Waterboarded 183 Times in One Month. Torture Issue Blows Up.

[Sigma]

Freshmen at the Citadel have endured far more than that!

[Lunican]

Hazing is also explicitly forbidden.

[Ron Mexico]

The point is not moot, Stephen.  The point is to ask yourself will you be willing to take action on it the next time.  Will we be willing to say to ourselves, "we know this guy has the information on an imminent attack, but we can't extract it forcefully, and we have exhausted every other tactic, we just have to wait for the attack." 

So when a similar intel assessment comes to BO, what are you and he willing to do to save lives?  If you aren't willing to do those things that were done to KSM, that is fine.  We are a nation of laws and if the law says we cannot waterboard, strike people or make them uncomfortable then that is the field in which we play.

But we can't have it both ways.  We go into Afghanistan, capture these terrorists and ask them questions.  Now that they know we won't do anything to them, how do you think they will train their operatives? what information do you think they will give up? 

So when something like the Madrid bombings or the London bombings take place in NYC, Chicago or LA, what do you suggest we do then?

[Lunican]

Hire a professional interrogator.

Torture as an interrogation technique is widely accepted as ineffective for gaining accurate information.

It does work on TV though.

[Sigma]

Here is where we diverge yet again.

Torture is for torture sake - punishment, revenge, hatred.

Interrogation is a process with a goal to get vital information that will save lives.  It comes in the good cop and bad cop form.  We have professional interrogators on staff.

In Stephen's Fox news video of Shepard Smith - this was his point.  He stated he was against torture but he would not define it. 

And "BS" to your statement.  Interrogation techniques are very effective for gaining accurate information. 

[Lunican]

And "BS" to your statement.  Interrogation techniques are very effective for gaining accurate information. 

That was not my statement.

[jaxnative]

 

Bush had the information he needed to stop 911 from happening without torture.

Damn, we already had some guys we could have "tortured" and stopped 9/11?  Hell, it sounds like we should have "tortured" Bush and Clinton since they both had such intricate information and just sat back and clapped while we were attacked.  I can't wait for some more stunning revelations!!!

[Sigma]

Clinton also had Bin Laden in the "cross hairs" but did not take the shot.  Stephen, do you really want to go down this road.  How many times did Clinton make huge mis-steps for political reasons? 

Information gained through "nice" interrogation techniques provided such effective information that we bombed an aspirin factory.  Way to go team!

[Sigma]

Now stop lulling me back into this conversation!

[Sigma]

This isnt about Clinton or the Dems.  This is about Torture.  And Clinton had the information without ever having to use it.

In fact he forwarded it on to the incoming president, who promptly took a loooong vacation in Crawford.

Stephen, that may one of the more ridiculous statements I've seen you make.

The Real Torturers
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, April 29, 2009 4:20 PM PT

National Security: The media are reporting that two al-Qaida leaders were waterboarded a shocking 266 times on George Bush's watch. The narrative is in place and won't easily be dislodged, even if it's misleading.

When the Obama White House disclosed memos from the previous administration's discussions about terrorist interrogations, critics jumped at the chance to accuse, yet again, the Bush administration of torturing detainees.

Media reports that CIA agents had waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah 266 times stirred an already angry nest of political opponents who want to prosecute Bush officials for their tactics in the war on terrorism.

As has been said, a lie will make it halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Deceptive reporting operates at the same speed.

The truth, which is just now reaching for its boots, is that Mohammed and Zubaydah were not waterboarded a total of 266 times (183 alleged waterboardings in one month for Mohammed, the 9/11 architect, 83 for Zubaydah, an Osama bin Laden insider). They were waterboarded fewer than 15 times in all, according to the Red Cross, which has spoken to the men.

The larger numbers the media ran with to shock the public were not individual waterboarding sessions, but the number of times water was poured on them, with each pour lasting only seconds.

Credit Joseph Abrams of Fox News for finding a "U.S. official with knowledge of the interrogation process" who would explain the numbers.

The interrogators who performed the waterboarding process to pry lifesaving information out of Mohammed, Zubaydah and one other detainee were not mindless thugs under command of a malevolent regime in Washington, but CIA officers working under strict guidelines.

Limited to no more than five sessions a month, they would have had to waterboard Mohammed for more than three years to reach the alleged 183 sessions. While not impossible, it's unlikely.

