I really have no idea what the reliability is of any type of interrogation. All I've heard is a bag of wind from both sides, and never from anybody with an actual background in the matter.

The CIA lady that was being interviewed on one of the TVs I was watching while on the treadmill a couple days ago would not discuss any of the things we actually do to prisoners (cause the terrorists are watching and train against the stuff we admit to doing)but was sure none of it was torture.
She was very proud of the "thousands" of intelligence reports that have been generated by coercing said prisoners (in non-torturous ways of course). Would not discuss how many of those thousands were at all accurate... came off sounding like real jackass imo.

Maybe to you, but she is right on target. No one needs to know the details IMHO.

The intel was there. Those in power chose to cherry pick it and ignore what did not fit their policy plans.

I have a very good friend who is currently in Iraq as a GS worker with NCIS as an interrogator.

This can give you some insight. I gave it to a young kid in HS 2 years ago. He is now a Army interrogator.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...16011532&itm=3

There is a new one out on the subject that I have not read yet but just ordered. Looks good.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...51221124&itm=1

I believe that in fact there is less torture now than there has been in the past, precisely because of the explosion in digital cameras that allowed us the unexpected glimpses into Abu Ghraib and others. The truth is you can't get away with anything these days.

A friend of my dad's served during Vietnam as a translator. The vast majority of his job was translating what prisoners were saying as they were being interrogated. According to him, he never saw a single prisoner leave the room alive, period.

Yea, times have changed quite a bit. Even then if you have enough people involved someone is eventually going to spill the beans on what went on if wholescale illegal activity was going on.

But you have direct quotes from people who do this stuff. We have long known from professionals that torture results in inconclusive facts and more often results in lies. Furthermore, a tortured man cannot be 'read' or tested with a 'lie detector' test. A man who talks without torture can be 'read' and can tested with a lie detector machine. Professional interrogators state this repeatedly.

From the BBC of September 2006 entitled The jihadi who turned 'supergrass' and also quoted in The Cellar on 30 September 2006 as Why does America need Secret Prisons? As a result, Nasir Abbas blew open the entire terrorist organization called Jemaah Islamiyah - also known as the Bali bombers. Those who remain free quickly separated from Jemaah Islamiyah and are rumored to have formed small isolated terrorist cells. Why? Mr Abbas was not tortured. Therefore he could cooperate in response to his own convictions.

Same is reported on America's earliest interrogators in a finally not secret gathering reported in The Washington Post on 6 Oct 2007 entitled Fort Hunt's Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII and also posted in The Cellar. The reason to justify torture is an assumption that a tortured man will talk. Yes. And professional interrogators then note how few truths are mixed with too many lies. Torture is when the interrogator has no idea and no way of knowing what is truth – and desperately needs to know that truth. But torture often results in statements that cannot be confirmed by all common means of judging validity, is often what the interrogators want to hear, and resulting statements are too often completely bogus. Torture so routinely results in bad information as to even create a long list of phony Orange alerts.

When does torture work? When some ‘feel’ it must work. After all, anyone tortured will tell only truths – right? Therefore all that torture in Abu Ghriad with the arrival of Gen Miller got confessions of WMDs, terrorists hiding in America, and Orange Alert attacks on the Prudential Building in Newark and the Golden Gate Bridge.

That was more like prisoner abuse, not torture, used in an effort to "soften up the prisoners" for the interrogators according to the reports. All of the pics that came out of Abu Ghraib showed prisoner abuse, none of them were torture sessions in an effort to directly get info.

Aliantha, no I would not like. The remark gives offense. Get this and get it good: I dumb down for no one. No one in or under heaven. You come up to my level; it's both possible and it's really pretty nice here.

I can point you at things to look over and talk over. PM me if you like.

