How America Came To Torture Its Prisoners

[Bronco_Beerslug]

Originally Posted by barryr

Obama only changed the torture issue by having other countries do it instead,

Link, or are you talking out your arse again?

[Boomhauer]

Originally Posted by TonyR

Agree, I'm disappointed more wasn't done but at the same time I'm not surprised.
But at least the Obama admin has changed our policies on torture.

The Bush and Obama administrations have maintained identical policies - false imprisonment, torture and murder of foreigners and American citizens on foreign and US land, including these methodical human rights abuses against US citizens here at home.

But these actions are deemed 'legal' and have/have had, the full approval of all three (four) branches of the Government, so discussion on or speaking against these atrocities is a waste of time. If the US Government decides to arrest, dismantle and hold themselves accountable, discussion can take place at that time. Until then, only actions will have results and I'd recommend those be against all individuals, organizations, collaborators, institutions and even the political, financial and judicial support structures behind it - the same actions that are taken against international regimes guilt of the same actions.

[That One Guy]

What a thread.

People are terrorized by the thought of something like torture when the only mistake that was made was the fact that it WASN'T institutionalized well enough so it was often a half-assed effort so those above could claim deniability.

If our government wasn't a bunch of pussies, we'd have a totally different perspective on the war on terror and there'd be a lot more soldiers at home with their families today - either because they weren't killed based off our pussified policies or because those people realized we weren't ****ing around and quit playing their weekend terrorist bull****.

This thread pisses me off. Much like the pacifist hates war but doesn't realize dissolving the military would lead to much worse atrocities, people here are so in love with the idea of clean and perfect warfare that they preach without having a ****ing clue what they're talking about. Waterboard yourselves but use a plastic bag instead of a towel.

[mosca]

Our military and CIA's interrogation experts tell us that torture is ineffective and DOES NOT WORK. Yet we still have tons of Internet terror warriors telling us that we need to do it... hrm...

This is starting to remind me of how Supreme Court Justice Scalia cited episodes of Fox's 24 in supporting his pro-torture argument. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said. Way to stay based in reality...

[That One Guy]

Originally Posted by mosca

Our military and CIA's interrogation experts tell us that torture is ineffective and DOES NOT WORK. Yet we still have tons of Internet terror warriors telling us that we need to do it... hrm...

This is starting to remind me of how Supreme Court Justice Scalia cited episodes of Fox's 24 in supporting his pro-torture argument. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said. Way to stay based in reality...

It's all about implementation. If you have the ability to instantly test any information they give you, it negates their ability to mislead you. Put in a system of x min per session but if they give you bad information, explore the information instantly and with them in tow if possible. Let it be known that if it isn't rock solid, the session time will become 2x mins.

If you think out the process, it can work. It's all about the mind rather than the physical pain. Physical pain isn't nearly as strong a motivating factor. In many cases, neither is the threat of death though I think you have to use that for those who don't fully participate as a punishment and threat to the next guys.

Yeah, you'd have some mistakes but this should only be implemented carefully and when you're absolutely sure. You're not out to breed a bunch of sadists having fun torturing everyone.

Also, if torturing Kalid Sheik Mohammed had been the only torture session to ever work and it helped prevent a new 9/11, do you consider torturing a success? Is it not better to get some false information but also some legitimate information?

Human intelligence will always be susceptible to misdirection and that's been going on as long as there's been people asking questions. If you're able to identify those falsehoods though AND work with a reprimand, you can knock that out quickly. There's at least two of the major interrogation techniques that are set up perfectly to root out these guys giving false information and they work but you just have to have competence at work when dealing with these guys. Let them feel like they can lie to you and win and you'll lose every time.

[mhgaffney]

Originally Posted by That One Guy

It's all about implementation. If you have the ability to instantly test any information they give you, it negates their ability to mislead you. Put in a system of x min per session but if they give you bad information, explore the information instantly and with them in tow if possible. Let it be known that if it isn't rock solid, the session time will become 2x mins.

If you think out the process, it can work. It's all about the mind rather than the physical pain. Physical pain isn't nearly as strong a motivating factor. In many cases, neither is the threat of death though I think you have to use that for those who don't fully participate as a punishment and threat to the next guys.

Yeah, you'd have some mistakes but this should only be implemented carefully and when you're absolutely sure. You're not out to breed a bunch of sadists having fun torturing everyone.

Also, if torturing Kalid Sheik Mohammed had been the only torture session to ever work and it helped prevent a new 9/11, do you consider torturing a success? Is it not better to get some false information but also some legitimate information?

