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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 shit.
Is anybody going to jail?
How about Bush, is this enough to put Bush in jail?
Yet, despite common ground with some of the findings of the Committee’s Study, we part ways with the Committee on some key points. Our review indicates that interrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qa’ida and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.
Just when will the CIA get off its high horse of believing that this program, in its former form, or any newer form, produces value for the American citizen or state as a whole? They need to stop defending this indefensible stance that it's okay as long as the CIA is in charge of capturing, detaining, violating rights, and denying everything it does or has ever done.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
The opinion that Nazis committed war crimes is not universal, either.
I prefer this memo:
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/05/-versch-auml-rfte-vernehmung/228158/
Part of being the "good guys" means NOT being the "bad guys".
More people die in traffic accidents EVERY YEAR than the "terrorists" have ever killed here. So why give up a morally superior position to "fight" people who pose almost no threat to anyone outside their own countries?
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.
Even if torturing prisoners was "effective," who cares? If something is immoral, good results will never make it moral.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Page 115
I'm reminded of a quote I once heard from a U.S. Army interrogator (paraphrasing a bit to make the context and intent clear): "Torture and Drugs are something people do for fun - they're not used for gathering intelligence."
"I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored."
From a Republican even.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
No comments needed.
Who doesn't pay? Those responsible for such atrocities. We increasingly live in a society where a few - IE military and intelligence brass, the rich, the police, and corporations and individuals with the money to play the game can do nearly anything with impunity.
This meets the definition of tyranny - arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power - and we live it every day, but most do not see it. The question is, is the natural state of being for humans - people abusing their power over others, or can it be changed and transcended?
Silence is a state of mime.
Where's the oversight? Oh, it was by the same people that oversee the NSA, never mind.
I mean, really.
In case no one has noticed it seems everything is out of control theses days. War, spying, bankers and the economy, human rights and the list goes on.
As Leonard Cohen says in his song The Future:
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
It seems that everything we ever used to benchmark human progress has slipped away.
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.
Not just the cruelty.
Did fMRIs disappear yesterday and did I just miss the memo? Did psychoactive agents stop working? We couldn't have used neurological stimulation of the pleasure center each time a detectable truth was told until the subject couldn't wait to answer?
Did all this disappear yesterday? Did the hundreds of other neurological manipulation techniques we might have employed painlessly go away? Suppose we stimulated the "God Spot" in each detainee, and broke their religious beliefs. Think that wouldn't have worked?
Are security agency personnel simply incapable of reading neurophysiology journals? Or do we just hire stupid people?
So, instead, the CIA and probably Homeland Security (i.e. the new KGB) wallow in the temple of dumb. Any one of the aforementioned techniques is likely to be at least as effective as crude torture, and probably more so.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I might too, but that doesn't make us right.
I see.
Terrorizing is bad.
So obviously the solution is more terrorizing.
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.
With their own approval rating at 16%, Senate Democrats announced today that Bush was a meanie. More exciting news after the break.
You gotta do what you gotta do. If someone was tied to terrorizing my neighborhood I would hang them from a chain, soak them with salt water, and zap them with a MIG Welder.
God I hope you aren't American. Because to any objective observer, it is the US who is terrorizing everyone else's neighborhoods. Do you apply the same standard to yourself?
The Israelis who have no qualms supporting state sponsored assassinations in the name of national security told the Bush administration that torture doesn't work.
For Xsakes, this are your friends telling you not to do it, because it doesn't work. What did Bush do? he carried on regardless.
This has become a signature pattern for the right in the last 15 years. It wasn't always that way. In the 80s and 90s one could disagree yet respect the opinion of Republican leaders and administrations, even if one didn't always agree with them. Somewhere around the time of the Contract with American ideology became more important than facts and it has been all downhill for America. The 2 trillion dollar invasion of Iraq on false pretenses, the loss of critical support across the world with unwarranted acts of torture, the obstructionist practices of the Republican congress v. the Obama administration.
Give it another 10 years and the present GOP will achieve from within what Osama Bin Laden foolishly tried to do with a few planes. He should have financed the Tea Party instead, and by now he would be further ahead in his goal.
You're going to bathe them in a mixture of Argon/CO2 while poking them with a steel wire that has a small ball on the end?
wow.
