Red Cross Torture Report

[Lemur]

what is torture, and what is a traditional interrogation?

Traditional interrogation, as perfected by the FBI and MI5 involves coopting the detainee, making him think that you are there with his best interests at heart, and then squeezing him dry. It's quite effective.

As for "what is torture," you have read the rest of the thread, right?

[Furunculus]

i've flicked thru it, and i've seen people complaining about the techniques which obama graciously admitted his nation has partaken in, and i've been left unconcerned by those revelations.

people like the rest of you guys that get your knickers in a twist over a little waterboarding are precisely the reason why i have no objection to beardy fellows with cemtex and flight plans getting a little rough treatment when caught.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

nevermind

[Furunculus]

nevermind

what?

[Tribesman]

Well said Alexander

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

what?

I retracted something silly, and Tribesman compliments me.

[Lemur]

Finally, a mainstream news source points out the blindingly obvious, that the SERE techniques used on detainees were duplications of the torture techniques used by the North Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese. About time.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

Today, asked how it happened, Bush administration officials are finger-pointing. Some blame the C.I.A., while some former agency officials blame the Justice Department or the White House.

Philip D. Zelikow, who worked on interrogation issues as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 and 2006, said the flawed decision-making badly served Mr. Bush and the country.

“Competent staff work could have quickly canvassed relevant history, insights from the best law enforcement and military interrogators, and lessons from the painful British and Israeli experience,” Mr. Zelikow said. “Especially in a time of great stress, walking into this minefield, the president was entitled to get the most thoughtful and searching analysis our government could muster.”

-edit-

The Senate Armed Services Committee just released its newly declassified report on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody (PDF warning). Haven't read it yet (and it's hundreds of pages, so I may never get around to it). An interesting tidbit:

On October 2, 2002, Lieutenant Colonel Morgan Banks, the senior Army SERE psychologist warned against using SERE training techniques during interrogations in an email to personnel at GTMO, writing that:

[T]he use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects... When individuals are gradually exposed to increasing levels of discomfort, it is more common for them to resist harder... If individuals are put under enough discomfort, i.e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. This will increase the amount of information they tell the interrogator, but it does not mean the information is accurate. In fact, it usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain... Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low. The likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the level of resistance in a detainee is very high... (p. 53).

[Furunculus]

Finally, a mainstream news source points out the blindingly obvious, that the SERE techniques used on detainees were duplications of the torture techniques used by the North Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese. About time.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

Today, asked how it happened, Bush administration officials are finger-pointing. Some blame the C.I.A., while some former agency officials blame the Justice Department or the White House.

Philip D. Zelikow, who worked on interrogation issues as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 and 2006, said the flawed decision-making badly served Mr. Bush and the country.

“Competent staff work could have quickly canvassed relevant history, insights from the best law enforcement and military interrogators, and lessons from the painful British and Israeli experience,” Mr. Zelikow said. “Especially in a time of great stress, walking into this minefield, the president was entitled to get the most thoughtful and searching analysis our government could muster.”

-edit-

The Senate Armed Services Committee just released its newly declassified report on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody (PDF warning). Haven't read it yet (and it's hundreds of pages, so I may never get around to it). An interesting tidbit:

On October 2, 2002, Lieutenant Colonel Morgan Banks, the senior Army SERE psychologist warned against using SERE training techniques during interrogations in an email to personnel at GTMO, writing that:

[T]he use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects... When individuals are gradually exposed to increasing levels of discomfort, it is more common for them to resist harder... If individuals are put under enough discomfort, i.e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. This will increase the amount of information they tell the interrogator, but it does not mean the information is accurate. In fact, it usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain... Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low. The likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the level of resistance in a detainee is very high... (p. 53).

good read.

certainly gross incompetence involved if they are using ineffective interrogation techniques that were known to be ineffective. if that includes waterboarding so be it.

[Swoosh So]

i've flicked thru it, and i've seen people complaining about the techniques which obama graciously admitted his nation has partaken in, and i've been left unconcerned by those revelations.

people like the rest of you guys that get your knickers in a twist over a little waterboarding are precisely the reason why i have no objection to beardy fellows with cemtex and flight plans getting a little rough treatment when caught.

That makes no sense at all.

[LittleGrizzly]

people like the rest of you guys that get your knickers in a twist over a little waterboarding are precisely the reason why i have no objection to beardy fellows with cemtex and flight plans getting a little rough treatment when caught.

TBH i read this one of two ways...

I support rough treatment (like waterboarding) because people get upset about it... which doesn't make to much sense unless your someone who argues for the sake of winding other people up...

or

I support rough treatment (stuff worse than waterboarding) because people get upset about waterboarding... can take this one of two ways... either your a really big wind up merchant... or you support harsher torture because everyone else supports none at all.. thus to make up for everyone else's moderation you make yourself far more extreme...

I think you were right that it would be terrible to live in a society that approves of torture, guess i should just be more thankful other britons put more thought into the subject...

[Xiahou]

Well, it looks like KSM has gotten a sponsorship deal out of all this.

