Amnesty International’s Ad Against Waterboarding

[nerdgirl 0]

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But many experts also agree with me. I think I'll stick with them.

Such as? Other than John Yoo (Berkeley Law Prof) & Alan Dershowitz (Harvard Law prof), who I've named, can you cite some of these experts and provide some indication of their operation background?

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I'm saying that just because a technique does not work 100% of the time does not mean we should throw it out - and it seems you agree with that.

That's a fallacious description – the argument *for* torture rests on it being effective in cases in which traditional methods do not work. It’s not.

By your thinking dipping suspects in chocolate & rolling them in coconut may also be effective. So might tickling them. Subjecting them to rap/rock/country/blue grass or techno music or repeated episodes of Sex & the City/Colbert Report/Ellen Degeneres Show/A-team/Battlestar Gallatica/Japanese anime. Any new or previously discredited method *might* work. There's as much evidence to support & suggest all of those methods as effective for interrogation as torture. (Hollywood depictions may be highly entertaining, but that is not "evidence.") By your argument, which is completely contradictory to every credible operational source available, any of those might be “effective.” Should US interogation policy be based on "hey, let's try this"?

[edit to add:] One more example of a credible operational expert stating explicitly that torture is not effective for interrogation, (as well as addressing foreign policy & normative reasons to oppose torture):

LTG Harry E. Soyster, USA (ret) and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), i.e., the Defense Department's lead intelligece agency, & Commanding General of Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM): “If they think these methods ["enhanced interrogation," i.e., torture] work, they're woefully misinformed. Torture is counterproductive on all fronts. It produces bad intelligence. It ruins the subject, makes them useless for further interrogation. And it damages our credibility around the world.”


Why are you so gung-ho on torture?
Is it purely partisan support of current President Administration politics?
You seem too smart to be part of the “Jack Bauer-wanna-be” crowd.

VR/Marg

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

[thirdworld19 0]

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But many experts also agree with me. I think I'll stick with them.

Such as? Other than John Yoo (Berkeley Law Prof) & Alan Dershowitz (Harvard Law prof), who I've named, can you cite some of these experts and provide some indication of their operation background?

Why are you discounting the ones you've already mentioned? How about General Hayden - I would think he might know a thing or two about the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques.

I think many people believe that torture in the US (or at the behest of the US) is happening far more than it does. According to General Hayden, waterboarding was used on only 3 individuals and not after 2003. Two of those individuals, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zabayda, actually broke and produced great intel.

Paul Gimigliano and A.B. Krongard also stated that the enhanced interrogation techniques worked.

How about "Torture: A Collection" - actually presents many sides to the discussion. "The considered opinions of Jean Bethke Elshtain, Oren Gross, Miriam Gur-Arye, Oona A. Hathaway, John H. Langbein, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Mark Osiel, John T. Parry, Henry Shue, and Jerome H. Skolnick, along with the other essayists, demonstrate that reasonable scholars committed to human rights can reach diverse conclusions." There are essays in this collection that point both to the effectiveness as well as the ineffectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques.

So now what.

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I'm saying that just because a technique does not work 100% of the time does not mean we should throw it out - and it seems you agree with that.

That's a fallacious description – the argument *for* torture rests on it being effective in cases in which traditional methods do not work. It’s not.

And this is where we disagree. There are many people who believe it is ineffective (and I would bet that much of that rests on the distaste for the actual act). There are also many people who believe that it is effective. It's like bringing experts into court - you can find experts to support just about anything.

My point was simply that the US has an official policy against using torture. It is possible (I would like to say even likely, but I won't) that government agencies that produce these reports/manuals may have an interest in what the reports say. It would be bad form to publicly support something that they are officially against (for example, saying that it is OK to use these techniques in a field manual - that would go against the official policy). It may even be a good thing to show the world that "Hey, we don't torture, it's not effective, so why would we."

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By your thinking dipping suspects in chocolate & rolling them in coconut may also be effective. So might tickling them. Subjecting them to rap/rock/country/blue grass or techno music or repeated episodes of Sex & the City/Colbert Report/Ellen Degeneres Show/A-team/Battlestar Gallatica/Japanese anime. Any new or previously discredited method *might* work.

Are you saying that you don't like The A-Team. That's heresy!

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Why are you so gung-ho on torture?
Is it purely partisan support of current President Administration politics?
You seem too smart to be part of the “Jack Bauer-wanna-be” crowd.