Fox's clarification won't alter the media narrative that has been â€" and will be â€" endlessly repeated by those who can't get beyond their hatred for Bush and Dick Cheney. The sensational numbers are out there and have become part of the spin. Bush haters will continue to claim any treatment of detainees by the last administration that was less than indulgent is torture.

What's really been tortured is their sense of priority. They crave the approval of left-wing elitists here and in Europe more than they value their country's security.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=325900026023183

[Lunican]

OK, so we have established that torture definitely was used.

[Sigma]

No, just interrogations - and not really harsh interrogations as previously reported. 

[Sigma]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/05/01/torture_no_except_96283.html

May 1, 2009
Pelosi: Utterly Contemptible
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, "You do what you have to do." And then take the responsibility.

Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don't entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen.

The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. We know we must act but have no idea where or how -- and we can't know that until we have information. Catch-22.

Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding.

Did it work? The current evidence is fairly compelling. George Tenet said that the "enhanced interrogation" program alone yielded more information than everything gotten from "the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together."

Michael Hayden, CIA director after waterboarding had been discontinued, writes (with former Attorney General Michael Mukasey) that "as late as 2006 ... fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al-Qaeda came from those interrogations." Even Dennis Blair, Obama's director of national intelligence, concurs that these interrogations yielded "high value information." So much for the lazy, mindless assertion that torture never works.

Asserts Blair's predecessor, Mike McConnell, "We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened." Of course, the morality of torture hinges on whether at the time the information was important enough, the danger great enough and our blindness about the enemy's plans severe enough to justify an exception to the moral injunction against torture.

Judging by Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress who were informed at the time, the answer seems to be yes. In December 2007, after a Washington Post report that she had knowledge of these procedures and did not object, she admitted that she'd been "briefed on interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the future."

Today Pelosi protests "we were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any other of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." She imagines that this distinction between past and present, Clintonian in its parsing, is exonerating.

On the contrary. It is self-indicting. If you are told about torture that has already occurred, you might justify silence on the grounds that what's done is done and you are simply being used in a post-facto exercise to cover the CIA's rear end. The time to protest torture, if you really are as outraged as you now pretend to be, is when the CIA tells you what it is planning to do "in the future."

But Pelosi did nothing. No protest. No move to cut off funding. No letter to the president or the CIA chief or anyone else saying "Don't do it."

On the contrary, notes Porter Goss, then chairman of the House intelligence committee: The members briefed on these techniques did not just refrain from objecting, "on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda."

More support, mind you. Which makes the current spectacle of self-righteous condemnation not just cowardly but hollow. It is one thing to have disagreed at the time and said so. It is utterly contemptible, however, to have been silent then and to rise now "on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009" (the words are Blair's) to excoriate those who kept us safe these harrowing last eight years.

[Sigma]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/the_tortured_rhetoric_of_the_r.html

May 03, 2009
The Tortured Rhetoric of the Reactionary Left
By Ben Voth
The reactionary left has descended upon waterboarding as its new case study in why conservatives are diabolical and without conscience.  The sad reality is that conservatives are reacting in the rather conventional manner of going on the defensive.  Conservatives need to fight back more vigorously against this community now willing to name even Harry Truman as a war criminal alongside President Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Vice President Cheney, and so many more good citizens.

The reactionaries of the Left are celebrating their own unique sense of jingoism that has come to dominate their political community since Vietnam.  In this distinct and pathological view of the world, there is only one reality -- America's imperialism.  The global human community has ceased to exist for this reactionary community.  'America does not f***ing torture,' in the over heated words of Shepard Smith. 

For the torture reactionaries, the question can only be if America tortures.  The global concept of torture has completely been subordinated to a view that no one tortures in the world except as a genuine and comprehensible response to American imperialism.  It is an America in need of God's damning to paraphrase one of its unrepentant spiritual leaders. 

A more productive and comprehensive study of the question of torture would include:  Is it torture to slowly behead someone with a knife as Musab Al Zarqawi did with American ANSWER leader's son Nicholas Berg?  Berg's father Michael robotically answered this question by telling the world that George W. Bush killed his son-- completely consistent with ANSWER's reactionary brainwashing.   Is it torture for Saddam Hussein and his sons to watch victims in Iraqi prisons witness the raping of spouses or have an electric drill run into someone's ankle bone?  Is it torture to discharge an AK-47 into a woman's skull in front of crowds at a Kabul soccer stadium? 