Human intelligence will always be susceptible to misdirection and that's been going on as long as there's been people asking questions. If you're able to identify those falsehoods though AND work with a reprimand, you can knock that out quickly. There's at least two of the major interrogation techniques that are set up perfectly to root out these guys giving false information and they work but you just have to have competence at work when dealing with these guys. Let them feel like they can lie to you and win and you'll lose every time.

There is no way to confirm that the information obtained by the CIA from KSM was "legitimate."

The CIA refused the 9/11 Commission permission to interview KSM -- and other CIA detainees.

The CIA also refused the commission permission to talk to the CIA staffers who conducted the information gathering, i.e. torture sessions.

It was a farce. The body charged with the official investigation of 9/11 was denied access to the key witnesses!

That One Guy is brain dead -- like the children of Fallujah.

MHG

[That One Guy]

Originally Posted by mhgaffney

There is no way to confirm that the information obtained by the CIA from KSM was "legitimate."

The CIA refused the 9/11 Commission permission to interview KSM -- and other CIA detainees.

The CIA also refused the commission permission to talk to the CIA staffers who conducted the information gathering, i.e. torture sessions.

It was a farce. The body charged with the official investigation of 9/11 was denied access to the key witnesses!

That One Guy is brain dead -- like the children of Fallujah.

MHG

Do you not understand the word "if"?

It was a hypothetical, dingbat.

[TonyR]

You have much to learn, That One Guy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/th.../2010/nov/04/2

[TonyR]

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast....ican-spin.html

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast....-big-lie-.html

[TonyR]

Here's a fascinating quote from torturer and war criminal, Jose Rodriguez, who destroyed over 90 tapes of torture sessions he insists were not torture sessions. When told that president Obama has called them torture, he replies:

Well, President Obama is entitled to his opinion. When President Obama condemns the covert action activities of a previous government, he is breaking the covenant that exists between intelligence officers who are at the pointy end of the spear, hanging way out there, and the government that authorized them and directed them to go there.

In other words, the president answers to the CIA and not the other way round. If that is really true - and we have evidence that a president and the Justice Department do not have the strength or will to bring war criminals to justice - then we no longer live in an accountable democracy. We are run by a security state that invents its own laws and makes money off its own war crimes.


http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast....o-the-cia.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...#ixzz1tccjk9qG

[alkemical]

Originally Posted by mosca

Our military and CIA's interrogation experts tell us that torture is ineffective and DOES NOT WORK. Yet we still have tons of Internet terror warriors telling us that we need to do it... hrm...

This is starting to remind me of how Supreme Court Justice Scalia cited episodes of Fox's 24 in supporting his pro-torture argument. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said. Way to stay based in reality...

Programming isn't just a time slot Mosca.... (5gw?).

Look at our TV shows/movies: Law & Order, 24, NCIS, SuperTroopers.

We like when laws are broken by 'authority'.

[alkemical]

Originally Posted by Bronco_Beerslug

Link, or are you talking out your arse again?

He's right on this one. It's all about how the SOP is written.

Originally Posted by alkemical

Well....maybe not:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=12041

Conclusion



The loopholes in President Obama’s executive order on torture may permit cruel abuses of prisoners to continue, using a legal parlor trick. Labeling detainees the product of counterterrorism operations rather than of armed conflict, or holding detainees in detention facilities operated by entities other than the CIA, may allow government agents and private contractors conforming to the letter of the president’s order to continue practices most would consider torture. The president should close these loopholes or explain to Americans why he won’t.


add in the crack down on whistlebowers - and well...yeah.

[mhgaffney]

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

CIA whistleblower Glenn Carle on TJ Radio today

Truth Jihad Radio Wed. 5/2/12, 3-5 pm Central, American Freedom Radio (archived here.)
http://www.americanfreedomradio.com/Barrett_12.html

Call-in: (402) 237-2525 or post your questions to my Facebook page.

by Kevin Barrett

Guest for both hours: Glenn Carle, 23-year veteran of the CIA's clandestine services, retired in 2007 as Deputy National Intelligence Director for Transnational Threats. Carle's book The Interrogator is the best insider account of the CIA I've yet read.

After 9/11, Carle was assigned to interrogate an "al-Qaeda high value target." It turned out that the alleged terrorist - supposedly "al-Qaeda's banker" - was obviously innocent. Despite Carle's heroic efforts, he couldn't stop the machinery of state from brutalizing the innocent kidnapping victim for almost a decade.

In the course of his duties, Carle discovered that not only was his guy innocent, but that "al-Qaeda" itself was a lot less than meets the eye. He learned that "the closer one looked at al-Qaeda, the further it receded and the smaller it was."

