John Yoo responds to democrat smears of the CIA....

[2aguy]

Joe....Santa Claus is watching.....if you want that Christmas Puppy you need to change your behavior....

 

[2aguy]

Thus, enhanced interrogation techniques have been encountered by any first year CJ major. They don't work. They elicit false confessions.

These techniques did work...ask the people who actually used them instead of the democrats trying to smear the CIA...

You know....we know water boarding works....why...because they used them on our pilots and our special forces....and they all talked....in training no less.....they knew they were not going to be killed by their trainers, they knew they just had to hold out....and they still talked...Navy Seals, Green Berets, and Navy Pilots....all water boarded....and they all spilled the info....

 

[2aguy]

this talks about how effective water boarding was when used on SERE school students of the U.S. Military...

CIA Waterboarding Produced Intel That Stopped Attack on Los Angeles by Terence Jeffrey on Creators.com - A Syndicate Of Talent

While waterboarding was exceedingly rare in CIA interrogations of al-Qaida terrorists, it was routinely used on certain members of our own armed forces who went through "Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape" (SERE) training. According to another previously classified memo that Obama released last week, some branches of the U.S. military stopped using waterboarding in training certain troops not because waterboarding had harmful long-term effects, but because it was so universally effective in extracting information.

"With respect to the waterboard, you have also orally informed us that the Navy continues to use it in training," said a 2002 Office of Legal Counsel memo to the CIA's Rizzo. "You have informed us that other services ceased use of the waterboard because it was so successful as an interrogation technique but not because of any concerns over harm, physical or mental, caused by it. It was also reported to be almost 100 percent effective in producing cooperation among trainees."

 

[2aguy]

this article looks at why the military stopped most of their water boarding of trainees for special forces......it was too successful........yes....too successful at getting the toughest men on the planet to give up information during training.....with no harm to them physically.....

we are talking Seals, Special Forces, Pilots....the toughest men in the military.....


EXCLUSIVE Waterboarding Too Dangerous Internal DoD Memo Reveals

The Clare memo stated, in part:

3. Area of Concern: The JPRA official stance is that the water board should not be used as a physical pressure during Level C SERE training. This position is based on factors that have the potential to affect not only students but also the whole DoD SERE program. The way the water board is most often employed, it leaves students psychologically defeated with no ability to resist under pressure. Once a student is taught that they can be beaten, and there is no way to resist, it is difficult to develop psychological hardiness. None of the other schools use the water board that leaves the San Diego school as a standout.

In an attachment to Colonel Clare’s memo, "Observations and Recommendations," JPRA indicates that the waterboard technique as used in the SERE schools is "inconsistent" with the JPRA philosophy that its training and procedures be "safe, effective" and provides "a positive learning experience."

The water board has always been the most extreme pressure that required intense supervision and oversight because of the inherent risks associated with its employment…. Forcing answers under the extreme duress of the water board does not teach resistance or resilience, but teaches that you can be beaten. When a student’s ability to develop psychological resiliency is compromised… it may create unintended consequences regarding their perception of survivability during
a real world SERE event. Based on these concerns and the risks associated with using the water board, we strongly recommend that you discontinue using it [underlined in the original].

 

[Synthaholic]

These techniques did work...

Not according to the CIA's own documents.

Sorry, chump.

 

[Disir]

I know...there are several threads about the democrats smearing the CIA and redefining harsh interrogation techniques as torture.....but this is a response from the man who looked at the legalities and helped make policy. It didn't seem right to let his response get buried in another thread....

John Yoo A torture report for the dustbin - NY Daily News

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

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

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

I would want to know if they lied to me and other Bush administration officials, as the Feinstein report asserts. If it turned out that the facts on which I based my advice were wrong, I would be willing to change my opinion of the interrogation methods. As economist John Maynard Keynes reportedly said to a critic, “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”

But given its profoundly partisan tenor and fiercely disputed details, I have significant reason to doubt this report’s veracity.

Take, for example, an absolutely critical fact related to the utility of enhanced interrogation tactics — about how the U.S. tracked down and ultimately killed Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

According to several former CIA directors, harsh interrogations and waterboarding of Al Qaeda leaders such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed allowed U.S. analysts to identify Bin Laden’s courier (he would not use electronic communications). Tracking the courier then led us to Bin Laden’s hideout.

