Whoops! CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding

[rightwinger]

No. They wouldn't necessarily be outed. Images in tapes can be obscured, just like words in documents can be blacked out, and were.

Yes and voices can be disguised and all that, and how many will then be crying that the tapes were edited? The CIA did the right thing to protect their agents. You want them to be evil and not believe them fine, find another government that acts any better.

Exactly. There is no pleasing them. It's not about the substance, it's about the liberals trying to manufacture a political issue.

Do they even care that a major terrorist attack was foiled? No.

Americans openly engaging in TORTURE is manufacturing a political issue?

The whole fucking world is repulsed at the actions of the Bush administration

 

[SFC Ollie]

Yes and voices can be disguised and all that, and how many will then be crying that the tapes were edited? The CIA did the right thing to protect their agents. You want them to be evil and not believe them fine, find another government that acts any better.

Exactly. There is no pleasing them. It's not about the substance, it's about the liberals trying to manufacture a political issue.

Do they even care that a major terrorist attack was foiled? No.

Americans openly engaging in TORTURE is manufacturing a political issue?

The whole fucking world is repulsed at the actions of the Bush administration

The world was repulsed by the attacks of 9-11 the world would have been even more repulsed if we had not prevented another such attack when it was within our power to do so. But we understand that you would rather another 3000 or more died......

Why can't you understand that?

 

[logical4u]

We used water boarding on 3 people. Supposedly we received some valuable information from them that probably saved American lives. At the time it was sanctioned by the Government, now it isn't. I don't know about this former agent and why he would lie. Obviously we cannot believe anything he says now.

I believe that we were justified in the use of enhanced measures, and I believe they were only used when it was thought that lives could be saved.

When US soldiers are tortured, don't the torturers think they are saving lives? American soldiers have information on tactics, capabilities, strengths and vulnerabilities.....by your logic, our soldiers can be tortured because the information will save lives

Glad you brought that up....lets compare:
waterboarding vs four people holding a bound man while a fifth man saws off his head
firing a gun in the vicininty of a prisoner vs drilling numerous holes into a captives head (until they die)
telling someone a "really bad inscect" has been dropped into a box with them or disembowlment

Okay, time is up, which do you think is more reasonable, humane, preserves life? Come on, I know it is tough, which would you choose if you "happened" to be captured trying to kill your captors?

 

[QUENTIN]

There is no evidence that waterboarding produced intel that interrogation didn't or couldn't have, furthermore there is no evidence that any intel produced by the three known to have been specifically authorized for waterboarding stopped a terrorist plot against L.A.

You're working in two degrees of hypotheticals (if we hadn't waterboarded, we wouldn't have known about this alleged plot, without us knowing about this alleged plot 3000 people would die) and operating under the assumption that anything the most secretive, untrustworthy, intentionally deceptive (and designed that way) organization in the Western world says is the unquestioned and absolute truth.

Given the CIA's track record, taking their word is even more naive and ill-advised than trusting politicians.

 

[QUENTIN]

Glad you brought that up....lets compare:
waterboarding vs four people holding a bound man while a fifth man saws off his head
firing a gun in the vicininty of a prisoner vs drilling numerous holes into a captives head (until they die)
telling someone a "really bad inscect" has been dropped into a box with them or disembowlment

Okay, time is up, which do you think is more reasonable, humane, preserves life? Come on, I know it is tough, which would you choose if you "happened" to be captured trying to kill your captors?

Murder is worse than rape. Given that your only moral standard is "better than what Al Qaeda does," do you support our rape of uncharged, untried detainees with foreign objects?

 

[SFC Ollie]

There is no evidence that waterboarding produced intel that interrogation didn't or couldn't have, furthermore there is no evidence that any intel produced by the three known to have been specifically authorized for waterboarding stopped a terrorist plot against L.A.

You're working in two degrees of hypotheticals (if we hadn't waterboarded, we wouldn't have known about this alleged plot, without us knowing about this alleged plot 3000 people would die) and operating under the assumption that anything the most secretive, untrustworthy, intentionally deceptive (and designed that way) organization in the Western world says is the unquestioned and absolute truth.

