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CIA Lied Over Brutal Interrogations
mrspoonsi sends this news from the BBC:
The CIA carried out "brutal" interrogations of terror suspects in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., a U.S. Senate report has said. The summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report said the CIA misled Americans on the effectiveness of "enhanced interrogation." The interrogation was poorly managed and unreliable, the report said. President Obama has previously said that in his view the techniques amounted to torture. The Senate committee's report runs to more than 6,000 pages, drawing on huge quantities of evidence, but it remains classified and only a 480-page summary (PDF) is being released. Publication had been delayed amid disagreements in Washington over what should be made public.
CIA Director John Brennan has posted a response.
No comments needed.
The Committee's Study outlined 20 specific cases that the CIA claimed either solely based on EIT (torture) or thwarted attacks. In ALL cases, there was either other corroborating intelligence (so they didn't need to torture anyone) or that the "attacks" were either fantasies or non-operational.
Brennan's statement doesn't actually refute this. Providing intelligence that "helped" is not the same as intelligence that was critical.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Oh just fuck off. If you actually read TFA, you'd see that it also indicates that Bush had little to no knowledge of the specifics of the interrogations or their brutality, and in 2006, upon his learning of it, it was ramped down. Also, waterboarding was done on 3 prisoners, though the media would have you believe every single prisoner in gitmo had it done to them. The onus here is on the CIA, primarily. And that's from a report from people not likely to be favorable to Bush.
According to the report, CIA officials did not disclose the methods of interrogation to White House officials, either by omission or blatantly lying about it. This is in reference to techniques that went beyond the initial executive order authorizing "enhanced interrogation techniques." Note that this report is not collected from sources friendly to the previous administration; if they could have thrown Bush under the bus, they would have.
7.5 days with no sleep? After half that you'd be saying its pretty brutal.
"Brutal"
No injuries, marks, or other affects, permanent or otherwise.
They didn't have fun, to be sure, but brutal it wasn't.
Brutal is having your skinned peeled off in one inch strips, electrodes to the privates, hammer to the toes, peeling your finger nails off, propane torches, pliers and nipples, etc. THAT'S brutal.
These guys just didn't have a good time is all.
I'd like to chain you by your wrists and suspend you from the ceiling for 4 days, while trained fighters deliver peritoneal kicks to your legs, and see whether you still think that's not brutal. For as long as you survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Dilawar (born c. 1979 Ã" December 10, 2002), also known as Dilawar of Yakubi, was an Afghan taxi driver who was tortured to death by US army soldiers at the Bagram Collection Point, a US military detention center in Afghanistan.
He arrived at the prison on December 5, 2002, and was declared dead 5 days later. His death was declared a homicide and investigated and prosecuted in the Bagram torture and prisoner abuse trials....
On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling. "Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned that most of the interrogators had in fact believed Mr. Dilawar to be an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
Also, waterboarding was done on 3 prisoners, though the media would have you believe every single prisoner in gitmo had it done to them.
FTFA:
The CIA has maintained that only three prisoners were ever subjected to waterboarding, but the report alludes to evidence that it may have been used on others, including photographs of a well-worn waterboard at a black site where its use was never officially recorded. The committee said the agency could not explain the presence of the board and water-dousing equipment at the site, which is not named in the report, but is believed to be the âoeSalt Pitâ in Afghanistan.
Who are you going to believe, the CIA or your own lying eyes?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Wait a minute. They forced pureed food into detainees butts, in one case causing severe tearing and prolapse.
But hey, this Anonymous Coward says that's not brutality so we can all go back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Seriously, fuck you.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Only one person has gone to jail over this - John Kiriakou, a whistleblower who was prosecuted for revealing classified information about this activity.
Leaving marks or not is a choice for any half-way competent torturer. Being brutal without leaving marks is something which was first developed around 1920 and which has been refined since then. England, France, and the United States have led the world in this, and various governments around the world have been quick to learn from their examples. The reason is, of course, to mislead people like you into believing that torture is not torture.
See Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Except that doesn't work, because people being tortured will say anything to make it stop. At no point when they change their stories can you be certain they're now telling the truth. Even if their stories suddenly match, it could be a complete fluke, or as a result of the interrogator asking leading questions. Torture is useless.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
They didn't have fun, to be sure, but brutal it wasn't.
Your ability to think of something more horrific does not mean it was not brutal. All you proved is that there are even more horrible things that can be done but that does not in any way mitigate or excuse needlessly harsh treatment of another human being. Just because you don't leave a mark doesn't mean it isn't torture and certainly doesn't make it right.
The uselessness of torture as an interrogation tool was conclusively described about 400 years ago in "Cautio criminalis" by Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld. You are free to ignore 400 years of knowledge though. But then you are just ignorant.
"Brutal"
No injuries, marks, or other affects, permanent or otherwise.
They didn't have fun, to be sure, but brutal it wasn't.
Ah, the Spanish Inquisition rationaliztion approach From the Wikipedia page:
"Although the Inquisition was technically forbidden from permanently harming or drawing blood, this still allowed for methods of torture. The methods most used, and common in other secular and ecclesiastical tribunals, were garrucha, toca and the potro. The application of the garrucha, also known as the strappado, consisted of suspending the victim from the ceiling by the wrists, which are tied behind the back. Sometimes weights were tied to the ankles, with a series of lifts and drops, during which the arms and legs suffered violent pulls and were sometimes dislocated. The toca, also called interrogatorio mejorado del agua, consisted of introducing a cloth into the mouth of the victim, and forcing them to ingest water spilled from a jar so that they had the impression of drowning .[76] The potro, the rack, was the instrument of torture used most frequently."
The freaky part is the similarity to teh Spanish inquisition.
No one expected that!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Are there "lawful" enemy combatants and under who's law these ones unlawful?
Yes, there are. I'll explain in a moment. The Law in this case is International Law - the Geneva Convention, among others, is involved here.
And aren't they enemy combatants because a "coalition of forces" invaded their countries?
Yes, that is part of what makes them enemy combatants. The other part is that they chose to shoot at those invaders.
Ok, so some explanation -- there's some rules of war that the countries in power at the time put together. They include things like soldiers needing to wear a uniform with identifying marks for the country (or group in cases where you might not have an officially recognized country) in whose service they are fighting. If two of those powers went to war, they'd follow those rules (in theory), and soldiers of the other side would be lawful enemy combatants (or usually just enemy combatants, contrasted against enemy civilians).
If some of those soldiers stripped off their uniforms and did stuff against those rules, they could be disavowed by the other country -- they were out of uniform and therefore they were unlawful enemy combatants. The special rules regarding the treatment of Prisoners of War wouldn't apply. They could be held after the cessation of hostilities, for example, and could be tried by the country that captured them for their crimes rather than those acts (such as mass-homicide and such) being considered acts of war and therefore somehow perfectly acceptable.
So if these insurgent groups wore a uniform of some sort, and followed a normal command structure, and didn't hide in civilian populations, they could be lawful enemy combatants. They'd also be a lot easier to eliminate, which is why they don't do that. However, because they aren't playing by the Big Powers rules, that means the Big Powers don't technically need to follow those rules either. I still think we should, but that's a separate discussion.
That should hopefully help you understand where the term comes from, and why it gets used in reference to actions like this.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
Even the Spanish Inquisition regarded waterboarding as torture.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It's not enough to kill the perps, you have to kill somebody helpless that's important to them. Torture a man's wife and small child then give him a gun with no bullets!!!
Wow. Classy. The way to combat terror is to be a terrorist?
Suffering the sins of the father on the son has been recognized as unjust since Old Testament times, and probably earlier.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.