USe of Torture/Zero Dark Thirty/Michael Haden on GPS Today

hey man I don't know... this originally came out due to the KSM interrogation as far as I remember and once it was out of the bag it caused a ****storm.

I'm just askin what people think about the Waterboarding that went on and was it justified in anybodies mind? Is it ever?

As for referring only to 'Bush Era'... Like I say it only caused a ****storm because it 'happened' to come out. But you're right the Bush Era in particular oversaw many violations such as Abu Ghraib, contractors killing civilians in Iraq, Torture, Black sites etc.. That it was Tacit approval specific to Bush Era leadership i.e. with the heavy Neocon influence at the top, doesn't mean it wouldn't have continued into Obama's period were it not 'OUTED'. I don't think you can blame Torture on Bush for any logical reasons - it's all part of the same fog of morals which 9/11 kickstarted.

As for ZD30... the movie clearly points to torture having produced info which led to killing UBL. Haden did not reject it outright - in fact he basically said that Torture has helped keep the US safe at various junctures due to data produced, and he supports any actions which did that.

Enhanced Interrogation is sanitized language for torture in many cases and certainly when it comes to waterboarding.

Tying their hands not allowing them to torture data from people in black sites means they are more likely to pull the drone trigger IMO, rather than go other routes. But I still think Torture is wrong and should never be allowed.

so true and I believe the E.I. techniques were all developed by reverse engineering the air force 'when you get captured behind enemy lines' manual... it was contracted to two scientists/psychology experts with no military experience who were paid cash 1000 dollars a day to come up with a list of E.I. Techniques and produce a manual. They had no 'real' data to work off so basically just applied their opinions to the air force manual (from the Korean War) to reverse engineer interrogation techniques which included torture in the form of Water-Boarding and other physical techniques including the infliction of Hypothermia, prolonged forced standing - i.e. 20 hours, damaging decibel level sound torture, cramping the person into a small box, slapping the person in the stomach and face, 'Fear-upping' using snarling dogs in their faces a la Abu Ghraib pics and sensory deprivation in the form of goggles/hoods and head phones... all of which is now considered illegal and unacceptable. Basically it is thought that these two guys were paid a fortune to come up with ideas and so they did, whether the ideas were known to be productive in producing information from an unwilling detainee or not.

This 'torture manual' was then used to a 'certain extent' post-9/11. They applied the same techniques but slightly altered the application in specific ways as to be deniable as the same techniques or same level of 'accused abuse'. For instance the hoods and sensory deprivation techniques could not be used as the manual had originally prescribed so they changed the rules to allow them to hood etc.. when 'in transit' or 'between facilities' or 'outside'... hence the pics of the GITMO hooded guys. The rules were bent as much as possible and the techniques were applied by unqualified individuals, especially in the case of Abu Ghraib which was symptomatic of a system of E.I. gone mental within a group of insane soldiers. Talk about counter productive. That Abu Ghraib thing really damaged all fronts of the so called GWOT as well as even further souring the hopeless image of the US in the eyes of the world. As bad if not worse than marines raping women in Japanese bases did. The vengeful hatred Abu Ghraib caused among the vulnerable would-be jihadist young men of the Arab World can't be over estimated, as bad as the hatred which daily drone strikes caused/cause. You can't help but begin to think the US military/Intel leadership is psychotic at this stage with all the shooting-themselves in the foot things they've done and continue to do.

It's as if they haven't a bleeding clue what to do about anything and they just try and apply some bureaucratic manual to 'terrorism' as if that'll work.
Step1: Capture people who 'seem' like terrorists or who may in the future become a 'terrorist'.
Step2: Hood them gag them earplug them and ship them to Poland to some Black Site.
Step3: Apply Enhanced Interrogation techniques 1 through 7 OR anything you bloody like coz nobody's watching.
Step4: Ship them off to GITMO and eventually set them free without charges to some country who'll take them, I dunno how's Jordan this time of year?

How many of you are actually aware of what happened in GITMO:

Here's one account ... you can Google it for verification.