Given the CIA's track record, taking their word is even more naive and ill-advised than trusting politicians.

So we have another one who will simply assume that the CIA is lieing, and I suppose you believe that Rep Pelosi was telling the truth when she called them liars too.

I happen to believe them 100%. Why? because I don't want my country to be evil. Some people would prefer that for some reason.

 

[logical4u]

The non torture rules are there to help protect our troops if they are captured.
If you support torturing prisoners then you do not support our troops.

Bullshit. How many heads have we cut off?

How many have we blown off?

Your point is totally off base with mine.

In any case are we to become like them?

Well they did it first sounds kinda childish.

We have fired bombs into places known to have extremists. And yes, civilians have been killed, it is not something we promote or try for in a fight. We would prefer the ones that have declared war on all things that have advanced since the time of mohammed (may all his followers read the "other Book" of truth), fought openly. That is not the case, they choose to hide behind the most heart wrenching photo ops. If their enemy does not kill enough or gruesomly enough, they ad lib with their own killings.
Now, those guys (the terrorists), they are all about killing people that have nothing to do with the military to disrupt our culture and our way of life. If they can catch military, it is cause for celebration (because the military was caught unawares). The only reason, this nation really got involved with "their war against the west" was because they killed over 3,000 people....just ....because. They (the terrorists) continue to prove their desires to kill us in great numbers (and it will not be humane, they will not disregard "torture", and they will not stop). If you want evidence of this, read the press accounts of what is happening in other nations: a muslim accuses a Christian of raping a muslim girl (now understand Christians are outnumbered by more than 9 to 1), the only proof is one man's word against another (the Christian's word DOES NOT COUNT, because he is not muslim), in "retaliation" eight Christians are killed and their neighborhood attacked, homes and church burned. Yes, just a little "petting" and these terrorists will fall right into line......NOT.

 

[logical4u]

You made the statement that it is OK to torture if it saves lives. By your logic, the torture of US soldiers is acceptable if the soldures give life saving information. You say that because we only did it three times it is acceptable.....so torturing three soldiers is OK....Its ONLY Three

Innocent lives. Think about it. If you are able.

so you would support the torture of Cheney and Rove to prevent the Iraq invasion then?

If a frog had a pocket, it could carry a pistol and shoot snakes...Major Logo told me that.

 

[CMike]

There is no evidence that waterboarding produced intel that interrogation didn't or couldn't have, furthermore there is no evidence that any intel produced by the three known to have been specifically authorized for waterboarding stopped a terrorist plot against L.A.

You're working in two degrees of hypotheticals (if we hadn't waterboarded, we wouldn't have known about this alleged plot, without us knowing about this alleged plot 3000 people would die) and operating under the assumption that anything the most secretive, untrustworthy, intentionally deceptive (and designed that way) organization in the Western world says is the unquestioned and absolute truth.

Given the CIA's track record, taking their word is even more naive and ill-advised than trusting politicians.

Yes, there is evidence. The evidence is the Obama declassified CIA memo.

You wish to disregard the evidence. I don't.

The CIA's job was to stop terrorist attacks. They were the ones in the foxhole dealing with these terrorists.

I know I am talking to a wall, however, the information that the CIA gets from terrorists, and how they get it, is extremely sensitive information. If that information falls to the enemy it would be used to against america. Therefore, that information can not be released.

The CIA did what they were supposed to do. They went by their guidelines. They got approval from the department of justice, and their own legal department, and they told speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, who didn't raise an objection.

As far as the tapes, they told the committee that they were destroying them because they outlived their usefulness.

The CIA acted properly.

Now if you liberals still don't believe the CIA that is your problem. I feel secure that these people who have kept you safe, did the right thing, and I trust them to keep national security information quiet.

I have no doubt that the left cares much more about creating political issues than the fallout of releasing information that would make it easier for terrorists to attack us. Heck, the Obama adminstration wouldn't even call terrorism, terrorism.

 

[CMike]

Yes and voices can be disguised and all that, and how many will then be crying that the tapes were edited? The CIA did the right thing to protect their agents. You want them to be evil and not believe them fine, find another government that acts any better.