First off, Kitsune, your use of the pooh-poohing quotemarks is wholly illegitimate, and I'll thank you to stop. It is a tactic of the America-must-lose-because-it's -- well -- America faction, and those people think only in fascist drivel. Reject fascist drivel and the people who drivel it, and you'll help sustain the Republic. It will also help you to stop talking a bunch of fascistocommunist-antihuman shit and drivel. A Congressional declaration of war is not required to start the shooting, and never has been, and is very unlikely ever to be -- and the Supreme Court, both houses of Congress, and the Department of State are all fine with that, particularly in the long view -- they all recognize that situations can turn ugly fast if some peckerslap wants them to and that situations vary in size. And if we had declared a state of war, just where would the bozos of the Left be on this anyway? They'd still not be behind our winning, now would they?

This is why I'm not a leftist: I'm too honest a man.

Now that you've been reminded what good behavior and intelligent thinking are like, on to your... demand. If you think you're being patronized -- you're right. I patronize people who insist on idiot-think; they tire me. Sophomoric suits sophomores, but it's been a long time since I was one. The difference that this makes is a hard one to communicate effectively, one generation to a younger, but the difference sure is there, and it can cause impatience.

Victory lies in active reduction of the Non-Integrating Gap, as Barnett puts it, and I think he's got it right. His overall theory is that the world's troubles are going to spring not from the great powers of the developed world and probably not from the growing powers of the large nations who are well along in developing -- Russia, China, India, Brazil and one or two others -- but from those parts of the globe where globalization has not yet spread, and cultural, informational, and especially economic connectivity are not yet achieved -- almost all of Africa, Haiti and quite a bit of the Caribbean and some of its rim, the tribal territories half of Pakistan, southeast Asia -- those always-poor places that for some dang reason never seem to get a break and get rich. They are so often undemocratically run also that one can hardly believe that to be mere coincidence.

Victory in the Iraq campaign, part of the overall War on Terror, is in bringing Iraq from its previous place in the Non-Integrating Gap where Saddam like so many Arab despots was keeping it, towards at least being what Barnett calls a seam state, one both physically and in other senses on the border between the world's economically Functioning Core and the Gap. It's not an instant process; you can't push a society's development too fast or the whole shebang comes apart.

American foreign policy generally favors a "go fast" approach in developing nations out of the Gap and into the Core, and in every society in question there are both "go fast" and "go slow" factions on the matter of globalization and integration into the greater global economy. Tension is inevitable during the process, and it can become such as to create a major rift and a sizeable conflict. It depends on the strength and determination of the reaction of the reactionaries, and reactionaries must be expected. There are external "go slow" exponents also, for many varied reasons, some worthy, some just plain obstructionist. What drives the American foreign-policy ideal and a "go fast" pace is that when people get rich and have the prospect of getting steadily richer, they are much more content and much more willing to be team players with the rest of the world, and not resort to banditry. Face it, most of what vexes us about places like Syria, Iran, and North Korea is a penchant for banditry, no? Counterfeiting, even.

Well, there's likely a lot more, but it's time to let somebody else talk and bring it up.

UG, what you said doesn't make sense.

it just goes to show................. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

BTW UG, if that's how you respond to people who ask for clarification it's no wonder people don't listen to you. :alien:

My use of the quotation marks stems from the many varied ideas of what winning this war means to the many different people involved. Depending on who you speak to, we're fighting actions, we're fighting ideas, and/or we're fighting a religion or religious extremists. We are not fighting a traditional war, we are not fighting an organized army, we are not fighting any nation. The edges of the scope of winning are even more blurred in what it involves, depending on your point of view, and are as narrow as Iraq and Afghanistan or as wide as all of the middle east and expands, perhaps, to ideas and concepts embedded in populations worldwide. It is just as multifaceted and has just as many potential (as well as seemingly unreachable) ends as our decades long War on Drugs. I'd simply like to know how you define a win for The United States and what would determine this ordeal to be over with.

I did not realize the use of quotation marks in this fashion was a known tactic of The Enemy. I'll take note of it and, in the future, be sure to remain suspicious of anyone I witness doing it in writing or marking quote mark motions in the air with their fingers when discussing such matters.

That would be 'a good idea' Kitsune. :alien:

What caused Kitsune to hate America?

