Posted on 12/15/2007 12:27:15 PM PST by dhot
We have the latest bombshell, or turd in the punch bowl, depending on your point of view: the intelligence community has destroyed tapes of our guys using “harsh” questioning techniques on terrorists.
OK, now listen: CAN WE FIRST STOP TAPING our guys doing things? Do we not get that if you tape it CHANCES ARE IT WILL APPEAR ON TELEVISION AND THE INTERNET?
How stupid can we be? I will answer that. VERY.
However, the debate should not be about the destruction of the tapes; clearly, that is massively stupid and wrong. The debate we should be having is whether, as a nation, use should even be using torture methods. And, let me say this upfront: Waterboarding is 100 percent torture.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
So, one of the 22 national intelligence agencies — in this case, the CIA — decided to destroy all evidence of the way they successfully interrogated two very bad men. I say successfully because we are told that the terrorists that were “tortured” gave up information that saved lives.
WHICH IS THE POINT - right?
We should not be more brutal to them than the are and have bee to our people. I’ve been looking for advancement, Can I pour the water????? I don’t care what they do to a terrorists to get information out of them. I remember some of our own being dragged through the streets, burned and hung. I remember Islamic scum partying in the streets right after 9/11. We have a lot to make up for and I hope it takes us many, many years to get even. Yes, I want revenge for every one of the lives lost on 9/11 X 10.
It saddens me that the “men” of this great country have turned to into sheep like this fellow Col. Hunt.
Hi N00B! :o)
The interviews are taped so the intelligence folks can review them again and again to sift through responses and get every shred of helpful data. After that, they can be destroyed, because there is no law or authority requiring they be kept forever.
Respectfully Colonel, that's bovine excrement. I have a chronic congestion problem and have found that relief can be had without drugs or surgery. The answer is the age old Yoga cleansing ritual of pouring saline solution through you nose and sinus passages. The practice has the following benefits:
* Removes mucus and pollution of the nasal passages and sinuses
* Helps to prevent respiratory tract diseases
* Daily use relieves allergies, colds and sinusitis
* Beneficial in the treatment of headaches and migraines
This is carried out with the head horizontal and rotated to the side so that salt water introduced into the upper nostril flows through the sinus passages and out the lower nostril. There is absolutely no danger of salt water entering the esophagus or lungs.
As "waterboarding" is carried out with the head lower then the torso it seems very unlikely that water would enter the lungs. It is necessary to remember to breath through your mouth while using a "Neti pot" to cleanse your sinuses and I would think the same strategy would work for "waterboarding".
The practice of Yoga is widespread and the use of salt water to cleanse your nasal passages is part of a daily ritual for millions of people worldwide. I expect that many of them are having a gentle laugh as our learned leaders attempt to define what is obstensively a harmless ritual as torture.
Regards,
GtG
PS Mayhap they would prefer it if we used warmer water?
“Waterboarding is 100 percent torture.” Then why are we torturing American Servicemembers with this technique?
When did Hunt become a RAT? He used to jump up and down and talk about blowing things up. Now he’s afraid to pour water on a terrorist.
“...gave up information that saved lives.”
Yep, that’s the point, exactly.
Did you read the entire article, or just the snippet posted here? He seemed to be advocating making an adult decision on whether or not we will do what needs to be done, which would include torture, so that those who do what needs to be done (including torture) will not be hung out to dry as they so often are now.
What a doofus!
If out elite troops can experience waterboarding as part of their training, it can't be 100% torture.
When you hurt for weeks or days and then die, that's torture.
This guy hunt is either senile or on the wrong meds. There may be a serious reason why he's retired.
Yes, saving lives (vs viewing body parts and endless jihad videos on the internet) is always satisfying.
Intelligence June 2005 Atlantic Monthly
A classic text on interrogating enemy captives offers a counterintuitive lesson on the best way to get information
by Stephen Budiansky
Truth Extraction
Six months before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison broke into public view, a small and fairly obscure private association of United States Marine Corps members posted on its Web site a document on how to get enemy POWs to talk.
The document described a situation very similar to the one the United States faces in the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan: a fanatical and implacable enemy, intense pressure to achieve quick results, a brutal war in which the old rules no longer seem to apply.
Marine Major Sherwood F. Moran, the report’s author, noted that despite the complexities and difficulties of dealing with an enemy from such a hostile and alien culture, some American interrogators consistently managed to extract useful information from prisoners. The successful interrogators all had one thing in common in the way they approached their subjects. They were nice to them.