Exactly. There is no pleasing them. It's not about the substance, it's about the liberals trying to manufacture a political issue.

Do they even care that a major terrorist attack was foiled? No.

Americans openly engaging in TORTURE is manufacturing a political issue?

The whole fucking world is repulsed at the actions of the Bush administration

I would be repulsed if the CIA agents didn't do whatever was necessary to stop the terrorist attack of the plane crashing into a LA building.

 

[rightwinger]

We used water boarding on 3 people. Supposedly we received some valuable information from them that probably saved American lives. At the time it was sanctioned by the Government, now it isn't. I don't know about this former agent and why he would lie. Obviously we cannot believe anything he says now.

I believe that we were justified in the use of enhanced measures, and I believe they were only used when it was thought that lives could be saved.

When US soldiers are tortured, don't the torturers think they are saving lives? American soldiers have information on tactics, capabilities, strengths and vulnerabilities.....by your logic, our soldiers can be tortured because the information will save lives

Glad you brought that up....lets compare:
waterboarding vs four people holding a bound man while a fifth man saws off his head
firing a gun in the vicininty of a prisoner vs drilling numerous holes into a captives head (until they die)
telling someone a "really bad inscect" has been dropped into a box with them or disembowlment

Okay, time is up, which do you think is more reasonable, humane, preserves life? Come on, I know it is tough, which would you choose if you "happened" to be captured trying to kill your captors?

Wow! very good example there.

You set the bar very high. Anything the United States of America does that is less than beheading is acceptable behavior to some Americans.

Our founding fathers would be repulsed at what has become of this great country

 

[logical4u]

“Yasser tearfully described that when he reached the top of the steps ‘the party began…They started to put the [muzzle] of the rifle [and] the wood from the broom into [my anus]. They entered my privates from behind.’ …Yasser estimated that he was penetrated five or six times during this initial sodomy incident and saw blood ‘all over my feet’ through a small hole in the hood covering his eyes.”
–Physicians for Human Rights, Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact

Waterboarding. It’s all we seem to discuss when comes to American torture. Whenever you see people discussing “enhanced interrogation” on your TV, chances are they’ll be throwing around the same tired arguments, all revoling around waterboarding. Why, of all the things we’ve done to our suspected (and not-so-suspected) terrorist detainees, is waterboarding the issue? Why confine the rapidly dwindling debate to that single technique? We’ve engaged in a lot of other practices that qualify universally as torture. Are sleep deprivation or “Palestinian hanging” not controversial enough? Is solitary confinement too mundane?

How about sodomy? Is that something we consider unremarkable?

“This is highly consistent with the events Amir described, including a traumatic injury and subsequent scarring process. Examination of the peri-anal area showed signs of rectal tearing that are highly consistent with his report of having been sodomized with a broomstick.”

–Physicians for Human Rights

That’s right; sodomy. Forcible anal penetration. The documentation of this and other forms of sexual humiliation is too extensive to be denied or pawned off on a couple of redneck privates. And we know now that sexual humiliation techniques were among those discussed and approved by the National Security Principals Committee, a White House group including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John “History will not judge this kindly” Ashcroft.

I don’t want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It’s just that there’s something about anal rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus. Just once, I’d like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the Neocons’ freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy’s ass. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn’t be fucking mortified that raping prisoners was considered within tolerable interrogation practices by my country. I want Glenn Beck to justify butt-raping a suspect.

The next time I hear some idiot refer to Jack Bauer in defense of torture, I want to ask him what he thinks of Jack Bauer rogering terrorists with a broomstick. You’ve never seen that in the hours of not-so-subtle pro-torture TV drama we’ve seen since 2001, have you? Never saw Andy Sipowicz cornhole a skell on NYPD blue? Or Michael Chiklis on The Shield making a suspect drink his pee? Me neither. Something tells me that might have hurt their ratings.

The key to winning the debate on torture is to eradicate any illusions about just what this was, which is sick, twisted, and freakish beyond any usefulness in gathering information. And it becomes very clear in the light of a rectally inserted lightstick. Raise the specter of White House-authorized sexual abuse, and anyone who doesn’t shrink away from defending it will be doomed to be remembered as the guy who defended ass-rape and forced urine-drinking, which is the very least an American should suffer for trying to justify brutally raping prisoners.

