Turns Out, We Do Torture
 

But only three times!

CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly confirmed for the first time the names of three suspected al-Qaida terrorists who were subjected to a particularly harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, and why.

"We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time," Hayden said. "There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al-Qaida and its workings. Those two realities have changed."

Hayden said that Khalid Sheik Mohammed — the purported mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States — and Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were subject to the harsh interrogations in 2002 and 2003. Waterboarding is an interrogation technique that critics call torture.

Waterboarding induces a feeling of imminent drowning with the restrained subject's mouth covered and water poured over his face.

"Waterboarding taken to its extreme, could be death, you could drown someone," McConnell acknowledged. He said waterboarding remains a technique in the CIA's arsenal, but it would require the consent of the president and legal approval of the attorney general.

Should have done it more times.
Extreme torture? Pouring water over your head while you have a towel on? Whatever.

Who is "we"?

AFAIK, SKM has never set food on US soil or GTMO. I could be wrong. But if he's waterboarded in say, Jordan or Saudia Arabia, Pakistan or Turkey, under the auspices of that country's Govt. with a CIA guy taking notes or asking questions, are we doing the boarding?

Whether SKM gave up real or false info under interrogation, I'll lose no sleep over using the procedure on the likes of him.

I don't know of the other 2, so I offer no comment.

Fair enough. When they go around slicing people's head off, are we supposed to play good cop / bad cop with these guys?

I guess that meas we will no longer being complaining about other nations human rights violations since we have joined their ranks.

What does waterboarding have to do with human rights? So Darfur is the same as waterboarding????

Does it matter if the acts took place outside the country or in a Holiday Inn in Des Moines if the Central Intelligence Agency directed it?

I look at it this way, what if it were your Mother, Daughter, Wife, Sister, Son, Father, or best friend somewhere with a camera and a rusty machete on him.
You caught a suspect that was involved but he won't talk.

Now are you gonna ask him nicely for the location, or are you gonna roll up the sleeves and work him over a bit?

I know if it were someone I loved, I would use whatever I could get my hands on to make that sucker talk and I would expect the government to do the same.

These suckers are blowing themselves up and taking as many innocent lives they can with them.

I'm sure the terrorist recruiting halls would be barren if the suicides were nice, slow and painful instead of instant kaboom!

If it works, go for it, but do it slow and painful.

Funny thing is, is that the gov don't have to tell us everything they do to get information from these scum bags.
We just hear about the stuff that leaks.

To the naysayers, I ask what is your solution?
How do we quickly get information from these pukes?

Do we just let them go to kill again?
Do we keep them for bargaining chips to be used by other killers?

What would you want done if it were a personal loved one of yours they had hidden away with a bunch of stinking rapists and murderers?

Would you sing playschool songs to them and let them play with puppy dogs and kittens until their soul softens, or would you crank up the 220 and give them a jolt that makes their teeth crack so they consider talking next time you ask the question?

I think morally (and legally) it doesn't matter, but in terms of American public perception I think it does.

This really comes as no surprise. In fact I would be surprised if they DIDN'T use torture at all.

I didn't know the gov had defined the technique as torture. When did that happen?

I have spoken with US Navy personnel who were water boarded as part of their training before doing covert operations in Vietnam back in the 1970's. They had a doctor nearby just in case somebody needed to be revived.

Google this: U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE)

Might be a recent thing . . .

February 2, 2008, Los Angeles Times Editorial excerpt

The attorney general of the United States, Michael B. Mukasey, testified this week that he would consider waterboarding to be torture if it were done to him, but that he cannot say it's always illegal. We believe these statements are legally and morally wrong, and set a dangerous and hypocritical standard of convenience for torturers. Such repugnant equivocation will be mimicked and distorted in dark corners around the world, and will make it more likely that waterboarding and other forms of torture will be used against U.S. soldiers and civilians.