I'm not going to tell you he does; just that the antidemocracy oids do this all the time, and you know how I feel about them. I thank Kits for clarifying; this is good. However, I don't see any necessity at all for such quotemarking -- I never do it wrt the war.

Aliantha, tone also matters in inquiry -- it can come off throroughly and wrongly rhetorical.

I did say I can point you to some things to look at. This guy Barnett is one busy li'l blogger, and his site seems a pretty good introduction to what he's all about. I can't expect everyone to have read his books but I will say they are worth the reading. I'm only certain two Cellar Dwellars have read either of Barnett's books: myself and tw -- who's had less of substance to say on them than I have, and I haven't said much.

Thomas P.M. Barnett -- what I've seen of this guy's works leaves me impressed and fascinated.

Somebody has a crush on Thomas P. M. Barnett!

I can spare you a big wet kiss too, Flint! :p

I think we can find a way to keep America safe and not have to give up our honor.

I want to win, but not at all costs or with any tactic.
That is not winning.
We cannot win in Iraq, we invaded a nation that was not a threat just to steal their oil.
If we leave them with all of their natural resources in their hands... that alone is as close as we can hope to come to victory.

Rkzen, how is it that you've simply never noticed that leaving "them with all of their natural resources in their hands" is one of our policy goals, from which we've simply never swerved? Look at where the "steal their oil" idea comes from: the lunatic fringe, not the policymakers. Are you sure you should buy the product of the fever-swamps?

Wanting friendlies, not unfriendlies in control of major petroleum reserves is not "stealing their oil."

I've understood this from the beginning in April '03. How do you explain not getting it?

We have an honorless, bigoted enemy, do we not, dar? Where can you find dishonor in stymieing them, then? I cannot, and I have keen vision and no blinkers.

They held elections as we wanted, we have no room to complain about whom they elected.

I certainly have no grounds for complaint there.

Then we can leave them to it.

As with any large number of people, I'm sure that some Iraqis are honorless. We don't know that any of the prisoners are among those. As a matter of fact, we don't know for sure that any of the prisoners are enemies, since they've never had a trial.

Even should it be true, lack of honor in my enemy does not require me to give up mine.

You say 'stymie' when you mean 'torture'.

The preferred term under the new definition is "victory tickle".

lol kitsune. That's very funny.

We lost our honor and dignity in conducting this goddamn war, UG and The Mercenary. Bush can't even applaud 'successes', such as the deaths of Saddam Hussein and his sons, especially since Saddam faced his death with relatively more dignity than Bush and the neocons did in conducting this war. That's how bad this war got for America, UG and Mercenary.

Deadbeater, the abyss set between you and us seems unlikely to be bridged: can't any of you get it through your heads how inherently, necessarily good and noble it is to destroy dictatorships and dictators, replacing them with democracies? Honestly. Anyone who can't see how much evil and oppression and poverty we can eliminate this way is missing quite a bit of his frontal lobes. When the last dictator is hanged on the entrails of the last national chief of secret police, how much misery will have fled the world? None here make answer, strangely enough.

The neocons are hardly evil: they want to propagate democracy (even if they're a bit more statist than I like, but in politics half a loaf, etc.) and as such must be regarded as friends of all mankind. Now there are a lot of ill-founded shitheads screaming at this, but that's because they're fascist sympathizers, deep down. I have no fascist sympathy whatsoever anywhere in my being, and for this nobility of mind I am dissed by troglodyte cryptofascists and quasibarbarians, who have the mad effrontry to imagine themselves virtuous. Damnation to the lot of them who are such, along with Hitler, Stalin, Mao the psychopath, and Pol Pot. They're keeping evil company and haven't the foggiest idea of the depth of their sins.

Dar, I will thank you to drop that silly idea: I said stymie and stymie is what I mean. Whatever you do, do not lie to me about what I say unless you particularly want me to skin you alive and sew your hide back on backwards with red baseball thread. Lying to me about what I said all because you have a foundationless opinion makes me very angry.

Our foes must be defeated. That is truly supporting the troops, rather than that feeble lipservice the Democratic Party gives the idea. That lot is visibly looking for a way to both lose the Iraq campaign and blame the Iraqis for it, and Christ it makes me tired.