The Feinstein report alleges that other sources had already provided the name of the courier independently.
But the CIA’s rebuttal — signed by Obama’s appointee Director John Brennan — makes clear this information “was insufficient to distinguish him from many other Bin Laden associates until additional information from detainees put it into context and allowed CIA to better understand his true role and potential in the hunt for Bin Laden.”

It's torture. Not enhanced interrogation techniques. It doesn't work. If it was 100% foolproof then we wouldn't be calling it torture. But, it's not. If I torture you then you will tell me anything and everything that I want to hear whether it is true or not. You are not going to give a flying fuck.

I guarantee that every single cotton picking one of those clowns knew this in advance. Torture 9 out of 10 times will not elicit truth. Knowing this in advance, like they do, it can be said that it was designed to elicit false confessions.

I don't give a damn how many times they repeat the shit: it gave us very critical information. It doesn't show a damn thing besides an advert as good as Shannon Miller on a box of Wheaties. So and so said that it gave us critical information, therefore, it must be true.

Now, the CIA has received all kinds of money to create all kinds of mayhem for a very long time. There is no moral line in the sand and hasn't been for some 40 + years. So, maybe we can drop the bullshit.

If we focus on this and spend hours arguing a bunch of petty bullshit then we can pretend that the US wasn't behind or wasn't instigating much of the revolts in other countries in our current and recent past for another twenty years. How bloody convenient is that.

Its not torture and it is effective. Not 100%, but nothing is 100%. You are wrong.

No. You are wrong.

 

[Spare_change]

for the OP .....

Man, you're wasting your time. You made three crucial, but incorrect, assumptions.

1) You assumed that liberals wanted to know the facts. They don't --- they want nothing that interferes with their agenda.

2) You assumed that liberals would even bother to read the information. They don't - they're afraid that it might contain something factual that didn't fit their agenda.

3) You assumed the liberals wanted all the information. They don't - they only want carefully extracted facts that can be twisted to appear to support their tortured position.

Save your breath ...

 

[Disir]

Thus, enhanced interrogation techniques have been encountered by any first year CJ major. They don't work. They elicit false confessions.

These techniques did work...ask the people who actually used them instead of the democrats trying to smear the CIA...

You know....we know water boarding works....why...because they used them on our pilots and our special forces....and they all talked....in training no less.....they knew they were not going to be killed by their trainers, they knew they just had to hold out....and they still talked...Navy Seals, Green Berets, and Navy Pilots....all water boarded....and they all spilled the info....

There are decades of studies and the CIA documents that support what I just said.


A 2006 Intelligence Science Board flatly noted that there was no data supporting the claim that torture produces reliable results. The 372-page report would be summed up by this passage: “The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information. In essence, there seems to be an unsubstantiated assumption that ‘compliance’ carries the same connotation as ‘meaningful cooperation.’ ” In other words, waterboard someone or smack his head against the wall, and sure enough, he’ll open up and talk. But does that mean you’ll get reliable info that you couldn’t have gotten using more conventional techniques? Absolutely not. Dick Cheney insisted that two CIA analytical reports (that he apparently pressed to have prepared) concluded that his torture techniques rendered positive results. But these reports were declassified and published, and lo, they don’t say what he claimed they do.


the use of such techniques appears motivated by a folk psychology that is demonstrably incorrect. Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or ‘enhanced’ interrogation.

Newsweek’s Sharon Begley summarizes O’Mara’s analysis:

So let’s break this down anatomically. Fact One: To recall information stored in the brain, you must activate a number of areas, especially the prefrontal cortex (site of intentionality) and hippocampus (the door to long-term memory storage). Fact Two: Stress such as that caused by torture releases the hormone cortisol, which can impair cognitive function, including that of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Studies in which soldiers were subjected to stress in the form of food and sleep deprivation have found that it impaired their ability to recall personal memories and information, as this 2006 study reported. “Studies of extreme stress with Special Forces Soldiers have found that recall of previously-learned information was impaired after stress occurred,” notes O’Mara. “Water-boarding in particular is an extreme stressor and has the potential to elicit widespread stress-induced changes in the brain.”