Mukasey's arguments rely on a legal and moral relativism of the very type that conservatives typically revile. "There are some circumstances where current law would appear clearly to prohibit the use of waterboarding," Mukasey said in a letter before his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Other circumstances would present a far closer question." In fact, the question isn't remotely close. Torture is defined as the deliberate infliction of extreme pain and suffering, physical or mental, and mock execution is universally held to be a form of torture. Waterboarding, which has been used centuries, makes the victim feel as if he or she is drowning. Whether it is done carefully enough that the victim does not drown is irrelevant, as the point is to simulate execution. After World War II, the United States prosecuted for war crimes Japanese who waterboarded American prisoners.

There are several levels of SERE and if you want to do anything productive with your military career you have to go through it, although waterboarding is mighty unpleasant its sandbox play compared to other torture techniques.


http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0524072torture2.html

Is torture not torture, even when we said it was torture?

In "Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts," Judge Evan Wallach of the U.S. Court of International Trade has documented the trials in which the U.S. used evidence of water-boarding as a basis for prosecutions. The article will be published soon by the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

Among the numerous examples, Wallach cites one involving four Japanese defendants who were tried before a U.S. military commission at Yokohama, Japan, in 1947 for their treatment of American and Allied prisoners. Wallach writes, in the case of United States of America vs. Hideji Nakamura, Yukio Asano, Seitara Hata and Takeo Kita, "water torture was among the acts alleged in the specifications . . . and it loomed large in the evidence presented against them."

Hata, the camp doctor, was charged with war crimes stemming from the brutal mistreatment and torture of Morris Killough, "by beating and kicking him (and) by fastening him on a stretcher and pouring water up his nostrils." Other American prisoners, including Thomas Armitage, received similar treatment, according to the allegations.

Armitage described his ordeal: "They would lash me to a stretcher, then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about two gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness."

Hata was sentenced to 25 years at hard labor, and the other defendants were convicted and given long stints at hard labor as well.

Wallach also found a 1983 case out of San Jacinto County, Texas, in which James Parker, the county sheriff, and three deputies were criminally charged for handcuffing suspects to chairs, draping towels over their faces and pouring water over the towel until a confession was elicited. One victim described the experience this way: "I thought I was going to be strangled to death."

The sheriff pleaded guilty, and his deputies went to trial where they were convicted of civil rights violations. All received long prison sentences. U.S. District Judge James DeAnda told the former sheriff at sentencing, "The operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country."

So what? While we are wasting time on this stupid stuff they could be planning another attack. Win the war, then you have the luxury of playing monday morning quarterback.

None of us are in a position to weigh the value of torture against matters of national security. It's simple to kick back in an easy chair and declare that torture is immoral and unnecessary. It's just another sign of the softening American character that bin Laden laughs about. In the meantime, we have troops in Iraq playing nice and getting shot up for it.

Boil 'em in pig fat.

That way they will appreciate the waterboarding.....

How true, I had an interesting conversation last Saturday with a solider who just got out. He spent two tours in Iraq, I forget exactly where I couldn't really pronounce the name let alone spell it. Anyway he said the )(&)*(&*( insurgents would place IED's on one stretch of highway all the time, it got to the point where they would go off several times a week, one actualy took the track off a tank! He said they would approach the road from this valley because they had good cover at night, then they would plant them and go back up the valley. So this one section always had IED's. One night they were on another mission but from where they were could observe the valley and road, and sure enough about a dozen of them were coming down carrying crap. They radioded back to base and wanted to get permission to as he said "waste the mother ****ers." But they couldn't rules of engagement, I guess can't fire on "civilians". But sure enough the next day as a convoy went by, BANG.:rolleyes:

How the **** can we win a war like that. In WW2 they would have just opened up on them. As the old saying went, "when in doubt win the war!"

who in their right minds today believes that torture never exists in war? of course it does. the value of intelligence and saving your guy's ass outweighs anything. ive never served, i've never killed, etc, but damn sure if i saw some a-hole terrorist planting a bomb, id do whatever it takes to make him give up the other guys waiting to spring the ambush. if there's any moral equivalency or relativism, lets remember who cuts off heads when they finish their interrogations and who doesnt.