The Left has lost its honored place, true enough.

Give me a specific case where the mistreatment of these prisoners has had the direct result of drawing the conflict in Afghanistan or Iraq to a positive conclusion. Then I might agree that the word is 'stymie'. However I will never agree that torture of a human being is worth 'stymieing'.

Ah. So we should torture the enemy so that we can protect our American freedom? Would that be the freedom to threaten to torture me? Or would that be my freedom of speech that you would like to curtail by threatening me?

I think you would benefit from an anger management class.

There's a lotta things I think UG would benefit from. Would he ever do them? No way.

Trust me on this one - it's not worth it. You've been here longer than me... but still, take my word for it, you'll feel a lot better for simply ignoring UG and letting his obvious contradictions and cognitive dissonance go by uncorrected. It's not worth the argument and the belittling he'll throw at you.
Just walk away. I've been proud of myself this last batch of UGism; I've hardly responded at all. Give it a try, dar.

Wow, you're in rare form today, UG. You completely crack my shit up!! :lol:

I understand your point, Ibram. And I agree that UG is unlikely to change his mind from anything he reads here. But sometimes you have to speak out.

The point is not to win. The point is to learn - to better grasp - a mindset behind people such as Cheney, Project for a New American Century, and others with a political agenda so strong as to pervert reality.

Those same UG attitudes were more overtly expressed on American streets during Nam. The expression "The whole world is watching" occurred because UG types had to cure Americans of their 'subversive political views' – with billyclubs.

Appreciate the opportunity to learn. UG is not an exception. He more bluntly expresses an attitude probably found in at least 20% of Americans today. Those others will not speak up when it is politically incorrect. But I suspect that 20% number does properly represent how many fully agree with UG's spirit.

The point is not to win. The point is to appreciate another perspective and the reasoning that justifies that opinion. UG is not the exception in America.

Ahem, haven't you recall that I favored getting Saddam out? However, Bush botched even that, pulling off the impossible: making Saddam a sympathetic guy, and turning Bush into an anarcho-fascist. That's right, I said it. Bush turned into an anarcho-fascist, by ruling over only the oil fields, and leaving the rest of the country to rot.

What a sweetie. UG, Dar didn't lie, he reinterpreted your words and posited a potential and, in the view of many, better and more apposite term for what you were describing. That isn't lying, it's engaging in debate.

tw, please, I read the cellar before bed, are you trying to give me night terrors? :P


I'm guessing not. Oh I hate that argument, it's logic is so twisted it makes a helter skelter look straight forward. We get that here too, amongst some of the right wingers (even the right wingers who've hijacked the left wing parties :P). A friend of mine (an ex MP) has spent her entire life campaigning for human rights; supported the dissident Iraqi trade unionists who sought asylum in my country; lobbied for greater support of those trade unionists and political radicals who were persecuted by Saddam; visited Halabja in support of the Kurds.

She was vehemently opposed to the war. Still, even now, with all that's happened and all the death and destruction which has rained down on that country, the right will accuse her of supporting Saddam. Usually it's a sideways swipe: "Not all of us were against the war ****, some of us are happy Saddam's gone". The two are not mutually exclusive no matter how much someone may try to argue that they are. One could be entirely against the war without being a supporter of Saddam. One could be wholly against Saddam and be active in the struggle, without being in favour of the invasion.

There's a word for that kind of logic...my mind's gone blank though and I can't think of it (tired, tough meeting tonight :P). I'd be very grateful if one of you excellent and eloquent debate hounds could tell me what word I'm looking for :P

Coulter.

hahahahah thanks Bruce.

False dichotomy?

Coulter works, though.

*shakes head* it's a single word. God, I hate that. I hate it when words escape dammit. I much prefer it when they're locked safely in my head where I can reach them at will....little bastards...

Bifurcation?

Heh! now this is some funny shit.

No, I don't recall, but if I missed that, I do apologize. In my defense, I don't believe it's ever come up in anything we've said to each other.

