Obama to decide today on torture memos

[Suburbanelite]

I might have a bit more information, but I'm not talking unless you pour water on my face again! OH NO THE WATER

[Kuya]

We threw him against a wall after he had already given us information, but in our defense it was a really soft wall.

[Deftscythe]

We threw him against a wall after he had already given us information, but in our defense it was a really soft wall.

Look he was wearing a collar to prevent whiplash while he was getting walled again and again, I really don't know what more you hippies want.

[Kuya]

Is hippy a derogatory term in America, like socialism and communism? I don't really understand the point of the word.

In any case, what us people who care about the rule of law want is that when you have rules, you follow them, and when you break them, you are punished for it. That when you capture suspects outside of the battlefield and move them to a base, you give them the right to challenge their accusations to make sure they really deserve to be there, so hopefully, they won't get their genitals sliced even though they are in fact innocent, and that torture, because it is widely inefficient and against the international law, not be used, not only for the fact that is is morally decrepit, but because you can't torture people AND give them habeas corpus rights, they don't go together.

No one in their right mind would allow a government to have the right to secrecy and immunity from investigation when it has taking it upon itself to kidnap and detain people indefinitely. No one in their right mind would permit and honestly think that by just outlawing it and letting it go away like it were a bad dream would be enough when a new president with less liberal leanings arrives, there needs to be a precedent set. And furthermore, no one who believes in small government, democracy, human rights, and moral decency allows a government to get away with this.

[Heian]

Is hippy a derogatory term in America, like socialism and communism? I don't really understand the point of the word.

In any case, what us people who care about the rule of law want is that when you have rules, you follow them, and when you break them, you are punished for it. That when you capture suspects outside of the battlefield and move them to a base, you give them the right to challenge their accusations to make sure they really deserve to be there, so hopefully, they won't get their genitals sliced even though they are in fact innocent, and that torture, because it is widely inefficient and against the international law, not be used, not only for the fact that is is morally decrepit, but because you can't torture people AND give them habeas corpus rights, they don't go together.

No one in their right mind would allow a government to have the right to secrecy and immunity from investigation when it has taking it upon itself to kidnap and detain people indefinitely. No one in their right mind would permit and honestly think that by just outlawing it and letting it go away like it were a bad dream would be enough when a new president with less liberal leanings arrives, there needs to be a precedent set. And furthermore, no one who believes in small government, democracy, human rights, and moral decency allows a government to get away with this.

I think you got whooshed on the hippie joke.

[Kuya]

I imagine that i would, seeing as how i did say i don't know what the point of the word was.

[Rhinox]

Hippie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

read that then reread his post. It was obviously sarcasm.

[Kuya]

Oh you mean it was sarcasm? I honestly couldn't tell.

[Heian]

Oh you mean it was sarcasm? I honestly couldn't tell.

That's the best kind. Think Colbert.

[Kuya]

Oh well, at least i got to post that genital slicing link.

[Jer]

It's not like the U.S. has ever listened to the U.N. anyway. Expecting that to happen would (about) the same as expecting the Queen to actually tell Canada what to do. It's a figurehead.

Also

People are worried that the guy who planned the attacks received too much waterboarding?

[_chuchu]

It's not like the U.S. has ever listened to the U.N. anyway. Expecting that to happen would (about) the same as expecting the Queen to actually tell Canada what to do. It's a figurehead.

Also

People are worried that the guy who planned the attacks received too much waterboarding?

Of course most people think he couldn't get enough of it

[Kuya]

I think people might be missing something. If the US can break international law, such as laws prohibiting torture, the US then has no basis for prosecuting torture perpetrated on its citizens by foreign countries. The fact that waterboarding was done over a hundred times serves more of a dramatic effect, they already broke the law by waterboarding him once, a hundred times well... Yea.

[Muffins]

I think people might be missing something. If the US can break international law, such as laws prohibiting torture, the US then has no basis for prosecuting torture perpetrated on its citizens by foreign countries. The fact that waterboarding was done over a hundred times serves more of a dramatic effect, they already broke the law by waterboarding him once, a hundred times well... Yea.

