CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding

More lies from the Bush administration lackeys that are slowly coming to light.  Or maybe he's more of a stooge. 

Massive fail!

;D

I saw an interview with George Piro, the guy who was responsible for getting information out of Sadaam, and he didn't believe in torture, said it was unreliable. 


www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/24/60minutes/main3749494.shtml

Saddam was created by America, Inc.  He was our creation to destroy.

The whole politically correct position that "waterboarding does not work" is yet another exercise in the attempted brainwashing of Americans by its current government.

My opinion?  Waterboarding is some really nasty stuff.  I would imagine that for some of the terrorists, it actually DID yield some decent actionable intel.  On the other hand, for other terrorists they probably confessed to everything including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy to get the water to stop, yielding "nonsense intel".

I think the issue really needs to be distilled to "On average did it yield more good intel versus bad/phony intel?" and "Is the use of waterboarding, regardless of effectiveness issues, consistent with American principles?"

People who say that "torture does not work" talk in absolute terms and that's nonsense.  Many a tortured person has ratted out his comrades to make the pain stop.  (And many have given up completely fabricated info too) The main issue, I think, is whether or not torture is consistent with American principles...

The main issue, I think, is whether or not torture is consistent with American principles...



In my opinion, no.  I like to think we are better than that, but many do not.

The whole politically correct position that "waterboarding does not work" is yet another exercise in the attempted brainwashing of Americans by its current government.

My opinion?  Waterboarding is some really nasty stuff.  I would imagine that for some of the terrorists, it actually DID yield some decent actionable intel.  On the other hand, for other terrorists they probably confessed to everything including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy to get the water to stop, yielding "nonsense intel".

I think the issue really needs to be distilled to "On average did it yield more good intel versus bad/phony intel?" and "Is the use of waterboarding, regardless of effectiveness issues, consistent with American principles?"

People who say that "torture does not work" talk in absolute terms and that's nonsense.  Many a tortured person has ratted out his comrades to make the pain stop.  (And many have given up completely fabricated info too) The main issue, I think, is whether or not torture is consistent with American principles...


What are American principles?  Is the Eighth Amendment an American principle.  If it is, then torture is not consistent with it.  If we prohibit "cruel and unusual punishment" for ourselves but allow torture as a method for our foreign foes, then we become hypocrites.  If we do it to them because they would do it to us, we undermine our own vaunted Judeo-Christian principles.  America's respect around the world has been compromised enough already.  Do we want to diminish it further by applying a method everybody agrees is unreliable at best.

As for Professor Dershowitz's "ticking time bomb" scenario, sorry, I don't buy it.  I don't know why anybody with an IQ above room temperature would.  I put myself in the shoes of the terrorist who set the time bomb.   If I snitch, my mission fails, and I go to prison forever anyway.  If I snitch on my conspirators and you let me go, I can count on getting murdered anyway because guys who set time bombs establish they don't object to killing people to accomplish their goals.  Murderous affiliations from the U.S. crime syndicates to Afghan paramilitary bands agree on two things: Nobody likes a snitch and you gotta teach a snitch a lesson.  So, you got me.  My bomb's going to detonate in the U.S. stock exchange in one hour.  Turn up the current, pour the water, and brand my nads with a white hot coat hanger, but ain't telling you dick!
:-X

What are American principles?  

A contradiction in terms....

As for Professor Dershowitz's "ticking time bomb" scenario, sorry, I don't buy it.  I don't know why anybody with an IQ above room temperature would.  I put myself in the shoes of the terrorist who set the time bomb.   If I snitch, my mission fails, and I go to prison forever anyway.  If I snitch on my conspirators and you let me go, I can count on getting murdered anyway because guys who set time bombs establish they don't object to killing people to accomplish their goals.  Murderous affiliations from the U.S. crime syndicates to Afghan paramilitary bands agree on two things: Nobody likes a snitch and you gotta teach a snitch a lesson.  So, you got me.  My bomb's going to detonate in the U.S. stock exchange in one hour.  Turn up the current, pour the water, and brand my nads with a white hot coat hanger, but ain't telling you dick!
:-X


I think Douchewitz' scenario has validity.  Of course the opportunity does not present itself very often and it is not applicable to most of the waterboarding opportunities that have come up (I am presuming this part).

Torture or physical threats DO WORK a certain percentage of the time. I'll reiterate my position that the essential question comes down to American principles, and the "average effectiveness" once taking into account false intel that torture can also produce.

