E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
AFP - Getty Images file
Sept. 11 attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is shown on March 1, 2003, shortly after his arrest in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. He is said to have been waterboarded 183 times.
Whatever its artistic merits, the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” is giving Americans a shocking first-hand look at the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA on suspected terrorists and rekindling that most polarizing of national security debates: Did waterboarding and other practices amount to torture and were they even effective?
The movie, which opens in wide release on Friday, is unlikely to resolve those issues, particularly given that critics – including acting CIA Director Michael Morell -- say it misrepresents the role the interrogations played in the eventual tracking and killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
But more than a decade after the harsh techniques were authorized, the movie does offer an opportunity to examine the methodical, legalistic, bureaucratic process that led to the use of waterboarding and other physically and mentally stressful interrogation techniques.
Their development illustrates what former CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his memoir, “At the Center of the Storm”: “Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, in situations like this, you don’t call in the tough guys; you call in the lawyers.”
Interviews over three years with former high-ranking U.S. officials, and a review of documents and memoirs of participants by NBC News, provide a detailed picture of the how the intelligence community and Justice Department crafted the “enhanced interrogation techniques” – known as EITs in CIA jargon -- that were used on some of America’s most wanted terrorists.
The approval process for the techniques – many of which are prohibited for use on battlefield adversaries by the Geneva Conventions – created not just a list of those that were permitted, but included detailed instructions covering everything from the dimensions of the waterboard to how long detainees were to be strapped down and their airflow restricted. Specific legal procedures also were prescribed before each technique could be administered.
The process of developing a “menu” of interrogation techniques that could be used on suspected terrorists began in the spring of 2002, and moved quickly -- even feverishly – at first.
AP file
An undated file photo provided by U.S. Central Command shows Abu Zubaydah, date and location unknown.
The CIA, which lacked interrogation expertise, needed to develop a plan for questioning alleged al-Qaida terrorist training camp operator Abu Zubaydah, the first major jihadi captured after the 9-11 attacks.
Wounded in a shootout in Pakistan at the end of March 2002, Zubaydah was initially interrogated by FBI agents. But CIA agents soon joined the questioning and the bureau withdrew its agents by June out of a concern that the agency’s interrogators had crossed the line. (That suggests that Zubaydah’s harsh treatment began even before enhanced interrogation techniques were approved in August 2012, since the 9-11 Commission’s final report included references to at least five CIA interrogations between late May and early July.)
“Interrogation wasn’t a big deal till we got a big deal guy,” said one former intelligence official who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity. “We had reporting from prior to 9-11 as well as afterward that Abu Zubaydah might well know about future operations. So … we get him in our clutches…we figure we might need to do something to find out what he knows.”
'Zero Dark Thirty' torture controversy: Filmmakers stand their ground
To come up with a “menu” of harsh interrogation tactics, the agency turned to the Pentagon’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program, which trains U.S. servicemen to resist harsh treatment that might be inflicted on them by an enemy that doesn’t abide by the Geneva Conventions. In other words, torture.
Agency officials made first contact with the SERE trainers in April 2002, not long after Zubaydah was captured, according to staff investigators with the Senate Armed Services Committee. Richard Shiffrin, the Defense Department’s deputy general counsel for Intelligence, later confirmed in congressional testimony that the purpose was to “reverse engineer” the techniques that U.S. servicemen were being subjected to for use on al-Qaida detainees.
Some techniques were demonstrated to CIA officials in an initial two-day tutorial on July 1-2, 2002, with SERE instructors playing the roles of both prisoner and the interrogator. A CIA lawyer decided following the tutorial that "significantly harsh techniques” would have to be approved by the Justice Department.
In late July, Dr. John “Bruce” Jessen, then a senior psychologist at the Defense Department agency that administered SERE training, was sent to the CIA “for several days” to discuss the techniques, according to congressional investigators.
