Torture doesn't work. Film at 11.

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LKD,
I think you as much as the commentator may have misconceptions about interrogations.

The suggestion that if you don't torture you get no information is a false dual choice, that inevitably leads to an erroneous conclusion. I think the rhetorical device is used intentionally towards that end.

Read this about someone who knows that interrogation is not about 'pretty please tell us what we need to know? We'll give you cupcakes!', former FBI agent Ali Soufan. He got Abu Zubaydah to talk, and to identify who actually planned the 9/11 attacks - guess what - without water boarding, before the water boarding.

Or try this take from the guy who caught Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who writes under the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, and who also refused to use the euphemistically so called 'harsh tactics'.

Torture is for swaggering amateurs it seems.

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In hindsight, with the benefit of additional information, one can finally put Mr. Kiriakou in context. In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government’s use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. He gave his interview in December 2007. His narrative was instrumental in shaping the torture debate in the US. He said at the time that water boarding worked, that it broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds, and that he was only water boarded for those 30, 35 seconds. Quick and easy.

Ponder that: If it worked so well why did they need to break him again 82 times for the duration of a month? Because it worked so well, instantly? For sports? That doesn't sound quick or easy.

Contrast it with Mr. Ali Soufan's account (above). Kiriakous's story doesn't add up. Turns out that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand knowledge of the waterboarding: He was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field. That makes me wonder about the integrity of “accounts from the field.” Let's leave it at that Kiriakou's narrative was the very least, to be generous, misleading.

Finally, it was only the declassification of the related documents that allowed Ali Soufan to talk about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. It is curious in this context that Kiriakou was allowed to speak freely in 2007, whereas Ali Soufan was not. This stinks.

Hypothesis: Kiriakou was, wittingly or unwittingly, part of a disinformation operation targeting the domestic American audience.

 

You misunderstand me, Rags, either that or you think I'm a moron. I sincerely hope it's the former.

The commentator was not in favor of torture (I'll try to find a text record of what he said -- neither he nor I attempted to create a false dichotomy -- we are both aware that good intelligence can be obtained by non-torturous means) His question was, when does interrogation cross the line into torture? Some would claim that long periods of isolation constitutes torture. I don't. When the police interrogate a suspect they use threats of incarceration, threats of possible retribution by criminal associates of the person being interrogated, and all sorts of techniques to get the person to talk. Most reasonable people don't construe these tactics as torture, though some zealots for prisoners' rights do. But when is it no longer an interrogation and torture? I mean, the argument for waterboarding is that the life of the victim is never truly in danger, but most of us here (myself included) classify it as torture. Where's the list of sanctioned and non-sanctioned techniques? Or if no such list exists, what is the criteria under which a torture technique is defined?

 

I wouldn't call water boarding torture, as it is just a less intense version of something that thousands(maybe tens of thousands) of military personal have gone through.
What am i talking about?
A little thing called "Drown Proofing"
You want to see torture, check out the navy seals or coast guard rescue swimmers or marine force recon training.
Laying head pointed out to sea in the surf, trying to keep your head above the surf as instructors spray water from water hoses straight up your nose & into your mouth.
And you volunteer for this!!

Extracting finger/toe nails?.................................................Torture
Breaking bones?...............................................................Torture
Pulling teeth?...................................................................Torture
Removing body parts?.......................................................Torture
Removing bodily fluids via syringes(typically joints or eyeballs)? Torture
Flaying?..........................................................................Torture
Sexual assault or Rape?.....................................................Torture

Electric shocks (in line with a taser?)..............................................................Interrogation
Walling? Hell, from the description it sounds like wimp training for a mosh pit!..........Interrogation
Humiliating activity(making them stand naked or in cold/hot enviroments, etc.)........Interrogation
Sleep deprivation?...................................................................................... Interrogation
Sound activities(loud music, sub-sonic pulses, irritating vocalisms)?.......................Interrogation
Physical Discomfort or using their own phobias against them?................................Interrogation
Threatening them with things/items their religion thinks is unclean/blasphemous?......Interrogation
Chemical irritants(mace, pepper spray, etc.)?....................................................Interrogation

Yes, a lot of these may seem harsh to some people but they leave no lasting permanent damage(they have the potential to do permanent mental damage but that can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis).

Would i recommend these for police to use against regular citizens? Of course not.
For military forces against other forces? Damn skippy.

 

Just trying to be clear on this, does this mean you're morally ok with it if any of these interrogation techniques are used by any country's military forces on any other country's military forces, including American ones? I am pretty sure many people in the US would think it torture if, say, a Joe Bloke from 249th infantry division was captured in Pakistan and electroshocked, maced, or banged into a wall for information. Whether he would give any is beside the point - I personally would simply feel indignant if this happened to someone I know, whether they were in uniform or not.