on a related note, all this torture talk and restoring "our reputation in the world" (a favorite liberal mantra that means jack sh#t) is just politics, plain and simple. the left wingers have been trying their damn best to sully the reputation of our guys over there with meaningless stories of naked iraqi terrorist pyramid triangle and alleged koran abuses at gitmo. all this jack idiot talk about "why are we torturing?" and "what is torture and what methods are we using" is only relevant to academics, ninny taoists, lawyers, and berkeley types who have nothing better to do than to find ways to hate our government...err...hate anyone who isnt a democrat.

and on another note, this is the thing i dont get when liberals talk about "restoring our credibility" with the world: since when has anyone except for britain had our backs? the rest of the world doesnt give a s##t about us. they delight when we hurt, but cry for our help when they need us---anyone remember that big earthquake in iran a few years back? i was on a biz trip in taiwan last year when i was browsing the hotel's free servers which included the staff's own folders. in it was a powerpoint presentation file w/ the title "The Great USA". in the presentation was pictures of the katrina disaster, pictures of dead american troops, etc (another can of worms). you bet i chewed the office staff out and never returned to that crappy hotel again.

Is it that hard for a country, through its leaders and people, to abide by the moral standards they so cherish? It apparently is.

"Col. Jessup, you don't have to answer that last question."

What cures a bully from being a bully?

You whip his ass like he never whipped anyone else's.

If OBL, and his ilk, thinks that strapping bombs on women and children, then setting them off on "Zionists Pigs" is his calling in life, then so be it...

But, I for one, don't want to go to their country and have myself, or loved ones, blown to bits because so,r arsehole thinks that because I'm not kissing his version of his prophet's, or God's arse, I'm scheduled to die according to HIS f**ked-up timetable.

And if there are ways to find out how this puke thinks, plans and acts, I say "More power to you, and yours!"

If it involves peeling back the toenails of "combatants" or waterboarding, or slit-trenching them up to their necks and pouring honey and ants on them...go for it...and if the information is incorrect or misleading, bring on the fire-ants and more honey...I don't give a damn...

What I want to see is this...an Attorney General that knows the Constitution and begins to prosecute every smart-ass Senator and Congressman that thinks the Constitution is toilet paper and that the Oath of Office, where they said that they would protect the Constitution "...against ALL ENEMIES, BOTH FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC..." is carried out and enforced to the letter...

And, if the press NEVER FINDS OUT about a misdeed, you won't find me crying "croc tears" over that...I'd start prosecuting them bastards for giving aid and comfort to the enemy by telling every detail of how some bastard was tricked into being captured or brought to his/her demise by some "previously unknown" sley-of-hand trick.

"LOOSE LIPS SINKS SHIPS!" And this country is floundering because of the liberal left and misguided moderates.

Nobody ever said that the freedoms we have and experience today came for free, but there will ALWAYS be a price to pay to keep what we have and maintain the will to keep those freedoms.

And if it takes NEARLY killing someone to do it (Remember, that person wanted to take it away from us first...), I'm all for it. If you're not around to defend your liberty, you never had it to begin with.

And, AFAIC, anyone that doesn't believe torture is a neccessary evil, is either brain-dead stupid or has no grasp on the current state of reality.

:cool:

Wow.

It's certainly a worthwhile goal and one never to lose sight of, like global disarmament, etc. Maybe, one day.

"Originally Posted by MTI
Is it that hard for a country, through its leaders and people, to abide by the moral standards they so cherish? It apparently is."

It is possible only in a world in which everybody follows the same rules all of the time. You know, like the Geneva Conventions. If you can convince Al Qaeda to quit blowing-up civilians in market places and flying aircraft into buildings and beheading prisoners of war I'll work with you on the waterboarding thingie.

B

I think when we start defining what is right by what actions our enemies are taking that we have lost the battle.

Waterboarding sounds a lot like torture to me, but I am a devout coward.

I think we should be following the standards that we are obligated to follow by our treaties.

Tom W

I have been through SERE, been waterboarded. was it fun? no. do I wake up at night needing counseling? no. I knew they were not going to kill me, although the feeling of involuntary panic from the procedure is indescribeable. The insurgents also know we are not going to kill them during interegation, so something that brings on an uncontrollable panic and willingness to cooperate to make that s**t stop is a useful tool. No one is immune to it's effects. It is not torture, but it will make you talk......

