Osama Bin Laden is Dead!!!

[dmg1969]

Originally Posted by Uday

If that is what you want your country to be, far be it from me to get in the way.

What I WANT is the ability to use unconventional methods to break these people and have them give up information which can potentially save thousands of lives!

I don't consider the techniques that I have heard used (making someone stand for many hours at a time, sleep deprivation or threatening their families with death) torture in the classic sense. And while waterboarding (simulated drowning) may be terrifying to the person on the receiving end, these methods are designed to not cause permanent physical injury. These methods are MAINLY psychological in nature.

Are you saying that you would be against these methods being used if they stopped another 9-11 here or in another country?

[DanaC]

Sleep deprivation is not mainly psychological in nature. It can cause serious physiological damage.

[dmg1969]

Originally Posted by Uday

Incidentally:

And if all that doesn’t convince the Cheney family, father and daughter, try Ethics 101. The ends do not justify the means.
Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...H9mF_blog.html

And who is to say that he WOULD have given up the names using on standard interrogation methods?

[dmg1969]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Sleep deprivation is not mainly psychological in nature. It can cause serious physiological damage.

As if someone who is willing to strap a bomb to themselves and blow themselves up to kill you and I isn't already seriously psychologically damaged?

Misread that. I see you said physiological. My opinion remains. If it provides information which prevents you or I from getting killed, I'm good with it. It's a far cry from shoving bamboo shoots under their fingernails, cutting off fingers or burning them with red hot knife blades. Again, we're not dealing with people with the same thought process as you and I. Your chances of getting information from them using standard techniques (especially high value detainees) are almost nil.

One final addition is that the physiological effects of sleep deprivation appear to be from LONG term deprivation...not short term.

[DanaC]

From what i read (there's a link somewhere around here) the information was not given up during that 'enhanced' interrogation. It was given up much later under normal interrogation techniques.


As to whether or not it's worth it if it prevents more terrorist attacks, that relies rather heavily on the idea that the person being tortured has any information to give up. I have serious doubts as to the terrorist credentials of most of the people who passed through Guantanamo's gates. Several of my countrymen were captured and tortured, sorry no interrogated with the above methods, seemingly on very little (read no) evidence.

[dmg1969]

I highly doubt that every detainee in Gitmo was waterboarded...only those deemed to likely have valuable information. No justice system is perfect. I'm sure there are people in Gitmo who shouldn't be, but that is true of any prison anywhere is the world.

I have to believe Rep. King when he says that KSM revealed information on the courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden's doorstep. And I'm fine with that. We agree to disagree. It's all good.

[DanaC]

I think the difference between Gitmo and 'any prison anywhere in the world' is that most of those in other prisons have been convicted of a crime.

[dmg1969]

Agreed, but you can't lump enemy combatants in the same category as civilian criminals. We can't arrest them, have them pay bail and promise to show up for court. Anyone in Gitmo is not there for mugging an old lady or shoplifting...they have direct or indirect ties to terrorism.

[DanaC]

Some of them weren't combatants. Their connection to terrorism may just be geographical proximity to the areas where battles were fought.

[classicman]

This morning on MSNBC they reported that the three men who were killed were NOT armed.
Then this from The WSJ -

The Pakistani official said bin Laden's 12-year-old daughter, who is among those in Pakistani custody,
told authorities the Americans took two people when they left, including bin Laden.
U.S. officials say bin Laden's body was the only one removed from the scene.

From armed, to human shields, to some undefined resistance, to this...
I am really confused as to why any info was given in the first place and why the story from the Admin keeps changing.

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by dmg1969

If it provides information which prevents you or I from getting killed, I'm good with it.

The CIA has a tip that your mom has information that will prevent you or me from getting killed. The information might not be accurate, but they have to waterboard her, just to make sure.

[infinite monkey]

A Q-tip? My mom always has Q-tips.

[dmg1969]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

The CIA has a tip that your mom has information that will prevent you or me from getting killed. The information might not be accurate, but they have to waterboard her, just to make sure.

