Lestat:

It’s not about them. It’s about us, unless you want to become them.

So using techniques reminiscent of this:

is going to turn us into terrorist?

Give me a break.

Confess, it just makes you feel “icky” inside, and it’s all about feelings with you liberals.

i guess what i am trying to say is all u have to do is get a hose hook it up to a tap, turn it on and spray over the guys nose and mouth. confession in under 1 minute.

this is a very scary torture

Sparkie:

I know the breathing techniques and can hit a quarter from a goddamn long way away with my .223

Hm… Was the quarter armed at the time?

Chris,

If you’re gonna do this you’d better get a whole lot better at it in a hurry.

Your quote, mangled though it is in your rendition, was from Benjamin Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson, and it was from before the American Revolution with a completely different context in mind.

Rodney,

Is your avatar a picture of John Brown?

Looks awful, but contrast that with how they treat our prisoners.

It’s not about them. It’s about us, unless you want to become them.

T o d,

Must be a real drag to be tired of oneself.

2H9,

…That is not waterboarding. I have been boarded and that was not it.

SERE?

Out Here
Rodney Grves
rodney.g.graves@gmail.com

Bat One:

Anybody who thinks that not subjecting high level detainees to “harsh” interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, will improve the treatment of any captured American military personnel is a witless imbecile who should be seen but not heard.

Exactly.

Totalitarian countries and extremist individuals routinely ignore them at every possible level. It is only the knowledge of how they will be treated if captured that prevents them from doing worse. In that sense, moderating how we treat these people actually probably has made the type of inhuman treatment they subject their prisoners to actual worse.

The fact is in terms of its stated goals, the Geneva Conventions are a complete failure.

You’re either above it, or not. When I was a green suiter we were above it and were proud of it. I have no problem killing them. The more the better. I really don’t even have a problem with the waterboarding. I have a problem with this administration lying about everything. You keyboard commandos with a minor in Law should just STF. Unless you been there you’re just as worthless as the draft dodgers we currently have in the Administration and shouldn’t even be allowed to have a fucking opinion.

Thanks for the video, man!

Come on over and take my opinion away from, America hating twit. I have dealt with you socialist morons on 2 continents and have no fear of wannabe hippy scum such as you.

Finally got it to run. That is not waterboarding. I have been boarded and that was not it. You don’t put a rag in the mouth, don’t hold hand over mouth either. You take a towel or t-shirt and cover the entire face, then pour water directly over mouth and nose. You also do not yell or scream, calm and quiet is far more un-nerving.

Yes indeed, Rod. Twice, second time I got jetplaned instead of boarded.

Oh, good. A training film to teach terrorists what to prepare to resist. Good thinking, media. AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!!

my dictionary says “to torture” means “to bring great physical or mental pain upon another.” hard to see how this treatment is anything other than torture.

contrast that with how they treat our prisoners

not sure i follow the logic. if they do it to their prisoners, then that somehow makes it ok to do it to ours? if they behave inexcusably, then we can too?

keep in mind that prisoners have been released from gitmo after years of detention, having been charged with nothing. people like to make it so simple and say, “these guys are terrorists, so anything we do to them is ok.” the reality is, these guys are suspects. what about the huge fraction of them that have done nothing wrong, and were just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

we’ve already destroyed so many more lives in this “war on terror” than we lost on our soil. even Bush himself estimates at least 30,000 iraqi civilians killed. my god, is that worth it? is it worth torturing people, people who haven’t even had a fair trial (or any trial at all for that matter), to get information that is almost completely unreliable?

le_sacre: The prisoners have a choice; they can just tell us what we want to know; if they don’t do that, they are creating a situation where we will do whatever we need to do until they choose to tell us. Where and when it stops is up to them.
Torture is the gratuitous infliction of pain/injury. Getting intel isn’t gratuitous; it is for a purpose. When they torture our soldiers, it is for in gratuitous infliction of pain. Big difference.

Pilgrim, that’s algore TV

Nothing: I said waterboarding was not torture; I didn’t say it was not torture when we do it. You made that up all by yourself.
BTW, no intel officer wastes his time with subjects who have no information; there are many methods of making that determination that don’t involve anything coercive at all. Duh.

joel: Your position might have some credence if we strapped bombs on children, beheaded people on video or launched thousands of ball-bearing warhead rockets into civilian areas, but we don’t, so your position is meaningless.

Bill: If you will kindly move to France, you will undoubtedly get your wish. Just take a walk through the Muslim suburbs. Your pathetic and dishonest attempt to make equivalence with the terrorists is just wrong. One example is that you can spew your toxic filth on this blog with no fear of retribution. Try it in a Muslim country. I dare you! Go to Iran and speak out against Mahmoud, or to Venezuela and speak against Hugo. If you’re still alive and intact, go to Nork and speak out against Kim Jong. Let us know how it all works out.

