Is anyone still defending US interrogation methods? Anyone at all?

[Sojourner Judas]

It's going to be a rough road for the holdouts, methinks.

Emphasis mine, of course.The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?hp (http://www.kaytastrophe.com/vb/redirector.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F 2008%2F07%2F02%2Fus%2F02detain.html%3Fhp)

[Hatter]

Nothing gets my blood boiling more than people who defend torture, the only I've ever shouted at someone in the office was in such a 'discussion'.

[Sojourner Judas]

I honestly want to hear what John McCain has to say about this. After he made such a fuss about being anti-torture only to later say the CIA shouldn't be restricted in the methods it can use, I was goddamned mystified. If he tries to rationalize the fact that the CIA is using nearly the exact handbook that was thrown at him in the Hanoi Hilton, then he'll have sold out his last principles to Mammon.

[doc]

They should try useing a "tucker telephone" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_telephone)

[Ancalagon]

I honestly want to hear what John McCain has to say about this. After he made such a fuss about being anti-torture only to later say the CIA shouldn't be restricted in the methods it can use, I was goddamned mystified. If he tries to rationalize the fact that the CIA is using nearly the exact handbook that was thrown at him in the Hanoi Hilton, then he'll have sold out his last principles to Mammon.

He stands to lose a lot of credibility if he doesn't put some sort of limit...

[Edena_of_Neith]

(curious)

What kind of torture was McCain subjected to as a POW?

[Critter]

(curious)

What kind of torture was McCain subjected to as a POW?

I couldn't begin to imagine what all he went through. I have several older ex-military friends (two special forces snipers and a helicopter gunner) and they all did the kinds of things they're not allowed to talk about, even a long time after the fact. Hell, one has 54 confirmed kills with a rifle and three with his hands during things not related to, or even during a war period in time.

But, being as they spent a lot of time behind enemy lines and they had to go through a PoW training. They went into it knowing it was training, but their "captors" had to mimic techniques that could be used against them. Most of them told me that after about the second day they forgot it was training and realized they were in hell.

[Edena_of_Neith]

(dark humor)

(bemused look, knows he is going to get negative Rep from this! :D )

So, you don't believe in torture, eh?

Well then, let us say you have a terrorist, and he has planted a 100 kiloton bomb in your city, and he refuses to tell you where it is.
Now, you could torture him and thus find out where the bomb is, but you don't believe in torture. So you do not torture him, he does not talk, and you do not find out where the bomb is. The bomb then detonates.

And this happens:

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nukergv.html

Well ok, the above happens on a slightly miniature scale (100 kilotons is not as big as 900 kilotons.)

(evil grin) Still don't believe in torture?

I am the Evil American! Torture, torture, torture!

Besides, you know I believe in torture. I post on the internet, don't I? :D
You have all been throughly Edenazised.

It's a cruel world, and someone has to Edenazise it.

Edena_of_Neith (who does not believe in Corporeal Punishment)

[Name Lips]

Alternate scenario: You have a few hundred of people who have been fingered as terrorists. They may or may not be terrorists, you don't really know. All you have is the word of other people whom you've never met. For all you know they're just unpopular or generally disliked, or they didn't pay back the money they owed. But you've been ordered to arrest them, take them to US bases around the world, confine them, deny them representation, deny them the ability to hear the evidence against them, and hold them indefinately. You are also asked to torture them, just in case they might know something that might concievably be of any use.

Years later, most of them have maintained their innocence and provided no information. Even if they knew anything, by now it would be years out of date. But they're still being held indefinately and being tortured (though certain tactics have been redefined as "not torture" according to government documents. Torture is really in the eye of the torturee, is it not?).

Because in our two scenarios, Edena, yours didn't happen. Mine did.

I think everybody will admit that, in certain hypothetical situations fabricated entirely in the fantasy of people's minds, it's possible to come up with situations where torture is unequivicably the best option - or, in fact, the only reasonable option. If such a situation is to occur, I have no doubt that those in charge will make the call.

But I think it is also very important to realize that you are presenting the argument as a false dichotemy - that torture should either be "Always Permissable" or "Always Forbidden." And then you smile and declare victory when you get people to say that torture should not be "Always Forbidden," as though that were a vote for the other option.

The truth of the matter is that there are annoying shades of gray in the world. What if your captured terrorist has only a 0.0001% chance of knowing anything useful. Should he be tortured just in case? How badly? Should he be "vanished" in a torture center somewhere in eastern Europe, or should he practically be on public display at Gitmo? Should his family be captured and tortured too, just in case they witnessed something? His children?

Assuming you said "we need better information before we decide to torture this guy," how likely does it have to be? Will you torture him if there's a 10% chance he knows something? 20%? I think most people would agree that 90 or 100% chance of knowing something that could save innocent lives, yeah, torture him and squeeze it out. But what about those pesky low percentages? Should they be detained and tortured or not?

[Edena_of_Neith]

Well ok, that is a more serious question, and here's a more serious answer.

The answer to terrorism is good intelligence (just as good intelligence wins wars, it wins wars against terrorism.)
Good intelligence means competent intelligence organizations, such as the British Secret Service during World War II.
Good intelligence means competent leadership, such as Churchill gave the British People during World War II.

That's the real answer to the problem. I'm not evading your question, merely commenting on what I think really works.

Indiscriminate torture? Useless. Proven useless historically.

[Name Lips]

No, you're not evading the question. That's a good answer.

Unfortunately organizations like Al-Qaida have proven nearly impossible to infiltrate. You have to be known and vouched for, and even then you're most likely to be a suicide bomber unless you have history and are from a good, trusted family and are well-known. Even then, you have to prove yourself time and again, kill time and again, organize successful suicide bombings again and again, before you're really, truly trusted. And even then, only a small, select handful are ever allowed into the inner circle, allowed to know the Big Picture of the organization, allowed to know real, useful secrets.

Traditional intelligence gathering methods have failed. Military action is marginally effective, but only at mind-bogglingly high cost. Police action is useless when the organization is trained as a private army.

So we're left with nontraditional methods. Analyzing why people join - and more importantly why they choose to quit - terrorist organizations. Rooting it out at the cause. Reducing the pool of recruits. Developing amazing new technologies for intelligence gathering (those flying fly-cams? Woah!), and so on.

Terrorism can be defeated - or at least, rendered ineffective - but we have to realize what things are working and what things aren't. And I'm sad to say that the invasion of Iraq has been, by itself, the largest victory on the part of the terrorists that anybody could have imagined. We need to focus on what works - and what won't bankrupt us.

[Edena_of_Neith]

Exactly. We need to focus on what works.

heers, Eek Lips. Well put! :)

[Varaj]

Years later, most of them have maintained their innocence and provided no information. Even if they knew anything, by now it would be years out of date. But they're still being held indefinately and being tortured (though certain tactics have been redefined as "not torture" according to government documents. Torture is really in the eye of the torturee, is it not?).

I don't believe the US has used any techniques that would be considered torture for about three years now.

[Name Lips]

This thread seemed like a good place to chip in with this little bit of trivia. Apparently the primary influence on US torture techniques was Jack Bauer.
Torture documents cited the main character of 24 more often than the US constitution...


http://www.newsweek.com/id/149009

[Scarbonac]

This thread seemed like a good place to chip in with this little bit of trivia. Apparently the primary influence on US torture techniques was Jack Bauer.
Torture documents cited the main character of 24 more often than the US constitution...


http://www.newsweek.com/id/149009

I sincerely hope this article is a gag.