Bush Administration wants an exception for CIA to commit torture

[Az]

[q](1) Torture is usually unproductive in gathering actionable intelligence. The proven best way is to isolate the subject and then treat the subject well. He then begins to confide in you[/quote]

Actually isn't true - but that's not the point.

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Why would so many people in the intelligence community want to make use of the techniques in question if they are ineffective?

They don't - unless you're talking about those knuckleheads in MI who gave you Abu Graib and Gitmo.

What stand up successes in terms of intel those 2 little enterprises have been

And what about the collateral cost of those torture experiments? You think it stacks up against the mostly worthless tittle tattle gained?

The torture thing has always been politically motivated, no matter who employs it. Imo its about vengeance for 9/11, not information.

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
Reasons why this is a crackpot idea.

(1) Torture is usually unproductive in gathering actionable intelligence. The proven best way is to isolate the subject and then treat the subject well. He then begins to confide in you.

It just needed more than one and I got carried away.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Ted Striker

Nice try. That was the SECOND definition listed. Meaning the LESS COMMON version. The FIRST definition listed was:

1. Of, characterized by, based on, or constituting a system.

So then we go on to SYSTEM:

1. A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.
2. A functionally related group of elements,

That's your defense? Alright then here is the first listing which is just as damning as the second in regards to your misuse of the term "systematic":

sys·tem·at·ic Audio pronunciation of "systematic" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (sst-mtk) also sys·tem·at·i·cal (--kl)
adj.

1. Of, characterized by, based on, or constituting a system.
2. Carried on using step-by-step procedures.
3. Purposefully regular; methodical. See Synonyms at orderly.
4. Of or relating to classification or taxonomy.

Clearly none of these pertain to the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody in various places.

The problem is that there is in fact no system in place now, despite the fact that the Army has had an updated section for it's interrogation field manual ready to roll since this spring, which according to the NYTimes has been held up by bureaucratic infighting between the Pentagon and the White House.

[SIZE=1] Originally posted by Ted Strik

Can't help that it's over your head.

Point stands, the top down allowance of these Geneva Convention violations, allows interrogators at EVERY LEVEL, in EVERY BRANCH of government (ZOMG teh system), civilian and domestic, to do a bunch of stupid things like torture people.

The Geneva Convention cannot be violated where it doesn't apply, ie illegal combatants. It does not apply to criminals anywhere for instance. It does apply to uniformed members of the former regime obviously, but it may not apply to insurgents who are hiding within civilian populations or non-Iraqis / Afghanis who may claim that they are fighting an insurgency but in fact are merely murderers with no standing under the conventions.

If the administration has basically scrapped the Geneva Conventions as you contend and that has left a complete void in the system as you seem to contend above, what is the basis for the prosecutions of the guards at Abu Graib and the several instances in Afghanistan as well?

[MosesPresley]

Torture is bad, mmmmkay?

The issue of torture is very simple. The USA are the good guys. We don't torture people. Period. We rescue people from torturers. It doesn't matter if torture is effective or not. The fact that this administration has opened the doors on this argument shows how low this nation has fallen.

The good guys don't torture. Only reprehensible perverts torture.

If we allow our people to torture, then we don't have a leg to stand on when the enemy tortures our people.
__________________________________________________

Italics are mine. The bolded portions belong to the author.

Georgie Anne Geyer

10/28/2005

THE DARK HEART OF DICK CHENEY

WASHINGTON -- Dick Cheney is, by all accounts, probably the oddest -- and the most dourly ambitious -- duck in the administration's pond of wing-flapping, sky-diving and prideful birds.

He rarely speaks, running things quietly and secretly from behind the White House's closed doors, where he maintains his own administrative staff (roughly 60 persons, almost as many as the president's). When he does speak, it is usually either a sarcastic observation or rejoinder. As to his knowledge of Iraq, many remember how, on "Meet the Press" just before the Iraq war, he told Tim Russert, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

He is an enigma to many who have known him. President George H.W. Bush almost pleaded with a friend of mine, a journalist, in Houston recently: "Please -- tell me -- what has happened to Cheney?"

There was always a brooding, Hobbesian Cheney just beneath the misleading openness he learned in his native Wyoming. But this week, the vice president took a turn into the deepest heart of human darkness. This week, unprecedented in history, an elected vice president of the United States of America proposed that Congress legally authorize the torture of foreigners by Americans.

The Washington Post titled its devastating editorial "Vice President for Torture." I would say that the deceptive man from sunny Wyoming has become the Marquis de Sade of America. Think about it -- he is insistent upon making torturers of many of our young soldiers -- your children.

In both the Afghan and the Iraq war, the U.S. has been involved -- as never before in ANY war -- with carefully conceived methods of torture -- "waterboarding" or simulated drowning, mock execution, beatings until death, the deliberate withholding of pain medication, the burning and desecration of enemy bodies, and every possible form of sexual perversion.

These acts were the direct outcome of the president's, Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's errant dismissal of the Geneva Accords, to which we are a signatory, of an international treaty against torture negotiated and ratified by the Reagan administration and, not least, of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids "cruel and unusual punishment."

[i]Although such directions would HAVE to have come from the top, not one top-ranking general or officer has been punished.[i] Only the privates from West Virginia and the Carolinas, who would be protected by a responsible military from debauching their service -- and themselves -- with such sick acts, are in jail.

But now the grand inquisitor Cheney, who took five deferments in the Vietnam War rather than experience it for himself, wants more. Sen. John McCain, who DOES know what war is all about, put forward an amendment to the $440 billion military spending bill banning the military and all government agencies from engaging in torture. Ninety senators voted for the new law, including 46 Republicans. So Cheney stepped in with a further amendment to the McCain amendment, which transfers torture to the CIA to use against the many foreign prisoners it is secretly holding abroad. These men have "disappeared," just like they do in the old banana republics and the gulags of the totalitarians.

