Torture revelations

Dayton's like his own Ministry of Truth and Ministry of Love all rolled into one.

Are you implying you know this from hands-on experience?

All Ferguson was concerned with is whether we'd cracked the Japanese diplomatic code prior to Pearl Harbor, and even the government fought tooth and nail to keep the truth from the Senator.

If you manipulate them, you can often get more than you'd get by bullying them. Like performing surgery with a scalpel instead of a chainsaw.

But to manipulate them, you first need to get their complete attention, and they do see us as despicable non-believers and agents of, obviously, the Great Satan, doing the bidding of Satan. So how do you start a conversation when they won't say anything? Well, how about talking about their arm. The arm is a wonderful thing to have. Be a shame is anything happened to it.

Actually, no. Ferguson sat on the Senate committee which oversaw the whole shebang and he knew what the truth was, but was trying to make a name for himself and claimed that the government was hiding more. As part of this, he released classified material in hopes of stirring up shit. When that didn't work, he went on to destroy the Tucker corporation and to put "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance because he thought it would make it impossible for Communists to say. He also had ties to at least one racist organization.

I'll just leave this here, even though he had no problem with supporting regimes who practiced it.

(As Sean Hannity)
You want the terrorists to win! You hate America! Why do you hate America?

The Reagan mythologized by the right is thoroughly disconnected from the Reagan that actually existed. So much so, in fact, that he has his own TV Tropes category.

It was a political move. In reality he escalated everything. Why would he do that if not because he came into office and saw the reality of the situation he was put in the middle of.

I'm not saying torture is a good thing. I'm saying that we live in a black and white world where we can afford to call it wrong. The people dealing with the terrorists deal with a lot more grey areas. Obama saw the same thing and decided to expand JSOC. From all accounts, up until they got out of control, they were very successful. In fact, out of control might equal successful.

Are you dense? Most JSOC operations will never be talked about, nor will you ever know what the CIA clandestine service has been doing the last 10 years. How many off the books interrogations do you think they conducted the last 10 years that you will never hear about? We are talking about the most secretive and successful intelligence organizations ever created. Not a chance that you know what they've been doing.

Nor do you.

Are we even talking about the same thing? I was talking about the CIA torture program.

You appear to be rather dense. There is literally a zero percent possibility that if torture were widely "successfully" used there wouldn't be at least handful of examples that could be detailed publicly without meaningfully compromising secrecy and security, especially once word of torture methods had leaked.

What kind of fantasy world do you live in that you could possibly believe that there is significant truthful and useful information extracted through torture but every last bit of the torture information and whatever would need to be provided to verify that the torture information was useful amounts to a highly classified state secret? That's just not the way the world works. There's very little information that is genuinely so important to keep secret that it won't be published if there's substantial reason to do so for people with the power to do so. Information is routinely and overwhelmingly overclassified for a variety of reasons: fetishization of secrecy, a strong preference for overclassifying rather than underclassifying, to prevent embarrassment, etc. If torture routinely "worked" then Bush and Cheney would have released videotapes long ago.

Um, the CIA released plenty of examples of its success, including the 9/11 architects. After WW-II, many of the condemned Nazis protested that the evidence against them was obtained under torture.

They released claims, not a single whit of actual evidence. That's the point. We'd have HD video all over the internet of torture producing information and extensive documentation of that information being usefully implemented if torture actually worked. A claim is not evidence; it's just a claim.

I can claim that you're an ignorant clod all I like and that's only evidence that my claim exists; it's your writing that's the evidence of your ignorance.

Daily Mail Article from 2 years ago.

Kahlid Sheik Mohammed didn't crack after CIA interrogators pushed him around, slapped him, physically intimidated him or waterboarded him 183 times.

The mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks was finally spilled his information about upcoming al-Qaeda plots after he was kept awake for 180 hours -- seven and a half days -- straight.

...

José Rodriguez Jr, revealed in 'Hard Measures' that US officials were only able to extract the information from Mohammed because they subjected him to such harsh interrogation.

'Even with waterboarding, he was counting on his fingers, because he knew we would stop at 10, so he wasn’t terribly intimidated by that,' Mr Rodriguez told the New York Post.

Notice the problem was that the Sheik knew we were very limited in our methods. The enemies read all these Democrat leaks and use the information to resist interrogation. In the Sheik's case, as we waterboarded him we couldn't induce panic (the goal of that particular method), because he knew it was essentially a fraternity hazing ritual. 1, 2, 3... 8, 9. 10 - done. The point of the enhanced methods is to induce despair and panic, and that doesn't happen if they're onto your game and don't believe you'll actually do anything really bad. Shackling yourself regarding the methods renders the methods much less effective.

The second point is that he cracked under a different brutal technique.

Here and in the Dayton thread, I find the usual gang of filthy anti-american counter-culture misfits and euro-trash crying hot crocodile tears for sociopath muzzie terrorists. I find it surprising they can divert their attention from their Ward Churchill shrines long enough to pout and stamp their feet in libtard outrage. Go stage another die-in while the adults protect the country, worthless hippie cupcakes.

They're not really attempting to get anyone to feel sorry for the terrorists, as they're just barely smart enough to realize that's a losing argument. I couldn't possibly care less if Muqtada Al' Terrorist spends the rest of his useless life screaming in agony. String 'em up by the IV's they're being fed through and run a few thousand volts through their testicles, just for shits and giggles.

And the "torture doesn't produce results" argument fails because it assumes extracting strategic information is the only purpose for torture. Of course it isn't. Intimidation, fear-building, those are goals every bit as important. Oh, and enhanced interrogation techniques do lead to useful information, although you won't find any terrorist sympathizers openly admitting it.

No, instead they're going for the larger moralistic argument - "torture" (however its being defined, and the definition keeps expanding for those with pro-terrorist sympathies) is philosophically wrong. Philosophical ethics are man-made constructs that can be bent, broken and rebuilt to suit whatever objectives serve the greater good. In this case the greater good is the preservation of our way of life and the prevention of more loss of innocent Western lives. If that means some muzzies, muzzie sympathizers and traitors have to be rectally rehydrated a few times before they spill the beans, so be it.

When it comes to interrogation, I'm in favor of pragmatism. If torture works, use torture. If torture doesn't work, use something else that does. Get the job done.

Which is what I meant by ROI (was it in this thread or the other?).

You've got one technique that produces false data more often than not, and another that's almost always effective.
One requires extra manpower, can involve over a decade of coverups (your tax dollars at work), and puts you at risk of accusations of war crimes, the other doesn't.

Only one of the two makes for good teevee. Easy enough to see who'd be attracted to that...

Wanna know a secret?

If these techniques didn't work, they wouldn't be used.

Yes, it really is that simple.

And all of the bedwetting and hand wringing in the world won't change that.

Now I'm not saying to throw every prisoner under the waterboard, but once you know you have someone involved with terrorism...all bets are off.

Archangel's posts are torture.

But..but...according to Garamet, we should bake them cookies and buy them Happy Meals and sing them lullabies at night. If we're just nice enough to the fanatical jihadists, they'll reveal all!!!

This does absolutely nothing to back up the idea that torture is a source of reliable information. Just the opposite, in fact, because the unreliability of torture-induced confessions is the entire reason people claim their confessions were obtained that way.

And of course we're only discussing this because the Democrats were desperate for a shocking story to overshadow the simultaneous Gruber testimony and push it down to page eight, regardless of the damage done to national security and US intelligence. It seems to have worked.

And yet the information was good enough to send them to the gallows, wasn't it.