CIA torture report could ignite unrest, Kerry warns

Sleep deprivation and confined quarters are used because they're tried and tested to be effective. They worked in Vietnam and they still work today. Whether it's torture is in the imagination of the beholder, isn't it? They've also used power drills on prisoners and that's more like traditional torture. Also '___'-type chemicals that are intended to invoke terror and confusion. All of which is intended to break down the mental resistance of prisoners and make them deliver information.

At what point does the torturer feel satisfied that the tortured has disclosed everything? How does that part work out? Do they give it some more to be sure? At which point does the tortured start telling the torturers what they want to hear?

I get that people don't see sleep deprivation as torture, but then miss asking the question: why do they use it at all? Personally, I do see it as torture. It's recognised as such by the UN and the US maintains a quibble/loophole to withhold itself from signing up to the full letter of the international laws against torture.

Kerry can worry about 'timings' and people in other nations getting the wrong idea. I wonder if it's made better by not letting people know at all? If nobody gets to know and the US just denies it, won't that make everything above board and alright??

a reply to: Shamrock6

Abandoning the principle of reason, and giving up on the moral and ethical highground is way too dangerous.

According to that logic Russia, or China, or some other nation could conduct an attack within the United States, kill a few thousand citizens, with less than 2% of the victims being high-profile targets, and all the rest being civilians, children and "alleged" combatants, and THEN they'd just say: You did the same. Deal with it.

See? An eye for an eye is madness.

a reply to: tothetenthpower

You are not going to get a simple "yes" or "no" answer out of me, it's complicated. I refuse to painted as an apologist.

Take all the families who have lost their brothers, sisters and children to the brutal and disgusting acts of terrorists; beheaded, limbs torn off, starvation, etc. Put them in the same room with the terrorist responsible for their loved ones death. You will see people do things that are far worse than what we put them through during an interrogation.

Not to mention, interrogating a known terrorist doesn't fit into the "eye for an eye" category. Since I cannot validate the success, outcome or value of information that comes from these interrogations, I cannot say for sure that I condone them all.

If done correctly, they aren't designed to punish, they are designed to crack. We get information in return that could lead us to PREVENT more brutal attacks on innocent civilians, if the US was actually doing it's job correctly. See the trade-off there?

I'm trying to hang out in the grey area of all this. I don't agree with the US or most of anything it does. I do not believe people should be tortured. But you have heard the voices at least on this site before, "if that were my son or daughter, I would be arrested for murder!" Let me know how you'd feel meeting the convicted murderer of your son or daughter in a private room. Justice comes in many forms they say.

What the US is SUPPOSED to do is use these interrogations to save more lives. Learn the location of hidden POW's. Locate a hidden missile silo or weapons of mass destruction cache. I can see them getting overzealous and forgetting when the right time is to turn the heat up. The tactics are more than likely being abused and that in itself is very wrong.

It gets better. Wait until it comes to light that there are companies, not small ones either, that do "contract interrogation" for the agencies that don't have the aegis or charter for it. And hell, even CIA uses "contract interrogation" houses, they don't have enough trained personnel.

Great thread.
I think it's telling when the politicians
worry about repercussions and not
state sanctioned torture.

a reply to: eisegesis

You will see people do things that are far worse than what we put them through during an interrogation.

That's not a good enough answer for me. If my neighbor beats his wife and I got out there and kill him in cold blood, I'm no better than he was.

Sure, I have the supposed 'Moral Authority' to act and stop what's going on, but at the end of the day, I've used the same tactics that I abhor in order to fit my current emotional state.

If done correctly, they aren't designed to punish, they are designed to crack. We get information in return that could lead us to PREVENT more brutal attacks on innocent civilians, if the US was actually doing it's job correctly. See the trade-off there?

If we didn't already know, that information received from torture is often ineffective, than I would agree with you.

To me it's not worth it, even if it's sucecssfull once, considering the hundreds if not thousands of people who are subjected to these 'enhanced' interrogation techniques.

And besides those facts, if they weren't as bad, or as illegal as the Government would like to claim, then they would have NO problem talking about it and owning up to it. As well as proving the methods work by disclosing which pieces of information led to what successes within the actual theater of war.

They don't do that.

Which just leads me to believe they just did whatever THEY considered necessary without any regard for anything else.