Immediately after the assignment ended, Jessen resigned from the Air Force and, along with another recently retired colleague, Dr. James Mitchell, founded Mitchell Jessen & Associates.
The business -- co-owned by seven individuals, six of whom either worked in the SERE program as employees or contractors – quickly signed a contract with the CIA, a deal that provided the two men with $1,000-a-day tax-free retainers, according to ABC News.
Susan Walsh / AP file
Former Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, testifies about the legal justification for 'enhanced interrogation techniques' on Capitol Hill on June 26, 2008.
At roughly the same time, starting July 13, 2002, White House and Justice Department lawyers began drafting the memos approving the techniques. By July 22, John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general in the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, had prepared his eventually famous secret memo to Alberto Gonzalez, then counsel to President George W. Bush. In it, Yoo suggested that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to terrorism cases. Furthermore, he wrote, international law “lacks domestic legal effect, and in any event can be overridden by the president.”
Meanwhile, within days of hiring Mitchell Jessen & Associates, the CIA asked the Defense Department for a rush “list of exploitation and interrogation techniques that had been effective against Americans” in the SERE training.
The Pentagon quickly replied with a memo, “Physical Pressures used in Resistance Training and Against American Prisoners and Detainees,” according to the Senate investigators.
Working with Mitchell Jessen & Associates, the CIA soon developed a menu of 20 enhanced techniques – a list that was ultimately whittled down to 10, mainly because some of proposed techniques were considered too harsh even for terrorists.
“Not everything they proposed was part of the final menu,” said a former senior intelligence official, also speaking on condition of anonymity. “They came up with some stuff people didn’t like and were not approved. … There were legal tests. … Does it shock the conscience? Does it lead to deep long-lasting injuries?”
The official said he was unaware specifically which techniques had been rejected or why. Two other Bush administration officials familiar with the approval process for enhanced interrogation techniques, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were unaware that any techniques had been rejected prior to approval of the final “menu.”
Approval of the 'menu'
By Aug. 1, 2002, only five days after the Pentagon’s memo had been delivered to the CIA, use of the 10 techniques was approved in a memo signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge. The approved techniques were: “attention grasp,” “walling,” “facial hold,” “facial slap (insult slap),” “cramped confinement,” “wall standing,” “stress positions,” “sleep deprivation,” “insects placed in a confinement box” and “waterboarding.”
Waterboarding, probably the most controversial of the techniques, was at the time only used by the U.S. Navy SERE school and prohibited by the Army and Air Force, according to the committee. The Navy has since abandoned waterboarding.
While the techniques were undeniably harsh, senior CIA officials were comforted by the fact that they had been used by the U.S. against its own servicemen, said the former intelligence official.
“A big factor in people’s thinking was that these techniques were used in the training of U.S. Special Operations Forces,” the ex-official said. “If it was something that had been done to U.S. forces … although admittedly very tough … then it couldn’t be considered torture.”
Indeed, Jose Rodriguez, who as director of the CIA’s clandestine service ultimately controlled the EIT program, has written in his memoir, “Hard Measures,” that “waterboarding had been used on 26,829 U.S. Air Force personnel between 1992 and 2001.” Eventually the Air Force stopped using it, he added, because “the airmen subjected to it found it impossible to resist.”
While waterboarding received most attention, “walling” also was controversial because of reports that detainees’ heads would be thrown against the wall.
Rodriguez, however says that was not the case. In his memoir, he wrote that “special ‘rooms within rooms’” were constructed with flexible plywood walls to prevent injury.
Among the proposed interrogation techniques that didn’t make the cut were “smoke,” “immersion” and “grounding,” according to Senate investigators.
In “smoke,” detainees were to have been blasted for up to five minutes with “an extraordinary amount of thick, sickening smoke” created by a mechanism that used dry tobacco as fuel. “Immersion” called for detainees to be placed in a makeshift cold water bath where “depending on wind and temperature, the subject may be either fully clothed or stripped.” In “grounding,” detainees were to be “forcefully guided…to the ground, (with the interrogator) never letting go.”
