helfpul information. That apparently is the kind of tactic that produced the intelligence that eventually led to bin Laden.

But if you capture a guy and you know he knows where the bomb is and when it's going to go off, and is refusing to tell, hell yeah torture the bastard. Start with waterboarding and move up from there.

Nice spin.

KSM and al-Libbi knew how to get to bin Laden when we captured them. They knew the identity of people who had regular contact with him and would lead us to him. That was about as high priority a piece of information as we could imagine. We asked them for the whereabouts or a lead on bin Laden while we waterboarded them. Neither of them gave us any useful information.

When we interrogated them according to the tried-and-true, field tested Army Field Manual, with no waterboarding or harsh techniques, they gave us the information we wanted - the name of the guy who led us to bin Laden - and it allowed us to find and kill our top target.

So clearly, in the real world rather than the plot of 24, if someone has information we desperately need we shouldn't torture them but interrogate them if we want the actionable, valuable intel they possess.

I see. So you were there and you know all about it. Don't you think that when you imprison someone under these conditions, where they don't have access to a court system to seek redress and are at the mercy of their captors, that there are a hundred different ways that you can make their life miserable and that they will do just about anything in order to earn more favorable treatment. I seriously doubt these terrorists volunteered this information because they had an epiphany and regretted the error of their ways. The military has one primary interest in these prisoners 24/7, aside from keeping them behind bars, and that is extracting useful information from them, and I am sure they know how to get it using psychological and coercive measure that fall short of the technical definition of torture.

Saying we can't employ bona fide torture is like saying we should trash our nuclear arsenal, since in the vast majority of circumstances where you want to use force nuclear weapons are inappropriate. However, there are circumstances where it is the right thing to do (Hiroshima, Nagasaki). The OP asks if torture should be a tool in the arsenal of techniques for extracting information from terrorists. I have faith that the CIA has enough expertise to know when to use soft measures, and when waterboarding or other tortures are needed to get the job done, so the answer is yes.

 

[JamesInFlorida]

I'm not really sure what I think about it. I will admit the past day or so has made me re-evaluate my thoughts on waterboarding though. I guess I have to wait and see what information came out of waterboarding, beforse I make up my mind.

 

[xsited1]

Oh this is gold Jerry, gold.

From NewsMax, well-known diehard conservative news site's exclusive interview with Rumsfeld:

Rumsfeld Exclusive: There Was No Waterboarding of Courier Source






So waterboarding led to the phony intelligence that got us into Iraq and was not responsible for helping us capture Bin Laden.

You were saying?

So waterboarding was never used at Gitmo?

the notion that terrorist suspects were waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay is a “myth.”

So when was waterboarding used? If it was never used, why the uproar?

(BTW, let's put this article in perspective: This is Newsmax and this is Donald Rumsfled we're talking about.)

Waterboarding was never used by the DOD and it was never used at Gitmo. You bet it was used, and then admitted by the government and many of those involved to being ordered and carried out, at foreign detainment facilities and black sites by CIA agents and by Egyptians (and possibly other foreign agents) working on their behalf.

The fact that it's Newsmax and Donald Rumsfeld is the perspective. Newsmax is a hardcore conservative news source that has been a cheerleader for torture for years. Donald Rumsfeld is second only to Dick Cheney as the most dedicated and tireless advocate of torture over the last decade. Even they admit that waterboarding wasn't used to coerce these confessions but rather regular, legal, uncontroversial interrogation.

You might expect the Huffington Post and an anti-waterboarding advocate to make this argument. But when even an issue's biggest proponents describe a critical and relevant event as not a win for their cause, even a setback for their cause, you know they're telling the truth because they'd have zero incentive or ulterior motive to make this claim if it weren't true.

I hear 'ya, although Rumsfeld's point is that no torture was used at Gitmo and that Bush’s administration set everything in motion to catch OBL. (The only reason OBL was caught was because Obama continued what Bush had started. Yay!) It seems more like he's covering his tracks and proclaiming Bush to be a great leader.