But no one will pull the trigger. Even as more proof is revealed, nobody seems to mention the sodomy. The torture debate is limited to waterboarding alone. Why? Forget the 48 photos Obama has flipped on releasing (like the putz he’s turned out to be). There are known photos—you can see them at Salon.com—of a female prisoner being raped, and a male. Not to mention the kinky naked slave-stacking and forced masturbation–and the prisoner with a banana up his ass.

We blared Metallica at them 24 hours a day while they shat themselves, chained to the floor. We kept them in coffin-sized boxes for hours on end. We hung them from the ceiling. We made them jack each other off. We beat some of them to death. Many have lost their minds. Some these people were guilty of nothing but being in Afghanistan or Iraq and being swept up as part of an intelligence “mosaic.”

“Perhaps most important are the widespread anal scars that were observed. Not only are these scars highly consistent with anal trauma (i.e., as would result from forced sodomy or penetration with an object), these scars are in a location where accidental injuries would not occur.”

–Physicians for Human Rights

The inevitable dunderhead response, “they beheaded our people,” is a sickness unto itself. From Abu Ghraib to Gitmo, we’ve suffered countless such humiliating comparisons, judging ourselves by the lowest standards current events can offer. Sorry, but it is not enough to say we aren’t as bad as Saddam Hussein or the scumbags that killed Daniel Pearl. The very idea that we should measure our own conduct by theirs is a total failure of self-respect. Only the worst kind of scumbag can excuse himself by saying, “I’m incrementally better than the Taliban.”

“These brainstorming meetings at Guantanamo produced animated discussion. ‘Who has the glassy eyes?’ [Guantanamo Judge Advocate Diane] Beaver asked herself as she surveyed the men around the room, thirty or more of them. She was invariably the only woman in the room, keeping control of the boys. The younger men would get excited, agitated, even: ‘You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas.’ “

–Phillipe Sands, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values

What’s so sick about it is that the sexual nature of the torture seems so unnecessary. I mean, even if we were going to torture them, we could have stuck to waterboarding, pulling some fingernails or just beating the shit out of them. But menstrual blood smeared on their faces? Ass rape? What kind of people do that? What possible purpose does that serve that outweighs becoming known as the country that ass-rapes people? We couldn’t get enough answers, or false confessions, or whatever we were looking for, from regular brutality? We had to go all BDSM on these people?

The upshot is this: America is the country that rapes its prisoners. We’re sex criminals. That’s our thing now. And Obama’s refusal to “look back,” i.e. prosecute these incredibly serious crimes, ensures that it’s our permanent legacy. No national reputation can survive this simply by shrugging it off. We used to be seen as a bastion of freedom and decency around the world. That shit is over, folks. We’re like the Soviet Union with better movies now. When we talk about human rights, we are an international joke.

And when we talk about torture, we stick to waterboarding, because nobody, not even the “liberals,” are willing to face what we’ve done.

What you have described is: utterly terrible and there is no excuse for that type of abuse. I believe one of the reasons it is "ignored" is because it happens to our citizens in our jails and prisons every day. Only when this is revealed and brought into the light of day, will those that do this, stop, embarrassed by the evilness of these actions.

 

[logical4u]

Glad you brought that up....lets compare:
waterboarding vs four people holding a bound man while a fifth man saws off his head
firing a gun in the vicininty of a prisoner vs drilling numerous holes into a captives head (until they die)
telling someone a "really bad inscect" has been dropped into a box with them or disembowlment

Okay, time is up, which do you think is more reasonable, humane, preserves life? Come on, I know it is tough, which would you choose if you "happened" to be captured trying to kill your captors?

Murder is worse than rape. Given that your only moral standard is "better than what Al Qaeda does," do you support our rape of uncharged, untried detainees with foreign objects?

I think rapists are the absolute worst of the worst. I think it is wrong for any military member to rape anybody. I think it is wrong for any "captor" to rape a "prisoner". I think it is wrong for anyone doing jail time to rape another person in jail (something the liberal TV shows seem to celebrate).

