| flere-imsaho |
04-23-2009 12:34 PM |
Hrm, looks like I do have to repost this:
Torture doesn't work. It just makes those wanting vengeance feel better.
General David H. Petraeus:
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Originally Posted by General Petraeus
The top U.S. commander in Iraq admonished his troops regarding the results of an Army survey that found that many U.S military personnel there are willing to tolerate some torture of suspects and unwilling to report abuse by comrades.
"This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we -- not our enemies -- occupy the moral high ground," Army Gen. David H. Petraeus wrote in an open letter dated May 10 and posted on a military Web site.
He rejected the argument that torture is sometimes needed to quickly obtain crucial information. "Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary," he stated.
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Lieutenant General John Kimmons (Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, 2006):
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Originally Posted by Lt. General Kimmons
No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that.
And moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, under -- through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility. And additionally, it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can't afford to go there.
Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been -- in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized, humane interrogation practices, in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of legal, moral and ethical, now as further refined by this field manual. So we don't need abusive practices in there. Nothing good will come from them.
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Robert Baer, former CIA Case Officer:
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But legal or not, the important thing to remember is that torture doesn't work. When I was in the CIA I never came across a country that systematically tortures its citizens and at the same time produces useful intelligence. The objective of torture, invariably, is intimidation.
When Stalin asked the KGB to find out how to make an atomic bomb, the KGB didn't kidnap and torture American and British scientists. It recruited spies. And Stalin got his bomb.
The Israelis figured all of this out a long time ago. For the last three years I have been in and out of Israeli jails interviewing members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Many of them had been in suicide bomber cells — just the kind of people the Israelis would want to extract every last detail out of. None of them, however, claimed to have been tortured. The Israelis found out what they needed to know using traditional, legal police methods. It simply isn't worth it for them to risk damaging their already shaky international reputation by torturing suspects on the slim hope they just may get a lead.
Another thing the Israelis learned is that the "ticking bomb" scenario so popular on shows like 24 (and even in recent presidential debates) is a false choice. Any terrorist group capable of carrying off a sophisticated attack knows enough to "compartmentalize" its attack — the operatives are told only what they need to know. Or the attacks are so closely timed that it is impossible to stop them. For instance, had we arrested one of the 9/11 teams, there would not have been enough time to physically coerce its members into telling us about the other three hijacking teams.
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Vincent Cannistraro, 27 veteran with the CIA, including leading clandestine units:
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Detainees will say virtually anything to end their torment
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Merle Pribbenow (CIA):
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A similar stance was articulated last year by Merle L. Pribbenow, a 27-year veteran of the agency's clandestine Directorate of Operations. Writing in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA's in-house journal, Pribbenow recalled that an old college friend had recently expressed his belief that "the terrorist threat to America was so grave that any methods, including torture, should be used to obtain the information we need." The friend was vexed that Pribbenow's former colleagues "had not been able to 'crack' these prisoners."
Pribbenow sought an answer by revisiting the arcane case of Nguyen Van Tai, the highest-ranking Vietcong prisoner captured and interrogated by both South Vietnamese and American forces during the Vietnam War. Re-examining in detail the techniques used by the South Vietnamese (protracted torture that included electric shocks; beatings; various forms of water torture; stress positions; food, water, and sleep deprivation) and by the Americans (rapport-building and no violence), Pribbenow reached a stark conclusion: "While the South Vietnamese use of torture did result (eventually) in Tai's admission of his true identity, it did not provide any other usable information," he wrote. In the end, he said, "it was the skillful questions and psychological ploys of the Americans, and not any physical infliction of pain, that produced the only useful (albeit limited) information that Tai ever provided."