 

[L.K.Eder]

In reality the torture methods used by the US are childs play compared to countries like Iran, North Korea, Egypt, Sudan etc do.

one of the reasons why some "enhanced interrogation" was outsourced to egypt, e.g..

 

[Spoonman]

A fairy tale thread.

Amusing.

Should be right up your alley.

lmao

 

[Vanquish]

The End never Justifies the Means.

Anyone who thinks it does is childish and probably has no connection to law enforcement, the military or the legal system.

 

[Spoonman]

Water boarding does not kill, Bin Laden's action did. I keep thinking of the picture of the person jumping from the 80th floor of the WTC. Did Bin Laden worry about that, it looked like torture to me. I don't like torture but when faced with pure evil, killing Innocent people, you do what you have to in order to stop it.

I also think it is wrong to celebrate the killing of Bin Laden, it was necessary but it is not something to cheer about. Killing never is.

i stood a few blocks from the trade ctr that day. I watched the plane hit, I saw the people jump, i watched the buildings collapse. I knew 11 people killed that day and countless more who lost loved ones. the intent was to instill terror, to kill and injur as many as possible and to impact as many people as possible. Yep, you have to get down in the mud with shit like these people if you want to beat them. it's the only way

 

[xsited1]

The End never Justifies the Means.

Anyone who thinks it does is childish and probably has no connection to law enforcement, the military or the legal system.

So what would you do if enhanced interrogation techniques were used on a terrorist which provided information about the location of a mass murderer? Would you act on this intelligence?

 

[Vanquish]

Ooooooh the Jack Bauer/24 style of government.

If I was in command or someone's peer and the prisoner had already been tortured, I may or may not use the information, depending on how credible it was, when combined with what we already knew. If it we could check it, sure I'd use the info. If we only had time/resources to check ONE possibility...and we had two possible leads...the choice isn't as easy.

I know that's not a FUN answer. People (especially some conservatives) always think this shit is easy...and come up with REALLY easy hypotheticals that scream childishness.

What people fail to realize is that torture - and be assured waterboarding IS torture - is wrong for so many reasons:

1) its just wrong to put through excruciating and prolonged pain

2) the founding fathers were against it - ever hear of cruel and unusual punishment? yes, even for non-citizens. They said ALL MEN had inalienable rights. Those rights dont stop at the border or the birth certificate line.

3) Who decides who is innocent and who's guilty? What if the government gets "credible intelligence from a terrorist" that your mother has information on the next terrorist event. They bust in during the middle of the night, yank her out and start torturing HER for information. There HAVE TO BE RULES and LIMITS. You can't just say "this event could be so bad that the rules get thrown out the door.

4) Americans abroad - this will be great when another country takes our citizens or a terrorist group takes our citizens and retaliates. People with these Jack Bauer hypos never do answer those questions. They simply see, like a gorilla or the hulk, MAN BAD! ME SMASH!! TOTALLY JUSTIFIED!!! ARRRRGHH!!!

The world is a bigger, more complex place than that. I hope people will wake up and see that.

 

[bodecea]

Let's assume for a moment that information gleaned during enhanced interrogation techniques of Al Qaeda members at Gitmo led to the killing of OBL. Was it worth it?

Years of intelligence gathering, including details gleaned from controversial interrogations of Al Qaeda members during the Bush administration, ultimately led the Navy SEALs who killed Usama bin Laden to his compound in Pakistan.

Read more: Bush-Era Interrogations Provided Key Details on Bin Laden's Location - FoxNews.com

I am sceptical that any torture gleaned the info used to find OBL....it sounds too convenient for some to jump on and make that claim in order to excuse it.

While it is too early to know for sure (if we ever will), I'm beginning to hear that the info leading to the courier was NOT gleaned from torture but from months of standard interrogation and piecing together small tidbits of information.

 

[asterism]

Oh this is gold Jerry, gold.

From NewsMax, well-known diehard conservative news site's exclusive interview with Rumsfeld:

Rumsfeld Exclusive: There Was No Waterboarding of Courier Source

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tells Newsmax the information that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden was obtained through “normal interrogation approaches.”