That's pretty much the most significant consequence of the whole torture fiasco. Granted, if someone were to torture a US citizen, it would be done without regard for international law anyway, but because the US has committed torture, they're in no position to demand justice for anyone that does the same. By "putting the past behind us" like this, it sets a precedent that sells every US citizen out to any future torturers. Unless, of course, we kill the torturers without due process, but then who would be the barbarous one after that?

[archibaldcrane]

That's all fine and good, and I think it's bullshit that waterboarding was authorized in the first place, and using it over 100 times on one prisoner seems extra absurd...

...but when we toss around stuff about international law...

...I thought the U.S. never ratified the pertinent part of the Geneva Convention that we would otherwise be supposedly held responsible for - or am I confusing that for the "what is an enemy combatant" argument?

[Bingbong]

I bet Daniel Pearl wishes, excuse me, WISHED, that his torture consisted of being slapped in the face and sleep deprived.

When do those Extremists go before the UN council on torture?

[Elvis]

I bet Daniel Pearl wishes, excuse me, WISHED, that his torture consisted of being slapped in the face and sleep deprived.

When do those Extremists go before the UN council on torture?

Have you ever heard of Bagram prison?

One soldier, Pfc. Willie V. Brand, was charged with manslaughter in a closed hearing last month in Texas in connection with one of the deaths, another Army document shows. Private Brand, who acknowledged striking a detainee named Dilawar 37 times, was accused of having maimed and killed him over a five-day period by "destroying his leg muscle tissue with repeated unlawful knee strikes."

The attacks on Mr. Dilawar were so severe that "even if he had survived, both legs would have had to be amputated," the Army report said, citing a medical examiner.

Or the Taguba Report?

(S) A male MP guard having sex with a female
detainee;

(S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box,
with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his
sfingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;

(S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate
themselves while being photographed and videotaped;

(S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and
female detainees;

(U) Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and
perhaps a broom stick.

The above report contains several first-hand observations. Here is one on Abu Ghraib Prison by Sgt. Samuel Provance, Alpha Company 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion:

The first alarming incident I heard about was that some of the interrogators had gotten drunk, and then under the guise of interrogation, molested an underaged Iraqi girl detainee. It could have been worse, but MP on duty stopped them. Friends of some of the interrogators involved were concerned that COL Pappas would deal severely with the incident. They asked me to recite a falsehood about COL Pappas, in the hope that he would be disqualified from serving as convening authority. I refused to do this.

So what does all this mean? The abuse was widespread and intense. Is this uniquely 'American'? No. This shit happens everywhere in every war. On this issue of torture and abuse, I wouldn't say we torture "better" than "them."

[Kuya]

Some interesting information came out yesterday from Democracy Now, they had Mark Benjamin, national correspondent for Salon.com, and Katherine Eban, an investigative reporter who writes for national publications. In it, they talked about how two specific psychologists were behind the creation of these torture techniques, but the interesting thing about them was that these two psychologists actually had no data to back up the effectiveness of any of these torture techniques, and these techniques were actually reversed engineered from the SERE program that is used to let soldiers experience what they might be put through. The psychologists were James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

Here is the interesting part of the report:

AMY GOODMAN: Here in Spokane, we’re broadcasting from the PBS station KSPS, run by the Spokane Public Schools, and we’re talking about an institution, a company, not three miles from here, operating out of the American Legion Hall in Spokane.

Our guest here in the studio is Karen Dorn Steele, a George Polk Award-winning journalist. She wrote for The Spokesman-Review a series of pieces on Jessen, Mitchell. In Washington, DC, Mark Benjamin. In New York, in our firehouse studio, we’re joined by Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair.

I wanted to ask about Dick Cheney’s latest comments. Dick Cheney is demanding that the CIA release memos that show that these enhanced interrogation techniques were effective. He said, “What we authorized wasn’t torture. But it worked. We got actionable intelligence from these techniques.” Katherine Eban, from your research, what did you find?