Water is poured over the detainee.
Interrogations start at Midnight, and last 12 hours.
When he falls asleep, he is woken up by American pop music and water.
Female personnel tries to humiliate and upset him, which is successful.
A military dog is used to intimidate him.
The soldiers play the American anthem and force him to salute.
They stick pictures of 9/11 victims to him.
He is forced to bark like a dog and his beard and hair are shaved.
He is stripped nude.
Fake menstrual blood is smeared at him and
he is forced to wear a women's bra.
Some of the abuses were documented in 2005, when the Interrogation Log of al-Qathani "Detainee 063" was partially published.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

Here's PBS FRONTLINE Documentary called: The Torture Question
which deals with the whole subject in depth. I strongly recommend it. Most peoples concept of Abu Ghraib and GITMO is from the odd article or news bits here and there. This is the real deal.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/view/

but Claire, some of these dudes did nothing and were innocent - more than 600 guys were released form GITMO without charge, some were 17 years old - about 20 of them and others were the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time and hundreds were delivered to the US wrapped up in a bow in return for thousands of dollars ($5000 on average) and could've come from anywhere or been anyone at all... the US didn't know - The US army dropped millions of leaflets offering thousands of dollars for prisoners - the Afghans just rounded up dudes and delivered them and disappeared with the cash - enough to support their tribe for months or years. Out of over 700+ prisoners at GITMO you're talking less than 100 guys of any significance at alllll....and maybe as little as 20 who were really worth taking off the 'Global Battlefield'. The whole thing was and is a complete utter fuking mess, beyond retarded, beyond inhuman, utterly counter productive and has brought shame and danger to the entire US population with story after story of abuse and torture. GITMO and the program which fed it with people is a complete travesty from start to finish and Obama should've closed it like he promised he would form his first day in office.

GITMO has endangered the American people by amplifying the hatred which is preyed upon by Terrorist plotters to convince angry vulnerable young men to give their lives in suicide attacks against the US. It's like meeting a guy to make peace and then poking him in the eye while saying 'I don't want to fight lets be friends'. poke....POKE...POKE. Torturing people, the horror and injustice of GITMO and Black sites and Abu Ghraib and the unaccountable indiscriminate use of 440 cowardly, murderous drone attacks is all just a bunch of stupid mistakes. Like using a sledge hammer in heart surgery. It's like the US has been at war with itself... constantly creating more hatred towards it over and over again making the same stupid mistakes and miscalculations in an effort to be seen to be doing something rather than nothing. Nucklehead war mongering killers from the military combined with hyper-realist Intel chiefs who have turned the CIA into an illegal global kill squad combined with petty hyper-polarized ridiculously retarded shortsighted partisan 'pride and hate' based politics. It's self destruction and I wish Obama had been the guy to straighten it out but instead he chose to be the SIN-EATER and do the drone thing and not close GITMO and to treat Terrorists as threats to structural national security rather than a relatively small and relatively rare threat which should be treated as crime and not as War which it IS CLEARLY NOT.

Waterboarding - This guy bet he could last just 15 seconds and he KNEW he could stop it himself instantly at any second which makes it entirely easier.

9/11 was horrific and evil believe me I get that.... on the day itself I was on a call to my uncle who was a big wig in a bank at the time and his conversation with somebody in one of the towers was cut short literally by one of the planes, that's why he rang me to turn on the TV which I did and saw the second plane come in moments later... you can believe that or not I don't mind. There was an Irish bank here which had many business colleagues in associated firms in the towers in NY that day. So the attacks reached many nations and nationalities that day and I do not side with terrorists. I side with standing by your values.

But you might not know this one fact when it comes to torture which Waterboarding is, in fact I would say most people wouldn't know this fact... so I'll tell you. You can try and prove me wrong if you like.

Since 9/11, Torture has NEVER produced information which has stopped a terrorist attack.

That is a fact. The consensus is that - torture produces unreliable information because the tortured person will give you what they think you want.

KSM's torture did not produce one single piece of information which stopped a specific attack.

He was tortured til he was virtually brain dead - 183 times. His information is said to have tied up the FBI and CIA for millions of wasted man-hours and NEVER stopped an attack.

Complex terrorist attacks on the scale of 9/11 are not coordinated in a way which would allow one individual to be blackmailed into giving up enough data to allow the attack to be stopped. It's simply not how they are planned. KSM was a 1 in a million terrorist genius (not my words) and catching him literally stopped any further 9/11 scale events from happening... not drones.... not waterboarding or Black sites - literally just simply catching the most extreme and successful terrorist event planner in history.

He single-handedly concocted 9/11 on his own and sold the idea to UBL. Originally he intended to kill 250,000 during the attacks but had to scale it back to have it accepted. He is the sole reason so much fear was created from 9/11... not AQ.... not IED attacks on roads in Afghanistan or Iraq - K S M. Nobody before or since has had the fuked up imagination and intelligence to back it up to plan and importantly CONVINCE the leaders of AQ to accept his plan. He was out on his own and they took him in because they were impressed by his drive and intelligence which convinced UBL to accept his plan and give him the go ahead to do it with their 20 trained men.