While no evidence exists to suggest that “smoke” or “grounding” were ever used against the al-Qaida detainees, the International Red Cross Committee has reported that at least three of the detainees claim they were subjected to “immersion” and their description of the technique precisely matches what was laid out in the original menu the Pentagon provided the CIA.
Rodriguez, who oversaw the use of EIT program, has offered some of the most detailed descriptions of how the techniques were applied.
Writing in “Hard Measures,” he said the 10 approved techniques were broken down into the three categories, “neutral probe,” “corrective” and “coercive.”
Under “neutral probe,” detainees were subjected to sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation and enforced nudity.
If detainees refused to cooperate, Rodriguez said the “corrective” measures were introduced. “Attention grasp,” “facial hold” and finally “insult slap” met the definition of “corrective.”
In the final stage, “coercive,” detainees were placed in a confinement box, at least once with insects (only non-deadly varieties permitted), “wall standing” – where a detainee was directed to stand four or five feet away from a wall with his arms in front of him, fingertips resting on the wall,
Waterboarding was the final technique, only to be used “should all else fail,” Rodriguez wrote. It was to be carried out only with “specific headquarters approval,” and in keeping with a detailed description laid out in the memo drawn up by the Bush Administration DOJ Legal Counsel’s office, one that specified the dimensions of the board (“approximately 4 feet by 7 feet”), the time air flow should be restricted (“20 to 40 seconds”) and the desired effect (“perception of suffocation and incipient panic.”)
It appears from the Bybee memo that the CIA used “experts” in determining whether the techniques had long lasting health effects, something that even administration lawyers understood to be a violation of the Geneva Conventions. In one reference, Bybee noted that an expert “who has 10 years of SERE training … stated that … insofar as he is aware, none of the individuals who completed the program suffered any adverse mental effects.” In another instance, Bybee wrote, an expert cited by the agency “expressed confidence that the training did not result in any long term psychological impact.” (One Bush administration official theorized that “smoke” had not been approved because tobacco smoke could have had long lasting health effects.)
Also embedded in the documentation of the use of the interrogation techniques is the CIA’s meticulous record-keeping of things like waterboarding.
CIA interrogators used common everyday bottled water in their waterboarding of high value detainees, according to several former and current U.S. officials, both inside the intelligence community and Bush administration.
Rodriguez reported the same thing in a recent Washington Post review of “Zero Dark Thirty.” He wrote, “Instead of a large bucket, small plastic water bottles were used on the three men,” who were subjected to waterboarding.
“The public was only given (quite literally) a cartoon version of what others imagine the technique was like,” he wrote in his memoir. “Irresponsible animations showed detainees practically being dowsed by a fire hose.”
Officials added that each pour from a bottle constituted a single waterboarding procedure.
A one-pint water bottle takes about seven seconds to empty, so four or five bottles would empty in 30 or 40 seconds, the time prescribed by the Justice Department memo approving the process. (Larger two-liter bottles might have been more efficient. Each takes a full 30 seconds to empty.)
Alleged 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, reportedly waterboarded 183 times, Zubaydah and Abdelrahim Hussein Abdul Nashiri, a Saudi who allegedly ran al-Qaida operations in the Arabian Peninsula and once planned to assassinate Vice President Al Gore, all told the Red Cross that bottled water was used in their waterboardings.
'It was hopeless'
Zubaydah described to the Red Cross an experience mostly faithful to the technique prescribed in the Bybee memo, albeit less clinical:
“I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.”
He continued: “The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die.”
Nashiri said he had the same experience, except the water used was cold.
“Injuries to my ankles and wrists also occurred during the waterboarding as I struggled in the panic of not being able to breathe,” he told the Red Cross.
Not everything was approved by the CIA General Counsel’s office. According to both former intelligence officers and Iraqi Survey Group officials, the Office of the Vice President Cheney wanted to use enhanced interrogation techniques on a recalcitrant Iraqi intelligence officer who they believed had information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The office angrily refused, according to another former agency official familiar with the request.
