The Science of Torture

happy jack wrote:

This coming from someone who just brought up Dick Cheney in a recent post.
More than a couple years ago, wasn't it?

You're the one who opened with:

Quote :

Defense Secretary Panetta Admits Information from Waterboarding Led US to Bin Laden

Posted by Jim Hoft on Sunday, February 3, 2013, 8:56 AM

... referencing info from two years ago. So, yeah... when the sheep start recycling years old talking points, I'm forced to hit the archives.

Are you just now finding out about this? Is that it?

Artie60438 wrote:

Panetta: Enhanced interrogation did not lead to bin Laden



"Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used," he admitted.

CIA chief: Waterboarding aided bin Laden raid

WASHINGTON — Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him, CIA Chief Leon Panetta told NBC News on Tuesday.
“Enhanced interrogation techniques” were used to extract information that led to the mission’s success, Panetta said during an interview with anchor Brian Williams. Those techniques included waterboarding, he acknowledged.




Lying then, or lying now?

Well since we're going down memory lane:

Quote :

C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden


By MARK MAZZETTI

Published: July 4, 2006

WASHINGTON, July 3 — The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice "dead or alive."

This is a litttle confusing, if Dick Cheny's approval of torture led to getting Bin Laden, why did George and Dick give up back in 2006?
Maybe jack can clear that up.

This article is about torture and Dick Chenny. I still can't figure out why Dick gave up trying to get BinLaden in 2006 when torture was according to Dick and all the torture apologists, producing 'phenomenal results.' If they were getting all these phenomenal results, why in the fuck did they give up?
Oh wait, maybe they got shit and Dick is a lying piece of shit.

Quote :

Cheney Claims Waterboarding ‘Produced Phenomenal Results’

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 9, 2011

Dick Cheney wrapped up his book tour on home turf this morning at the American Enterprise Institute. The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes — the official Cheney biographer and famous peddler of the false “connection” between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda — moderated the event and eventually got to the sticky topic of torture. In what he called “a thoughtful critique,” Hayes asked Cheney to respond to those who argue “the things that we did amounted to torture and the sense that maybe the moral position of the United States was eroded because of the things that we did here in this country.”

Cheney dismissed the question, saying they waterboarded only “a handful” of people, which, he claimed, “produced phenomenal results”:

CHENEY: When we get into the whole area of one of the most controversial techniques, waterboarding. … Three people were waterboarded — not dozens, not hundreds. Three. And the one who was subjected most often to that was Khalid Sheik Mohammad and it produced phenomenal results for us.

There are reports that the intelligence committee did of the results of the program which were declassified at my request and are now available on the internet that talk about the quality of information that we got as a result of our enhanced interrogation techniques applied to a handful of individuals. We are talking about only a handful of people who were indeed part of the al Qaeda organization.

The “reports” Cheney is presumably referring to are two CIA documents the agency released in 2009 — at Cheney’s request. However, they do not prove torture worked and in fact, they “actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.”

The bottom line is that there is no evidence to support Cheney’s claim that torture “produced phenomenal results.” “What we got [from waterboarding] was pabulum,” said one FBI agent. A former senior CIA official said most of what came from waterboarding “was total f*cking bullsh*t.” “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence,” said another former Pentagon analyst.

[quote="edge540"]This article is about torture and Dick Chenny. I still can't figure out why Dick gave up trying to get BinLaden in 2006 when torture was according to Dick and all the torture apologists, producing 'phenomenal results.' If they were getting all these phenomenal results, why in the fuck did they give up?
Oh wait, maybe they got shit and Dick is a lying piece of shit.

Quote :

Cheney Claims Waterboarding ‘Produced Phenomenal Results’

Help me out a little here, edge.
If, as you say, “they got shit and Dick is a lying piece of shit.”, then what to make of Leon Panetta?
By the way, this is the same Leon Panetta who was the director of the CIA when according to you, he told this big fat lie:


http://www.today.com/id/42880435/ns/today-today_news/t/cia-chief-waterboarding-aided-bin-laden-raid/

CIA chief: Waterboarding aided bin Laden raid

WASHINGTON — Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him, CIA Chief Leon Panetta told NBC News on Tuesday.
“Enhanced interrogation techniques” were used to extract information that led to the mission’s success, Panetta said during an interview with anchor Brian Williams. Those techniques included waterboarding, he acknowledged.



Then, after telling that big fat lie, thus making him “a lying piece of shit”, just like Dick Cheney, Barry decided that the best thing to do with Panetta, the “lying piece of shit”, would be to make him the Secretary of Defense.
Is that what it takes to get ahead in this administration?
Is that pretty much how you see things?

Cheney is a liar. They only way anyone can say that the torture program had "phenomenal results" is if you ignore all the times it didn't. Christian Science is still medically dangerous despite the "phenomenal results" of prayer. Hitting the jackpot once over a lifetime doesn't make your scheme useful. My broken watch produces "phenomenally accurate results" twice a day, but if I relied on it to get to my appointments on time, I'd never be on time.

So even if it had provided key information (it didn't), and even if it had provided information we couldn't have gotten any other way (it most likely didn't, especially considering that we wouldn't have been distracted by Iraq without it), it's still a desperate cherry pick done to justify an unreliable program. And its no justification for it now anymore than it was two years ago.

happy jack wrote:

Help me out a little here, edge.
If, as you say, “they got shit and Dick is a lying piece of shit.”, then what to make of Leon Panetta?

jack, please spare me your ridiculous, bullshit false equivalency. If Panetta mistakenly for some strange reason thought that torture might have lead to getting bin laden, so be it. Who cares, it doesn't matter. BFD.
That's hardly the same as illegally authorizing torture, blatantly lying about it and then bragging and lying about how well it worked.
Bottom line, jack:
Leon Panetta will be known as the CIA director that got bin laden, unlike Dick Cheney who will go down in history as a pathological liar who lied us into an unnecessary war, authorized torture and is still pathetically trying to justify it.

edge540 wrote:

If Panetta mistakenly for some strange reason thought that torture might have lead to getting bin laden, so be it. Who cares, it doesn't matter. BFD.