What? Bush did not make Saddam into an sympathetic figure -- because as you said, it's impossible. Sure, he has his fans in Tikrit, just as he always did, but does anyone give weight to that lot of fascist-symp creeps? This if anything is some unreality put out by the lunatic fringe on the America-must-lose left. As for "botched," Saddam is dead, dammit, which is not "botched" by any rational standard I've ever heard of. Nor is there any such thing as an "anarcho-fascist," as a bit of thought will tell you these terms are about as mutually exclusive as may be imagined. Try imagining somebody ordering you to, fascistically, nationalize major industries but to have no government -- over which he shall not-rule? It collapses of its own absurdity. What on Earth are you doing buying any of this?

Frankly, our effort around any of the oil fields isn't getting any coverage from anybody, either cable news or network. I would hesitate to believe we're doing anything in particular. Even the opposition in Iraq seems to think blowing up pipelines is passe'. And if you're only getting your knowledge of the Iraqi theater of operations through the likes of the New York Times and their fellow travelers, whose bias against George Bush is beyond all reason and so far as I can see without any merit, of course you're not going to be informed about Iraq at all.

An unbelief in the legitimacy of Republican Presidents such as the Times' editorial staff evinces is not worthy editorial policy, but a sort of disgusting spasm. Comes of having too many modern Democrats in journalism, no doubt -- JFK would have thought the current lot a bunch of idiots. No wonder circulation is declining and more conservatively inclined news outlets are growing and being increasingly trusted. They are the ones getting it right.

This is because frankly none of the opposing ideas put forth here have been good enough to persuade me to adopt them. I don't buy shoddy goods -- and speaking against destroying fascist autocracies is about as shoddy as it comes, am I right? Therefore, I speak out, to show you the enlightened, prodemocracy, prohuman way. Anti-fascist/anti-communist can hardly help but be pro-human, can it?

Funny how much goddam fighting I get from people whose sympathies should not lie with foreign fascists, yet too apparently do, and for the silliest of rationalizations. It was crap in the Sixties with the New Left's fascisto-communist sympathies and it's not improved forty years on. Superannuated, obsolete crap is crap cubed. You should be ashamed of your antidemocracy sympathies, you know. Well -- now you know. I observe that Leftism tends to prevent certain understandings.

I see what I said still stands: throughout this page, "none here make answer, strangely enough." Lots of scrabbling around the side-issues, which tells me I'm getting through to those who once were blinkered.

Please take note that UG has no answer for this:

or this:
What does that tell you?

It would seem obvious that you could spin things like that so long as the fighting in Afghanistan is still going on. I call that intellectual dishonesty, dar512. I urge you to cease it and forever desist, that you may come into the practice of honesty, rather than sympathizing with more fascistic mullahs. Sure, the fighting's not over, and none of us knows when it might be, and shooting at foreigners is still almost more of an Afghan tribal sport than playing bushkazi. I don't expect peace, quietude, or rose gardens there anytime soon, precisely because of the Afghan penchant for shooting at anybody of a different language, a penchant practiced mutually by everybody.

We are struggling primarily against a non-national enemy who is driven by his bigotry, is he not? The way we can beat these people is by getting information, since we cannot put pressure upon their nation -- and clearly we are indeed getting information enough to take down their leadership on a semiregular basis, which tells me we're doing something right -- I've been involved in secretive national doings myself, whose triumphs are unheralded every bit as much as their failures get trumpeted. I reckon we are having our successes, quietly. I don't think we should be interrupting them.

Your second boxful is frankly frothy rhetorical stuff, unworthy of reply. Think better.

Most of our successes are pretty quiet to those not having them, i suppose. The media isn't let to know about them a whole lot.
I'll bet they're not too quiet to those in the room with the uh, 'successes' though. They're probably more like

no...please...imtellingyouidontknow...whatareyoudoingwiththaaaaaaaaanostopnomakeitstopgurglegurglenoooimtellingyouiswearaaaaaagaspgaspgaspmakeitstopmakeitstoppleaseimbeggingyouuuuuu

...you dont want to know what the failures sound like.
mostly, they stop after that gurgle, gurgle part.

