"If the Detainee Dies, You're Doing it Wrong"

[Lemur]

More info coming out, contradicting Antonin Scalia's claim that 30 released Guantanamo detainees returned to the battlefield.

Seton Hall Law’s Center for Policy and Research has issued a report revealing that Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinion in Boumediene v. Bush, which accords Guantánamo detainees the right to habeas corpus review in federal court, cites inaccurate information that was retracted by its original source, the Department of Defense (DoD).

From the final report:

According to the Department of Defense’s published and unpublished data and reports, not a single released Guantánamo detainee has ever attacked any Americans.

Despite national security concerns, the Department of Defense does not have a system for tracking the conduct or even the whereabouts of released detainees.

Full report. Certainly calls into question the idea that according detainees the right to question their imprisonment will result in mass casualties on the home front.

[Lemur]

A long, detailed, well-sourced article about the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Worth a read, although it's not going to confirm or convince anybody from their positions. But it's worthwhile to read an article about a specific interrogation that names names.

A revealing passage:

Senior Federal Bureau of Investigation officials thought such methods unnecessary and unwise. Their agents got Abu Zubaydah talking without the use of force, and he revealed the central role of Mr. Mohammed in the 9/11 plot. They correctly predicted that harsh methods would darken the reputation of the United States and complicate future prosecutions. Many C.I.A. officials, too, had their doubts, and the agency used contract employees with military experience for much of the work.

Some C.I.A. officers were torn, believing the harsh treatment could be effective. Some said that only later did they understand the political cost of embracing methods the country had long shunned.

[Vladimir]

Sorry, just had to bump with a @Lemur. For old time's sake.

If you care about this topic, educate yourself. Then keep reading.

[rory_20_uk]

...and invariably yields unreliable evidence alongside significantly negative strategic impacts.

In my mind the crucial point: if one could show that there was concrete returns on torture I would probably be guardedly in favour in certain cases.

Does torture include drugging of subjects to decrease their ability to confabulate / create plausible lies?

[Ironside]

In case you've been wondering about were these "enhanched interogation methods" comes from, they are at least partially from the article “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” from 1957...

Sure it was after it passed through SERE, so the ones responsible might not known the source, but still...

Linky

[LittleGrizzly]

From the Article
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

If this is true its the hieght of hypocriscy

[drone]

If this is true its the hieght of hypocriscy

No, it's the height of stupidity. They recycled techniques from the SERE program, which were originally based on ChiCom methods to get false confessions for public relations and war crime purposes.

"Hey, everybody, I know where we can get techniques to beat false confessions out of people!"

[LittleGrizzly]

No, it's the height of stupidity.

What if we just agree its the height of both.... i mean seriously what was this idiot thinking ? how much does this idiot get paid not to think ? and how do i apply ?!

[Banquo's Ghost]

Christopher Hitchens contributes a thought-provoking piece on waterboarding - and undergoes the procedure himself to try to understand the impact.

[Fragony]

Pffffft I think I can handle that

[Tribesman]

Banquo , are you sure Hitchens didn't just go because he thought waterboarding was some new cocktail ?
When he read the blurb.....

“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.

....surely he thought it just sounded like a reallt big session .
His only shock was that they served only water .

[Xiahou]

More info coming out, contradicting Antonin Scalia's claim that 30 released Guantanamo detainees returned to the battlefield.

Seton Hall Law’s Center for Policy and Research has issued a report revealing that Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinion in Boumediene v. Bush, which accords Guantánamo detainees the right to habeas corpus review in federal court, cites inaccurate information that was retracted by its original source, the Department of Defense (DoD).

From the final report:

According to the Department of Defense’s published and unpublished data and reports, not a single released Guantánamo detainee has ever attacked any Americans.

Despite national security concerns, the Department of Defense does not have a system for tracking the conduct or even the whereabouts of released detainees.

Full report. Certainly calls into question the idea that according detainees the right to question their imprisonment will result in mass casualties on the home front.