The prolonged silence and ambivalence of the reactionary left toward such atrocities has created a rhetorical vacuum.  The reason the term "neo-conservative" was invented by the reactionary left was to close the door on an ugly divorce within their community between human rights and global politics.  The Left largely no longer believes in individual human rights for people outside the United States -- with the possible exception of individuals inside the Gaza strip.  The reason Pat Buchannan can sit alongside Keith Olberman on an MSNBC television set is that the paleo-con and the reactionary leftist share an ambivalence for the rights of individuals oppressed by non-American and non-Israeli points of power.  For both political stances, the retraction of American power will lead to a world of useful silence wherein we will simply not know or concern ourselves with inhumanity as it may be practiced in the world.  It is after all 'their culture.'  The mind numbing multiculturalism is the intellectual sedative that has put the struggle for individual human rights to slumber on the Left. 

Noticeably missing from the discussion of whether water boarding crosses the line from interrogation to torture is analysis of how the decision was made.  The Bush administration conducted a legal debate within their ranks and the broader public sphere.  That is the most important principal revealed by the CIA memos and the most important contrast principal of Obama's politics in choosing to release only one side of that debate. 

The reactionary community that fuels the Obama administration does not believe in free and fair debate.  They believe that strategic exclusions of information constitute appropriate means for building political power.  On the other hand, within the Bush administration, the CIA, the American media, and the public, there was a constant debate about whether water boarding was appropriate. 

There were no debates in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or dozens of other countries where torture actually does take place.  In sharp contrast, the torture enjoyed by families such as the Hussein family of Iraq, was a matter of pure impulsive indulgence and spectacle.  There was little or no notion of protecting a public sphere in Iraq.  The heads of Iraqi victims were regularly posted outside the homes of victim's families after these spectacles were complete.  The adamant refusal of the Olbermans, Stewarts, Riches and other reactionaries to entertain a serious conversation on global torture is one which is veiled in their jingoistic display of the flag.  This is America!  We don't torture!

The sad state of affairs was amplified in the recent 100 day press conference.  At this event, President Obama appealed to the idea that the British refused to torture during World War II.  The appeal to a foreign government as more moral than America fits easily within Obama's worldview.  Obama and his team must have missed this gem from the British press published in 2006 by the Guardian:

"Sherman Carroll, of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, said British authorities should also apologise and pay compensation to survivors. "The suggestion that Britain did not use torture during world war two and in the immediate aftermath, because it was regarded as 'ineffective', is a mythology that has been successfully propagated for decades," he said. "The fact that it took place should be acknowledged.

. . . Others interrogated at the same prison, at Bad Nenndorf, near Hanover, included Nazis, prominent German industrialists of the Hitler era, and former members of the SS.  At least two men suspected of being communists were starved to death, at least one was beaten to death, others suffered serious illness or injuries, and many lost toes to frostbite.

The appalling treatment of the 372 men and 44 women who were interrogated at Bad Nenndorf between 1945 and 1947 are detailed in a report by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward."

Obama's misstatement is symptomatic of the community from which he draws his arguments -- reactionary and shallow.  The British actually used brutal tactics against Nazis and other rivals in World War II -- including thumbscrews and shinscrews -- and continue to use techniques that most US officials would blanche at in fighting terrorists such as the IRA during the 1980s.  Obama's slick answer is typical wishful thinking from the reactionary left which only allows itself to consider American and Israeli roles in torturing the innocent.  It is intrinsic to the close mindedness that has descended on the Left regarding human rights as a global struggle.

The circularity of the reactionary Left's worldview is one that not only condones torture but encourages it.   It is a circularity that helped America look away from the torture of the Khmer Rouge after Vietnam.  It helped Clinton look away from Africa after Mogadishu when Hutus took up machetes against their brothers and sisters in Rwanda.  It is a view that helps genocide expert and Obama administration aide, Samantha Power see a "monster" in Hillary Clinton when she threatened Obama's path to power, but now she sees an acceptable sovereign seated in Khartoum.  The Obama administration would do well to look at the recent example of Democratic congressional members arrested at the Sudanese embassy and less to the shrill jingoism of Code Pink, ANSWER, and Michael Moore.  The insular jingoistic view of torture held by the reactionary left is killing us all.