There is NEVER a situation where you catch a guy and he knows the piece of info which will allow you to stop a major attack and so you torture him to get that info and you stop the attack. This is simply not reality. This is just another convenient FALSE BINARY which the media wrongly focuses on. Torture does not save lives. Torture is a FISHING EXPEDITION - a vague attempt as in Abu Ghraib to torture a load of guys you caught or were handed to you for money and so you torture thew sh1t out of them to see can you gain any useful intel - which again I repeat - HAS NEVER EVER PRODUCED SPECIFIC INTEL TO STOP AN ATTACK

which has been admitted.

"We must adhere to our values as diligently as we protect our safety with no exceptions,"

Obama

Jan 9 2009

Ok for an absolute fact no I do not - correct. Point taken but it is important to qualify that 'over-step'.

What I DO KNOW is that there has never been an attack thwarted by the CIA/FBI etc where information garnered by the use of torture/Waterboarding has been cited. This is an important fact because the US admin have been very quick to point out operations which thwarted attacks on the US. Likewise Brennan and Rumsfeld and many others dept representatives have defended the use of Waterboarding on many many occasions, in public, in hearings etc

There is no way that Waterbaording resulted in information which stopped an attack so far without us knowing about it, not just in my opinion. Here's Ex CIA Veteran of 21 years Bob Baer.



I would gladly argue it is extremely unlikely that WB stopped an attack without us knowing about it but I do not know it for an absolute fact, correct. But It would make no sense at all. You COULD argue that there would possibly be some specific operational reason which precluded such information release but again that is extremely unlikely. If anything the only way I see WB having produced information which actually stopped an attack on the US so far without them shouting if from the roof tops is IF they did the torturing AFTER Obama banned it which would make it even more illegal than it already was anyway and would result in people losing their jobs or worse. Again - extremely unlikely.

Do you agree? I don't know it for a fact I just know that every major attack attempt which HAS been thwarted has been made known right up to the point of literally offering channels documentaries on these defensive operations on the pure basis that it would heighten respect for the FBI and CIA and that the current head of the CIA supported WBing and direct assassinations and the use of Black Sites and handing over terrorist SUSPECTS to third parties who definitely did torture them... and a lot worse than WBing torture so he would be more than likely to put it on a pedestal as a successful use of WBing. It's illegal now of ocurse we know that but the US tortured officially until it was made illegal.

Dennis C. Blair says it best
Former United States Director of National Intelligence

"..the bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security..."

He said that while he was acting director.

MadYaker wrote: »

Be Like Nutella, do you think Bin Laden would have been found without the use of torture?

personally from what Haden said on GPS and from what I've heard decent pundits and journalists say I don't think so, at least not in the time frame we witnessed. But there's a complex combination of luck and chaos involved in intelligence and knock on effects of things you can never plan for. The courier dude makin the calls from the various locations and subsequently allowing the NSA/CIA to narrow down UBLs location in the end was extremely lucky. The particular CIA unit which wouldn't drop the lead on the path to this couriers identity obviously played the most important role and I do believe that the long term torture of a couple of guys they had, helped them in an unquantifiable way, follow particular paths.
That torture helped... in the end... doesn't make it worthwhile because one thing didn't lead directly to another. The connection between the actual illegal torture of their prisoners and the finding of Bin Laden was nothing you could use in an argument FOR torture because the link was so weak between one action and another affect. Nobody has argued that the US or anyone should be allowed torture anyone for anything under any circumstances - the brackets set have been extremely narrow i.e. in extraordinary circumstances where an attack is imminent and you can stop it by torturing the sh1t out of somebody like an animal... nobody has said that you just pick up some guys and torture them to see if they know some sh1t coz ya know they might... you would be verging on insanity to argue that type of loose application of torture. The US has officially tortured about 35 guys in history and in one case 183 times over months. There has never been a wish to torture people willy nilly by anyone in the circle here. Bin Laden's hunt involved torture - that's an admitted fact. Was he found directly from that torture - no he wasn't - also admitted - but did torture play a roll within the fabric of the overall investigation - yes definitely and did it help? yes in a small way the importance of which has not been admitted to or revealed. This would again point logically given the whole picture here that torture did not play a major roll in his hunt - it played a minor roll and nobody would argue for the freedom to torture based on that particular minor success and nobody has.

The military's position is that WB is NOT torture, Haden, Brennan and Rumsfeld's position is that we're all pussies and we need to realize that they are trying to save everyone's lives from the overblown constant massive threat of terrorism - statistically less than an American getting hit by lightening! Obama banned it, the official admin position is that WB is tantamount to torture, amnesty intl, the UN and the rest of the civilized world agree. Abu Ghraib opened the can of worms and showed how fuked up various individuals such as Rumsfeld are within Washington who pushed for torturing people from a hard right defense based position but they were all shortsighted as is those on the 'drone team', blind to how counter productive the entire venture is and how badly it really hurts US interests in the long run.