Today's Wall Street Journal


Tall Torture Tales
February 6, 2008

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri planned the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Abu Zubaydah was the mastermind of the foiled millennium terrorist attacks, which had Los Angeles airport as one of its targets. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed directed the September 11 attacks, and has claimed to have personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl.


All three men were captured by the CIA in 2002 and waterboarded in the course of their interrogations. They are also the only U.S. detainees to have been waterboarded. That fact, publicly confirmed yesterday by CIA Director Michael Hayden, shreds whatever is left to the so-called torture narrative, according to which the Bush Administration has engaged in widespread, needless and systematic torture of detainees.

Instead, we have sworn public testimony that the waterboarding was conducted against the three individuals best positioned to know about impending terrorist atrocities. The interrogations took place when a second major terrorist attack was widely seen as inevitable. And we know that the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah helped lead to the capture of KSM, and to the foiling of an active terrorist plot against the United States.


The waterboarding was conducted by intelligence professionals who understood they were operating not only with the approval of the Justice Department but also the informed consent of key Congressional leaders, including Democrat Jay Rockefeller, then the ranking minority Member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

In his own testimony yesterday, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell refused to rule out the use of waterboarding in the future, though he said it would have to be approved by the President and Attorney General. To the extent that his comments provide a measure of uncertainty to terrorist detainees who might otherwise think they have nothing to fear from their captors, this helps make us safer.

I believe you should have the proper credentials or training to torture someone in order to extract information. On the other hand I believe that if you have been and are acting suspicious and have been already caught in a couple of lies, which would have some significance to the safety and well being of people and property, then you are asking for trouble. There may also be room for civil rights to claim that information, discovered under torture, is inadmissible in court and cannot be used to incriminate you. This would be like obtaining evidence without a warrant..

2 cents worth

Where in the hell do you draw the line? "torture" too me is any type of detainment, blindfolding or anything done against my will. With that said waterboarding is an effective, needed and necessary interogation tool that we need to extract information from unwilling axis that holds information that can save allied lives. I'm sure an anti-waterboarder would change their tune if they had a loved one kidnapped and waterboarding could be used to extract the information needed for a safe return.

This investigation is not about human rights, there is a segment of our government that wants some high profile cases in the news and to imprison a few CIA interrogators.

The "GC" argument is specious . . is the US concerned that al Qaeda is going to bring war crimes charges or treaty violations against it in the Hague? Please, that's a justification that demonstrates an inoperable moral compass.

"non-uniformed combatant"

In other words the GC does not apply, no grey matter there.

Also this is not a matter of the GC, the people (aclu) pounding the media drum of upset about is extraordinary rendition flights and waterboarding taking place in CONUS, which have been taking place since 1995 btw.

Unfortunate
 

Its really distasteful to me that there are so many "blame America first" Americans. The majority of the responses to MTI's original post are from Americans who write the kind of stuff of which I am proud. The Daily Kos, and Democratic Underground would generate more sympathetic comments, I think.

Yes
 

I could not agree more.

The label "blame America first" . . . implies that there is animus towards America, which is an easy label to utilize when the goal is to create a "us versus them" mentality.

However, instead of laying the "blame America first" label, consider the possibility that the position is more along the lines of "America is better than that" as the motivation for taking an anti-torture (or as the CIA calls it "particularly harsh interrogation technique") point of view.

In light of the number and nature of the countries that believe waterboarding or other forms of coercieve interrogation IS appropriate, put me on the side that believes that America is better than that.

C'mon. If a bunch of guys were doing that to you and you had no assurance that they were going to stop in time, you'd have a different POV on it.

Waterboarding is not 'simulated' drowning, it's actual drowning, stopped short of actual death (usually).

And most everyone who's done interrogation for any length of time agrees that torture doesn't work well. Does give wanne be tough guys like Bush-o-mon a sense of power and 'we're kicking butt now. . . '

KSM has been confessing to crimes on 6 continents since they waterboarded him. Turns out he was in Dallas in November of '63. Hmmmm . . . . . .

The instances you speculate on are so unlikely to actually happen that they are about useless in debate about whether or not to use waterboading or other torture.