...

“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.”

So waterboarding led to the phony intelligence that got us into Iraq and was not responsible for helping us capture Bin Laden.

You were saying?

So waterboarding was never used at Gitmo?

the notion that terrorist suspects were waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay is a “myth.”

So when was waterboarding used? If it was never used, why the uproar?

(BTW, let's put this article in perspective: This is Newsmax and this is Donald Rumsfled we're talking about.)

It's also useful to note Rumsfeld's exact wording, "“The United States Department of Defense did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone." CIA interrogations are not part of the DoD's authority. The Director of the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence.

http://www.dni.gov/overview.pdf

 

[Flagwavrusa]

Ooooooh the Jack Bauer/24 style of government.

If I was in command or someone's peer and the prisoner had already been tortured, I may or may not use the information, depending on how credible it was, when combined with what we already knew. If it we could check it, sure I'd use the info. If we only had time/resources to check ONE possibility...and we had two possible leads...the choice isn't as easy.

I know that's not a FUN answer. People (especially some conservatives) always think this shit is easy...and come up with REALLY easy hypotheticals that scream childishness.
What people fail to realize is that torture - and be assured waterboarding IS torture - is wrong for so many reasons:

1) its just wrong to put through excruciating and prolonged pain

2) the founding fathers were against it - ever hear of cruel and unusual punishment? yes, even for non-citizens. They said ALL MEN had inalienable rights. Those rights dont stop at the border or the birth certificate line.

3) Who decides who is innocent and who's guilty? What if the government gets "credible intelligence from a terrorist" that your mother has information on the next terrorist event. They bust in during the middle of the night, yank her out and start torturing HER for information. There HAVE TO BE RULES and LIMITS. You can't just say "this event could be so bad that the rules get thrown out the door.

4) Americans abroad - this will be great when another country takes our citizens or a terrorist group takes our citizens and retaliates. People with these Jack Bauer hypos never do answer those questions. They simply see, like a gorilla or the hulk, MAN BAD! ME SMASH!! TOTALLY JUSTIFIED!!! ARRRRGHH!!!

The world is a bigger, more complex place than that. I hope people will wake up and see that.

You must be a conservative.

 

[Vanquish]

Nope. I'm a centrist. Try to take the ideas that work best from each side and put my support behind them.

I seriously think that everyone just needs to watch the Denzel Washington movie The Seige one more time. It makes the exact point I'm trying to make...but with guns and explosions and spies.

 

[TheBrain]

Let's assume for a moment that information gleaned during enhanced interrogation techniques of Al Qaeda members at Gitmo led to the killing of OBL. Was it worth it?

Years of intelligence gathering, including details gleaned from controversial interrogations of Al Qaeda members during the Bush administration, ultimately led the Navy SEALs who killed Usama bin Laden to his compound in Pakistan.

Read more: Bush-Era Interrogations Provided Key Details on Bin Laden's Location - FoxNews.com

I am sceptical that any torture gleaned the info used to find OBL....it sounds too convenient for some to jump on and make that claim in order to excuse it.

While it is too early to know for sure (if we ever will), I'm beginning to hear that the info leading to the courier was NOT gleaned from torture but from months of standard interrogation and piecing together small tidbits of information.

I'm skeptical that you even know ANYTHING about the intelligence business. The CIA always has and always will use umm advanced interrogation techniques.

 

[TheBrain]

Ooooooh the Jack Bauer/24 style of government.

If I was in command or someone's peer and the prisoner had already been tortured, I may or may not use the information, depending on how credible it was, when combined with what we already knew. If it we could check it, sure I'd use the info. If we only had time/resources to check ONE possibility...and we had two possible leads...the choice isn't as easy.

I know that's not a FUN answer. People (especially some conservatives) always think this shit is easy...and come up with REALLY easy hypotheticals that scream childishness.