As for what methods are acceptable to use on prisoners... Well, isolation per se (I mean, no irritants specifically designed for physical discomfort) I would say is ok under most circumstances, though something like being put in a coffin and buried for a while (I believe a 1930's NKVD favourite - incidentally often used for confessions for the trials of the purge they did at the time) is obviously going too far. Threatening someone (alone or as part of the good cop, bad cop routine) is mostly ok, though actually carrying out that threat may cross the line (i.e. " you have a family, we will make sure they are imprisoned/killed/flogged/raped/whatever if you do not cooperate"). Using cultural and religious taboos...hm, it depends. IIRC there is an anecdote that the Russians in Chechnya made it clear that they would bury a certain killed jihadist in pig's skin, which according to Muslim tradition means they would be denied into heaven as unclean. Given that most jihadists were religious, at least in a way, and not forced, this could have been acceptable - though it might have caused revenge attacks, so how efficient it was overall is open to debate. On the other hand, showering someone with blood and gore is probably going too far, if not for the prisoner's discomfort itself then to the bad publicity it creates. In general, if a tactic yields significant blowback if it becomes known, it should not be employed.

And yes, I'm sure all of these are used in special forces training - but using them on willing people does not mean they would not be torture if used in other circumstances. That is usually the whole point, having elite soldiers be at least somewhat inured to anything the enemy might put them through. It is a precaution measure, similar to how iirc most soldiers are drilled what to do in a case of a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon attack. They still have such drills, right?

 

But Shaman! What a stupid question! The Americans are the good guys! When they do they do it they do it for the right reasons! If someone do it to the Americans they are the bad guys and they do it out of pure sadistic joy. Anyone the Americans do it to deserves it and has it coming, do you really think any American, one of the good guys, deserves it? Seriously, what a stupid question.

 

I think you are a few years too late with that joke, Joacqin. By now I doubt more than 20% of the people in the US themselves would claim that their country never did anything wrong. The dark hero stereotype seems to be all the vogue now, anyway .

 

Sorry it took so long to answer your question shaman, RL you know?

Yes, if i expect to inflict it on the enemy, i should expect it to be inflicted on me.
Not that the known enemies we have don't regularly do far worse than what it is i have advocated.

More often than not joacqin, we still are the good guys.
Now i'm not saying we always are or that other countries aren't sometimes the good guys also.

 

There are no comprehensive "do" and "don't" lists concerning what is and is not torture. Under current law, torture is defined as anything that causes A) "extreme physical discomfort" or B) "fear of death". So it could be argued that waterboarding constitutes torture on both points. The problem, of course, is that there is no definition of what constitutes "extreme physical discomfort". I imagine being slammed into a wall, paper sprayed, or forced to stand naked in a really cold room would be physically discomforting, even if they didn't cause permanent damage.

 

Could there be another side?

I didn't watch the actual interview, but I'd wager that it probably went badly.

 

Of course the fantasy-interview in his mind went better than the actual interview! He is obviously incapable of asking himself questions he could not foresee. I thought the entire story was hillarious. This guy basically is saying if only Jon Stewart conducted the interview exactly the way he envisioned, he would have done great! Well, that's not how interviews work. The interviewer, not the interviewee gets to pick the questions.

 

What the hell?

How do you not watch the interview - and thus, completely omit one side - and then ask if there could be another side? How do you present a counter-argument to absolutely nothing? You got skillz?

You aren't even trying anymore.

EDIT - Mea culpa below.

 

Of course, however I'm curious if his fake interview facts are really facts. Is it true that only 3 people were waterboarded and they were told in advance that they wouldn't die and that there was a doctor present? From the way the media and Ragusa talk I was under the impression that we were waterboarding people 24/7 and just maiming people left and right. Is this entire thread/issue a lot about nothing?

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Funny, I thought we had 7 pages of the counter argument. I think you need to stop prejudging posts by conservative posters. Please see my response to Aldeth as to what I was getting at. I probably should have included that in the original post, but I don't think the omission warranted your response.

 

Ok, that wasn't clear. It looked like you were presenting a counter-argument to Jon Stewart by presenting May's own counter-argument in the form of a fantasy-retelling of the interview (which I watched, both the broadcast version when it aired and the extended version online) which was understandable given how May came away looking after the interview. It wasn't at all clear that you were posting it as a response to the topic as a whole. Based on Aldeth's response that seems to be the impression he got as well. Now that you've provided clarification, I apologize.

And I don't pre-judge conservative posters. I respond negatively to patently bad-faith arguments, which you have made in the past and appeared to be making now. It has nothing to do with the side of the aisle you sit on.