This discussion started over "waterboarding", it evovled into ANY form of abuse. War is hell, our guys get caught up and some overreact (understandable), but the absolute abuse of prisoners is wrong.
That being said....there are times when you must do horrendous things to end war (Hiroshima & Nagasaki or Black Jack Pershing)). I sometimes wonder if the politicians and the press would just get out of the way and stop the PC (politically correct) BS, if this would not have been over seven years ago.

 

[SFC Ollie]

“Yasser tearfully described that when he reached the top of the steps ‘the party began…They started to put the [muzzle] of the rifle [and] the wood from the broom into [my anus]. They entered my privates from behind.’ …Yasser estimated that he was penetrated five or six times during this initial sodomy incident and saw blood ‘all over my feet’ through a small hole in the hood covering his eyes.”
–Physicians for Human Rights, Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact

Waterboarding. It’s all we seem to discuss when comes to American torture. Whenever you see people discussing “enhanced interrogation” on your TV, chances are they’ll be throwing around the same tired arguments, all revoling around waterboarding. Why, of all the things we’ve done to our suspected (and not-so-suspected) terrorist detainees, is waterboarding the issue? Why confine the rapidly dwindling debate to that single technique? We’ve engaged in a lot of other practices that qualify universally as torture. Are sleep deprivation or “Palestinian hanging” not controversial enough? Is solitary confinement too mundane?

How about sodomy? Is that something we consider unremarkable?


That’s right; sodomy. Forcible anal penetration. The documentation of this and other forms of sexual humiliation is too extensive to be denied or pawned off on a couple of redneck privates. And we know now that sexual humiliation techniques were among those discussed and approved by the National Security Principals Committee, a White House group including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John “History will not judge this kindly” Ashcroft.

I don’t want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It’s just that there’s something about anal rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus. Just once, I’d like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the Neocons’ freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy’s ass. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn’t be fucking mortified that raping prisoners was considered within tolerable interrogation practices by my country. I want Glenn Beck to justify butt-raping a suspect.

The next time I hear some idiot refer to Jack Bauer in defense of torture, I want to ask him what he thinks of Jack Bauer rogering terrorists with a broomstick. You’ve never seen that in the hours of not-so-subtle pro-torture TV drama we’ve seen since 2001, have you? Never saw Andy Sipowicz cornhole a skell on NYPD blue? Or Michael Chiklis on The Shield making a suspect drink his pee? Me neither. Something tells me that might have hurt their ratings.

The key to winning the debate on torture is to eradicate any illusions about just what this was, which is sick, twisted, and freakish beyond any usefulness in gathering information. And it becomes very clear in the light of a rectally inserted lightstick. Raise the specter of White House-authorized sexual abuse, and anyone who doesn’t shrink away from defending it will be doomed to be remembered as the guy who defended ass-rape and forced urine-drinking, which is the very least an American should suffer for trying to justify brutally raping prisoners.

But no one will pull the trigger. Even as more proof is revealed, nobody seems to mention the sodomy. The torture debate is limited to waterboarding alone. Why? Forget the 48 photos Obama has flipped on releasing (like the putz he’s turned out to be). There are known photos—you can see them at Salon.com—of a female prisoner being raped, and a male. Not to mention the kinky naked slave-stacking and forced masturbation–and the prisoner with a banana up his ass.

We blared Metallica at them 24 hours a day while they shat themselves, chained to the floor. We kept them in coffin-sized boxes for hours on end. We hung them from the ceiling. We made them jack each other off. We beat some of them to death. Many have lost their minds. Some these people were guilty of nothing but being in Afghanistan or Iraq and being swept up as part of an intelligence “mosaic.”



The inevitable dunderhead response, “they beheaded our people,” is a sickness unto itself. From Abu Ghraib to Gitmo, we’ve suffered countless such humiliating comparisons, judging ourselves by the lowest standards current events can offer. Sorry, but it is not enough to say we aren’t as bad as Saddam Hussein or the scumbags that killed Daniel Pearl. The very idea that we should measure our own conduct by theirs is a total failure of self-respect. Only the worst kind of scumbag can excuse himself by saying, “I’m incrementally better than the Taliban.”