Oh please, you act like they just grab random people off the street and waterboard them to see if they know anything. While I am not saying that a few innocent people may have been caught up in it, the vast majority are there for a reason. And by the way, my Mom doesn't travel to the middle-east or hang around known or suspected terrorists so I think she's safe. I'll be sure to ask her on Sunday when I see her for Mother's Day...just to be sure.

[Nirvana]

Originally Posted by infinite monkey

A Q-tip? My mom always has Q-tips.

Just don't stick them in your ear...

like no one does that

[tw]

Originally Posted by dmg1969

And who is to say that he WOULD have given up the names using on standard interrogation methods?

How many times must examples be repeated before learning starts? Greatest intelligence that resulted in complete destruction of entire terrorist networks meant, first, keeping Americans away (because Americans and Nazis torture). And second, taking the prisoner out even for fine dinners.

Go back and read the so many descriptions of how terrorist networks were so successfully destroyed. No torture. Search the Cellar for the term Jemaah Islamiya.

Or from the Washington Post entitled "Fort Hunt's Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII
Interrogators Fought 'Battle of Wits'":

For six decades, they held their silence.

The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners' cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess. ...

Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army's Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

"I feel like the military is using us to say, 'We did spooky stuff then, so it's okay to do it now,' " said Arno Mayer, 81, a professor of European history at Princeton University.

When Peter Weiss, 82, went up to receive his award, he commandeered the microphone and gave his piece.

"I am deeply honored to be here, but I want to make it clear that my presence here is not in support of the current war," said Weiss, chairman of the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy and a human rights and trademark lawyer in New York City.

The veterans of P.O. Box 1142, a top-secret installation in Fairfax County that went only by its postal code name, were brought back to Fort Hunt by park rangers who are piecing together a portrait of what happened there during the war.

Nearly 4,000 prisoners of war, most of them German scientists and submariners, were brought in for questioning for days, even weeks, before their presence was reported to the Red Cross, a process that did not comply with the Geneva Conventions. Many of the interrogators were refugees from the Third Reich.

"We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice," said John Gunther Dean, 81, who became a career Foreign Service officer and ambassador to Denmark.

The interrogators had standards that remain a source of pride and honor.

"During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone," said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. "We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity."

Exactly what went on behind the barbed-wire fences of Fort Hunt has been a mystery that has lured amateur historians and curious neighbors for decades.

During the war, nearby residents watched buses with darkened windows roar toward the fort day and night. They couldn't have imagined that groundbreaking secrets in rocketry, microwave technology and submarine tactics were being peeled apart right on the grounds that are now a popular picnic area where moonbounces mushroom every weekend.

When Vincent Santucci arrived at the National Park Service's George Washington Memorial Parkway office as chief ranger four years ago, he asked his cultural resource specialist, Brandon Bies, to do some research so they could post signs throughout the park, explaining its history and giving it a bit more dignity.

That assignment changed dramatically when ranger Dana Dierkes was leading a tour of the park one day and someone told her about a rumored Fort Hunt veteran.

It was Fred Michel, who worked in engineering in Alexandria for 65 years, never telling his neighbors that he once faced off with prisoners and pried wartime secrets from them.

Michel directed them to other vets, and they remembered others.

Bies went from being a ranger researching mountains of topics in stacks of papers to flying across the country, camera and klieg lights in tow, to document the fading memories of veterans.

He, Santucci and others have spent hours trying to sharpen the focus of gauzy memories, coaxing complex details from men who swore on their generation's honor to never speak of the work they did at P.O. Box 1142. ...

By gathering at Fort Hunt yesterday, the quiet men could be saluted for the work they did so long ago.

Torture works only because those who 'feel' therefore know it must work. The term junk science reasoning applies.

Because he was tortured, investigators had to spend the next ten years sorting through every word to find the only word that was truthful. That is what torture does. Mask information that could be obtained without torture into reams of lies and myths.
In but a year (long after the WTC came down and long before bin Laden was finally found), the other terrorist network was completely destroyed. Because they did not torture anyone. They also used fine dinners to extract far more useful information.