VR/Marg

I am not gung-ho, but if it means saving a few million US citizens, yes, I would hope that someone does not give up the interrogation before using every possible means available to them.

It certainly is not partisan politics, but asking the question is partisan politics if ever there was any. The School of the Americas was operational through many presidential terms long before Bush. If anything, Bush is allowing much of this (stupidly) to come to light. Many techniques were tested during the Vietnam War (Phoenix Program) and exported to other countries. In addition, the rendition program that we hear about now was started during the Clinton administration. This is not new to the Bush administration, nor will it end there.

And lastly, I've never seen '24' - nor do I care to.

This was a great discussion, but in the end, we will have to agree to disagree.

[nerdgirl 0]

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The US was very successful breaking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Enhanced interrogation techniques also worked with Abu Zubaydah. There are many within the CIA who state that ehanced interrogation methods are effective - these are the people actually using the techniques. Even Aristotle thought that torture could be effective in certain circumstances. So who's right? Or will you try to downplay these success stories? I have no doubt that torture doesn't work on everyone, but that doesn't make it ineffective.

Let’s look more closely ay the two alleged “success” stories you cited.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Al Qa’eda's chielf of propaganda operations. Very bad person. Likely source of intelligence, needed to be apprehended, and removed from society.

Two critical questions:
(1) Was it interrogation by torture that led to obtaining useful information?
(2) Was information obtained via interrogation by torture useful?

If you review the DefenseLink transcript listing of things he confessed to (that have been publically released) – from a plot to assassinate former President Carter to a plot to kill Pope John Paul II to the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center – he confessed to everything. Was he asked if he was on the grassy knoll in Dallas in November 1963? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also compares himself to President George Washington – is that credible?

What proved to be the single largest source of intelligence obtained from him? A computer hard drive seized during Mohammed's capture. (So it wasn’t any part of the interrogation, empathetic, ‘enhanced,’ or torture.)

If you read the transcript, it’s less than clear what motivated his alleged assertions. At least one expert, forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner, M.D., who specializes in false confessions, “observed from the testimony transcript that his concerns about his family may have been far more influential in soliciting Mohammed’s cooperation than any earlier reported mistreatment.” During testimony, the CIA official cautioned that “many of Mohammed's claims during interrogation were ‘white noise’ designed to send the U.S. on wild goose chases or to get him through the day’s interrogation session.”

Of what was later confirmed to be accurate, what percentage was actually obtained through ‘enhanced interrogation’? And more importantly, what *was* missed or was lost because of ‘enhanced interrogation’? How much time, energy, & expense was wasted following up on false confessions? It is just – if not more – reasonable & supported by evidence and experts that more information useful to save US lives may have been obtained if he was NOT subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation.’ That’s the core of the effectiveness argument; effective interrogation techniques should be employed. Torture is not effective.

Next case: Abu Zubaydah. Of what was cited as useful intelligence gained from Abu Zubaydah, the leading piece that is mentioned – the identity of Ramzi bin al Shibh – was already known. FBI agent Dennis Lormel told Congress who Ramzi bin Al Shibh was in February 2002, i.e., a month before Abu Zubaydah was even apprehended. So yes, Abu Zubaydah did confirm what was already known. Is there any evidence to suggest that ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques were critical for the tertiary confirmation? No.

You didn’t mention Abd al Rahim al Nashiri. I’m sure you know that al Nashiri was the 3rd terrorist suspect on whom the CIA Director has acknowledged “enhanced interrogation” techniques were used including waterboarding. How accurate and useful was the information obtained from al Nashiri? Again from reading the Defenselink transcript, he asserts he made up a long list of al Qa’eda plots and attacks so his captors would stop torturing him, even telling interrogators that Osama bin Laden had a nuclear bomb. Al Nashiri, in all likelihood, had very useful information. What was lost & how many opportunities were wasted because ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods were used? When the signal to noise ratio becomes so low, it ceases to be effective for anything other than distracting US investigatory efforts.


Can you cite some of these CIA “operatives” who you previously mentioned?

You mentioned Paul Gimigliano; he is the public affairs voice of the CIA. His job is to make the agency look good. That’s what he is paid to do, & he is usually effective, including in some very difficult situations. Tony Snow, Scott McClellan, & Ari Fleischer were very good as well, but they weren’t operational experts either.