“These brainstorming meetings at Guantanamo produced animated discussion. ‘Who has the glassy eyes?’ [Guantanamo Judge Advocate Diane] Beaver asked herself as she surveyed the men around the room, thirty or more of them. She was invariably the only woman in the room, keeping control of the boys. The younger men would get excited, agitated, even: ‘You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas.’ “

–Phillipe Sands, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values

What’s so sick about it is that the sexual nature of the torture seems so unnecessary. I mean, even if we were going to torture them, we could have stuck to waterboarding, pulling some fingernails or just beating the shit out of them. But menstrual blood smeared on their faces? Ass rape? What kind of people do that? What possible purpose does that serve that outweighs becoming known as the country that ass-rapes people? We couldn’t get enough answers, or false confessions, or whatever we were looking for, from regular brutality? We had to go all BDSM on these people?

The upshot is this: America is the country that rapes its prisoners. We’re sex criminals. That’s our thing now. And Obama’s refusal to “look back,” i.e. prosecute these incredibly serious crimes, ensures that it’s our permanent legacy. No national reputation can survive this simply by shrugging it off. We used to be seen as a bastion of freedom and decency around the world. That shit is over, folks. We’re like the Soviet Union with better movies now. When we talk about human rights, we are an international joke.

And when we talk about torture, we stick to waterboarding, because nobody, not even the “liberals,” are willing to face what we’ve done.

What you have described is: utterly terrible and there is no excuse for that type of abuse. I believe one of the reasons it is "ignored" is because it happens to our citizens in our jails and prisons every day. Only when this is revealed and brought into the light of day, will those that do this, stop, embarrassed by the evilness of these actions.

The abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were extremely disturbing. There was no sense to any of it. And those who were there and conducting this treatment were tried and punished. Probably not severly enough and I doubt that they got everyone they should have.
That doesn't change the fact that waterboarding stopped a second 9-11 type attack.

 

[Coyote]

No. They wouldn't necessarily be outed. Images in tapes can be obscured, just like words in documents can be blacked out, and were.

Yes and voices can be disguised and all that, and how many will then be crying that the tapes were edited? The CIA did the right thing to protect their agents. You want them to be evil and not believe them fine, find another government that acts any better.

Exactly. There is no pleasing them. It's not about the substance, it's about the liberals trying to manufacture a political issue.

Do they even care that a major terrorist attack was foiled? No.

Actually, it's very much about substance - something you seem to ignore in your attempt to portray this as a partisan issue. Is it because you and Ollie are deflecting? It's easier just to point the finger at nasty liberals trying to make America look bad rather than addressing the core issue? I don't think torture is a partisan issue. Nor do I think it's anything to laugh at. I don't think anyone intends to begin to use torture by torturing every annoying person, I'm sure that in the beginning they try to make it highly restricted. But torture is seductive, it takes less time and it takes far less skill then other kinds of interrogation. It's making a bargain with the devil for the illusion of security.

You said over and over that only 3 high-value hardened terrorists were subjected to waterboarding. But that's not really true is it? We've had an ongoing program of extraordinary rendition - exporting prisoners to other countries known to use torture in order to get information from them. And, we really didn't care to terribly much about accuracy did we, since some of them were innocent, like Maher Arar?

Substance.

 

[SFC Ollie]

Yes and voices can be disguised and all that, and how many will then be crying that the tapes were edited? The CIA did the right thing to protect their agents. You want them to be evil and not believe them fine, find another government that acts any better.

Exactly. There is no pleasing them. It's not about the substance, it's about the liberals trying to manufacture a political issue.

Do they even care that a major terrorist attack was foiled? No.

Actually, it's very much about substance - something you seem to ignore in your attempt to portray this as a partisan issue. Is it because you and Ollie are deflecting? It's easier just to point the finger at nasty liberals trying to make America look bad rather than addressing the core issue? I don't think torture is a partisan issue. Nor do I think it's anything to laugh at. I don't think anyone intends to begin to use torture by torturing every annoying person, I'm sure that in the beginning they try to make it highly restricted. But torture is seductive, it takes less time and it takes far less skill then other kinds of interrogation. It's making a bargain with the devil for the illusion of security.