As a Brit living in Australia, two of the world's most ardent allies of the USA , I say this: America, you stink. When a friend tells you you stink you'd better wise up and do something about it. Your actions are CAUSING the terrorism that you are seeking so vainly to suppress. The more you oppress, the more people turn against you. I know you have a bit of a thick skull and your thinking processes are limited (as a country, we understand you have trouble walking and chewing gum, but that's OK, intellectual disability we can accept and sympathise with - we are similarly afflicted, truth be told). It's the actions we have a problem with. But now even your friends and allies can see the terrorists' point of view, and have done for some time. Wake up, fix your stupid foreign policies and you know, maybe THAT will sort out terrorism. It's win-win.
The people who ordered this deserve to be tried for war crimes. Some individuals were actually tortured to death. Baby Bush would be first in line for a hanging. It makes me sick that the lowest level guards who were following orders were the ones who were drummed out of the service etc.. And the public should know that we caused other nations to apply even worse tortures within the same prisons. I would rather be loyal to humanity than loyal to any nation.
In the US, the powerful can be the most evil scum and commit the most heinous crimes against humanity and will have nothing to fear from "the law" at all.
To be clear, torture is a human rights violation against customary international law and treaty; it is not a crime against humanity unless it is part of widespread or systemic practice.
It is, however, widely practiced as a practical matter. Sometimes even by heads of state. This guy has personally tortured people, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
We constantly try to convince ourselves and the world that we're supposed to be some sort of role model after which all others should strive to emulate.
.my point.
:|
Time and time again, the evidence tends to show that we can actually be much worse than those countries we love to demonize.
Can you imagine what would happen if another country ( pick one ) started a program like the one we run for snatching up Americans ( or American Allies ) suspected of ties to $scarylabel ?
Perhaps building their own version of Guantanamo and holding them indefinitely without charges, trial or even notification to anyone they were being held at all ?
Everyone here knows exactly what the reaction would be. Drone strikes, commando raids, hell we might even send a Battle Group or three and park them off your coast. Regime change, invasion, air strikes, sanctions, excuse for new war toys testing, etc. etc.
As long as the country in question isn't a major power of course. We love to send in the troops to countries that cannot possibly defend themselves from our mighty war machine. Not so much into the countries that can. See any Russian or Chinese detainees in that lovely detention camp of ours ? Yeah . .
Ever see a bully pick on someone who could kick their ass ? Me either.
Wonder how our war-nuts would handle it if $evil_country started snatching our worldwide intelligence agents ( or just Americans and their Allies at random ) and subjecting them to the same tortu. . . . er. . . . enhanced interrogation techniques that we use. Would be hilarious to hear what insanity would spew forth from our Government about how . . . how . . . EVIL such a thing is. How DARE they do that to an American ?! Resolutions !! Declarations !!! OMGTEHHORROR !! ( Fox News would just implode I think )
To the rest of the world, I would like to apologize for the arrogance, hypocrisy and illogical ideology of our "elected" government. If you have any ideas on how to fix it, we're all ears.
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.
Ah but that's where international treaties and international law come in. If it is a war, then treat the prisoners like prisoners of war.
Not following it because the enemy combatants have not signed it? CONGRATULATIONS, that is literally the Nazi justification for atrocities.
Yes, godwinning, but treating "enemy combatants" inhumanely is ridiculously stupid, shortsighted, and loses the moral high ground.
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.
Generally fighting fire with water or other fire retardants is the preferred method.
It is in the very nature of evil that it "gets results". The entire point of morality is that there are things you will not do even if they are in your interest.
As an American citizen, I do not in any way approve of the use of torture. I am willing to accept the higher risk of death by terrorism, assuming the risk even is higher, in return for the country behaving in a moral fashion. I am willing to trade my safety for doing what is right. No torture, no indefinite detention, no extra-judicial killings.
If I knew a legal way to stop the US from using torture, I would.
We have become the things we always claimed that we opposed in the world.
Inquisition. Witch Hunt. McCarthyism. War on Drugs. War on Terror. Anyone else notice a pattern?
The waterboarding done by the Japanese involved putting a hose down peoples throats, filling their stomachs to the bursting point and then hitting the victims stomach with sticks until it actually did burst.
Not even close to the same thing.
