LadyJane wrote on Apr 24^th, 2009 at 1:30pm:

I think it's worthwhile to ponder the assumption underlying your hypothetical:  that waterboarding actually works to elicit accurate intelligence from its victims.  What is the evidence for that assumption?  Dick Cheney's word?  A recent episode of 24?  I'm not impressed.  And would the First Family's whereabouts be revealed on the 180th or 181st application of waterboarding?  I'm sorry, but these appeals to fear and sentiment (shades of the infamous "Would you support the death penalty if your wife were raped and murdered, Gov. Dukakis?" incident) may be effective in whipping the uninformed masses into complying with government lawlessness ("The Communists have burned down the Reichstag, so we must take away your rights for your own protection!"), but they are no substitute for informed analysis of the issues, starting with the question of whether waterboarding is useful for producing anything but false confessions (see, e.g.,  the Korean War and the Spanish Inquisition).  Wake up!  Wake up!  Deutschland erwache!

Brainbell Jangler wrote on Apr 27^th, 2009 at 7:08pm:


So what is your answer?
OH I see. Dismiss the person asking the question as a ridiculous reactionary rather than give some thought to what YOU would do in this situation.


At least I pondered my own question and gave an answer.

LJ.

Precisely, fuman.  My point, LJ, was that your question was based on a false premise:  that waterboarding elicits accurate intelligence and that it does so more rapidly than non-torture techniques.  It was this false premise which caused West Point professors to criticize 24 because their own students were buying into the Jack Bauer worldview (I posted on this issue months ago).  When you combine such a false major premise with an appeal to hysteria ("What if your wife and kids were in danger?"), you replace a rational discussion of policy and morality with an action movie script.  Pernicious  false premises such as "Torture works" must always be confronted, even at the risk of inciting the cliché-mongers to wave the "douchebag" flag.

Brainy

Tough issues...NO DOUBT.

So I guess this article is pure bullshit?

Cracking KSM
By Deroy Murdock

Today, Library Tower looms 73 stories above Los Angeles. But the Pacific Coast's highest skyscraper might have become a smoldering pile of steel beams had CIA interrogators not waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) 183 times in March 2003, as recently released memoranda reveal. Americans should be proud that our public servants had the patience and persistence to pressure al-Qaeda's self-described military chief until he cracked, ratted on his homicidal conspirators, and thus prevented a bloody attack that could have murdered thousands of innocent people.

The hardcore hand-wringing among soft-headed liberals over the so-called "torture memos" ignores the fact that these tactics squeezed priceless intelligence from KSM and from al-Qaeda's Abu Zubaydah (waterboarded 83 times in August 2002). Tough stuff? You bet. But nowhere as nasty as what these killers had up their sleeves.

As former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen pointed out in April 21's Washington Post, a declassified May 30, 2005, Justice Department memo states: "Before the CIA used enhanced [interrogation] techniques . . . KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, ‘Soon you will find out.'" Waterboarding finally loosened his lips.

What this technique uncovered, according to the memo, was "a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,' ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later told Guantanamo authorities that al-Qaeda had targeted the 1,018-foot-tall Library Tower, the highest building west of the Mississippi. KSM's confessions, the memo says, prompted "the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the ‘Second Wave.'"

"Information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali," the memo continues. Hambali supervised the October 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, which killed 202 vacationers, including seven Americans, and wounded 209 others. Had KSM remained unwaterboarded, Hambali likely would have orchestrated fresh atrocities.

Rough questioning inspired KSM to identify Iyman Faris. He was convicted of plotting to sever the Brooklyn Bridge's cables with torches so it would crumble into the East River. KSM also fingered 9/11 collaborator Yazid Sufaat. The 9/11 Commission Report states (page 151): "Sufaat would spend several months attempting to cultivate anthrax for al Qaeda in a laboratory he helped set up near the Kandahar airport."

What about Abu Zubaydah? He long was considered a top al-Qaeda catch, although the insufferable New York Times described him as just "a helpful training camp personnel clerk who would arrange false documents and travel for jihadists, including Qaeda members." Waterboarding made al-Qaeda's "travel agent" sing. He squealed on USS Cole bomber Rahim al-Nashiri (17 Americans dead, 40 wounded), 9/11 conspirator Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and KSM - helping snare all three.

