Torture memos

[TheMercenary]

That is frigging hairlarrious. Mancow was in the idiot category of, "wish I would have just gone to breakfast."

[Undertoad]

Wheeeeee the wheel goes around again

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...T2009082804015

[DanaC]

Would that be a catherine wheel?

[classicman]

Excellent article UT- very interesting read. I need to digest it a bit more...

[dar512]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Would that be a catherine wheel?

I was wondering why you were bringing up fireworks in this thread, but wiki provided the answer.

I wouldn't have had any reference for Catherine wheel at all if it weren't for the Moody Blues Eternity Road.

[DanaC]

*grins* what can I say. I have a bleak sense of humour.

[Undertoad]

Oh good god damn.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...rding?page=0,0

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."
...
Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.

"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."

But never mind, he says now.

"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

[lookout123]

RebuttalFor each genius who says no another says yes.

[classicman]

I have spoken to the people who — unlike Kirakou — were in the room for the interrogations of Zubaydah, KSM and other terrorists held by the CIA. And in Courting Disaster, I meticulousluy document the evidence for the efficacy of the CIA interrogation program — based not on Kirakou's claims, but on the testimony of the actual interrogators, interivews with top CIA and other intelligence officials, the evidence presented in the CIA inspector general's report, and other top-secret documents declassified by the Obama administration. I urge you to read it and judge for yourself. The evidence is overwhelming.

Before these documents were released, there was room for debate on the efficacy of CIA interrogations — because the facts had not been declassified. No longer. Yet the critics will continue to attempt to muddy the waters and use Kirakopu as "proof" of their claim the interrogations did not work. They will do so because if they admit that the interrogations worked, that means that the consequence of their position would have been another 9/11. They have to argue that a) enhanced interrogation is wrong and b) it did not work, because if the latter is not true then the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women, and children would have been the price of their approach.

The last part from LO123's link

[Pete Zicato]

What I hear: "The end justifies the means."

And I still don't believe it.

Originally Posted by classicman

The last part from LO123's link

As far as I recall, beyond the legal questions, the CIA IGs report raised questions about the effectiveness of torture

But you can read it for yourself.

Today, the National Security Archive posted a side-by-side comparison of two very different versions of a 2004 report on the CIA's "Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities" by Agency Inspector General John Helgerson. Yesterday, the Obama administration released new portions of the report including considerably more information about the use of torture and other illegal practices by CIA interrogators than a version of the report declassified by the Bush administration in 2008. The report was first posted on the Web yesterday by the Washington Independent.

New revelations include:

* Details on a number of “specific unauthorized or undocumented torture techniques” not mentioned in the 2008 release, including the use of guns, drills, threats, smoke, extreme cold, stress positions, “stiff brush and shackles,” mock executions and “hard takedown.” The Bush administration censured almost all portions of the document pertaining to specific torture techniques, save for a few references to waterboarding that omitted nearly all other contextual information.

*A look at the legal reasoning behind the Agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and the development of Agency guidance on capture, detention and interrogation.
A brief discussion of the history of CIA interrogation, including the "resurgence of interest in teaching interrogation techniques" in the early 1980s "as one of several methods to foster foreign liaison relationships."
The conclusion that, while CIA interrogations had produced useful intelligence, the “effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained” is not “so easily measured.”

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torture...e/index_ig.htm

IMO. the ends dont justifty the means....we are a nation of laws...or we are no better than the enemy.

[lookout123]

If you I am causing you discomfort and you believe I may escalate that into the downright painful and possibly lethal, do you think you would be more or less likely to answer my questions?

[Pico and ME]

But its no good if the person just doesn't have any information to give. Of course, then, they will make it up to survive. I wonder how many people we tortured who were in that category? How often did we really get the right people to torture?

[Pete Zicato]

Originally Posted by lookout123

If you I am causing you discomfort and you believe I may escalate that into the downright painful and possibly lethal, do you think you would be more or less likely to answer my questions?

<sarcasm>shoving hot needles under their fingernails would probably also work. Or we could use an iron maiden. That would please the heavy metal folks.</>

The results don't matter if the methods are reprehensible.

[classicman]

What is acceptable, Pete? - seriously.