Moran was writing in 1943, and he was describing his own, already legendary methods of interrogating Japanese prisoners of war. More than a half century later his report remains something of a cult classic for military interrogators. The Marine Corps Interrogator Translator Teams Association (MCITTA), a group of active-duty and retired Marine intelligence personnel, calls Moran’s report one of the “timeless documents” in the field and says it has long been “a standard read” for insiders. (A book about the Luftwaffe interrogator Hans Joachim Scharff, whose charm, easygoing manner, and perfect English beguiled many a captured Allied airman into revealing critical information, is another frequently cited classic in the field.) An MCITTA member says the group decided to post Moran’s report online in July of 2003, because “many others wanted to read it” and because the original document, in the Marine Corps archives, was in such poor shape that the photocopies in circulation were difficult to decipher. He denies that current events had anything to do with either the decision to post the document or the increased interest in it.
But it is hard to imagine a historical lesson that would constitute a more direct reproach to recent U.S. policies on prisoner interrogation. And there is no doubt that Moran’s report owes more than a little of its recent celebrity to the widespread disdain among experienced military interrogators for what took place at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo when ill-trained personnel were ordered to “soften up” prisoners. Since the prison scandals broke, many old hands in the business have pointed out that abusing prisoners is not simply illegal and immoral; it is also remarkably ineffective.
“The torture of suspects [at Abu Ghraib] did not lead to any useful intelligence information being extracted,” says James Corum, a professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the author of a forthcoming book on counterinsurgency warfare. “The abusers couldn’t even use the old ‘ends justify the means’ argument, because in the end there was nothing to show but a tremendous propaganda defeat for the United States.”
Corum, who recently retired as a lieutenant colonel after twenty-eight years in the Army and Reserves, mostly in military intelligence, says that Moran’s philosophy has repeatedly been affirmed in subsequent wars large and small. “Know their language, know their culture, and treat the captured enemy as a human being” is how Corum sums up Moran’s enduring lesson.
Part of why Sherwood Moran became such a legendary figure among military interrogators was his cool disregard for what he termed the standard “hard-boiled” military attitude. The brutality of the fighting in the Pacific and the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese had created a general assumption that only the sternest measures would get Japanese prisoners to divulge anything. Moran countered that in his and others’ experience, strong-arm tactics simply did not work. Stripping a prisoner of his dignity, treating him as a still-dangerous threat, forcing him to stand at attention and flanking him with guards throughout his interrogation—in other words, emphasizing that “we are his to-be-respected and august enemies and conquerors”—invariably backfired. It made the prisoner “so conscious of his present position and that he was a captured soldier vs. enemy intelligence” that it “played right into [the] hands” of those who were determined not to give away anything of military importance.
In his report (written in the form of a letter of advice to interpreters newly assigned to interrogation duty) Moran stressed that he would usually begin an interrogation by taking almost the opposite tack.
I often tell a prisoner right at the start what my attitude is! I consider a prisoner (i.e. a man who has been captured and disarmed and in a perfectly safe place) as out of the war, out of the picture, and thus, in a way, not an enemy … Notice that … I used the word “safe.” That is the point: get the prisoner to a safe place, where even he knows … that it is all over. Then forget, as it were, the “enemy” stuff, and the “prisoner” stuff. I tell them to forget it, telling them I am talking as a human being to a human being.
Every soldier, Moran observed, has a “story” he desperately wants to tell. The interrogator’s job is to provide the atmosphere that allows the prisoner to tell it.
Begin by asking him things about himself. Make him and his troubles the center of the stage, not you and your questions of war problems. If he is not wounded or tired out, you can ask him if he has been getting enough to eat; if he likes Western-style food … You can ask if he has had cigarettes, if he is being treated all right, etc. If he is wounded you have a rare chance. Begin to talk about his wounds. Ask if the doctor or corpsman has attended to him. Have him show you his wounds or burns. (They will like to do this!) …
On [one] occasion a soldier was brought in. A considerable chunk of his shinbone had been shot away. In such bad shape was he that we broke off in the middle of the interview to have his leg redressed. We were all interested in the redressing, in his leg, it was almost a social affair! And the point to note is that we really were interested, and not pretending to be interested in order to get information out of him. This was the prisoner who called out to me when I was leaving after that first interview, “Won’t you please come and talk to me every day.” (And yet people are continually asking us, “Are the Japanese prisoners really willing to talk?”)