CIA chief: Waterboarding aided bin Laden raid

WASHINGTON — Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him, CIA Chief Leon Panetta told NBC News on Tuesday.
“Enhanced interrogation techniques” were used to extract information that led to the mission’s success, Panetta said during an interview with anchor Brian Williams. Those techniques included waterboarding, he acknowledged.




Do you sense any uncertainty in the above statements?
I don’t.
Do you see the word 'might' anywhere in the above statements?
I don’t.
My goodness - you'll wear as many pairs of blinders as are necessary in order to cover for this administration, won't you?

edge540 wrote:

Leon Panetta will be known as the CIA director that got bin laden, unlike Dick Cheney who will go down in history as a pathological liar who lied us into an unnecessary war, authorized torture and is still pathetically trying to justify it.

Kinda sorta maybe looks as if Panetta himself justified the 'torture'. According to Panetta, the information acquired through "enhanced interrogation techniques" was what allowed Panetta to become "the CIA director that got bin laden".

Quote :

Do you sense any uncertainty in the above statements?

Your "above statement" is from a news source. Below is what Panetta actually said which I find has plenty of uncertainty:

"Some of the detainees who provided useful information...had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques," he continued. "Whether those techniques were the 'only timely and effective way' to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively."

Quote :

Kinda sorta maybe looks as if Panetta himself justified the 'torture'

Bullshit, Panetta is record saying torture is wrong:
"I believe that waterboarding is torture and it's wrong," Panetta said during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Asked whether the president could authorize the agency to resume using such harsh methods, even in the midst of a crisis, Panetta replied: "Nobody is above the law."

Panetta Obliterates The Myth That Torture led to Bin Laden

Here's the money quote:
"In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts."
http://www.politicususa.com/panetta-oliterates-torture-led-bin-laden-myth.html

I think you should ask him.

edge540 wrote:

Quote :

Do you sense any uncertainty in the above statements?

Your "above statement" is from a news source. Below is what Panetta actually said which I find has plenty of uncertainty:

"Some of the detainees who provided useful information...had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques," he continued. "Whether those techniques were the 'only timely and effective way' to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively."

He's too stupid to grasp the concept of the difference between a news source headline and actual quotes.

It does not take a brain surgeon to figure out that Panetta was being told this bullshit by the conservative torture loving crowd at the CIA which I'm sure still exists at the CIA.
Later on reality set in and Leon was set straight with the facts:

"Let me further point out that we first learned about the facilitator/courier’s nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier. These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier’s role were alerting.
In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means."


End of story

Now, now jack, we all know everybody is susceptible to bullshit now and then, even you. Nobody is perfect.

You're exhibit "A"

Let me ask you something, do you believe torture works?

I don't

happy jack wrote:

edge540 wrote:

Now, now jack, we all know everybody is susceptible to bullshit now and then, even you. Nobody is perfect.

As I said earlier: you'll wear as many pairs of blinders as are necessary in order to cover for this administration, won't you?

No not at all, Panetta is 75 years old and I really doubt a 75 year old man looked at thousands of pages of intel documents and then decided if torture worked or didn't work. It's obvious he was told some bullshit. Anyway, like I said before:
If Panetta mistakenly for some strange reason thought that torture might have lead to getting bin laden, so be it. Who cares, it doesn't matter. BFD.

edge540 wrote:

Let me ask you something, do you believe torture works?

Quote :

I don’t know – I have no experience in such matters. If I had to speculate, I would guess that it works under some circumstances, but not under all circumstances.
But it is apparent that Leon Panetta believes it worked - mainly, because he said so.

And then after that he was informed of the facts and said it did not.
The evidence is beyond overwhelming that torture does not work, it's too bad that gullible conservatives still believe the bullshit.

You're the one with the blinders, jack not me.
Waterboarding Doesn’t Work, Scientists Say

It's not surprising, after all conservatives don't believe in science, they believe in a TV show
http://mediamatters.org/research/2007/02/02/conservatives-continue-to-use-foxs-24-to-suppor/137925

edge540 wrote:

Panetta is 75 years old and I really doubt a 75 year old man looked at thousands of pages of intel documents and then decided if torture worked or didn't work. It's obvious he was told some bullshit.

Your excuse for Panetta's behavior appears to be based upon your belief that your Messiah appointed a lazy, incompetent, senile old man to head one the most important agencies in the country, if not the world, and then (after he said what Barry told him to say) promoted him to the position of Secretary of Defense, 4th or 5th in the line of succession to the presidency.
Great judgment on Barry's part.
Keep those blinders on, edge - and keep that CYA coming.

Well yes indeed, it was great judgment on Barry's part, he did get bin laden as opposed to the incompetent shit for brain clowns that you admire and vote for.

happy jack wrote:

edge540 wrote:

Well yes indeed, it was great judgment on Barry's part, he did get bin laden ....

.... and he only needed to use a little bit of information derived through torture in order to get him.

Well no he did not.
It's a shame you can't prove that nonsense, you have absolutely nothing to back that up...and keep those blinders on with your head in the sand, it looks good.