Justice's memo concludes, "The CIA believes ‘the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.'"

Besides waterboarding KSM, Abu Zubaydah, and Rahim al-Nashiri, enhanced interrogations for less hardened terror suspects who ignored simple interview questions involved face slapping, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, and dietary manipulation. Even softer terrorists needed to be leaned on, though more lightly. Are any of these techniques too much? One memo quotes Abu Zubaydah himself on what it takes to crack a terrorist: "Brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship." Preventing mass murder sometimes requires American security personnel to push these sworn killers past that line.

Meanwhile, the ceaseless whimpering over KSM's waterboarding almost universally neglects his victims' agony. KSM masterminded the 9/11 massacre (2,976 dead, 7,356 wounded). He also, he said, "decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the City of Karachi, Pakistan." KSM financed the February 1993 Twin Towers bombing (six dead, 1,040 injured). According to the March 16, 2007, Wall Street Journal, KSM admitted he was "directly in charge" of "managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American Soil."

KSM has no regrets. In a Guantanamo military-commission pleading to U.S. Army Judge Col. Stephen Henley, KSM and four co-defendants wrote on March 5:

Your intelligence apparatus, with all its abilities, human and logistical, had failed to discover our military attack plans before the blessed 11 September operation. They were unable to foil our attack . . .

Our prophet was victorious because of fear. At a month distant, the enemy did not hear from him. So, our religion is a religion of fear and terror to the enemies of God: the Jews, Christians, and pagans. With God's wiling [sic], we are terrorists to the bone. So, many thanks to God.

The Arab poet, Abu-Ubaydah Al-Hadrami, has stated: "We will terrorize you, as long as we live with swords, fire, and airplanes." . . .

We will make all of our materials available, to defend and deter, and egress you and the filthy Jews from our countries. . . .

We ask to be near to God, we fight you and destroy you and terrorize you. The Jihad in god's cause is a great duty in our religion...Your end is very near and your fall will be just as the fall of the towers on the blessed 9/11 day. . . .

So we ask from God to accept our contributions to the great attack, the great attack on America, and to place our nineteen martyred brethren among the highest peaks in paradise.

Thus, my eyes stayed as dry as the Sahara upon learning that American counterterrorists had dampened KSM's nostrils 183 times. I prefer to cry for the 2,976 individuals whom KSM, Abu Zubaydah, and their colleagues slaughtered on 9/11. Of the 2,752 they killed at the World Trade Center, 1,125 (41 percent) were literally vaporized. These victims' loved ones do not have so much as bone fragments to bury, place flowers upon, or shed tears over.

Now that is torture.

Obama has zero clue.  Air Force One with fighter jets over NYC for a photo op without alerting the City's leadership?  Amazing judgment and sensitivity all rolled up in one!!

What an asshole!

nankerphelge wrote on Apr 28^th, 2009 at 6:11am:


WHOMEVER was responsible for THIS fiasco should be fired ASAP.

LJ.

lotsajizz wrote on Apr 28^th, 2009 at 6:12am:

 

What a bunch of revisionist hooey!


I already know the answer to the questioned posed about what BJ, and you too Jizzy would do if it were your family were being threatened with certain death at the hands of radical Islamists. You would insist that any and all measures be done in order to keep your own families safe. Up to and including real torture, not this waterboarding crap. I know damned good and well you two would happily shove the barrel of a gun down KLM's sorry ass throat if you thought it would keep your family safe. Who in their right mind wouldn't?! If you deny that then you are lying. This idiotic argument about "it never happens that way" is horseshit! The same could have been said about 19 Islamist radicals flying planes into buildings. That had never happened before either!

It's real easy to sit back on your moral high horse seven years after the fact, but Bush did not have that luxury. These waterboarding sessions happened less than one year after 9/11 and the fear of another 9/11-style attack was still very much on the mind of most right thinking Americans. Bush was responsible for the safety of 300 million Americans, and you act as if he was the criminal. What a load of partisan shit.

FDR set up intern camps due the extreme situation that presented itself in light of Pearl Harbor. Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus in order to restrict states from seceding. This too was done in the context of the situations that were presented to them during a calamitous time in our history.