Carle's revelations may have helped another innocent man caught up in "war on terror" madness, Mohamed Harkat, win his April 25th hearing. It seems that Harkat, a not-very-political normal guy, has been under Security Certificate house arrest for years due to an alleged link to somebody with the same name as the innocent guy Carle interrogated. (You can't make this stuff up.)

Carle also played a role in revealing that supposed "al-Qaeda mastermind" Abu Zubeida turned out to be a mentally retarded individual who could barely mastermind the tying of his own shoes.

The retarded Abu Zubeida, under torture, apparently fingered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) as a fellow (retarded?) "terrorist mastermind." Mohammed was then kidnapped and tortured relentlessly - presumably until he "broke" and began parroting the torturers' claim that he had something to do with 9/11. And although all records of those torture sessions were illegally destroyed, hearsay accounts about what might have transpired during those torture sessions, and what KSM might or might not have said, became essentially the ONLY "evidence" supporting the 9/11 Commission's account of the "19 Arabs" version of what transpired. And now, KSM and others are being prosecuted in military kangaroo courts based on this tortured hearsay!

In fact, Philip Zelikow had drafted the entire 9/11 Commission Report, in chapter-by-chapter outline, before the Commission ever convened. So KSM was apparently tortured into going along with Zelikow's scenario - which, I am reasonably certain, was written before 9/11 as the script for that false-flag attack.

Zelikow, you may recall, is a self-described "expert on the creation and maintenance of public myths - especially those that leave a powerful impact on succeeding generations, such as Pearl Harbor." This same Zelikow co-authored a 1998 article in Foreign Affairs sketching the likely political, psychological, and cultural consequences of a Pearl Harbor style terrorist attack, such as the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Carle's The Interrogator is punctuated by a very large number of excisions - blacked-out passages removed by the CIA censor. I imagine that the CIA censors, if not his own internal censors, will actively or passively impede any pro-9/11-truth statements he might wish to make. But he's obviously a very thoughtful and morally serious person, so it should be a great conversation in any event.

[TonyR]

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


...the Romney campaign should be asked: As president, would he revoke the executive order that Obama signed on his first day in office, restricting interrogation techniques to those in the Army Field Manual?

Here’s why this is an important question.

Yes, it’s true that Romney has expressed support for enhanced interrogation techniques, and doesn’t believe waterboarding is torture, so it would seem that Romney is implicitly saying he would overturn the executive order. But an actual answer from Romney on whether he would revoke it would be something else entirely.

This question goes to the heart of how serious Romney is about reviving enhanced interrogation techniques, and whether he’d be able to.

[alkemical]

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boing...iously-to.html

Stuff that isn't obviously torture if you're a US gov't official
by Cory Doctorow

Courtesy of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a list of "things that government officials could do to an American citizen and still claim later that they didn't know they were "torturing" that citizen."

Prolonged isolation; Deprivation of light; Exposure to prolonged periods of light and/or darkness; Extreme variations in temperature; Sleep adjustment; Threats of severe physical abuse; Death threats; Administration of psychotropic drugs; Shackling and manacling for hours at a time; Use of "stress" positions; Noxious fumes that caused pain to eyes and nose; Withholding of any mattress, pillow, sheet or blanket; Forced grooming; Suspension of showers; Removal of religious items; Constant surveillance; Incommunicado detention, including denial of all contact with family and legal counsel for a 21-month period; Interference with religious observance; and Denial of medical care for serious and potentially life-threatening ailments, including chest pain and difficulty breathing, as well as for treatment of the chronic, extreme pain caused by being forced to endure stress positions, resulting in severe and continuing mental and physical harm, pain, and profound disruption of the senses and personality.

Lowering the Bar explains:

The legal issue was whether John Yoo should be entitled to "qualified immunity" in a case brought by Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen detained as an "enemy combatant." "Qualified immunity" is a doctrine that bars claims against government officials if, at the time they acted, it was not "sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he or she was doing violated the plaintiff's rights." The idea is to try to preserve some freedom of action for officials who have to act in areas where the law may not always be clear. If it applies, no lawsuit.

So, next question: do you think a "reasonable official" in 2001-03, when John Yoo was in the government, should have understood that doing those things to an American citizen -- one who, by the way, had not been convicted of or even charged with a crime -- violated that citizen's rights?

http://www.loweringthebar.net/2012/0...ing+the+Bar%29

[TonyR]

Romney on torture:

Q: Waterboarding: do you think it’s torture?

Romney: I don’t. … We will have a policy of doing what we think is in our best interest. We’ll use enhanced interrogation techniques that go beyond what’s in the military handbook right now.

http://www.samefacts.com/2012/11/tor...waterboarding/