But perhaps most noteworthy was Pribbenow's conclusion: "This brings me back to my college classmate's question. The answer I gave him -- one in which I firmly believe -- is that we, as Americans, must not let our methods betray our goals," he said. "There is nothing wrong with a little psychological intimidation, verbal threats, bright lights and tight handcuffs, and not giving a prisoner a soft drink and a Big Mac every time he asks for them. There are limits, however, beyond which we cannot and should not go if we are to continue to call ourselves Americans. America is as much an ideal as a place, and physical torture of the kind used by the Vietnamese (North as well as South) has no place in it."
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Frank Snepp (CIA):
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From 1972 to 1975, Frank Snepp was the CIA's top interrogator in Saigon, where he choreographed elaborate, protracted sessions with Nguyen Van Tai and, at one point, seven other senior Vietcong captives. To the question of whether torture or abusive behavior by interrogators is justified, Snepp's answer is unequivocally no. And the fact that this point isn't understood at the agency today, Snepp says, is a sign of serious problems.
"One of the big lessons for the agency was that the South Vietnamese torturing people got in the way of getting information," he says. "One day, without my knowledge, the South Vietnamese forces beat one of my subjects to a pulp, and when he staggered into the interrogation room, I was furious. And I went to the station chief and he said, 'What do you want me to do about it?' I told him to tell the Vietnamese to lay off, and he said, 'What do you want me to tell them in terms of why?' I said, 'Because it's wrong, it's just wrong.' He laughed and said, 'Look, we've got 180,000 North Vietnamese troops within a half hour of here -- I can't tell them, don't beat the enemy. Give me a pragmatic reason.' I said, 'He can't talk. He's a wreck. I can't interrogate him.' He said, 'That, I can use with them.'
"The important lesson for me was that moral arguments don't work," Snepp says. "But if you have pragmatic reasons, that will work. But the most important thing is that the only time you can be sure that what you're getting from someone is valid is through discourse. In Tai's case, the idea was to develop absolute trust, which you do not do by alienating and humiliating someone. He liked poetry; I brought him books of poetry, and in many sessions we sat and discussed poetry, nothing else. The most extreme thing I did was a disorientation technique, where I would keep jumping from one subject to another so rapidly that he might not remember what he'd told me the day before, or not remember that he had not, in fact, told me what I was saying he'd told me. Little by little, I drew him into revelations. And I was highly commended for this work."
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Jack Cloonan, FBI Special Agent (full article in link, description/summary below):
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An FBI special agent from 1977 to 2002, Cloonan started working Al Qaeda cases in the mid-1990s. In this interview, he explains why he believes the FBI's method of interrogation is successful. He describes how the FBI cultivated former Al Qaeda operatives Jamal al-Fadl and Ali Mohammed as cooperative sources in the years before 9/11. Cloonan also recounts the FBI's battle with the CIA over custody of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who ran an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and who was one of the highest-ranking Al Qaeda operatives captured in the first months of the war in Afghanistan. Cloonan says al-Libi was revealing information that could have been useful in the prosecutions of Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, before he was transferred to CIA custody, duct-taped, put in the back of a truck, and sent to Egypt for more aggressive interrogation. Cloonan also discusses the FBI's role at Guantanamo and why he believes little good intelligence came out of there. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on July 13, 2005.
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Brigadier General David R. Irvine (Retired Army Reserve strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner interrogation and military law for 18 years with the Sixth Army Intelligence School):
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No one has yet offered any validated evidence that torture produces reliable intelligence. While torture apologists frequently make the claim that torture saves lives, that assertion is directly contradicted by many Army, FBI, and CIA professionals who have actually interrogated al Qaeda captives. Exhibit A is the torture-extracted confession of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al Qaeda captive who told the CIA in 2001, having been "rendered" to the tender mercies of Egypt, that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda to use WMD. It appears that this confession was the only information upon which, in late 2002, the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state repeatedly claimed that "credible evidence" supported that claim, even though a now-declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report from February 2002 questioned the reliability of the confession because it was likely obtained under torture. In January 2004, al-Libi recanted his "confession," and a month later, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements.
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