~Tenth

While I do not support torture of terror suspects on the whole, let me run a hypothetical situation by the members:

The US government has credible information that a nuclear device has been planted in New York City and will be detonated within 24 hours.
A suspect is captured and has been linked solidly to the planned attack. He has been questioned and will not talk.
It is left for you to make the decision....
Torture him to save 100,000 lives of innocent men, women and children?
Or just hold him in a roomy cell and wait for the device to detonate?

a reply to: butcherguy

you must have seen that movie i lniked to.

i say bring on the water

I think it's going to be an interesting spring and summer. How can anyone defend this or try to minimize it? Sleep deprivation isn't torture? It's okay because they're terrorists?

We're not talking about denying people naps or one night of sleep. We're talking about up to seventy-two hours, during which time a PERSON is constantly being screamed at, slapped in the face, switched between being in total darkness and blinding light, blasted with loud music, water-boarded, stripped naked while interrogators point and laugh... how do we even know how many actual terrorists we have versus people falsely confessing just to stop the torture.

If you can't have sympathy or empathy for the particular people that we have at Guantanamo right now, try to remember that the US government only need to 'believe' that a person is 'belligerent' (with no clear legal definition of what that is) toward the United States in order to grab them up and employ these techniques. No arrest, no trial, not even if you're American.

pdf on the "Leave no marks" enhanced torture techniques.

I don`t believe that either one of them is telling the truth, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
If congress didn`t know the full extent of what the CIA was doing it`s because they didn`t want to know.
This way the CIA gets to do what they want to do,congress can plausible deny they knew about it and nobody gets burned when the truth comes out.
They`ll say it was all just a misunderstanding,nothing criminal going on,no harm no foul.
congress probably told the CIA :
"do what you have to do but we don`t want to know any of the details.we have to maintain plausible deniability so that when this gets out we can`t be held accountable."

should we be torturing people?
I`ll just say this about that topic:

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

a reply to: butcherguy

If I were the terrorist in your make-believe scenario I would likely tell them anything just to make the torture stop.

That's the problem with torture. One can never trust the information gathered by such techniques. If I was being waterboarded I would tell them I was the ghost of Jimmy Hoffa just to make them stop, see my point?

the US gov is not the first to torture people and will not be the last.
i dont think it is something that will ever stop.

ever hear of the pear of anguish
en.wikipedia.org...

some of the stuff in here is nute.
the breast ripper, thumb screws, the knee splitter

www.viralnova.com...

it will always happen

a reply to: eisegesis

The terrorist are ok with torturing people, why treat them any better?

What kind of people are we if we torture? Why pretend that our ways are worth defending when in reality we're no better than anyone else?

Torture crosses a line. It's a (supposedly) useful tool and an abomination - same as nuclear weapons

originally posted by: CagliostroTheGreat
a reply to: butcherguy

If I were the terrorist in your make-believe scenario I would likely tell them anything just to make the torture stop.

That's the problem with torture. One can never trust the information gathered by such techniques. If I was being waterboarded I would tell them I was the ghost of Jimmy Hoffa just to make them stop, see my point?

Indeed. The only way to know if they've actually got a terrorist is to see if they info they get out them pans out... and if it doesn't well they've got to know something and they start all over again.

a reply to: tothetenthpower

Senator Who Put Pentagon Papers Into Public Record Urges Udall To Do Same With Torture Report

Mark Udall Promises America Will "Be Disgusted" at CIA Torture Report

What happened broke faith in the Constitution. It’s made our challenge much greater when it comes to facing the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. And it is morally repugnant. When this report is declassified, people will abhor what they read. They’re gonna be disgusted. They’re gonna be appalled. They’re gonna be shocked at what we did. But it will lay a foundation whereby we don’t do this in the future. That’s been my goal. That’s been my mission.

I understand and support Udall. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he went missing - this is that kind of story

I also understand Kerry's position. We made this bed and now we are going to lie in it - but this is not going to go well

originally posted by: tothetenthpower
So John Kerry wants to make sure that we don't 'offend' anybody with this new report.

Source

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry has asked Sen. Dianne Feinstein to "consider" the timing of the expected release of a long-awaited report on the CIA's harsh interrogation techniques.

Kerry called Feinstein to discuss the broader implications of the timing of publicly releasing a declassified summary of her committee's report "because a lot is going on in the world, and he wanted to make sure that foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Friday.