What people fail to realize is that torture - and be assured waterboarding IS torture - is wrong for so many reasons:

1) its just wrong to put through excruciating and prolonged pain

2) the founding fathers were against it - ever hear of cruel and unusual punishment? yes, even for non-citizens. They said ALL MEN had inalienable rights. Those rights dont stop at the border or the birth certificate line.

3) Who decides who is innocent and who's guilty? What if the government gets "credible intelligence from a terrorist" that your mother has information on the next terrorist event. They bust in during the middle of the night, yank her out and start torturing HER for information. There HAVE TO BE RULES and LIMITS. You can't just say "this event could be so bad that the rules get thrown out the door.

4) Americans abroad - this will be great when another country takes our citizens or a terrorist group takes our citizens and retaliates. People with these Jack Bauer hypos never do answer those questions. They simply see, like a gorilla or the hulk, MAN BAD! ME SMASH!! TOTALLY JUSTIFIED!!! ARRRRGHH!!!

The world is a bigger, more complex place than that. I hope people will wake up and see that.

1) It can be argued that placing someone in a 3X5 cell for the rest of their lives is cruel and prolonged pain. Scaring someone into believing they are about to die is not prolonged pain, the feeling goes away as soon as they are recovered.

2) The founding fathers believed in putting people in the stockades and pummeling them with fruit, certainly a agonizing punishment, just for starters.

3) My mother is a US citizen and thus immune to being interrogated without benefit of a lawyer being present, and thus no waterboarding.

4) You are a simpleton if you believe that other countries will be nice to Americans if we be nice to them. In fact quite the opposite is true. Ever wonder why the old USSR was NEVER the victim of a terrorist attack? Because the terrorists KNEW without doubt that if they killed any Soviet citizens, the KGB would hunt them down and kill their entire families and THEN kill them. And believe you me, the Muslims hate the Russian people.

 

[bodecea]

Let's assume for a moment that information gleaned during enhanced interrogation techniques of Al Qaeda members at Gitmo led to the killing of OBL. Was it worth it?

I am sceptical that any torture gleaned the info used to find OBL....it sounds too convenient for some to jump on and make that claim in order to excuse it.

While it is too early to know for sure (if we ever will), I'm beginning to hear that the info leading to the courier was NOT gleaned from torture but from months of standard interrogation and piecing together small tidbits of information.

I'm skeptical that you even know ANYTHING about the intelligence business. The CIA always has and always will use umm advanced interrogation techniques.

How odd....considering that even members of the Intell community are saying torture does not glean accurate, useful info. Now...if you want to use torture to MAKE someone suffer because you really want to punish them....that's a different goal altogether, isn't it?

 

[chikenwing]

I did and do.


others don't feel that way naturally. I ran across this today.I actually agree with some of the points he makes, but then I remember a Churchill quote;

"It's no use saying 'We are doing our best or what is 'right'. You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary."




Monday, May 2nd, 2011

In The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer-winning history of al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, author Lawrence Wright lays out how Osama bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war—an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam.

Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion.

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .

* We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
* We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
* In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
* We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
* The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
* The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
* Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)
* The current president has also claimed the power to execute U.S. citizens, off the battlefield, without a trial, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it after the fact.
* The Congress approved, the president signed, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a broadly written law making it a crime to advocate for any organization the government deems sympathetic to terrorism. This includes challenging the “terrorist” designation in the first place.
* Flying in America now means enduring a humiliating and hassling ritual that does little if anything to actually make flying any safer. Every time the government fails to catch an attempt at terrorism, it punishes the public for its failure by adding to the ritual.
* American Muslims, a heartening story of success and assimilation, are now harassed and denigrated for merely trying to build houses of worship.
* Without a warrant, the government can search and seize indefinitely the laptops and other personal electronic devices of anyone entering the country.
* The Department of Homeland Security now gives terrorism-fighting grants for local police departments across the country to purchase military equipment, such as armored personnel carriers, which is then used against U.S. citizens, mostly to serve drug warrants.
more at-



He Won | The Agitator

And ya gotta know only a man like Churchill could have the perspective to understand why his statement is so true.