Torture is the gratuitous infliction of pain/injury.

i have not seen the word “gratuitous” in ANY definition of torture anywhere. where’d you get that from? because it kind of sounds like you’re changing the commonly-accepted definition of torture in order to make sure the U.S. isn’t doing it.

no intel officer wastes his time with subjects who have no information; there are many methods of making that determination that don’t involve anything coercive at all.

what are these methods? as far as i can recall, intelligence experts have testified that information obtained under coercion is practically useless, because the detainee will say anything they can think of to escape the painful situation.

for example, published 11/25/05 in the guardian (guardian.co.uk story: )

Internal reviews by the CIA have raised questions about the treatment and credibility of the two men. The New York Times said one review, completed in spring last year by the CIA inspector general, found that in the first months after his capture Mr Mohammed had suffered excessive use of “waterboarding”, a technique involving near drowning which entails the detainee being strapped to a board and then submerged.

They just don’t seem to understand.

Terrorists are, under the customary laws of warfare, illegal combatants, and being an illegal combatant is a war crime under those same customary laws of warfare punishable by death. Once a determination is made that a detainee is an illegal combatant (via military tribunal as per Geneva III as reinforced by recent legislation in the United States), they lose all the protections of the customary laws of warfare and are also no longer under the protections of Westrn Civilization. The fact that we afford such war criminals a further tribunal for consideration of war crimes is a magnanamous gesture on our part.

As to the questioning, were they legal combatants, they would be shielded even from the coercive interrogations folks here are bemoaning.

The captured terrorists are suffering the consequences of their actions, which is as it should be. As soon as such vigorous interrogation methods are no longer allowed, we will need to proceed directly from the Combatant Status Review Tribunal to the scaffold.

Out Here
Rodney Graves
rodney.g.graves@gmail.com

an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind

if we do what the terroists do that makes us just as bad as them.

and of course, any one with even the slightly degree of sence can see that we’re much much worse

Come on, Bravo1! I would be more than happy to take any of these leftard idiots and introduce them to low level interogation. They would not make it through US Army Basic Training, much less SERE.

So, your entire post is a come on to get people to go to your blog. Very cute. Terrorists are not innocent waifs being abused by the Evil Americans, they are Brigand/Bandits, and Article 3 does not afford them any protection whatsoever. And your assertion that all we have to do talk to them and understand their terrible childhood or whatever crap you you are trying to peddle is just that, crap. Now toddle on back to Daily Kos or DU or where ever your trail of slime leads back to.

le_sacre,

It appears that Brian Ross of ABC News is a good deal better informed on the subject than the Guardian reporters.

When properly used, the techniques appear to be closely monitored and are signed off on in writing on a case-by-case, technique-by-technique basis, according to highly placed current and former intelligence officers involved in the program. In this way, they say, enhanced interrogations have been authorized for about a dozen high value al Qaeda targets — Khalid Sheik Mohammed among them. According to the sources, all of these have confessed, none of them has died, and all of them remain incarcerated.

While some media accounts have described the locations where these detainees are located as a string of secret CIA prisons — a gulag, as it were — in fact, sources say, there are a very limited number of these locations in use at any time, and most often they consist of a secure building on an existing or former military base. In addition, they say, the prisoners usually are not scattered but travel together to these locations, so that information can be extracted from one and compared with others. Currently, it is believed that one or more former Soviet bloc air bases and military installations are the Eastern European location of the top suspects. Khalid Sheik Mohammed is among the suspects detained there, sources said.

The sources told ABC that the techniques, while progressively aggressive, are not deemed torture, and the debate among intelligence officers as to whether they are effective should not be underestimated. There are many who feel these techniques, properly supervised, are both valid and necessary, the sources said. While harsh, they say, they are not torture and are reserved only for the most important and most difficult prisoners.

According to the sources, when an interrogator wishes to use a particular technique on a prisoner, the policy at the CIA is that each step of the interrogation process must be signed off at the highest level — by the deputy director for operations for the CIA.

Further in the same article,
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1322866&page=1
ABC notes the unconfirmed report that one detainee died while in CIA custody and that another may also have died while held by the US military. But those reports are again unconfirmed. And besides, so what? This is, after all, a war. And as Rodney has pointed out above, non-uniformed combatants are, by international law, entitled nothing more than a nearby scaffold or one final bullet.

2Hotel9,

Interrogation resistance training is the sort of thing you look back on with a combination of pride and horror. I might be reluctant to do it again… especially today and at my age. but I will never forget the lesson i learned, the primary of which is that you CAN survive.