She said Kerry during the call reiterated the support of the administration for the release of the report on detention and interrogation, but "he also made clear that the timing is of course her choice."

I don't like when they use 'unamed sources', but:

According to many U.S. officials who have read it, the document includes disturbing new details about the CIA's use of such techniques as sleep deprivation, confinement in small spaces, humiliation and the simulated drowning process known as waterboarding. President Barack Obama has acknowledged, "We tortured some folks."

That last line is sickening.

Something I find very interesting is this quote from Jose Rodriguez:

In an op-ed posted Friday on the Washington Post website, Jose Rodriguez, who ran the interrogation program as a top CIA operations officer, repeated longstanding assertions that Democratic lawmakers who are now criticizing it were fully briefed on it at the time.

"In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, lawmakers urged us to do everything possible to prevent another attack on our soil," he wrote. "Members of Congress and the administration were nearly unanimous in their desire that the CIA do all that it could to debilitate and destroy al-Qaeda. The CIA got the necessary approvals to do so and kept Congress briefed throughout. But as our successes grew, some lawmakers' recollections shrank in regard to the support they once offered."

Basically the CIA is saying that they gave ALL the information to congress while this was going on. Funny how we never heard about any of this. Funny how the secret detention centers were classified and weren't admitted to until other governments fessed up about housing CIA secret prisons.

However, Feinstein, in remarks on the Senate floor in March, said the CIA in briefings to Congress had fundamentally mischaracterized the nature of the interrogations, which she called "chilling," ''brutal" and "un-American."

"The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us," Feinstein said.

Now I'm not one to trust any politician. But if you make me choose between a guy who ran a secret CIA rendition program, vs Diane Feinstein...I"m probably going to believe the ladder.

~Tenth

Those who instituted or executed torture need to be in prison, period.

War crimes are war crimes. Waterboarding has been a war crime and torture since WWII. Japanese officers were convicted of war crimes for doing it to American soldiers. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Bush, needs to be locked away along with his cohort.

originally posted by: Spiramirabilis
a reply to: eisegesis

The terrorist are ok with torturing people, why treat them any better?

What kind of people are we if we torture? Why pretend that our ways are worth defending when in reality we're no better than anyone else?

Torture crosses a line. It's a (supposedly) useful tool and an abomination - same as nuclear weapons

Exactly, and torture is considered a war crime and is illegal under international law.

If we are torturing people then we are violating the very universal, "god-derived," and inalienable human rights we claim to embody as a nation outlined in the Bill of Rights and Constitution.

Those Americans who support torture either are hypocrites or don't actually understand those principles.

originally posted by: eisegesis
Seriously, since when were we so sympathetic towards terrorists and their ilk? You would think they have their own civil rights movement or something. The problem I see is using these tactics on "alleged" terrorists rather than known terrorists. They deserve different treatment.

First we were told to remove offensive material off of social media that might offend terrorists, now we are told that our interrogation techniques are un-American?

What should we do? Feed them Big Macs until they become overly bloated and confess?

No, first, we signed agreements and treaties after WWII outlawing torture. Waterboarding was used by the Japanese on Americans in WWII, and those officers were convicted of war crimes. Did you know that?

Second, YES, those interrogation techniques ARE un-American.

Violating due process IS against all of our American principles. The Constitution and Bill of RIghts specifically state that the human rights outlined are universal and no government can take them away. NO government, including the US, has the right to violate anybody's rights, including people of other countries.

When you violate due process and torture, you are no better than all of the supposedly un-democratic and evil countries the US is always claiming to be fighting.

Finally, do you really still believe that these wars are for justice and fighting "terrorists?"

Ok, I'm bowing out of this one. I will agree to disagree.

To all terrorist sympathizers,

A terrorist KNOWN to have murdered, tortured, raped and mutilated men, women and children has been captured. YOU are asked to interrogate them in order to find the whereabouts of a small village population stolen from there homes who are being held captive. Eventually, these village people will suffer the same fate as the others, death in a thousand painful ways.

What do you do? Tickle them into confession?

a reply to: Quetzalcoatl14

Those Americans who support torture either are hypocrites or don't actually understand those principles.

Morality is relative. When people have an enemy they sometimes forget themselves - and everything they believe in