Posted on 04/27/2012 2:18:49 AM PDT by Olog-hai
A nearly three-year-long investigation by Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats is expected to find there is little evidence the harsh "enhanced interrogation techniques" the CIA used on high-value prisoners produced counter-terrorism breakthroughs.
People familiar with the inquiry said committee investigators, who have been poring over records from the administration of President George W. Bush, believe they do not substantiate claims by some Bush supporters that the harsh interrogations led to counter-terrorism coups.
The backers of such techniques, which include "water-boarding," sleep deprivation and other practices critics call torture, maintain they have led to the disruption of major terror plots and the capture of al Qaeda leaders.
One official said investigators found "no evidence" such enhanced interrogations played "any significant role" in the years-long intelligence operations which led to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last May by U.S. Navy SEALs.
President Barack Obama and his aides have largely sought to avoid revisiting Bush administration controversies. But the debate over the effectiveness of enhanced interrogations, which human rights advocates condemn as torture, is resurfacing, in part thanks to a new book by a former top CIA official. …
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
The report is just a LIE. The reason of course is political like anything else with the socialist democrats. For these maggots power and politics trump everything else including national security.
In a well planned interogation, when a prisoner refuses to talk, you can extract no information. If a prisoner talks, even if they lie, they provide information. The more you talk, the harder it is to keep the lie straight and to keep nuggets of truth out of the lie. The primary purpose of enhanced interogation is to establish in the prisoners mind that they will talk, there is no avoiding it. Then the skilled interrogator can go to work on them.
The driver who provided the first break in the trail to Osama did not do so during torture. He slipped up weeks after he started talking.
I will wait for the Minority Report that will provide the TRUTH.
Kinda like the Zimmerman and Trayvon Media episode.
so exactly why is Abu Garhib still open for business? Why isn’t the media howling about that daily and why is the Ego-In-Chief breaking his campaign promise to close it? Must be another “run of bad luck.”
If any information obtained from these three in these sessions resulted in actionable intelligence we know it did work.
Actually, the downside (according to what I know about communist torture of our POW’s) is not that people give you the information you want to hear, it is that they give you everything including the truth, things you don’t want to hear, and things that are lies.
It makes it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.
But, everyone breaks and talks. Everyone, except for some extremely rare examples.
The bottom line, though, is this “report” is not worth the electrons it took to send it over the Internet.
This would have as much significance as hearing “Democrats find little evidence that lowering taxes has any positive effect.”
I can assure all of you that anyone who is worked on the Waterboard with earnest will tell anyone everything they know.
Every time.
No human could resist a concerted effort to extract information under that duress.
Nobody.
So, if this is the contention of the Senate Committee, either the captured persons didn't KNOW anything, or the Senate folks are lying.
It can be only one or the other.
The point that some made is that a person undergoing torture will say "anything" to make it stop. But "anything" also includes the truth.
This is why torture should not be used UNLESS YOU CAN VERIFY THE ANSWERS through other means. In the famous "hidden time bomb" scenario, you make clear that the torture will continue until the bomb is actually found. In other circumstances, you are not satisfied until you obtain actionable intelligence: location of safe houses, caches of weapons, secret bank account numbers, etc.
Then why the Senate Study to prove what is already known historically?
I would say that torture is just an extreme version of coercion and or intimidation which seeks to force people to do things INCLUDING extracting the answer you want; however, that does not mean that you will not get any truthful answers.
The history of coercion and or intimidation shows that people can be forced to do what they otherwise would not INCLUDING revealing information.
The definition of torture rather than being the extreme has evolved to include what is not actually in the extreme including the "more effective, less distasteful methods" you suggest are the alternative.
Exactly.
Enhanced techniques work. It is as simple as that.
Depends on how you do it.
If you do it willy-nilly and just ask questions where you fire away on questions you have no clue as to the answer, that is not helpful.
However, throw in questions where you know the answer. . .that is the key.
