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Senate Report Says CIA Misled Government About Interrogation Methods
mrspoonsi sends this news from the Washington Post:
"A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques. The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document. ... At the secret prison, Baluchi endured a regime that included being dunked in a tub filled with ice water. CIA interrogators forcibly kept his head under the water while he struggled to breathe and beat him repeatedly, hitting him with a truncheon-like object and smashing his head against a wall, officials said. As with Abu Zubaida and even Nashiri, officials said, CIA interrogators continued the harsh treatment even after it appeared that Baluchi was cooperating."
If it's obvious they were assaulting people without cause, why haven't they been arrested, prosecuted and thrown in jail?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
This shakes my world view to its very core.
Also, whoever decided to auto-play audio on Slashdot should be fired.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Cowards. They're not willing to call it what it is, because they're still the Establishment Media, and don't want to lose access to the government people who are their big information sources.
At least National Public Radio has the excuse that they're directly funded by the government (and "viewers like you", and grants from Exxon, Archer Daniels Midland, some recent movie, etc.) - it was 10 years after Gitmo before I first heard them use the T-word in a news story; before that it had only been guests on Terry Gross's interview shows (and Terry herself.)
Don't let the right-wingers tell you that either of these are "liberal" media.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Enabled: Have you missed the part where no one ever is held responsible?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Pfft the committee doesn't care about the lying, that goes without mentioning. The report is just retaliation for being spied on. Tit for tat. Nothing will come of it. Yes, we are the enablers.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
with people totally disconnected from the consequences of their actions, driven by some idea and illusion in their head doing the "right thing", not to use he term "pervert", which in fact this is coming from.....
Due to our own actions, the terrorists won yet another round...not a cry I'd championed previously.
The future, scratch that, the present is looking really bleak now that the average civilian can expect to be spied upon, searches and home invasions are being done without cause, due process is ignored, travel is restricted, "Homeland Security" are targeting civilians for desiring sexual contact with minors, and those declared enemies of the state are outright tortured, everything that was considered "evil" about the opposition when I was a child (be it the Third Reich or the Soviet Union) is currently taking place in the United States.
The only thing left is to disarm the populace to prevent revolt, and institute concentration or labor camps.
I never imagined I'd grow up to be embarrassed by my government and everything it stands for. Is fear next?
Well, just to play devil's (!!!) advocate, because you don't *know* Baluchi is cooperating as fully as he might be.
Ammar Al-Baluchi was unquestionably involved with moving money and goods around for Al Qaeda and was clearly involved with helping many of the 9/11 hijackers. Although that does not necessarily mean he was an active *member* of Al Qaeda or knew exactly what the 9/11 hijackers were up to, he'd have to be remarkably incurious not to know something was up. And he was captured with correspondence that was destined for Osama bin Laden.
So this is a person who, even if he had no specific knowledge of imminent attacks, knows a lot of useful things. But that actually poses a challenge for interrogators. He can give them an impressive amount of useful stuff while holding back even *more* useful stuff.
But one thing is certain: if he *had* known more important stuff, it didn't come out under torture. Nor did torture produce *anything* useful that couldn't be produced using different techniques. And now Americans -- servicemen, agents, and innocent bystandanders -- face an increased threat of torture throughout the world at the hands of people who figure if America does it, Americans should get a taste of it too.
It's important not to be too glib about dismissing torture, because in the future we're going to find ourselves in situations where it seems like a pretty good idea. And the person we're thinking of torturing may be a very bad person -- I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize Al-Baruchi's crimes as "heinous". But if ever torture was going to break the back of an enemy it would have done so with al Qaeda after 9/11.
Well, we tried it and it didn't work. What *did* work was ordinary interrogation and intelligence tradecraft. Which should come as no surprise. We spent the 19th and 20th C perfecting those approaches, and the idea that we could do better by tearing a page out of the medieval playbook should, in hindsight, seem ridiculous.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We are willing to sacrifice a certain amount of freedom for safety, or we'd all live in Somolia.
You are not referring to fundamental freedoms. If you are, do not say "we." I am not willing to sacrifice fundamental freedoms for safety; that just leads to things such as the TSA, the NSA surveillance, DUI checkpoints, etc. Even if those things were effective, they would still be absolutely intolerable.
That said, it's not even the point. Even if we value freedom to a very high degree, the information has already been uncovered.
It *is* the point. If we want to make it less desirable for the government to break the law, their ability to use illegal evidence must be severely curtailed. Merely punishing them will not prevent the problem as much as is necessary. It's better that many guilty people get away than one innocent person be harassed by the government illegally.
Punishing the police by punishing ourselves just seems counterproductive.
I'm all for defending individual liberties, and that's why I think illegal evidence should be tossed. This is one aspect of our system that I have no problem with.
[End Of Line]
If we allow prosecutions to succeed on the strength of illegal evidence, we allow a perverse incentive to continue gathering evidence illegally. It has to be perfectly clear that illegally obtained evidence might as well not exist. Otherwise we end up at a point where your rights get violated at the first whiff of suspicion (however unfounded) and nobody ever pays because it never goes to trial.
Add in that convicting a cop will require at least proof beyond reasonable doubt (presuming the prosecutor doesn't just find an excuse not to pursue the matter). In practice, the police still (for reasons that escape me) still get an extra benefit of the doubt. Because of that, we would see abuses run rampant with practically no convictions.
Public trust of the courts, prosecutors, and cops is already falling fast, If we start letting them profit from criminal activity, it will get worse fast.
If you don't want to see murderers go free, hold the police's feet to the fire. If they never violate people's rights, nobody will ever go free because of thrown out evidence.
In cases where a cop plants evidence, he absolutely should face whatever sentence the defendant would get.
Torture only works for confessions of things you already knew for sure. Then you can force someone to give up and confess. But as an investigative method, it is just unproductive. If you don't know what the suspect knows, how can you tell if he reveals something of value? And how many not-so-bad guys came under torture because of misleading statements, produced more misleading statements (as they didn't know shit), but when they were released they bore a grudge against their torturers and had firsthand knowledge of their structure, mentality, inner workings and locations?