That you guys would second guess Bush is pathetic, and shows your partisan colors for all to see. We know for a fact that actionable intel was, in fact, learned from these harsh interrogation sessions. Arrests were made, and another attack was prevented. Four separate CIA directors have confirmed this fact. Not to mention the fact that many Democrats were fully "in the loop" with regards to the methods we deployed to garner that intel. Even Pelosi knew. Democrats are real quick to sweep the memory of 9/11 under the rug, and pretend like Bush was acting out of some insane liberal branded, "cowboy mentality".

What Democrats, and liberals in particular, tend to ignore is that we haven't been attacked since that horrible day. Yet to liberals, that fact has zero to do with Bush's decisions at the time. Liberals try and claim that we haven't been attacked in spite of Bush not because of the tough choices that he had to act on given the situation that he was presented with at the time. Lord knows that Barry hasn't given hardly any thought to the decisions that he is making!

Do you guys ever get sick of attacking your own country? Or do you just attack it when it serves your political ideology?

Barry was an absolute idiot to release those memos. Everyone knows it, and now he's talking about releasing photos that are going to nothing but fan the flames of more radicals. Why is he doing this? To appease the fringe far left that has now completely taken over the Democrat party. It's sickening to watch. The Democrats are Soros' bitches. Sad to witness. JFK wouldn't even be invited into this band of morons.

The difference in our positions is plain for all to see. Most Americans, myself included, hate the prospect of waterboarding anyone. We would rather it only be done in the most extreme cases. We are against this kind of interrogation 99% of the time. The problem with you Bush hating liberals is that you are against it 100% of the time even if actionable intel can be gained from it. One thing we know for sure. Bush ok'd the use of waterboarding, and we did stop an attack on LA with the intel we gained. Had Barry been president at the time then we may have another huge hole in an American city to match the ones in NYC, the Pentagon, and a field in Penn, but hey, at least liberals would feel good knowing that they caused the mastermind of these evil acts no undo misery.


George S. Patton would bitch slap the entire chickenshit Democrat party today, and most Americans would cheer him on.



Riffy

Sounds to me like you're assuming that there is no other way to get the same intelligence.

"Sounds to me like you're assuming that there is no other way to get the same intelligence."

That isn't true at all.

The NSA wiretapping program was an excellent source of intelligence.
Oh but you libs wet yourself about your civil liberties being trampled.

Interrogations of those "in the know" about operations -- whether active or in the planning stages - is some of the best information available.  Unfortunately, it is a bit difficult to get anything useful while sitting around eating Smores with the captives. 

 

Real World Reasons Against Torture

By Coleen Rowley
April 24, 2009
Antiwar.com

Editor’s Note: Former Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration defenders keep insisting that their “enhanced interrogation techniques” worked and that people would feel differently about these tactics if they only knew the wonderful results.

That, however, is not the view of many professional interrogators who were sickened by the Bush administration’s torture for ethical, legal and practical reasons, as former FBI agent/legal counsel Coleen Rowley notes in this guest essay:

Back in December 2007, when I wrote "Torture is Wrong, Illegal and It Doesn't Work," I mentioned that "the FBI agent who reportedly had the best chance of foiling the 9/11 plot, Ali Soufan, the only Arabic-speaking agent in New York and one of only eight in the country, and who has since resigned from the FBI, could and should tell people the truth of how the CIA's tactics were counterproductive."

Well guess what?! HE FINALLY DID SO on Thursday!

"My Tortured Decision" is how former FBI Agent Soufan titled his New York Times op-ed, speaking out to specifically refute a number of Dick Cheney's lies about how torture "worked". The truth, according to Soufan, is quite the opposite.

Soufan wrote: “There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah [the first al-Qaeda suspect subjected to waterboarding and other harsh tactics] that wasn't, or couldn't have been, gained from regular tactics.

“In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions -- all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.” [For the full op-ed, click here.]

Former Agent Soufan is to be applauded for speaking out after seven years, something even FBI Director Mueller has not really found the courage to do (although Mueller was forced recently to truthfully admit that no attack on America has been disrupted as a result of intelligence obtained through "enhanced techniques").