But still cruel, ineffective at actually getting reliable information and likely used on people that didn't have the information they sought and we (US citizens) should be fucking ashamed of our government and ourselves by proxy.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
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.
This was 100% politics and had little to do with much else. Why else release such inflammatory information AGAIN?
...
The really sad part though is that it is highly possible that the release of this report will cost Americans their lives. The world is a dangerous place, but it's stupid to poke the enemy or hand them such a public relations win as this will be. We will be lectured by Iran and North Korea for human rights abuses and you can bet ISIS will be happy to use this to recruit/conscript more help.
(sarcasm)Oh Yea! That's great.. (/sarcasm)
The really sad part is that people get so caught up in petty politics that they can't see that torturing people is immoral and ineffective and that maybe we should consider not fucking torturing people and hold ourselves to a higher standard than "other people are worse than us."
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
terrorists, stop being an idiot. Richard Reid tried to light a shoe bomb and didn't kill anyone, yet let at all of the trouble and hassle EVERYONE who flies has to go through now. It isn't always about death. It's also about our way of life. How much money do you think is being spent to find explosives on persons who fly?
So stop saying "More people are killed by albino left-handed sharks than terrorists because that isn't the point."
No, that's exactly the point. We've completely caved to fear and thrown what little moral standing we had in the world right out the window. We've spent well over a trillion dollars, killed thousands of people directly, tens of thousands indirectly and replaced an evil but fairly contained dictator with a sectarian battlefield. Because we're bad at math and suck at assessing threats. We are a nation cowards, armed to the teeth and afraid of shadows. We are the fucking boogieman.
And before I get shit for it, no I don't think we deserved to be attacked on 9/11 and terrorists are asshats. But that doesn't justify overreacting and it doesn't justify holding people sans due process and torture.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
It's also beside the point.
The people in Guantanamo has not been found guilty of beheadings. Do you really think it's the right thing to torture individuals for something other individuals of the same faith and complexion did at a later date? Can I torture you a little for what Jeffrey Dahmer did?
If anything, torturing prisoners is used as a justification for what's done to hostages by others.
No one has a right to condone inhuman behavior and then act offended when others respond with inhuman behavior. We reap what we sow.
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.
When Japanese did the same thing to Americans during WW2, the soldiers doing that, and officers issuing orders to do that, were found guilty of war crimes and hanged after the war. Funny, that.
No, it's not allowed. Not by US law, not by half a dozen treaties that US has signed, and not by the international laws and customs of war.
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.
But the blow back undoes any advantage you got. The enemy knows we torture and uses it as a propaganda tool. Ie, the US does a better job of recruiting for Al Qaeda than Al Qaeda does. Also our friends know we torture and then don't want to be around friends so much (not a problem for US because we think "friend" means "does what we ask with no questions"). And it means that all those other countries out there are saying "hey, if US can torture then we can torture too!", or "if US can violate Geneva convention, then we can too!" And when our soldiers get captured, and they will, the enemy will use the same techniques we use or worse.
That's the main reason why so many in politics just wanted to cover all this up. They know it causes problems for the US, but it's ridiculous to pretend it doesn't exist or that anyone eventually freed from Guantanamo is lying when they claim to be tortured. If we don't want blowback from torture then we shouldn't do it.
Remember these are all interrogation methods disallowed by the army. The army knows there would be blowback. But they're ok for the CIA?
Another problem is that the interrogation techniques were not originally designed to get information. They were originally developed to get captured soldiers to admit to false confessions. Then the US used training for our soldiers so that they could attempt to resist such methods. Then ridiculously the CIA adopts those techniques and think that they would work to get useful intelligence. It's BS. If the CIA does know what it is doing then it is not using these enhanced interrogations to get information but for some other motivation (please the boss, please the political base, make it seem like we're doing something, finally have a suitable job for those who flunked the psych exam at Langley, etc).
Now there's this idiotic justification I do hear, not from politicians but the fanboys of one party or the other. That we treat the prisoners better than so many other countries. Dumb. That's like saying you beat your wife less than the neighbor does. Really, do these morons think that the standard of conduct should be "don't be as bad as North Korea"?
except: 99% of the american citizens are blameless in this!
we don't own our own country anymore. corps have more rights than people and they control the government. the government fights for corps and for itself. it cares nothing about us. NOTHING!
and so, you would blame the citizens who don't even have any control over their out-of-control government? how rational is THAT?