[KukriKhan]

Well, it looks like KSM has gotten a sponsorship deal out of all this.

I don' care who ya are....

tha's funny!!

-edit-
To the topic: I just want it to be a true statement of fact, like I thought it had been for decades: "We are American. We get tortured sometimes. But we don't torture. Ever. Because torture and individual liberty are incompatible."

I don't give a flying figleaf for the argument that such acts, perpetrated by MY agents, got valuable information quicker, or more actionably than standard interrogations. That's irrelevant to the strangling of the soul of my country that such brutality, performed in my name, wreaks upon us. When I take a life, sure: what does it do to the human I killed, or their family, or society or the world - but also, what did it do to me, the killer (or in this case, the torturer)?

And the folks who put forward the atrocities committed by the enemy (whomsoever today's is) as justification? I can only sadly stare in rheumy-eyed, slack-jawed disbelief at the lack of understanding for the principles that motivated the sacrifices made by our revolutionaries.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

You mean the revolutionaries who tarred and feathered tax collectors?

[Furunculus]

people like the rest of you guys that get your knickers in a twist over a little waterboarding are precisely the reason why i have no objection to beardy fellows with cemtex and flight plans getting a little rough treatment when caught.

TBH i read this one of two ways...

I support rough treatment (like waterboarding) because people get upset about it... which doesn't make to much sense unless your someone who argues for the sake of winding other people up...

or

I support rough treatment (stuff worse than waterboarding) because people get upset about waterboarding... can take this one of two ways... either your a really big wind up merchant... or you support harsher torture because everyone else supports none at all.. thus to make up for everyone else's moderation you make yourself far more extreme...

I think you were right that it would be terrible to live in a society that approves of torture, guess i should just be more thankful other britons put more thought into the subject...

Government will ALWAYS have to do nasty things, and given the nature of Gov't they will do nasty things to the general populace unless the general populace consistently reacts with horror and revulsion when such activity occurs.

Therefore:
I agree with the UK's interventionist foreign policy and therefore recognise that the UK will accumulate many state & non-state enemies.
I support the secret use of effective interrogation techniques against enemies of the state, even if they are distasteful to me.
I recognise that many of the brutal torture techniques provide zero certainty for interrogation purposes, and are thus ineffective.
I realise that the general public will find it very difficult to distinguish between effective/distasteful & ineffective/brutal interrogation methods.
I accept that the general public do not always make rational choices about the public good which is why we elect governments to make those tough choices.
I encourage public uproar about distasteful & brutal interrogation techniques as the most effective ward against the incipient totalitarian state.

Is that clearer?

[Incongruous]

Government will ALWAYS have to do nasty things, and given the nature of Gov't they will do nasty things to the general populace unless the general populace consistently reacts with horror and revulsion when such activity occurs.

Therefore:
I agree with the UK's interventionist foreign policy and therefore recognise that the UK will accumulate many state & non-state enemies.
I support the secret use of effective interrogation techniques against enemies of the state, even if they are distasteful to me.
I recognise that many of the brutal torture techniques provide zero certainty for interrogation purposes, and are thus ineffective.
I realise that the general public will find it very difficult to distinguish between effective/distasteful & ineffective/brutal interrogation methods.
I accept that the general public do not always make rational choices about the public good which is why we elect governments to make those tough choices.
I encourage public uproar about distasteful & brutal interrogation techniques as the most effective ward against the incipient totalitarian state.

Is that clearer?

No, we do not elect government in order that they may evict fellow subjects from their homelands, we do not elect governments to declare war without concensus, we do not elect governments to abuse the use of Royal perogative to stifle High Court rulings. We do not believe in the government taking blatant liberties with its powers under the pretext of "we know better". You're not a commie are you?

"interventionist policy"...
Oh you mean that stuff about invading countries for the sake of securing oil pipelines which our current group of Chums, the Taliban, can no longer do? Right.
Because our current adventure in the desert has gone sooo well!

The money that has been spent on Iraq could have been spent on the people who actually pay taxes, you know, some of those poor people who don't have much, who live off the crap which is frozen food and multiple jobs.
The only people who support the war in Asia are those whom don't struggle with the black holes which are Public schools and council estates.

[Furunculus]

No, we do not elect government in order that they may evict fellow subjects from their homelands, we do not elect governments to declare war without concensus, we do not elect governments to abuse the use of Royal perogative to stifle High Court rulings. We do not believe in the government taking blatant liberties with its powers under the pretext of "we know better". You're not a commie are you?

"interventionist policy"...
Oh you mean that stuff about invading countries for the sake of securing oil pipelines which our current group of Chums, the Taliban, can no longer do? Right.
Because our current adventure in the desert has gone sooo well!

The money that has been spent on Iraq could have been spent on the people who actually pay taxes, you know, some of those poor people who don't have much, who live off the crap which is frozen food and multiple jobs.
The only people who support the war in Asia are those whom don't struggle with the black holes which are Public schools and council estates.

that's lovely, and i disagree btw, but it has nothing to do with this discussion.