You also mentioned A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, who has spoken about sensory deprivation and the need to insure that it does not cross the line to torture. He has also spoken on how after September 11th, US IC members consulted counterparts in “Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and other countries” to compile a “catalog” of techniques for the CIA, which begs so many questions about inadequacy & problems with HUMINT, HUMINT training w/in the US IC. Krongard has publically acknowledged turning down ideas of ways to create pain as part of interrogation methods who he was deputy DO. If they were effective, would he do that?


Explicit comments from a couple former CIA operatives who assert that torture is not effective in obtaining intelligence:

Former CIA Directorate of Operations (DO), not the analysis side, officer Robert Baer: torture is “bad interrogation. I mean you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture’s bad enough.”

Larry Johnson, another former CIA officer – operations not analyst – and former deputy director of counterterrorism at the Department of State:

“I’m a former CIA officer and a former counterterrorism official. During the last few months, I have spoken with three good friends who are CIA operations officers, all of whom have worked on terrorism at the highest levels. They all agree that torturing detainees will not help us. In fact, they believe that it will hurt us in many ways.

“What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust - even with a terrorist, even if it's time-consuming - than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets, who believed that national security always trumped human rights.

“I am not advocating that terrorists be given room service at the Four Seasons. Some sleep deprivation - of the sort mothers of newborns all endure - and spartan living conditions are appropriate. What we must not do is use physical pain or the threat of drowning, as in ‘water-boarding,’ to gain information. Tough, relentless questioning is OK. Torture is not.”

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I think many people believe that torture in the US (or at the behest of the US) is happening far more than it does. According to General Hayden, waterboarding was used on only 3 individuals and not after 2003.

I suspect your first sentence is not inaccurate, which goes to the impeding US foreign policy & normative arguments not effectiveness. Once, however, is too many times.