Ibby you just sent a shiver down my spine.

UG precedes that quote by claiming he was privy to secret successes. Then he *speculates* that torture results in useful information. For all his privy access, he really does not know? In the next sentence, he converts total speculation into a fact - then uses that 'fact' to justify torture.

Barak used this exact same logic to 'play the white boys'.

Urbane Guerrilla cannot answer and completely sidesteps two simple questions: and Urbane Guerrilla is asked these questions repeatedly. UG avoids answering these questions repeatedly by attacking the questioner. How ironic. UG's responses are typical of a conspiring terrorist trying to hide his complicity. Even Barak did not resort to deceit.

UG - dar512 asked you two simple questions. Why not answer him with honesty? Is honesty that difficult - especially when it might contradict a political agenda? Answer his questions without political accusations. His questions are simple. Why can Urbane Guerrilla not answer dar512’s questions? Why must UG attack the messenger?

It tells me they are doing a good job of keeping things secret that should be kept that way and you don't know if a positive or negative result has happened or not.

Neither of you, tw or dar, are being honest, and if you get attacked for your dishonesty, you really shouldn't be implying I'm anything other than right. Enjoy your pseudotriumph if you can but remember: it's all based on you lying to yourselves. You can't lie to me. You never could accept the best answer, and tw in particular cannot endure an American victory, and is covering this up very thinly with noise. You and I both know what an actively antipatriotic individual you are, and for it you are damned.

Would you like some music to go with that dance?

I've given a worthwhile answer. Those who say otherwise are merely talking stuff.

I can picture you with earplugs, saying nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah, while you type that. It made me giggle like a school girl.

Dar's dishonesty consisted in the conceiving of his question: he might better have put it "Are we winning in Afghanistan and if so, when have we won?" That might have been a better question, and it wouldn't have been crafted to try and trip up someone, as dar's was -- not that he's very good at that when he's crossing swords with someone of my experience. If I'm going to answer a "have you stopped beating your wife" special, it will be an answer to something deeper than the surface of the question.

Tw has for a couple of years now been desperate to find anything at all he could give me grief about. Not on his best day. Not for the likes of him.

The opposition to this war against the newest fascists remains without any idea for actually winning it at all, let alone winning it better than the Bush Administration can. This prevents their point of view from having worth or integrity. You yourself, Bruce, have no idea how better to win this war, nor, I note, any principles on which to base an idea that your road has more virtue than mine. I did in effect ask you about that not long ago and got back complete silence. Either you have no principles on which to oppose me, or you're being reticent because you doubt they'd compare well to mine, or...? Just because you once told me you weren't at all on my side, is that any particular reason to run around trying to prove it at each and every opportunity? People who try that around me tend to talk themselves into corners...

The only right road against undemocracy is to win against it. There's nothing wrong with accomplishing this by a holistic strategy incorporating both war and peace -- but war is needed to answer the war they'd start to prevent, for whatever reason their warmongers think sufficient, their integration into the global economy and attendant culture, or mosaic of cultures.

Please fill us with your honesty. Our loins ache for your honesty. Answer dar512's two simple questions.

You don't know the answer, dar doesn't know the answer, I don't know the answer (though I have understanding enough of these things to make a couple guesses), Sean Hannity doesn't know the answer. There's a whole crowd of us who don't have a definitive, fully knowledgeable answer.

And OPSEC is why. This whole fight is going to be won or lost on HUMINT. HUMINT can be a dirty business -- it's where the old cloak and dagger of espionage novels comes in. Of course, losing the war is even dirtier than that, isn't it? Or had you noticed? Most of the rest of information gathering is a day at the office, or something close to radio astronomy. These only become relevant if they are where the information is. With this foe, these are mostly where the information isn't.

There is one answer I do know: if we do it the way you want it done, success will not follow. There will be no "positive conclusion" if we do what you want. I'd rather not have it that way, understanding your motivations as clearly as I do.