KATHERINE EBAN: Well, from my research, I found exactly the opposite, that there had been an FB—the issue is very active over the detainee Abu Zubaydah, and there had been an FBI interrogation team with him initially, which had basically nursed him back to health after gunshot wounds and used rapport-building, classic rapport-building tactics, which is what the FBI excels at, and it was because of those tactics that he revealed that KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was the architect of 9/11 and also revealed the name of Jose Padilla, and that in fact he was talking to interrogators until Mitchell showed up along with the CIA interrogation team, began imposing these harsh tactics, and Zubaydah clammed up.

So, in response to that, they made a request to accelerate these tactics. I think they refer to it in the memos that were just released as an “intense pressure phase.” You know, basically, what my sources say is, “Sure, these tactics, these coercive tactics, can get you to talk. But about what? So how do you verify the legitimacy of the information?” Well, apparently, under torture, Zubaydah gave investigators a lot of false leads, which ate up the time of American intelligence back at home. So, you know, the debate is a very live one. There are people in the CIA who say these tactics absolutely worked, and I do think that this is going to be a central question of investigations as they go forward, is the effectiveness of these tactics. And people are now—yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, I thought it was very interesting, Katherine Eban, how you describe what happened. The FBI there, they’re getting intelligence that they think is actually useful. George Tenet, then Director of Central Intelligence, hears about this. He’s very proud that intelligence is coming out from the interrogation. And then he’s informed it’s not coming from CIA interrogators, it’s coming from FBI interrogators. And he hits the roof. And that’s when they send in Jessen and the other CIA interrogators. You could take it from there.

KATHERINE EBAN: Right. You know, and let me just say that they sent in Mitchell. I don’t believe that Jessen was there at that point. But it was interesting—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean Mitchell.

KATHERINE EBAN: —that Mitchell Jessen—Mitchell’s company at that point closed up shop about a day before—the day after Zubaydah was captured, and then he was deployed to Thailand to the safe house where they were interrogating Zubaydah. But what you had in this situation was a classic turf war. You know, you had the CIA wanting to take the credit for getting actionable intelligence.
As soon as they started using these coercive tactics, it had a rather profound effect, which is that the FBI felt compelled to withdraw their investigators from the scene. The effect of that, the end result, is that the CIA had total control over these interrogations. So, by using these coercive tactics, they also won a turf war.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Benjamin, as you look at these torture memos right now and the whole cachet around Mitchell Jessen, if you can call it that, around getting effective intelligence when, as Katherine Eban was saying, it was the opposite.

MARK BENJAMIN: Well, that’s right. And when you look at the memos, there are even some hints there that show what interrogators have long believed, which is that these are not effective ways to gather intelligence, what Mitchell and Jessen were doing is just—it’s just not an effective way of running an intelligence operation.

And I would just add, you know, my reporting suggests that when the CIA put together this interrogation program, this torture program, they didn’t involve any experienced interrogators. There were no interrogators involved. Nobody who knows how to question—effectively question a suspect set this thing up. The CIA didn’t have anybody on board that knew how to do this stuff. I mean, it was people who just frankly didn’t know what they were doing. I mean, you know, they knew how to train soldiers how to resist torture, but not how to get effective intelligence.

And, in fact, if you look at the memos that came out last week, there is a reference in one of the memos to a CIA inspector general report. And according to the reference, the CIA inspector general criticized the CIA’s own interrogation program, saying essentially they didn’t know when somebody was being recalcitrant and wouldn’t talk and when they just didn’t know anything. That’s the problem with torture. And so, they ended up torturing people even though they had already said everything they know. I mean, it was just—and that’s the problem with torture. You don’t know—I mean, how do you know when to torture somebody and when not to? How do you know when they’re telling you the truth and when they’re not? It’s just, you know—and I think the memos, you know, while they’re meant to back up and say that this torture program is defensible, I think if you look at them pretty closely, that that facade starts to fall apart pretty fast.

The basis of the torture techniques was actually unscientific (this is substantial, these psychologists, being scientists were actually selling this to the CIA without any data to actually prove it worked) and perpetrated mostly by people who didn't even know how to torture. Hopefully this will help convince people who still think that any of this was legitimate and that it doesn't deserve to have everyone involved with it brought to justice.

[Enkidu]

Yet Dennis Blair is quoted as saying the interrogation techniques yielded "high-value" information on al Qaeda. So who's right?

[Kuya]

Does he work for the government?