What has Gen Michael Hayden, USAF said w/r/t use of waterboarding now? In Congressional hearings Gen Hayden has indicated that he officially prohibited it from CIA interrogations in 2006: “It [waterboarding] is not included in the current program, and in my own view, the view of my lawyers and the Department of Justice [post-John Yoo – nerdgirl], it is not certain that that technique would be considered to be lawful under current statute.” If torture is as effective for interrogation as you argue, would he do that? Remember Gen Hayden was the same CIA Director who declassified and released the CIA’s “Family Jewels.” There’s also purportedly a classified Executive Order.

~~~ ~ ~~~

Summary on ineffectiveness of waterboarding or “enhanced interrogation” as a euphemism for torture:

(1) In the 3 cases in which CIA has acknowledged use of waterboarding (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, & Abd al Rahim al Nashiri) it is unclear to dubious that “enhanced interrogation” did anything that traditional interrogation would not have. On the contrary, there is significant evidence that “enhanced interrogation” led to reams of false confessions, which took away time & resources, and may have undermined the useful intel for prosecution.

(2) In at least two “ticking time bomb” scenarios, useful intelligence has been gained without the use of “enhanced interrogation,” waterboarding, or torture.

(3) Torture has produced bad/faulty intel that has been passed on to US policymakers (Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi).

(4) At least 60 years of operators, across multiple agencies have observed the ineffectiveness of torture in interrogation.

Taken in consideration with the other 3 arguments (reciprocity on US service members, impedance of US foreign policy and national defense goals, and morals/ethics), there is no strategic, operational, or tactical advantage to employing waterboarding or “enhanced interrogation” as a euphemism for torture as part of investigatory process. One may argue that such a policy has (strongly) negative strategic, operational, and tactical repercussions.

As you may already know, HUMINT is as much art as science. It doesn’t need to be made *more* difficult by ineffective techniques or a cloak of incredibility.

VR/Marg

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

[jcd11235 0]

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I think many people believe that torture in the US (or at the behest of the US) is happening far more than it does. According to General Hayden, waterboarding was used on only 3 individuals and not after 2003. Two of those individuals, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zabayda, actually broke and produced great intel.

To the contrary, the intel provided by these two have been of questionable reliability.

… Dan Coleman and other knowledgeable members of the tribe of al Qaeda hunters at CIA were reading Zubaydah's top secret diary and shaking their heads.

This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality," Coleman told a top official at FBI after a few days reviewing the Zubaydah haul. "That's why they let him fly all over the world doing meet and greet. That's why people used his name on all sorts of calls and emails. He was like a travel agent, the guy who booked your flights. You can see from what he writes how burdened he is with all these logistics – getting families of operatives, wives and kids, in and out of countries. He knew very little about real operations, or strategy. He was expendable, you know, the greeter … Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar's Palace, shaking hands."

This opinion was echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and the Vice President. While Bush was out in public claiming Zubaydah's grandiose malevolence, his private disappointment fell, as it often would, on Tenet – the man whose job he'd saved.

"I said he was important," Bush said to Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You are not going to let me lose face on this, are you?"

"No sir, Mr. President."
…

According to CIA sources, [Zubaydah] was water boarded, … . He was beaten, though not in a way to worsen his injuries [sustained from three gunshot wounds at the time of his capture]. He was repeatedly threatened, and made certain of his impending death. His medication was withheld. He was bombarded with deafening, continuous noise and harsh lights. He was, as a man already diminished by serious injuries, more fully at the mercy of interrogators than an ordinary prisoner.

Under this duress, Zubaydah told them that shopping malls were targeted by al Qaeda. That information travelled the globe in an instant. Agents from the FBI, Secret Service, Customs, and various related agencies joined local police to surround malls. Zubaydah said banks – yes, banks – were a priority. FBI agents led officers in a race to surround and secure banks. And also supermarkets – al Qaeda was planning to blow up crowded supermarkets, several at one time. People would stop shopping. The nation's economy would be crippled. And the water systems – a target, too. Nuclear plants, naturally. And apartment buildings.
…

Zubaydah said that al Qaeda was close to building a crude nuclear device. This sent shock waves through the government. But it was unconfirmable.

A tried-and-true maxim: the only intelligence of value is that which can be independently confirmed. Interrogators, sending home one open-ended alert after another, pressed Zubaydah for the verifiable. They needed a body, a colleague. The captive wouldn't give one up.

Then there was a small break.
…

He gave up one body: Jose Padilla.

Padilla, a Brooklyn native, … converted to Islam [and] … left the United States for Egypt and later was being trained by Mohammed Atef when the al Qaeda military leader was killed in Afghanistan in November 2001. Padilla migrated over to the border to Faisalabad, and talked to Zubaydah about some of his improbable ideas. He wanted to build a small neclear device and detonate it in America. Padilla was not credible on that score – he was untrained in even the rudiments of such matters – but was encouraged by Zubaydah to pursue other projects.
…

It was the biggest break in the investigation.
…

On the issue of interrogation, Zubaydah represented a first test, with results that could now be reviewed. It seemed as though the FBI – and those inside CIA advocating a gentler model of interrogation – might be right. That sort of traditional, subtle "debriefing" seemed to have worked. But as to "extreme methods" – their worth, their deficits – a counterpoint was offered. "Did it work," a DO chief said, because he was tortured first? That's the problem. Once you go down this road – and try everything – it's hard to know what worked.
…


[A]s CIA received daily reports about what was being done to KSM (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -jcd11235) and how little intelligence was harvested, debates broke out on the seventh floor in Langley.

At one 5p.m. meeting in April, Buzzy Krongard raised the issue of "what have we learned to this point, and what might we do differently?" What had they learned? "There was a grudging professional admiration for how hard these guys were," Krongard recalled later. "They were real soldiers. They went through hell, and gave up very, very little."

This was especially true for the most valued captive, shy of KSM: Ramzi bin al-Shibh. In the six months since his capture, he'd received death threats, water-boarding, hot and cold treatments, sleeplessness, noise, and more death threats. Nothing worked.