You said over and over that only 3 high-value hardened terrorists were subjected to waterboarding. But that's not really true is it? We've had an ongoing program of extraordinary rendition - exporting prisoners to other countries known to use torture in order to get information from them. And, we really didn't care to terribly much about accuracy did we, since some of them were innocent, like Maher Arar?

Substance.

Again there is no argument that the USA is not 100% Lilly white.We make mistakes, and we may never know the extent of some of these programs or how many innocents might have been affected. But why do you refuse to address the fact that the CIA did prevent another 9-11 type attack? No matter how many examples of screwed up shit you bring up it doesn't change the facts of what happened on 9-11-01 or that we haven't had any further such attacks. In fact the more you show that we do know about CIA activities lends more credence to their report being completely true.

 

[Coyote]

Did harsh interrogation prevent terrorist attacks?

Two of the detainees subjected to those methods:

Abu Zubaida

Waterboarding, Rough Interrogation of Abu Zubaida Produced False Leads, Officials Say

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.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

One of the paradox's of torture - you can't be sure that the person you are torturing has the information you need until you torture him.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Officials in the Bush Administration maintain that the intelligence wrung from terror detainee Abu Zubaydah (whom the CIA waterboarded "at least" 83 times, according to an an agency document released by the Obama Administration last week) led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the self-proclaimed architect of the 9/11 attacks. His capture, in turn, helped prevent future terror strikes, they maintain; Mohammed himself, the memos revealed, was waterboarded a startling 183 times in March 2003 (a May 2005 memo from a CIA lawyer said waterboarding could be used on a detainee up to 12 times daily for as long as 40 seconds per event). Then-CIA director George Tenet, in his 2007 memoir, says that tough interrogation of al-Qaeda members — and documents found on them, he is careful to add — thwarted more than 20 plots "against U.S. infrastructure targets, including communications nodes, nuclear power plants, dams, bridges, and tunnels." A "future airborne attack on America's West Coast" was likely foiled only because the CIA didn't have "to treat KSM like a white collar criminal."

Critics of such claims argue that what was thwarted were merely al-Qaeda fantasies. "Torture gets people to talk — no question," says a former senior U.S. national security official involved in such matters. "They talk and talk and talk, until you stop hurting them. But in every instance, bar none, you later discover that they've just been lying or exaggerating, or telling you what they think you want to hear." In fact, a 1963 CIA interrogation manual warned that those resisting questioning "are likely to become intractable if made to endure pain" or generate "false, concocted as a means of escaping from distress."
Complicating matters is that even if such foiled plots were more than fantasies it's as hard to prove a negative after September 11 as it was before. Just because there were no attacks after 9/11 doesn't necessarily mean that the interrogations deserve the credit. And of course the intelligence community's failure to discover that Saddam Hussein lacked any weapons of mass destruction before the Bush Administration invaded Iraq in 2003 makes their purported knowledge about thwarting attacks suspect to many observers.

...Even one of the memos itself acknowledges the disagreement within the intelligence community about the effectiveness of the harsh methods. A footnote in the May 30, 2005 memo by Steven Bradbury, then acting head of the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel, states that, "According to the [CIA] IG Report, the CIA, at least initially, could not always distinguish detainees who had information but were successfully resisting interrogation from those who did not actually have information ... On at least one occasion, this may have resulted in what might be deemed in retrospect to have been the unnecessary use of enhanced techniques. On that occasion, although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within CIA headquarters still believed he was withholding information ... At the direction of CIA Headquarters, interrogators therefore used the waterboard one more time on Zubaydah. . . . n the Zubaydah example, CIA Headquarters dispatched officials to observe the last waterboard session. These officials reported that enhanced techniques were no longer needed."

Read more: Did Waterboarding Prevent Terrorism Attacks? - TIME

 

[Coyote]

Exactly. There is no pleasing them. It's not about the substance, it's about the liberals trying to manufacture a political issue.

Do they even care that a major terrorist attack was foiled? No.

Actually, it's very much about substance - something you seem to ignore in your attempt to portray this as a partisan issue. Is it because you and Ollie are deflecting? It's easier just to point the finger at nasty liberals trying to make America look bad rather than addressing the core issue? I don't think torture is a partisan issue. Nor do I think it's anything to laugh at. I don't think anyone intends to begin to use torture by torturing every annoying person, I'm sure that in the beginning they try to make it highly restricted. But torture is seductive, it takes less time and it takes far less skill then other kinds of interrogation. It's making a bargain with the devil for the illusion of security.

You said over and over that only 3 high-value hardened terrorists were subjected to waterboarding. But that's not really true is it? We've had an ongoing program of extraordinary rendition - exporting prisoners to other countries known to use torture in order to get information from them. And, we really didn't care to terribly much about accuracy did we, since some of them were innocent, like Maher Arar?

Substance.

Again there is no argument that the USA is not 100% Lilly white.We make mistakes, and we may never know the extent of some of these programs or how many innocents might have been affected. But why do you refuse to address the fact that the CIA did prevent another 9-11 type attack? No matter how many examples of screwed up shit you bring up it doesn't change the facts of what happened on 9-11-01 or that we haven't had any further such attacks. In fact the more you show that we do know about CIA activities lends more credence to their report being completely true.

Because it is not clear that any attacks were prevented as a number of articles indicate. Correlation does not equal causality - because there haven't been any attacks on U.S. soil (in the scale of 9/11) does not mean it is due to harsh interrogation methods. We had no attacks like 9/11 prior to then either.

 

[SFC Ollie]

Actually, it's very much about substance - something you seem to ignore in your attempt to portray this as a partisan issue. Is it because you and Ollie are deflecting? It's easier just to point the finger at nasty liberals trying to make America look bad rather than addressing the core issue? I don't think torture is a partisan issue. Nor do I think it's anything to laugh at. I don't think anyone intends to begin to use torture by torturing every annoying person, I'm sure that in the beginning they try to make it highly restricted. But torture is seductive, it takes less time and it takes far less skill then other kinds of interrogation. It's making a bargain with the devil for the illusion of security.

You said over and over that only 3 high-value hardened terrorists were subjected to waterboarding. But that's not really true is it? We've had an ongoing program of extraordinary rendition - exporting prisoners to other countries known to use torture in order to get information from them. And, we really didn't care to terribly much about accuracy did we, since some of them were innocent, like Maher Arar?

Substance.

Again there is no argument that the USA is not 100% Lilly white.We make mistakes, and we may never know the extent of some of these programs or how many innocents might have been affected. But why do you refuse to address the fact that the CIA did prevent another 9-11 type attack? No matter how many examples of screwed up shit you bring up it doesn't change the facts of what happened on 9-11-01 or that we haven't had any further such attacks. In fact the more you show that we do know about CIA activities lends more credence to their report being completely true.

Because it is not clear that any attacks were prevented as a number of articles indicate. Correlation does not equal causality - because there haven't been any attacks on U.S. soil (in the scale of 9/11) does not mean it is due to harsh interrogation methods. We had no attacks like 9/11 prior to then either.

I will never understand why some people want the USA to be the bad guy. You go on and believe anything you want, that is your right. I will continue to believe that you are wrong and in denial. Why would these people stop when they had such a huge success? The only logical answer is that something stopped them.

 

[Coyote]

I will never understand why some people want the USA to be the bad guy. You go on and believe anything you want, that is your right. I will continue to believe that you are wrong and in denial. Why would these people stop when they had such a huge success? The only logical answer is that something stopped them.

It is not that I want the USA to be the bad guy. It's precisely because I love what our country represents - or should represent - that I do NOT want it to be the bad guy and that is why I feel it's important to speak out when something is going to far in the wrong direction.

Why would they stop when they had such a huge success? Maybe because we bombed Afghanistan and chased them out of their refuges? Maybe because we made much of the world a lot less comfortable for them? Maybe because we've dried up some of their financial streams? Maybe they haven't really stopped but we've made it much more difficult for them to be successful from a variety of avenues that don't necessarily include torture and especially - the willingness to take the risk of sending innocent people to be tortured by mistake. Like Maher Arar.