I understand you are annoyed and upset by this. I am too - and am a born-and-raised US citizen. this makes me sick, but I realize its not the people who have done this but those in power. you know, the psychopaths.
solution: throw the psychos in jail, stop trying to police the fucking whole planet and maybe over the next few decades, people will stop thinking that the whole US is fucked up.
you really can't blame the people of any country. almost always, its the psychos who rule the country that are to blame.
please keep that in mind.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Nah. You're confusing cause and effect. They just expect it from God because they'd do it.
You are, of course, specifically referring to the section commonly known as the Bill of Rights. These amendments do not grant rights to anyone. The constitution does not grant rights to anyone. Doing so would make them privileges and not rights as rights are inherent and not something that can be granted. The Bill of Rights specifically limits the ways in which the government in allowed to infringe upon our rights. This is true both in intent and in wording. Further, those amendments do not make a distinction between citizens and non-citizens. You should try actually reading it sometime.
As far as "unlawful enemy combatants" goes, there is no such thing in international law. That is a term that was manufactured to make people feel better about denying folks their due process and to make torture easier to stomach. The people who created and support that sort of thing are cowards who lack any sort of honor or dignity. It is a stain on the country that will take decades or longer to wash off.
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.
It doesn't matter if it is effective. It doesn't matter if they lied about it. What matters is that the USA tortures people and torture is wrong.
the US does a better job of recruiting for Al Qaeda than Al Qaeda does
This is a really important point that the US still doesn't seem to understand. It's not just torture either, take drone strikes as another example. By remotely killing faceless civilians from an air conditioned room somewhere the US just de-humanizes themselves in the eyes of their victims, making it even easier to hate and despise them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well, "shoot to kill" sounds good, but it doesn't set an enemy back more than a combatant that is wounded and unable to fight does. Beating a hasty retreat is a lot slower if you have to drag a half dozen screaming meatbags with you as you go. Battlefield resources such as food, fuel, medicine, transport and the time of other warriors are consumed by the needs of the wounded and are not completely available for warmaking. There are secondary resource consumptions after the wounded get to safe havens, too, as they have to consume time and resources while healing, such as food, medicine, time and attention and protection.
Prisoners are a potential source for information about what happened on the battlefield and intelligence relating to what might happen next or might be planned. Presented with hypothetical scenarios, they can help model the thought process of the enemy and inform on what positions or assets the enemy sees as vital, what they might see as superfluous, and what tools or tactics they might be most willing to use. Then, they can be a kind of chip for the return of your own prisoners when hostilities cease. If your prisoner is dead, you get none of that.
I'd rather have thousands and thousands of prisoners (hell, hundreds of thousands) to deal with (and the US/NATO coalition has the capacity to deal with that kind of load) than have to expend twice the amount of ammunition, blood and battlefield assets to ensure their demise while fighting when time and attention is most precious. Prisoners taken and removed far from the battlespace are not a threat, and they are out of a commander's way as he gains control over terrain and projects his force into new areas.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
... precise surgical removal of heads, on their captive, without applying any anesthesia ...
Now which one is more BRUTAL ???
Even if all the prisoners had been caught red-handed beheading people, that still wouldn't justify torturing them.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The waterboarding done by the Japanese involved putting a hose down peoples throats, filling their stomachs to the bursting point and then hitting the victims stomach with sticks until it actually did burst.
Not even close to the same thing.
But still cruel, ineffective at actually getting reliable information and likely used on people that didn't have the information they sought and we (US citizens) should be fucking ashamed of our government and ourselves by proxy.
Yeah, some of us are. But it's not clear how a mere citizen can do anything effective about it without becoming one of the victims ourselves.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
People who conduct hostilities without uniforms are either (a) resisting an invasion before the regular army shows up (see the appropriate Hague convention for this), or (b) criminals. Criminals are not normally subject to punishment without a trial, and they are normally protected from cruel and unusual punishments after (and torture is, by definition, cruel).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Evil doesn't necessarily get results. Sometimes people do evil things for other reasons. In this case, there's a whole lot of good evidence stretching back over centuries that torture is a really bad way to get information. I don't call that getting results.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes