Red Cross investigation of CIA torture at Guantonamo Bay

Guess everyone needs a cheerleader now and then..

LoisLane wrote:

Ohhmama wrote:

Won the debate?? Because of an article posting??? LOL

Love the cheerleaders!

When someone stops replying it's usually a sign that they can't refute something.

One terrorist being held was "tortured" by a caterpillar in his cell. He was "terrified of caterpillars". So, is that torture unreasonable torture?

Kind of stupid for any U.S. citizen to even debate what methods are used to extract info from the very people who took the lives on 9-11.

I think everyone who opposes the methods would agree to waterboarding, etc., if they had lost a relative on 9/11.

UrRight wrote:

Kind of stupid for any U.S. citizen to even debate what methods are used to extract info from the very people who took the lives on 9-11.

Except that it doesn't work and doesn't make us any safer. For example:







and

Quote :

The Torture Myth

Meet, for example, retired Air Force Col. John Rothrock, who, as a young captain, headed a combat interrogation team in Vietnam. More than once he was faced with a ticking time-bomb scenario: a captured Vietcong guerrilla who knew of plans to kill Americans. What was done in such cases was "not nice," he says. "But we did not physically abuse them." Rothrock used psychology, the shock of capture and of the unexpected. Once, he let a prisoner see a wounded comrade die. Yet -- as he remembers saying to the "desperate and honorable officers" who wanted him to move faster -- "if I take a Bunsen burner to the guy's genitals, he's going to tell you just about anything," which would be pointless. Rothrock, who is no squishy liberal, says that he doesn't know "any professional intelligence officers of my generation who would think this is a good idea."

Or listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the "batting average" might be lower: "perhaps six out of ten." And if you beat up the remaining four? "They'll just tell you anything to get you to stop."

Worse, you'll have the other side effects of torture. It "endangers our soldiers on the battlefield by encouraging reciprocity." It does "damage to our country's image" and undermines our credibility in Iraq. That, in the long run, outweighs any theoretical benefit. Herrington's confidential Pentagon report, which he won't discuss but which was leaked to The Post a month ago, goes farther. In that document, he warned that members of an elite military and CIA task force were abusing detainees in Iraq, that their activities could be "making gratuitous enemies" and that prisoner abuse "is counterproductive to the Coalition's efforts to win the cooperation of the Iraqi citizenry." Far from rescuing Americans, in other words, the use of "special methods" might help explain why the war is going so badly.

An up-to-date illustration of the colonel's point appeared in recently released FBI documents from the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. These show, among other things, that some military intelligence officers wanted to use harsher interrogation methods than the FBI did. As a result, complained one inspector, "every time the FBI established a rapport with a detainee, the military would step in and the detainee would stop being cooperative."

There's also the bit from WWII on the previous page. You certainly haven't offered any evidence to suggest that these assessments are wrong.

UrRight wrote:

I think everyone who opposes the methods would agree to waterboarding, etc., if they had lost a relative on 9/11.

Of course. That's basic human psychology; knee-jerk reactions to such trauma are hardly ever rational. But that's vengeance, not a policy for national security. Well, not if you want to be safe anyway...

Soufan: CIA torture actually hindered our intelligence gathering An FBI agent testifies that an al-Qaida prisoner provided useful intelligence until the CIA got rough -- and casts doubt on Bush's statements about the effectiveness of harsh interrogations.

May 14, 2009 | WASHINGTON -- The testimony of a key witness at a Senate hearing Wednesday raised serious questions about the truthfulness of former President George W. Bush's own personal defense of the CIA's brutal interrogation program. Former FBI agent Ali Soufan also indicated that the harsh interrogation techniques may actually have hindered the collection of intelligence, causing a high-value prisoner to stop cooperating.

Here's another one, this time from Malcolm Nance, the former master instructor and chief of training at Navy’s SERE school shooting down the ticking timebomb as well as the "it ain't torture 'cause we do it to our troops in training" arguments:

http://share.ovi.com/media/neonmauve.public/neonmauve.10005

Quote :

MADDOW: In terms of the argument that SERE-based techniques, these techniques, reverse engineered as you say what was done by totalitarian regimes, reverse engineering figured out in the ’50s, the argument has been made that because we do it to American troops as part of training it can’t be torture, because then people like you who were an instructor could be charged with torture.

MALCOLM NANCE: That’s ridiculous on its face. Listen, there’s a whole class of people who I call torture apologists and their full-time job is to go out and find spurious arguments in order to justify exactly why they violated, you know, U.S. legal code. And, of course, the standing order from general George Washington to treat prisoners with dignity. And so it’s ridiculous. What we’re doing is we’re allowing a service member the opportunity to practice in a controlled environment over a few moments how to behave and how to react in order to act like Abu Zubaydah, in order for them to become resistant and for them to make sure that the techniques being applied to them don’t work. […]

MADDOW: In the case of an actual ticking time bomb scenario, which is a faulty premise because things don’t work out this way in the real world, would you do SERE, these techniques on a prisoner in that scenario?

NANCE: Of course not.

MADDOW: Any of them?

NANCE: No of course not, because one, it defeats the ticking time bomb scenario, in that all the prisoner has to do is not answer the question or, better yet, the prisoner will lie. And once the prisoner lies, especially with al Qaeda members. Let me tell you something, their ideology — they have a concept within their ideology called “al-warrah el barrah” (sp) and that is absolute devotion to their god, but absolute disavowal and hatred of anything that’s not their god.

Therefore, anything that they do to foil you is well within their plan, and they take great pride in that. And I’m sure when he was brought back to his little cage or to his holding cell, he saw every time that he defeated us, every time he didn’t get an answer out of us or got some gibberish out of us, he saw that was a victory.

MADDOW: Yeah, so you got to out wit them.

NANCE: Well what we’ve done is we created al Qaeda SERE school for them.

GWB has finally commented publicly on the torture controversy. Realistically, the only way he will ever be able to do any damage control is if he can find a magic machine that will rewrite history.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/29/george.bush.speech/index.html

Quote :

BENTON HARBOR, Michigan (CNN) -- Former President George W. Bush on Thursday repeated Dick Cheney's assertion that the administration's enhanced interrogation program, which included controversial techniques such as waterboarding, was legal and garnered valuable information that prevented terrorist attacks.

Quote :

Waterboarding for dummies

Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney's "dunk in the water"

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."

Disturbing indeed.

It's frickin' totally unacceptable. I had to literally force myself to read the entire article.

Man, this is far worse than anything that I ever imagined.

Perhaps I'll have more to say when I calm down a bit.

They had to switch to saline because otherwise it would have killed them.



I'm still processing too.

Sheldon Whitehouse D-RI warned about this months ago saying something to the effect that "you won't believe what was actually going on". I tried to locate the video but couldn't find it.