…

While bin al-Shibh managed to convince his interrogators that he knew less than they thought he did, there were no such demurrals with KSM. He knew everything, including the whereabouts of bin Laden and Zawahiri, and the status of many active (emphasis mine. -jcd11235) operations.

In the first few weeks of intense interrogative pressure, the most effective method is sleeplessness. After a few days of no sleep, a person will say almost anything for relief. KSM, half delerious, described several plats that were in the talking stages (emphasis mine -jcd11235), including the potential hijacking of other airliners in an attack on Las Angeles in 2002. There were other plots he mentioned that has never passed the stage of talk. And, at one point, he said, "There's a man in London named al-Hindi." That was it. All parts of the intelligence community and every U.S. ally in the intelligence war, starting with Britain, were alerted about someone "named al-Hindi." Not much had been given in that one sentence. No one picked up any leads.

But, as the days of stony silence passed, with interrogators sending thin daily reports to Langley, the pressure built. Many days, Bush would ask Tenet, "What are we getting from KSM?" in the morning briefing. Tenet would answer, Not much of anything. Then, the next day, the same question.

…

According to several former CIA officials, interrogators told KSM his children [,who were in U.S. custody,] would be hurt if he didn't cooperate. The response, said one CIA manager with knowledge of the incident: "He basically said, so, fine, they'll join Allah in a better place."

The traditional models of debriefing, used by both FBI and CIA, involved the building of a relationship, no matter how long and arduous a process. It's the need for some human contact, some basic comfort, rather than simply the bottomless human fear, which ultimately triumphs. The captive's previous life starts to fade and is slowly replaced by one constructed, often ingeniously, by his captors. This method, which the FBI still recommends, was cancelled out by what they did to KSM. That's the gamble. Once you do something as horrific as threaten someone's children, and it doesn't work – there's nowhere else to go.
…

"These guys are involved in a lifelong conspiracy," said Dan Coleman, who had experience with almost all the star witnesses of the FBI's prosecutions during the 1990s. "The CIA wants everything in five minutes. It's not possible, and it's not productive. What you get in that circumstance are captives and captors playing to each other's expactations, playing roles – essentially – that gives you a lot of garbage information and nothing you can use."
…

As to the underlying effectiveness, of determining what works, the FBI had ammunition to support its "meeting expectations" critique of the CIA's brutal, impatient techniques. Agents passed around copies of a training manual that was discovered in November in the ruins of Mohammed Atef's bunker in Kandahar. It informed al Qaeda recruits that if they were captured, they'd face torture, dismemberment, and certain death.

What the captives didn't expect, FBI interrogators knew from experience, was respect and judiciously offered favors. Coleman and FBI interrogators had successfully plied prisoners – like Wadi el Hage, a key player in the 1998 embassy bombings, or Jama al Fadl, a close aide to bin Laden and Zawahiri who turned into a witness-stand star – with Chinese food, porn, and, in one case an operation for a captive's wife. Agents were present when the grateful wife told her husband, "Now, you tell them whatever they want." He did.

excerpted from The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 by Ron Suskind

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Paul Gimigliano and A.B. Krongard also stated that the enhanced interrogation techniques worked.

Funny, Krongard acknowledged that it wasn't working. In fact, there's no evidence that torture worked for any of the three, Zubaydah, KSM, or bin al-Shibh. Want more expert opinion? Here is a quote from Lt. General John Kimmons, U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence.

"No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices," Kimmons said. "I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the past five years, hard years, tells us that." He argued that "any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility." And Kimmons conceded that bad P.R. about abuse could work against the United States in the war on terror. "It would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used," Kimmons said. "We can't afford to go there."

Kimmons added that "our most significant successes on the battlefield -- in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically, all of them" -- came from interrogators that stuck to the kinds of humane techniques framed in the new Army manual. "We don't need abusive practices in there," Kimmons said. "Nothing good will come from them."

Need more?

Or listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones.
…

An up-to-date illustration of the colonel's point appeared in recently released FBI documents from the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. These show, among other things, that some military intelligence officers wanted to use harsher interrogation methods than the FBI did. As a result, complained one inspector, "every time the FBI established a rapport with a detainee, the military would step in and the detainee would stop being cooperative." So much for the utility of torture.

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I'm saying that just because a technique does not work 100% of the time does not mean we should throw it out - and it seems you agree with that.

That's a fallacious description – the argument *for* torture rests on it being effective in cases in which traditional methods do not work. It’s not.

And this is where we disagree. There are many people who believe it is ineffective (and I would bet that much of that rests on the distaste for the actual act). There are also many people who believe that it is effective. It's like bringing experts into court - you can find experts to support just about anything.

You still haven't provided links to any experienced interrogators that with examples of torture producing reliable intel. Apparently you can't "find experts to support just about anything."

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My point was simply that the US has an official policy against using torture. It is possible (I would like to say even likely, but I won't) that government agencies that produce these reports/manuals may have an interest in what the reports say. It would be bad form to publicly support something that they are officially against (for example, saying that it is OK to use these techniques in a field manual - that would go against the official policy). It may even be a good thing to show the world that "Hey, we don't torture, it's not effective, so why would we."

You keep using this same illogical argument. Our government does not deny the interrogation methods being used. Quite the contrary, the White House administration vigorously defends them. They only deny that the methods used fit within the definition of torture. Never mind the fact that we have prosecuted people using the same techniques for torture in the past.

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