Ultra neocon, hard man, psycho patriotic, fear mongering, institutionalized defense budget nuthugging, myopic idealist dictatorial Wolfowitz-esque loon bags is what these people are! That is the story of US foreign policy in the last decade - a small band of cross-isle guys with ideals about how the US should act out in the world, bull****tin everybody into actions which only hurt the US while being raised up by an amoral brain dead disfuntional commercial media platform and supported by hundreds of companies within the M.I.C..... all while congress slept ignorantly. That's the story of what happened. That's why Iraq happened, that's why the 'easy' options of assassination drones was grabbed with both hands and that's why things like torturing a prisoner 183 times for bullsh1t information was allowed happen within the decision structure of Washington and 2 administrations. Literally a relatively small group of guys have inflicted mass murder and fuked up US foreign policy, defense and financial interests for a generation.They bankrupted the US nation financially while making billions for defense contractors shareholders. They bankrupted the US morally by inflicting things upon foreign peoples which go against every ideal the founding fathers built the US upon. 20 to 30 guys is all it took and everything after that was just a vicious circle - trying to get out of Iraq, leaving it in a fukin heap, trying to run from Afghanistan, leaving it in a murderous hopeless rubble, blindly cowardly blowing the sh1t out of thousands and thousands of Pakistani tribesmen with flying robots creating decades of Anti-US rage and generations of Jihadists. US congress allowed this to happen because they're mostly fat ignorant tunnel visioned career politicians without a fukin clue about the world who serve lobbying interests more than the interests of the people of the USA. Bush came in with these 20-30 guys and made a laughing stock out of every value the US stood for and Obama has made just about every mistake he could in trying to make amends for Bush's retarded administration. From Bad to Worse all because some guys like Paul Woflowitz and the list below convinced enough of the rest of Washington within a post 9/11 atmos-fear to do things which we now know are bleeding mental. The fog of fear blinded everyone and those which stood up and offered ideas were ignorantly listened to. Just like within the chaos of an accident or fire etc.. the guy who stands up and takes the lead can get people to do just about anything because they're confused and scared and they long for direction!

These men and men like them poisoned Washington from the inside out. Some of them followed the crowd, some of them were ambitious careerists, some had strong beliefs and suddenly a platform to push these beliefs from.. the phrase neocon is used too widely and is a bit outdated and misunderstood... the thing is to forget the word neocon and its conspiratorial connotations and simply look at the influence these guys and some like them have had on Washington and US foreign/military policy from before Bush right up to now. Some of them have since distanced themselves from the neocon movement but that doesn't change what they did to Washington from the inside.

• Elliott Abrams
• Ken Adelman
• Richard Armitage
• John David Ashcroft
• Fred Barnes
• Gary Bauer
• William J. Bennett
• Jeffrey Bergner
• John Bolton
• Max Boot
• Ellen Bork
• Paul Bremer Lewis Paul "Jerry" Bremer III
• David Brooks
• Shoshana Bryen
• Stephen D. Bryen
• Zbigniew Brzezinski
• Stephen A. Cambone
• Eliot A. Cohen
• Midge Decter
• Paula J. Dobriansky (PNAC)
• Thomas Donnelly
• John Doolittle
• Douglas Jay Feith
• David Frum
• Francis Fukuyama
• Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
• Reuel Marc Gerecht
• Newt Gingrich
• Joshua Goldberg
• Owen Harries
• Bruce P. Jackson
• Michael Johns
• Robert Kagan
• Zalmay Khalilzad
• Jeane Kirkpatrick
• Henry Kissinger
• Neal Kozodoy
• Charles Krauthammer
• Irving Kristol
• William Kristol
• Michael Arthur Ledeen
• Jay Lefkowitz
• I. Lewis Libby a.k.a. "Scooter"
• Michael H. Mobbs
• Joshua Muravchik
• Rupert Murdoch
• Richard J. Neuhaus
• Michael Novak
• Martin Peretz
• Richard N. Perle
• Daniel Pipes
• Norman Podhoretz
• Howard Raines
• Peter W. Rodman
• Karl Rove
• Donald H. Rumsfeld
• Richard Mellon Scaife
• Gary J. Schmitt
• William Schneider, Jr.
• Abram N. Shulsky
• Robert W. Tucker
• Harlan Ullman
• Vin Weber
• Paul Dundes Wolfowitz
• R. James Woolsey, Jr.
• David Wurmser
• Meyrav Wurmser
• Dov Zakheim
• Karl Zinsmeister
• Robert B. Zoellick