The problem isn’t that the leftards, as you so kindly put it, could not survive even basic training. The problem is that they refuse to recognize the basic reality of a wartime situation or what that situation entails.

dr2 opines:

…Someone stated that persons such as the “enemy combatants” designated by Bush were treated by the Geneva Conventions as Brigands/Bandits. There is no such category in the Geneva Conventions.

The “dr” is partially correct here, in that Geneva III makes no mention of Brigands and Bandits. The customary laws of warfare do, however, recognize the terms, and have traditionally punished Brigands and Bandits by summary execution.

The more appropriate term is illegal combatant, where Geneva III describes at great lengths in Article 4 legal combatants entitled to the protections of a Prisoner of War. Article 5 then describes the means for determining who is, and is not, subject to the protections of the Convention per the standards of Article 4.

This is the part [of Common Article III] that the Supreme Court says applies to the enemy combatants held at Guantanamo.(quote deleted)

Common Article III was primarily intended for situations of purely domestic armed rebellion or insurgency, which is emphatically not the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor does CA3 pertain to the terrorists making war in contravention of the customary laws of warfare.

“No active part in the hostilities” means just that.

When war is waged by a Non Governmental Organization, the following activities also constitute active participation on the part of the NGO and its members:

Gathering and Analysis of Intelligence
Planning and Organizing hostile acts
Procuring and dispensing arms for offensive use
Recruiting and Training combatants
Raising, holding, and disbursing funds used in furtherance of hostile acts

All of which acts are no less active hostilities than actually bearing arms, though such activity is harder to detect.

People handed over to us by rival tribes in Afghanistan, who told us they were Al Qaeda (perhaps because they spoke Arabic or another foreign language) are not, until there is direct evidence, people taking an active part in hostilities.

The claims of a third party do not rise to the level of proof, but are sufficient probable cause for detention and status determination. An admission of membership in the combatant NGO is sufficient for a determination of status as an illegal combatant.

Many of the prisoners at Guantanamo, a portion of them already released, have been recognized to fall in this category.

As CSR Tribunals have been able to review the evidence and reach their determinations (iaw Geneva III Articles 4 and 5), those determined either not be combatants, or those determined to have been combatants but to no longer pose a threat of rejoining the war, have been released. Of those released, more than two dozen have subsequently been killed or recaptured on the field, which clearly indicates an operating presumption of innocence.

We clearly, as the Supreme Court said, need to have good judicial process to recognize when there is evidence that shows prisoners *were* on the battlefield with guns in their hands, and when they just got rounded up and
handed in for a bounty. Many of the JAGs are concerned about good compliance with the Geneva Conventions.

The Supreme Court held that the President could not establish War Crimes Tribunals (not to be confused with the Combatant Status Determination Tribunals) without explicit legislative authorization. Which authorization, you should note, has now been provided.

The concerns raised by waterboarding of a few “high-value” targets by trained CIA operatives acting under separate orders every step of the way (Brian Ross, ABC News) do not stop at whether they tell us something. We should also be concerned, as citizens, that the executive branch (the CIA) has taken on judicial functions, that these prisoners have little hope of a trial, that they have no access to the Red Cross, that perhaps we actually found or had handed to us some people with “high-value” information, that we could also have gotten without using waterboarding.

A towering edifice of speculation and conjecture built upon a foundation of rumor and innuendo.

These Congressionally Authorized methods of interrogation are reserved for illegal combatants (as determined by Combatant Status Review Tribunals) who are further believed to have critical and perishable intelligence. Nor does any captured combatant (legal or illegal) have to be tried before the end of hostilities (indeed, legal combatants may NOT be tried for actions preceding their capture until after said cessation of hostilities). It is also worth noting that the ICRC regularly visits and inspects the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

QED

Out Here
Rodney Graves
rodney.g.graves@gmail.com

Oh, and D2, I don’t need a lying scumbag such as Brian Ross to tell me anything.

what are these methods? That’s on a “need to know” basis, and you have no need to know. as far as i can recall, intelligence experts have testified that information obtained under coercion is practically useless, because the detainee will say anything they can think of to escape the painful situation.If you want to believe that, in spite of all the good intel we have gotten by coercive methods, then go ahead. They wouldn’t tell you anyway, because the whole area is highly classified.

How do you define the difference?
In liters? How many times it is done per hour?

Is it OK?
Cause we want to know if you support some armed group?

Is it OK?
Cause we want to know who ate
the strawberries?

Is it OK?
Cause the cable is out, we’re bored,you dissed our momas and you scream funny.

2H9…I thought the way they were doing it looked a little odd.

I’ve read from “experts” on interrogation that the best way to get information out of someone is to disorient them, as opposed to hurting them. .

Make them uncomfortable or scared long enough, and they’ll talk.

And we know this

Settled law.

Que?