"I suspect what Cheney's been saying to McCain is that we've got a few people who know the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and the others," political scientist Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institution mused with me. "That we've got to use any means necessary to get information from very specific people. He's looking toward short-term goals without any understanding of the long-term consequences, which gets to the underlying reason why McCain is pushing ... The rules are in place to protect US. If this becomes official policy, then the enemy says that they can do the same thing."

But anyone who has studied the use of torture knows it doesn't work. Prisoners will tell their tormentors exactly what they want to hear. Among Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, too often, torture has become the "sport" of sociopaths. (According to Cherif Bassiouni, the renowned human rights and international law professor at DePaul University in Chicago, with fully 30 percent of our army recruits being kids with criminal sentences who were allowed to work their way out in the military, we are already courting trouble.)

Bassiouni told me that he has been called in as an expert witness on some of the trials of the foreigners held at Guantanamo. "You look at them," he told me with a deep impatience, "and you see how insignificant they are! One guy was a driver in Kandahar for one of the terrorists -- for a week. In my No. 2 case, the fellow operated a video shop."

Bassiouni then told of the private contractors who operate wholly on their own. He outlined how team after team of interrogators comes in. The first team says they "got something," so the second has to "get something," too. They charge $200 per hour per person to interrogate, and more than likely, they draw out their time clock by torturing prisoners. For four men for four hours, that's $3,200 of taxpayer money paid for the ugly demeaning of everything America once stood for. With the neocons and Cheney and their dark lusts, we are eating our own principles alive.

"America has lost its capacity for being indignant," Dr. Bassiouni summed up. "Where has our capacity for indignation gone? When a nation loses its respect for the Constitution and its treaties, what is next? And leaving even that aside, the next American serviceman who is being tortured -- and we can't go to his rescue -- will show us exactly what we have done."

_________________________________________________

[Kuciwalker]

WaPo had a very interesting story this morning. Too long to post here, but here's the first bit:

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; Page A01

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

linky

[Az]

I hardly find all of this surprising, I must say - why are you being surprised?

CIA tortures? duh. CIA kills? duh. I still am not sure why did the ask for permission this time - probably too much knowledge of Guantanamo - but then again, they have had so many other places besides that. Now with these ex-KGB facilities found, I am sure they were torturing people there, too, out of the public eye.

[Kuciwalker]

I hardly find all of this surprising, I must say - why are you being surprised?

I said interesting, not surprising. I'm not particularly shocked at it, though I hadn't thought about it before.

[Az]

I said interesting, not surprising.

I wasn't directly responding to you, actually.

[child of Thor]

i think the same story at the bbc:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4400728.stm

now if the god darn commie-leftist-pinkos would just let us get on with the job, we'd all live in a nice safe predictable world.

booyaka!

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Atahualpa
Why do you hate freedom Imran?

Ok, now THAT was funny .

[Chemical Ollie]

If some loony leftist Chomsky-fan would have told me a story like this 5-6 years ago, I would call him ridiculous. But now the Bush administration has proven itself worse than the loony leftists' sickest conspiracy theories.

[Dr Strangelove]

How about if we give them cocktails of Rohypnol and Ecstacy to loosen them up? I mean from personal experience I know it works on chicks, so there's no reson to believe that it wouldn't work on terrorists. Would that be OK?

[MosesPresley]

Truth serum.

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Sikander


The problem is that there is in fact no system in place now, despite the fact that the Army has had an updated section for it's interrogation field manual ready to roll since this spring, which according to the NYTimes has been held up by bureaucratic infighting between the Pentagon and the White House.

Systems are not defined by field manuals specifically. Plus, as we have seen, we already had a working system of interrogation that was, at least in spirit, SUPPOSED to be run in the spirit of the Geneva Conventions. THere were of course violations to the Geneva Conventions, however, what is happening now is that it is clear and OUT IN THE OPEN, that we are doing wrong, against the spirit of the Conventions, and yet here we have people still defending it with that legal mumbo jumbo, "enemy combatants," and "worst of the worst," crap.

The Geneva Convention cannot be violated where it doesn't apply, ie illegal combatants. It does not apply to criminals anywhere for instance. It does apply to uniformed members of the former regime obviously, but it may not apply to insurgents who are hiding within civilian populations or non-Iraqis / Afghanis who may claim that they are fighting an insurgency but in fact are merely murderers with no standing under the conventions.

If the administration has basically scrapped the Geneva Conventions as you contend and that has left a complete void in the system as you seem to contend above, what is the basis for the prosecutions of the guards at Abu Graib and the several instances in Afghanistan as well?

That line is so 2001, when the White House actually had credibility and we gave them the benefit of the doubt.

The Army still refuses to let a UN investigation team on Torture interview detainees on their own. They will let the UN tour the facility, but will not let them speak to the prisoners individually. What other reason could that be than for covering up what is actually going on. A nicely timed PR stunt, that's what they will show the outside world and that's it.

Many of those people labelled "enemy combatants" are infact innocent bystanders.

There is a case this week even of a detainee *EXCUSE ME* --> PRISONER, who has been held at Guantanamo for many years, having never been charged, having no criminal history whatsoever. His alleged reason for being imprisoned? He just happened to be in Tora Bora at the time there was a roundup.

His sitaution is NOT UNIQUE. Many prisoners have been released from Guantanamo ONLY because foreign governments, including our closest allies, like the UK, have DEMANDED we return their citizens. These citizens were held without a single charge. These are your "enemy combatants?"

That's the whole problem with scrapping the Geneva Conventions, it leaves people and systems unaccountable.

Innocent people are getting hurt from this, and it is making us look like a bunch of chumps.