Ex-Gitmo prisoner carries out suicide attack

Here's more from the DOD in a report dated last month that details several detainees who have done so. And this Denbeaux guy claims the DoD documents say none have ever gone on to engage in attacks?

[discovery1]

Ex-Gitmo prisoner carries out suicide attack

Here's more from the DOD in a report dated last month that details several detainees who have done so. And this Denbeaux guy claims the DoD documents say none have ever gone on to engage in attacks?

He wouldn't have done but for his time in Gitmo. REVENGE!

[Tribesman]

Xiahou read what Lemur wrote

[Ironside]

Xiahou read what Lemur wrote

Actually, according to Xiahou's link 3 of the realeased seems to been involved in attacks against US forces.

On the other hand you can consider that the "recividism rate" is around 7% according to the same paper.

[Tribesman]

Actually, according to Xiahou's link 3 of the realeased seems to been involved in attacks against US forces.

and Lemur wrote ....

Certainly calls into question the idea that according detainees the right to question their imprisonment will result in mass casualties on the home front.

and I hate to point out the obvious but Xiahous DoD report doesn't quite add up to 30 does it

[Xiahou]

and I hate to point out the obvious but Xiahous DoD report doesn't quite add up to 30 does it

Good point, it says 37, not 30.

[Tribesman]

Good point, it says 37, not 30.

and the other report makes a rather striking conclusion about what they defined as "returned to terrorism" doesn't it . In as much as the definition used to reach the 30(or 37) is absolute bollox
OMG they made a film , bloody hell they were released then arrested and held for a couple of months and released again without charge .
they is terrorists I tell ya

[Lemur]

A previously secret Red Cross report has come to light:

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law. [...]

Citing unnamed “sources familiar with the report,” Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.” Red Cross representatives were not permitted access to the secret prisons where the C.I.A. conducted interrogations, but were permitted to interview Abu Zubaydah and other high-level detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The book says the C.I.A. shared the report, which Ms. Mayer first described last year in less detail in The New Yorker, with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

[LittleGrizzly]

Even with plenty of evidence i really don't think high level goverment officials would be held accountable, the world couldn't do it and i don't think America would...

[Tribesman]

Even with plenty of evidence i really don't think high level goverment officials would be held accountable, the world couldn't do it and i don't think America would...

What about Britain ?
British forces were using methods that were specificly banned by the British army(and government) 30 years ago . Will British leaders be held accountable ?
British taxpayers are being held accountable in so far as its their money that is being used to pay compensation to the torture victims (or the victims families in cases that resulted in being tortured to death)

[LittleGrizzly]

I doubt we would charge ex leaders either, not politicians anyway.... aren't UK signed up to the world court or something similar ? i remember someone trying to bring charges through some international deal or agency we signed up for and america didn't....

[Lemur]

A little more reading:

No less destructive are the false confessions inevitably elicited from tortured detainees. The avalanche of misinformation since 9/11 has compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose chases. The coerced “confession” to the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to take one horrific example, may have been invented to protect the real murderer.

The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. Exhibit A, revisited in “The Dark Side,” is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His fabricated tales of Saddam’s biological and chemical W.M.D. — and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda — were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two F.B.I. officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: “They were killing me. I had to tell them something.” [...]

That’s why the Bush White House’s corruption in the end surpasses Nixon’s. We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all.

[FactionHeir]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/...ure/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration told the CIA in 2002 that its interrogators working abroad would not violate U.S. prohibitions against torture unless they "have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering," according to a previously secret Justice Department memo released Thursday.

Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft testifies before Congress July 17 about waterboarding.

The interrogator's "good faith" and "honest belief" that the interrogation will not cause such suffering protects the interrogator, the memo adds.

"Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture," Jay Bybee, then the assistant attorney general, wrote in the memo.

So its all good and fine to inflicting serious harm on someone as long as you don't intend it?