Interrogate and ask questions where you know the answer and ask questions where you do not know the answer and the prisoner hasn’t a clue if he will be caught in a lie.
This confuses the prisoner because he doesn’t KNOW what you know, and therefore risks being punished even more if he is caught in a lie.
It is keeping the prisoner mentally off-balance, never really knowing what is known or not that makes the technique effective.
Did they talk to former head of counter-terrorism Jose Rodriguez who in the May 2, 2011 issue of Time Magazine said enhanced interrogations of KSM lead to the eventual locating and killing of Bin Laden?? And many in the intel. community agree waterboarding KSM also stopped a 9-11 style attack on L.A.
This Senate panel was just a conclusion looking for an investigation. They knew what they were going to conclude before they ever even started.
The conclusion was written before the first hearing was held.
Well I don't agree with the first part of your statement but I do agree the U.S. doesn't need to use torture (but should always reserve the right to do so). That is why we use non-torture means for interrogation such as water-boarding.
If these buffoons really believe that torture isn’t effective, they aren’t doing it right.
I think someone needs to break out a battery on these dumocrats.
This statement is absurd on its face. Both are definitively torture. They are inhuman and unAmerican.
Second give me examples of the more effective methods.
Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1
It states:
PROHIBITION AGAINST USE OF FORCE
The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor. condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear. However, the use of force is not to be confused with psychological ploys, verbal trickery, or other nonviolent and noncoercive ruses used by the interrogator in questioning hesitant or uncooperative sources.
The psychological techniques and principles outlined should neither be confused with, nor construed to be synonymous with, unauthorized techniques such as brainwashing, mental torture, or any other form of mental coercion to include drugs. These techniques and principles are intended to serve as guides in obtaining the willing cooperation of a source. The absence of threats in interrogation is intentional, as their enforcement and use normally constitute violations of international law and may result in prosecution under the UCMJ.
Additionally, the inability to carry out a threat of violence or force renders an interrogator ineffective should the source challenge the threat. Consequently, from both legal and moral viewpoints, the restrictions established by international law, agreements, and customs render threats of force, violence, and deprivation useless as interrogation techniques.
******************
I am a Christian, a conservative and an American. Torture violates all three of those things. Cheney happens to be a great American, but he and Bush are wrong on torture. It has caused net/net more harm than good to America and American interests.
Hosenball was a close ally of CIA marxist turncoat Philip Agee, and was thrown out of England in the 1970’s as a threat to their security.
Under no circumstances is he to be trusted. I know that he has done some interesting writing for Newsweek, but a lot of it was innoccous in terms of hurting the communists or the jihadists.
Along with Hosenball, so-called journalist William “Big” Arkin (Institute for Policy Studies, Wash. Post columnist) is another “intelligence” journalist who is definitely an enemy of America. His exposure of reported American nuclear weapons stations across the world gave the KGB/GRU a intelligence coup that would have taken them years to gather by themselves. His other stories also did a lot of harm to America.
Another guy I don’t trust is the Wash. Post’s military/intelligence writer Walter Pincus. We have had a debate here at FR years ago about Pincus’s background, but instinct, and over 40 years of writing/participating in internal security affairs has raised my Alert Antennae to DefCong 5 on this guy. Remember, he was the writer who published the first information on the “Neutron Bomb” (i.e. Enhanced Radiation Bomb) that led to the massive Soviet/Communist Bloc and US Anti-Defense Lobby protests on the development of this weapon, as well as against the stationing of Soviet tank busting and retaliatory weapons such as the Pershing and Cruise missiles in England/Germany, etc.
The Soviets and now Russians, are the masters of “disinformation” , “misinformation”, “white lies, gray lies, and black lies” re propaganda they get published, often by paid KGB sympathizers, in the foreign press (Blitz, for one).
If you know who to watch, then you gain the advantage of being on guard against their lies against America as well as their exposing of national security programs and systems.
in other news, Juan McCain perform acrobatic feat by signing senate torture document with his head up his @$$.
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