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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.
Is anybody going to jail?
How about Bush, is this enough to put Bush in jail?
Queue all the posts of "Why are you surprised! of course they were doing this!"
No, you should be surprised. Suspecting and Knowing are 2 different things. Get mad, do something. Don't use your arrogance as an excuse for apathy.
I think the most enlightening part of the report was this:
The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some C.I.A. personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.
The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.
That gave me some hope for the world. At least some stood up and said "No" and likely ended their careers over it. I doubt we'll ever know who those people were, but if any of you read this, my hats off to you. You're the real Hero's of this war.
I didn't get that far. "Countless lives have been saved" that count is zero. 9/11 was a non-event.
We have some sort of war being waged against a faceless enemy that supposedly comes in, hijacks our shit, and attacks us from within. We haven't really stopped any such attacks; we've brought attention to attempts which were never going to succeed, but that's it. The PETN underwear bomber is one of the better examples: you can't blow up PETN that way; it needs compression, else it just burns.
The scenario we're worried about is untenable. We're not holding back an army; we're worried that people will cross our insecure borders, hide among our population, and then rise up as an army from within. They will blow shit up without warning, they will be everywhere, and they will destroy us. To combat this, we basically bomb other countries, call anyone over 18 a soldier ("militant"), and prove to the world that we're the axis of evil that must be removed.
This behavior is rattling the lion's cage of 3 billion muslims in Saudi and south-east Asia. We have 300 million Americans here. If an open theater of war comes in earnest, we will have Americans who can remember government prattling and a single attack, versus Arabs who can remember friends and family dying in bombings of coffee shops by Americans across decades. When we don't win immediately, we will lose our morale; while the muslims, remembering the constant bombings, knowing they are in the right, and still standing despite the onslaught of American military power, will recognize that they aren't *losing*, and will gain morale. The gaining of morale means more of that 3 billion become resources, soldiers to deploy to the fight; they will overwhelm us.
It's worse than providing no value for a great destruction of wealth. If we didn't win the war immediately, the protracted war would favor the abused muslims, and they would flatten America. A war machine that big would not simply push for its independence and then quiet; once it had crushed America, consumed it, taken the land for its own, the thirst for blood would spread across the globe. In the excitement, the blood of the oppressors would spill: some executions for vengeance would be carried out; this would be abandoned as soon as the international sphere was recognized, and the war would move to Canada, to South America, to Europe and Asia.
There are only two ways to stop it once it begins: either complete and total global annihilation, probably by nuclear war, such that communication and supply infrastructure is destroyed and pockets of survivors are too busy trying to survive to carry on a war; or the complete subjugation of the world as a whole by Arabs. We are fermenting an XK-class end-of-the-world scenario or a CK-class restructuring event.
That is the danger of this political warfare.
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Our nation spent a decade running a network of torture prisons, including Abu Grahib and Guantanamo bay, where cathartic biblical justice was and still is the prescription. Most of these prisoners cant be tried, and cant be released, for reasons that cant be told to the public. The actual details, while speculated for years by the public in quiet shame, were not only far worse than we could imagine but deliberately and baselessly shrouded in secrecy from the public. our intelligence agency actually lied to the govenment it was created to protect.
We can hardly keep our government open and when it is, its operation is ostensibly predicated on blanket covert surveillance against its own citizens. If anyone challenges it, we just lock them away forever and insist they are traitors. Our police operate entirely above the law, routinely executing unarmed citizens and exist in posession of several million dollars in military grade hardware from machine guns to tanks. the only thing "exceptional" about american exceptionalism these days is that we maintain the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, and yet still havent managed to usher in the apocalypse despite a very public report on the sheer bumbling incompetence of the military divisions assigned to operate and maintain these weapons. The most devastating part about this as a foreigner, ill presume, is that a country of this level of dysfunction, porverty and animocity still controls such a disproportionate level of wealth, power, and influence.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I still remember a GOP debate during the primaries. The moderator asked for a show of hands, who would approve torture to save american lives. The camera slowly pans past all the candidates with their hands up. And then there's John McCain on the end with what can only be described as a horrified expression. I felt sorry for the guy that day, there in front of him were some of his closest colleagues and presumably a few friends saying that the torture the Vietcong did to him was not only justifiable but in fact justified from the perpetrators point of view.
Torture is useless as an intelligence tool. It is also counterproductive for any reason other than a "sense of vengeance".
Sure, it satisfies that, but then you lose the moral high ground. And that shit is actually important.
I always thought that far Right wing social conservatives believed in torture beccause their God is the king of torture. Don't believe or forget to go to church on Sunday, and's it's into the barbeque forever for you, sinner! They wanna get in on the act too..
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.