 

The trouble is that a lot of the enemies of the West like to engage in torture for the sake of torture -- they'll behead someone on the Internet just for the shock value. I suppose they believe that this'll make soldiers afraid to come and fight in their countries, as the soldiers will fear such harsh treatment.

I don't believe that our enemies use torture to extract information -- they must know, as we do, that footsoldiers don't really have a lot of information available.

I would opine that the frequent violations of International law by these terrorist groups has really pissed the American / Western public off, and some of them feel that there is little reason to follow rules that the enemies don't -- it's like playing a game where one team doesn't follow the rules. Eventually the side that is following the rules gets tired of it and starts to retaliate. When it comes to torture, of course, all that does is degrade the West, but really, it's not something that should surprise anyone.

I enjoyed your list, Martaug, unofficial though it may be. It comes down in my mind to being similar to child discipline. For centuries in the West, spanking and other forms of corporal punishment were the norm. Then, a bunch of people decided that it was inhumane and started a campaign against it, saying that there are other techniques, like the silent treatment or a time out, to deal with disobedient children. Then, after a few years, another group (or maybe the same one) decided that the silent treatment ws emotionally abusive. Later, time outs became classified as abusive. If these people have their way, soon parents will have no tools at all to deal with their children -- and I've seen the terrible fruits of this sort of pathetic permissive parenting.

The same thing goes for torture. Prisoners rights activists go after capital punishment. Then they go after solitary confinement. Then they go after food quality. Then they go after 'rights of possession" and soon you have convicted rapists complaining that they are being tortured by not being allowed to have color TVs in their cells. I'm not making this crap up, there was an article a few years ago wherein convicted felons were yapping about the color TV issue and people actually took their **** seriously. It blows my mind.

This is why I think there must be a voice on the other side contending for the ability of the state to treat serious threats (like foreign combatants, terrorists of all stripes, and other international and local criminals) in an appropriate manner -- not torturing them but also not being so bloody weak that they all laugh up their sleeves at our lack of willingness to defend ourselves.

 

I have no idea if they are factual or not. I would imagine that you wouldn't tell someone they were in no danger of dying from being waterboarded. I would think it would make it less effective. Then again, even if you were told that you wouldn't die, the sensation of drowning is absolutely terrifying, and so perhaps it wouldn't matter if you were informed you wouldn't die before hand. If your brain tells you that you are drowning, I doubt you would find comfort in someone telling you several minutes before that you wouldn't drown - before the waterboarding session started.

Unless all the memos are released we have no idea how many people have been waterboarded. I have never heard of an exact number being issued in the past, but I was definitely under the impression that it was a hell of a lot more than 3 people. When you waterboard one guy 183 times, and another guy 83 times, it certainly leads one to believe that those two people did not represent 2/3 of all people to have been waterboarded.

 

You know, I'm one of those. I have not spanked any of my children: 7, 5 and 9 months - Ever. Both my girls have won awards for their behavior in school, with my 7 year old winning lunch with her principal 2 years in a row. I am very generous with them, and they receive ample "compensation" (new toys and stuff) for their grades and the awards they win. What I have discovered is that my generosity has an added benefit, since it gives me something I need for discipline: leverage. And the more I give them, the more leverage I have; the more they gain, they more they have to lose.

The reason I point this out is because there are alternatives to violence as a solution, but you have to be savvy with your kids, rather than just beating it out of them. That's just a plain stupid solution.

 

I hear you, Chandos, but bear in mind that every child is unique and what works with one does not always work with another. My point is that the bleeding hearts have been systematically removing a variety of tools from the repetoire of society, and some of them would start targetting your techniques as "bribery" and "not respecting their individual worth" or some other such nonsense.

A variety of tools for dealing with people who misbehave (and I use the term euphemistically when referring to criminals and terrorists) is necessary. Some tools are totally inappropriate but others, while they may make some squirm, must be kept in the toolbox. When it comes to criminals, bread and water diets, solitary confinement, and removal of priviledges such as television, family visits, and access to other entertainment must be available options.

 

Martaug,
what do you make of that:

Ronald Reagan, May 20, 1988, transmitting the Convention Against Torture to the Senate for ratification:

Convention Against Torture, signed and championed by Ronald Reagan, Article II/IV:

 

The bottom line is that the definition of torture can be interpreted differently by each individual. Being forced to watch Whoopi Goldberg movies for hours on end would be torture for me. Liberals would probably love it.

 

Liberalism doesn't automatically destroy one's sense of humor. I liked Whoopie Goldberg in The Color of Purple and Star Trek the next generation, but her humor....not so much.