I agree with almost everything Soufan writes except his wish that no agency officials at the CIA be prosecuted because almost all of them were "good people who felt as I did about the use of enhanced techniques: it is un-American, ineffective and harmful to our national security." But he says (implying, whether he realizes it or not, the Nuremberg Defense), they simply had to follow orders.

No disagreement exists on how difficult -- literally between a rock and a hard place, any government employee finds him or herself when given illegal and wrongful orders.

When the "green light" was turned on to torture, it was akin to the terrible situation that helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr. found himself in when he looked down from his helicopter to see Lt. William Calley and his men massacring Vietnamese villagers at My Lai. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Death of an American Hero."]

It was similar to the horrible situation that Daniel Ellsberg found himself in when he realized what was in the Pentagon Papers undercut several presidential administrations' lies in launching and keeping the Vietnam War going.

There is presently no protection whatsoever for government whistleblowers who find themselves in these situations, especially those who work in intelligence.

As it stands now, if you follow your conscience and speak out internally, you will, at the very least, be retaliated against, possibly fired and at worst, if you speak out publicly as Justice Department Attorney Thomas Tamm did about Bush's illegal warrantless monitoring, you will subject yourself to criminal prosecution as a "leaker."

So it’s quite understandable how former Agent Soufan sees the choice as going along with the illegal orders or resigning to avoid personal direct involvement but maintaining silent complicity.

As I wrote in an April 18 letter published in the New York Times: "It's true, and proved repeatedly in social psychology experiments, that otherwise good people will tend to conform to authority. It's true that people, under such circumstances, often fail to listen to their consciences. But don't conflate this obedience factor with not being able to appreciate the wrongfulness."

On my own personal note, the final thing I did the day I retired from the FBI (in December, 2004) was e-mail my last mini-legal lecture to every employee in the entire Minneapolis FBI office warning my former colleagues how the "green light" would inevitably go out, and when that happens, it always leaves the little guys holding the bag.

Nearly all the little guys in government knew, by that time, about the green-but-evil light that had been turned on. And even though the FBI was not going along with the torture tactics, it was going overboard in other areas involving massive data collection on American citizens.

Because I was already persona non grata in the FBI for having spoken out about wrongful over-reactions and counterproductive responses after 9-11, I would only catch others' hushed whispers about the "green light" stuff, but I think nearly everyone was well aware.

That last warning was the least I could do as I walked out the door but in all probability, many who got my goodbye e-mail immediately deleted it as they dreaded any reminder about "green lights" that always go out.

In the criminal justice system, the mitigating circumstances of such difficult, untenable situations and choices of subordinate government employees are not irrelevant and would be evaluated.

In the course of criminal investigation, it's common to give immunity to underlings who, it is found, had little or no choice but to follow orders and are therefore not as culpable as those in power giving the orders.

Additionally, once the truth of the facts is ascertained, there's room for all kinds of humanitarian arguments as to what, if any, are proper "punishments." With respect to those on the receiving end of illegal orders, I'd volunteer to help explain how absolutely difficult their situation is.

I'd even help the defense find a social psychologist or two who can demonstrate what all the experiments on "group think" and "obedience to authority" have proven with regard to human behavior.

But this would go to evaluating relative responsibility and mitigating punishments and should not be used as a reason to jump over the most crucial first phase of the criminal justice process: the fact-finding ascertainment of truth.

We've already heard enough from fictional characters like Jack Bauer. It's time to hear from real agents who operated in the real world like Ali Soufan.

After we hear the facts, then let's also hear the mitigating circumstances of how difficult, how very difficult it is not to follow a President's orders in the real world.

Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for almost 24 years, was legal counsel to the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003.  She came to national attention in June 2002, when she testified before Congress about serious lapses before 9/11 that helped account for the failure to prevent the attacks.  She now writes and speaks on ethical decision-making and on balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation.

fuman wrote on Apr 28^th, 2009 at 11:17am:


"I saw on the local news last night, New Yorkers were running through the streets screaming."

Another tax increase?????

Whoa.


    Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter will switch his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat, according to sources informed on the decision.

    Specter's decision would give Democrats a 60 seat filibuster proof majority in the Senate assuming Democrat Al Franken is eventually sworn in as the next Senator from Minnesota. (Former Sen. Norm Coleman is appealing Franken's victory in the state Supreme Court.)