All above said, the vast majority of the Gitmo people who were waterboarded should have been dispatched with a bullet to their heads on the battlefield where they were found, instead of warehoused on Fidel's doorstep.  The Bush Administration never had any sort of end-game-scenario prepared when it opened up Camp Gitmo and at the outset I felt that this was a stupid move.

I think the issue really needs to be distilled to "On average did it yield more good intel versus bad/phony intel?"

Not to mention "how do you tell the difference"?

People who say "torture doesn't work" don't always mean "you never get any good intelligence under torture", but sometimes the more nuanced "you can never be sure whether the intelligence you got under torture was good intelligence or not"

There are those who will argue that having a lot of torture-induced intel can be cross-referenced so that a level of confidence can be ascertained, but by then you're talking about widespread use.. it's nasty, and the guy who gets tortured worst of all is the innocent one who really doesn't know anything.


A contradiction in terms....

No, there's an overriding American principle, it seems at times: "we're right.. and we've got the most powerful army in the world to back that up"

As Tom Lehrer said (nearly half a century ago):
For might makes right
Until they've seen the light
They've got to be protected
All their rights respected
Til somebody we like can be elected


...at the risk of quoting whole songs, that one goes on:
Members of the corps
All hate the thought of war
They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means
Stop calling it "aggression"
We hate that expression
We only want the world to know
That we support the status quo
They love us everywhere we go
So when in doubt
Send the Marines

...every bit as sharply satirical today as it was when it was first written.

I think Douchewitz' scenario has validity.  Of course the opportunity does not present itself very often and it is not applicable to most of the waterboarding opportunities that have come up (I am presuming this part).

Torture or physical threats DO WORK a certain percentage of the time. I'll reiterate my position that the essential question comes down to American principles, and the "average effectiveness" once taking into account false intel that torture can also produce.

All above said, the vast majority of the Gitmo people who were waterboarded should have been dispatched with a bullet to their heads on the battlefield where they were found, instead of warehoused on Fidel's doorstep.  The Bush Administration never had any sort of end-game-scenario prepared when it opened up Camp Gitmo and at the outset I felt that this was a stupid move.


The end-game was to give the American people a message:  You f**kers are next if you step outta line!
:o

The end-game was to give the American people a message:  You f**kers are next if you step outta line!
:o


But they even failed at that. 

There was no exit strategy because the war wasn't (and isn't) supposed to ever end, but that's still no excuse for the incompetence we've seen at Gitmo.

If you're going to go full-bore into Banana-r(R?)epublicanism, you do it the way LyricBoy suggested.  If you're torturing them, but you're claiming that you don't torture, then they're - by defintion - outside of the legal system.  There is, to coin a phrase, no controlling legal authority.  A competent banana republic, one run by professionals, would simply put these people - who are already disappeared, already off the legal radar - onto a plane and go body-bombing the Caribbean.  (Too many of your own people on the plane who might talk?  Fine, put 'em all on one plane and have a couple of trusted subordinates, whom nobody would believe if they went public, fly the plane by remote control and body-bomb the mid-Atlantic when the drone runs out of fuel.)

As much as my paranoid imagination would like to attribute malice to the government on this issue, I've gotta go with incompetence here.  Even the most amateurish of us could come up with a more plausibly deniable way of disappearing people.

The real incompetence wasn't in assuming that the war would never end.  It was in assuming that the Elephant wing of the Party would be in power for so long that the Jackass wing of the Party could no longer make political hay out of the issue.  Now it's an embarassment for both wings of the Party, so both wings are working hard to exonerate everyone involved, and (to coin another phrase) to "move on".

But they even failed at that. 

There was no exit strategy because the war wasn't (and isn't) supposed to ever end, but that's still no excuse for the incompetence we've seen at Gitmo.



Thank you.  That is one of the visions Orwell foresaw and he was right yet again.  Karma.

As much as my paranoid imagination would like to attribute malice to the government on this issue, I've gotta go with incompetence here.  Even the most amateurish of us could come up with a more plausibly deniable way of disappearing people.


Oh I absolutely agree with you.  Before Gitmo, we simply found the bad guys and dispatched them where we found them. (Or had some other zhmuck do it for us).  Imprisoning them indefininitely simply gives them another soap box to sing from, and a "cause" for bleeding hearts (who they would kill in a heart beat) to sing their praises.

The creation of the festering sore that is Gitmo was a supreme act of incompetence on the part of the Bush administration and it was unneccessary.  Not well thought out at all, either tactically or politically.

The Obama doctrine of drone-bombing these guys is much more effective, and there's no lingering imprisonment issue with which to deal.