[Sigma]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/04/barry_honey_can_we_talk_about_3.html

April 28, 2009
Barry Honey, Can We Talk about Torture?
By Kyle-Anne Shiver
My dear Mr. President, I've just finished reading the formerly top-secret, classified CIA memos detailing interrogation techniques used in the aftermath of 9/11.  And frankly, Barry honey, I'm shocked.

Positively shocked that any President of the U.S.A. would make such documents public knowledge.

As a mother, who has invested blood, sweat, tears and every last vestige of my natural hair color into raising my children, I am appalled at the apparent casualness with which you are handling your #1 duty, protecting the lives of American citizens. 

At this very minute, I'm considering forming a new organization, Mothers Against Wimpy Defense. 

Before I start organizing millions of mothers with strollers and grade-schoolers in tow to march on the White House, perhaps I could attempt a bit of verbal negotiation. 

Not only have you given terrorists enough comedy at America's expense to fuel Al Jazeera for the entire time span of your presidency, you've told their plotters and leaders exactly how to train for the wimpy Americans and their host of morally-confused psychologists, who equate the real torture of gouging of human eyes with a forceful, closed-handed slap across the face and the real torture of removing every finger and toe with the temporary, psychological perception of the sensation of drowning.

Now the silliest thing in all of this -- for a mother who has fought hand-to-hand combat with a teenaged son twice her size -- is that these same arbiters of what could be justified to save the lives of countless innocent Americans, would most likely condemn the parental disciplinary methods used in this Country with terrific success for the past 2-1/3 centuries. 

How many among prior generations of Americans got through childhood without a single trip to the woodshed with an angry, had-it-up-to-here father?  How many American children (except Bill Maher and Rachel Maddow) escaped childhood without a single mouth-washing with bitter soap?  How many of our little ones thought messing with Mom was a good idea?

In other words, Barry Honey, now that I've read the stringent limits under which our CIA folks were forced to operate in the aftermath of 9/11, I'm actually quite stunned that there was such a degree of restraint.  The memos actually serve to demonstrate America's exemplary high standards in the realm of dealings with our attackers, not the reverse, as has been put forward by Democrats for the past 8 years. 

Unlike our Islamic terrorist enemies, we were not amputating fingers or extracting fingernails.  We were not gouging eyes from their sockets.  We were not applying high-amp electrical shocks to the genitalia of enemy combatants in our custody.  In fact, we were so darned civilized that the only shock in any of this is the degree of rancor with which our CIA protectors are now apparently regarded by a namby-pamby press and the Democrats in Congress seeking show trials and witch burnings.

Which brings us to the matter, Barry Honey, of your politicizing the role of Commander in Chief.  It is one thing -- and an altogether expected thing -- to politicize the presidency in domestic policy matters.  It is certainly also expectable that during an election campaign, candidates will agree or disagree with important foreign policy decisions of the current president.  But in making these classified-for-USA-protection documents public, you, dear Sir, have stepped over the line into banana-republic domain.

In this, you are behaving like a man, having just stormed the palace gates with armed guerillas, having imprisoned the former occupant and ransacked the place, puts on full public display whatever he can find that may justify his coup.  Bringing these documents to light to the full accompaniment of Party clamors for blood, is quite akin to the banana-republic dictator beaming in the wake of his successful coup and declaring that all evil deeds will now be punished.

All I can say is that your actions in politicizing the role of Commander in Chief, not only disgrace you, Barry Honey, they disgrace this Nation and sadly may have consequences for generations to come.  Every enemy we have now knows that you disdain America more than you disdain them and that you have no qualms about sacrificing our defense personnel on the altar of politics.

Could you possibly be more inept?

With every move you make as Commander in Chief,  you give more than ample proof to my old voters' axiom:  Never, ever put a man in charge of your military defense who has not at the very, very least, successfully done battle with his own teenagers.

Parents, who have made it to the successful end of preparing children for upstanding adult lives understand that in the face of one's children, as in the face of one's enemies, the adults stick together.  Bickering over tactics is absolutely, positively, every single time conducted behind closed doors and out of earshot.  This is the only way to run a healthy family in the best interests of children, and it is the only way to run a healthy foreign policy in the best interests of this Nation and our defense.

God help you when your girls are teens.

Until then, God help America.

I remain, Barry Honey, your faithful dissenting constituent.  Daily, however, my faith in you shrinks as my dissent grows more fitful.