One of the head interrogators during the Vietnam war and other conflicts since has spoken out on the ineffectiveness of torture. He says that by isolating prisoners and building up rapport, there were able to get reliable infor simply by getting messages from the guy's family to him, and simple stuff like that.

Of course if I catch someone with a rusty knife to the throat of someone I love I'm going to do my best to disarm, kill, whatever. It's a bogus hypothetical, not far from: "We find a guy -- we know he knows where a nuclear bomb is hidden that is set to go off in 24 hours . . . . "

Yeah, right.

This is a seriously tired and worn out line. We have no control over what other people do. We have control, some anyway, of what we do.

In order to take the high road, you have to know what taking the low road would be, or have some idea, and guard against it.

Amazing, I never read the Daily Kos, DU, etc. and yet I'm frequently accused of being one of their lackeys.

What did Reagan say about being the shining city on a hill, or something like that? We don't achieve that status by acting like a bunch of arrogant thugs who know best about how the rest of the world should live.

Red Herring Alert!
 

MTI,
Is your position that America is like every other country that uses torture (as you titled this thread) or is your position is that America is better than other countries that use torture (as described in your last response)? Another question for you... Who would you rather have win the war on terror? Islamofacists who would behead you and your mother and father or the U.S. Marines?

The fundamental issue here is the value of life. Americans value life and do things to the enemy to preserve life. The enemy does not value life only death and destruction which is why they don't care about sending unsuspecting children and mentally unstable people into public spaces to blow themselves up. There is really no point in reasoning with these animals. Our enemy has no respect for anything leaving them with nothing for which to bargain.

I don't give a damn about how the rest of the world lives, but I do give a damn about attacks on this country. If slapping around some moron will get us important information that could prevent an attack, then I'm glad the CIA has the balls to do whats needed.

You're wrong Hatterasguy...and insensitive. We need to build rapport and get to know them and reason with them. They're really just like you and me just misunderstood. I'm really glad you're not in charge.

You can't reason with people who from the time they are born have one goal in life, to kill infidels. You cannot use our modern western logic on them, they think like its the 14th century. If they stayed in their own country and were not hell bent on killing as many of us as they can I wouldn't give a care, its not our concern. But now it is, and the only reasoning they understand is force.

A 5.56 bullit through their head is the best way to "build rapport" and "reason" with them.


If I was president I would have the head of every AL qaeda leader we have caught on a pike on the White House lawn. Hows is that for sensitive?:D

It is sensitive. You could have put them sticking out of buckets of pigs blood.

See I'm a very sensitive guy.

wrong

I don't see being against torture as anti American. If anything it is
defending our values.

Torture will get information but not accurate information. Look at
the Vietnam POW confessions to war crimes, Witch confessions etc.

McCain is not a loony liberal!

Jim Jones was "misunderstood", Marshall Applewhite was "misunderstood", Charles Manson was "Misunderstood", Timothy McVeigh was "misunderstood", the teenage Palestinian girl that walked into a Jewish wedding and blew herself and 20 other peole into bits was 'Misunderstood",a whole society of young, brainwashed children being taught to kill themselves and others is "Misunderstood",no,....... glad YOU are not running the country.

You avoided that question and turned it around on itself rather well without answering the original question.

Are you running for office, or do you not have any loved one's important enough to contemplate the scenario, or is your denial so strong that it clouds any further thought into the matter?

This is the reason why liberal talk radio can't cut it.

They can never argue an important point head on, they twist the subject to avoid any involvement in a position that may remotely disagree with their own agenda.

When are you gonna get it, YOU CANNOT NEGOTIATE WITH TERRORISTS!

They don't care if you want to talk peace with them, they don't want peace, they want to kill you and me, and everyone else that does not feel the same way as they do about the radical Islamic fascist regime.

You cannot negotiate with that.
They tried that, it does not work.

They use positions such as yours for media compassion, and would just as soon cut your throat as the guy who's actually willing to stand up to them and fight.

Move over, and let the ass kickers take care of the problem so you can ridicule them back home while they make your world safe, warm and fuzzy.

Here, here. Thanks.

I am not going to spill the beans, but you couldn't be more wrong.

'Spaz--methinks you missed a little sarcasm by a teammate;)