Stress also releases catecholamines such as noradrenaline, which can enlarge the amygdale (structures involved in the processing of fear), also impairing memory and the ability to distinguish a true memory from a false or implanted one. Brain imaging of torture victims, as in this study, suggest why: torture triggers abnormal patterns of activation in the frontal and temporal lobes, impairing memory. Rather than a question triggering a (relatively) simple pattern of brain activation that leads to the stored memory of information that can answer the question, the question stimulates memories almost chaotically, without regard to their truthfulness. These neurochemical effects set the stage for two serious pitfalls of interrogation under torture, argues O’Mara. The first is that “information presented by the captor to elicit responses during interrogation may inadvertently become part of the suspect’s memory, especially since suspects are under extreme stress and are required to tell and retell the same events which may have happened over a period of years.” As a result, information produced by the suspect may parrot or embellish suggestions from the interrogators rather than revealing something both truthful and unknown to the interrogators. Second, cortisol-induced damage to the prefrontal cortex can cause confabulation, or false memories. Because a person being tortured loses the ability to distinguish between true and false memories, as a 2008 study showed, further pain and stress does not cause him to tell the truth, but to retreat further into a fog where he cannot tell true from false.
Torture Doesn 8217 t Work Neurobiologist Says Harper s Magazine

 

[JoeB131]

Joe....Santa Claus is watching.....if you want that Christmas Puppy you need to change your behavior....

Oh, no, you're a retard who still believes in Santa? Again, it explains much.

 

[JoeB131]

You know....we know water boarding works....why...because they used them on our pilots and our special forces....and they all talked....in training no less.....they knew they were not going to be killed by their trainers, they knew they just had to hold out....and they still talked...Navy Seals, Green Berets, and Navy Pilots....all water boarded....and they all spilled the info....

Did any of them lose their jobs or get discharges?

The problem is not that we can't get someone to talk, it's what they are saying is accurate or not.

When KSM started talking about recruiting black muslims in Montana, he was obviously just telling the torturers what he thought they wanted to hear.

 

[Meathead]

It worked fine. Stopped other attacks and found bin Laden. Making life a bitch for some scumbags was just the topping.

 

[JoeB131]

It worked fine. Stopped other attacks and found bin Laden. Making life a bitch for some scumbags was just the topping.

It took 10 years to find Bin Laden.

And there's no evidence it stopped any other attacks.

It did, however, help get us into a pointless war with Iraq, when these poor schlubs were willing to implicate Iraqis in schemes they had nothing to do with.

 

[Meathead]

It worked fine. Stopped other attacks and found bin Laden. Making life a bitch for some scumbags was just the topping.

It took 10 years to find Bin Laden.

And there's no evidence it stopped any other attacks.

It did, however, help get us into a pointless war with Iraq, when these poor schlubs were willing to implicate Iraqis in schemes they had nothing to do with.

We found him and there were no other attacks. It worked! I don't care if your low-life buddies suffered.

 

[Meathead]

Torture, or whatever you want to call it, "justified" by majority of Americans.

New poll finds majority of Americans believe torture justified after 9 11 attacks - The Washington Post

By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31 percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence.

 

[JoeB131]

We found him and there were no other attacks. It worked! I don't care if your low-life buddies suffered.

How about if totally innocent people suffered? Or do you not care if they were Muslims.

We didn't find him for 10 years because the torturers produced so many bad leads.

 

[Meathead]

We found him and there were no other attacks. It worked! I don't care if your low-life buddies suffered.

How about if totally innocent people suffered? Or do you not care if they were Muslims.

We didn't find him for 10 years because the torturers produced so many bad leads.

We might have found him earlier if we tortured more. This 'if' game is meaningless.

 

[JoeB131]

We found him and there were no other attacks. It worked! I don't care if your low-life buddies suffered.

How about if totally innocent people suffered? Or do you not care if they were Muslims.

We didn't find him for 10 years because the torturers produced so many bad leads.

We might have found him earlier if we tortured more. This 'if' game is meaningless.

No, not really. KSM was tortured, and he said that the Courier, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, was no longer an active AQ member and he was no one of importance. If the CIA had looked at him more closely, al-Kuwaiti would have lead us to Bin Laden a lot sooner.

It also would have been nice if Pakistan, our supposed "Ally", hadn't been hiding him since at least 2005 in a compound right next to their military academy.

 

[Darkwind]

I know...there are several threads about the democrats smearing the CIA and redefining harsh interrogation techniques as torture.....but this is a response from the man who looked at the legalities and helped make policy. It didn't seem right to let his response get buried in another thread....