Charles Duelfer, the former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, and the man ultimately in charge of interrogations, said at the time that he considered the request reprehensible.
In his 2009 book, “Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq,” Duelfer wrote that he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought the intelligence officer’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere.
“They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”
Duelfer did not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding. But in a recent interview, a former CIA officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that agency’s acting general counsel John Rizzo refused to permit the use of waterboarding because those same memos that authorized it for al-Qaida detainees said nothing about it being used in Iraq.
It is just the kind of detail that is missing from the movie. But the back-story of the bureaucratic process that changed the way the American government viewed the parameters of torture is in some ways even more dramatic than the hunt for bin Laden.
“The torture displayed in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ was the result of systematic legal and policy reasoning at the highest levels of government,” said Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and author of “The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days.” “Which techniques, how they would be applied, and with what specific legal authorities were all part of the detailed, cold, bureaucratic trail that methodically removed torture from the realm of illegal and forbidden and placed it in the realm of national policy.”
More from Open Channel:
- Exclusive: DEA agents arranged prostitute for Secret Service agent
- Rossen Reports: Metal water bottles can endanger kids
- John Brennan, Obama's pick for CIA director, has deep roots at agency
Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook
Leave a Comment:
I vote yes on water boarding. No on propane torches. Actually, I don't think that water boarding works very well.
Disgraceful for this country to participate in torture. That's never been the American way and it shouldn't be now. It makes us no better than the other side.
Fight fire with fire. I'm sure our men and women will not be afforded humane treatment when captured by these animals!
Innocents abroad--oh PLEASE. Americans have ALWAYS used Torture.
Try not to be so naive.
We have always been better at "it". That's why we enjoy the freedoms we do. Welcome to the human race.
It's not torture. You want real torture, study up on Commie regimes.
Airborne Dad is a gun rights guy, who also supports tough measures against terrorist detainees........and votes for liberals.
When the whole anti-muslim thing first started (9/12/01) there was immediately comparisons to the crusades of medieval Europe. I laughed about it back then. Mostly because it was the fundamentalist preachers who were all for a 21st century crusade. I don't laugh about it anymore. It seems it's gotten to be so HIP to be anti-muslim that mainstream society can ignore the hundreds of thousands of innocents killed in this so-called war on terror. It's gotten to the point where our supposedly liberal President doesn't hesitate to call in a drone strike that takes out 20 civilians along with the one bad guy that's targeted.
Are we really being morally superior to that that we fight against? What are we really becoming?
It's been really weird observing freaks like you try to twist the thousands of Muslim bombings of innocent people the last decade into some mistreatment of Muslims by the West.
Man, liberals are bizarre!
People should really read the entire timeline of this production being made, who was supporting it a couple layers down, what the intent of the movie really was, the leak of information and cover up, the lies about using the movie now through the media as to try and recapture its original failed purpose in changing viewers thoughts. It is all one big huge backfire for one political party. Would type some details, but why? Just for 50 comments saying "thats not true, ....". SO, if you have some time... go look for yourself a bit. You will be surprised.
No Barry Manilow tapes in the top 10?
How about back to back Star Trek reruns 24/7 until they talk?
How about an Obama inauguration speech?
How about David Hasselhoff's Christmas Album? I would spill the beans after 20 seconds.
Greg-2505403...not the Obama tapes...you cruel bastard!
RT--lol--say what you will about Shrub, (and I certainly never voted for him!) at least his speeches were entertaining to anyone with a modicum of intelligence and a decent knowledge of ENGLISH.
Tee hee.
How about strobe lights and a OOGA horn at random intervals 24/7 until they talk.
How about The Captain and Tenille, Barry Manilow, or the Partidge Family Does Led Zepplin's Greatest Hits?