Moran spoke fluent Japanese, but more important, he was thoroughly familiar with Japanese culture, having spent forty years in Japan as a missionary. He used this knowledge for one of his standard gambits: making a prisoner homesick. “This line has infinite possibilities,” he explained. “If you know anything about Japanese history, art, politics, athletics, famous places, department stores, eating places, etc. etc. a conversation may be relatively interminable.” Moran emphasized that a detailed knowledge of technical military terms and the like was less important than a command of idiomatic phrases and cultural references that allow the interviewer to achieve “the first and most important victory”—getting “into the mind and into the heart” of the prisoner and achieving an “intellectual and spiritual” rapport with him.
Moran’s whole approach—and Hans Joachim Scharff’s, too—was built on the assumption that few if any prisoners are likely to possess decisive information about imminent plans. (And as one former Marine interrogator says, even if a prisoner does have information of the “ticking bomb” variety—where the nuke is going to go off an hour from now, in the classic if overworked example—under duress or torture he is most likely to try to run out the clock by making something up rather than reveal the truth.) Rather, it is the small and seemingly inconsequential bits of evidence that prisoners may give away once they start talking—about training, weapons, commanders, tactics—that, when assembled into a larger mosaic, build up the most complete and valuable picture of the enemy’s organization, intentions, and methods.
Moran’s report had an immediate impact. The Navy and the Marines recruited second-generation Japanese-Americans to teach an intensive one-year language course for interrogators that included a strong emphasis on Japanese culture. James Corum notes that the graduates of this course were among the most effective interrogators in the Pacific Island campaigns of 1944 and 1945: Marine interrogators deployed to the Marianas in June of 1944 were able to supply their commanders with the complete Japanese order of battle within forty-eight hours of landing on Saipan and Tinian.
In contrast, in late 2002 the military’s Southern Command had so few interrogators and interpreters that it was forced to employ inexperienced and untrained civilian contractors to perform these jobs at Guantánamo. The officer in charge of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib had no interrogation experience himself and no skilled interrogators or interpreters working underneath him. He, too, turned to civilian contractors. Government auditors criticized these deficiencies in early 2004 and noted that several of the firms that supplied civilian contractors had no experience in such work. Yet the shortage of military interrogators continues, and the Department of Defense continues to employ people outside the military for some of this work. “They let a bunch of out-of-control contractors, CIA freelancers, untrained military-intelligence people, et cetera get turned loose under the promise and pressure of getting quick results,” Corum told me.
One of the most striking points Moran made was that those interrogators who tried the hardest to break down the morale of POWs were actually revealing their own fear—”fear that the prisoner will take advantage of you and your friendship.” This, he noted, was “the same idea that a foreman must swear at his construction gang in order to get work out of them.”
Of course there always is the danger that some types will take advantage of your friendliness. This is true of any phase of life, whether you are a teacher, a judge, an athletic trainer, a parent. But there is some risk in any method. But this is where the interpreter’s character comes in … You can’t fool with a man of real character …
Moran was saying that an interrogator who is genuinely tough has the confidence to know that he will always keep the upper hand, even while being nice. “Enlightened hard-boiled-ness,” he called this attitude. And he concluded that “strange as it may seem to say so,” the most important characteristic of a successful interrogator is not his experience or even his linguistic knowledge; it is “his own temperament” and “his own character.”
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200506/budiansky.
Thank you for reading the entire article.
I’m surprised at the number of people here who didn’t.
More from the article...
So, our government must have the discussion and decide whether this country will use torture or not. I hope we use this terrible tool only as a last resort. I hope we have the guts to back our people up and to carry this fight to the enemy. However, we must decide so that our own government stops burning tapes. We are for sure better than that.
We are in war with murderers, protected by countries who are not burdened with our ethics and beliefs. We have to decide how we really want to fight them. To date, we have not, and we all have witnessed, and our soldiers have experienced first hand, the result of what happens when you fight with one hand tied behind our back. We, as a nation, have to wake up and fight. We have to decide what kind of a nation we are going to be … and, whether it’s really worth fighting for.
We are not torturing American service members but there are times when the only way to learn how to deal with or rise above something is to experience that method and these people went into that knowing this and to the best of my knowledge were not forced. After all if nobody else used this method there would be no need to train here would there? Unfortunately we are not the only people who use this method, everybody uses this or worse, most case others use worse, I will bet anything we are the most humane at any form of “torture”
Yeah, it is. I'd start out with the water boarding and go from there. These scum deserve no sympathy from us.
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