John Yoo A torture report for the dustbin - NY Daily News

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

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

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

I would want to know if they lied to me and other Bush administration officials, as the Feinstein report asserts. If it turned out that the facts on which I based my advice were wrong, I would be willing to change my opinion of the interrogation methods. As economist John Maynard Keynes reportedly said to a critic, “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”

But given its profoundly partisan tenor and fiercely disputed details, I have significant reason to doubt this report’s veracity.

Take, for example, an absolutely critical fact related to the utility of enhanced interrogation tactics — about how the U.S. tracked down and ultimately killed Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

According to several former CIA directors, harsh interrogations and waterboarding of Al Qaeda leaders such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed allowed U.S. analysts to identify Bin Laden’s courier (he would not use electronic communications). Tracking the courier then led us to Bin Laden’s hideout.

The Feinstein report alleges that other sources had already provided the name of the courier independently.
But the CIA’s rebuttal — signed by Obama’s appointee Director John Brennan — makes clear this information “was insufficient to distinguish him from many other Bin Laden associates until additional information from detainees put it into context and allowed CIA to better understand his true role and potential in the hunt for Bin Laden.”

It's torture. Not enhanced interrogation techniques. It doesn't work. If it was 100% foolproof then we wouldn't be calling it torture. But, it's not. If I torture you then you will tell me anything and everything that I want to hear whether it is true or not. You are not going to give a flying fuck.

I guarantee that every single cotton picking one of those clowns knew this in advance. Torture 9 out of 10 times will not elicit truth. Knowing this in advance, like they do, it can be said that it was designed to elicit false confessions.

I don't give a damn how many times they repeat the shit: it gave us very critical information. It doesn't show a damn thing besides an advert as good as Shannon Miller on a box of Wheaties. So and so said that it gave us critical information, therefore, it must be true.

Now, the CIA has received all kinds of money to create all kinds of mayhem for a very long time. There is no moral line in the sand and hasn't been for some 40 + years. So, maybe we can drop the bullshit.

If we focus on this and spend hours arguing a bunch of petty bullshit then we can pretend that the US wasn't behind or wasn't instigating much of the revolts in other countries in our current and recent past for another twenty years. How bloody convenient is that.

Its not torture and it is effective. Not 100%, but nothing is 100%. You are wrong.

No. You are wrong.

No, I am not. Simply wanting it to be torture does not make it torture.

 

[2aguy]

Leave it to another conservative writer to get to the point.....

Tortured Reasoning - Thomas Sowell - Page 1

One of the most obscene acts of the Obama administration, when it first took office, was to launch a criminal investigation of CIA agents who had used harsh interrogation methods against captured terrorists in the wake of the devastating September 11, 2001 aerial attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Right after those terrorist attacks, when there were desperate fears of what might be coming next, these CIA agents were trying to spare fellow Americans another attack that could take thousands more lives, or perhaps millions more. To turn on these agents, years later, after they did what they were urged to do, as a patriotic duty in a time of crisis, is both a betrayal of those who acted in the past and a disincentive to those in the future who are charged with safeguarding the nation.

The ease with which politicians are willing to pull the rug out from under people whose job is to safeguard our lives -- whether they are CIA agents, the police or the military -- is not only a betrayal of those people but a danger to us all.

People who are constantly denouncing the police, including with demonstrable lies, may think they are showing solidarity with people in the ghettos. But, when police hesitate to go beyond "kinder and gentler" policing, that leaves decent people in black communities at the mercy of hoodlums and thugs who have no mercy.

When conscientious young people, of any race, who would like to help maintain peace and order see that being a policeman means having race hustlers constantly whipping up mob hostility against you -- and having opportunistic politicians and the media joining the race hustlers -- those young people may well decide that some other line of work would be better for them.

High crime areas need not only the most, but the best, police they can get. Taking cheap shots at cops is not the way to get the people who are needed.

When people who volunteer to put their lives on the line in the military to defend this country, at home and abroad, see their buddies killed on the battlefield, and sometimes themselves come back minus an arm or a leg, or with severe physical and mental damage that they may never get over -- and then see some headstrong politician in the White House throw away everything they fought for, and see enemy forces take back places for which Americans shed their blood, that can be galling to them and a deterrent to others who might otherwise take their place in the future.

But the thing is.....the libs never think beyond hurting their political enemies....the larger picture...never applies to them....history for a lib starts when they wake up in the morning and resets at night when they go to sleep......

 

[JoeB131]

Thomas Sowell- another Uncle Tom who goes in front of white people and says, "We sho be shiftless, boss!"