How 'bout being forced to stare 24/7 at pictures of ugly fat stupid teabaggers at an NRA convention? With Ted Nugent babbling away in the background.
How about reading posts from "gravis", that ought to do it.
Liberals made a big deal about waterboarding or possible inhumane treatment of terrorists who want to kill Americans, and yet these same policies, probably not as severe as what was portrayed in the liberal movie "Zero Dark Thirty," led to the capture of bin Laden. It is also very disturbing that these same liberals who want to pamper terrorists don't mind the killing of unborn babies.
How can you compare killing terrorists and to killing unborn fetuses?
Did you know Obama has bypassed torture and goes right to execution of terror suspects using drones?
Your post shows how misinformed Conservatives really are these days...
I saw this film last week and honestly if you have seen the Fox TV series 24 then you have seen more and worse torture than what is in the movie. Everyone is focusing on the first 30-45 minutes of the film which shows the torture, but that is only less than a quarter of the movie. The rest of the movie shows the struggles of one woman and the rest of the CIA to track down UBL over a span of 10 years and ultimately the killing of UBL. It is a greatly crafted film full of emotion and at the end of the film it left me feeling proud to be an American. I highly recommend this movie.
Well now they have made a movie about how people were tortured by our government. Now they admit it and even make entertainment out of it. Its just like saying We don't kill people unless they kill us first. We don't torture people unless they torture us first. Or you might say we stay out of those things regarded as in human except when we need answers. Any answers just some answers. And while we are getting them lets cut some fingers off or what ever we want. The Bible says Thou shalt not kill. Does God's word change because we wish it to be so? My understanding is God's word never changes. EVER! Even if one is to face their own death God's word can not be undone. Jesus Christ prayed this cup pass from himself but God's word continued as it was foretold. Jesus Christ did as his Heavenly Father asked of him and all the world was washed in the blood of a Savior we do not deserve. So when you start spouting off about our freedom and our place in the world you speak as if it is not wrong but yet it is even so wrong to kill. I therefore have to conclude that to kill another human being is wrong wether in the name of peace or rather a more likely scenario is in the name of power money status etc. We as Christians know this to be true and as we also know one day we will be put to death for believing in the word of God which is the Bible.
"We as Christians know this to be true and as we also know one day we will be put to death for believing in the word of God which is the Bible."
What?
The end is near for such divisive beliefs about GOD, his creation and his words...
That last sentence is kinda scary. I would keep an assault weapon away from this guy.
BeeCee--so, I'm assuming you were against the US getting involved in WWI and II? I mean, killing is killing.
And I DO believe that more wars have been fought in 'God's name' than in almost any other.
And you DO know that the God ALLAH is the same God we Christians worship?
BeeCee-3234866...the idea that the United States is a christian nation has some validity, much of what constitutes our morals, ethics and legal code is founded on the Judian-Christian ethic.
The United States enjoys the benefits of a Judian-Christian ethic without the undue restraint of strict adherence to a particular faith, which is a strength you obviously can't appreciate.
America is a polyglot of religions, cultures, ideas and practices which is at once at curse and a blessing. Only the truly fanatic hold to truth in religion, because the true faith does not permit the beliefs of non-believers. The real strength of America is it's tolerance of varying opinion, the belief that I can feel strongly about something, anything...but that freedom to believe requires me to allow someone else to believe in what they feel strongly in. The tolerance, the freedom to do that also requires us to prevent those who would take that freedom from us, to stop anyone from depriving a non-believer from his or her ability to believe. That prevention extends to those who would commit violence against any of us to change how any of us believe. Hence, the moral requirement to defend ourselves without exerting our philosophy unto those who believe differently.
Fly a plane into the World Trade Center and we will come and find you and kill you. We are required to come and find you, because we owe it to each other and to the notion that each American's right to believe is more important than the sacrifices we have to make to ensure those rights.
you do realize that the first settlers in America where not christian. the first settlers left England to get away from the church which controlled the government (king). they left England because they where being persecuted for their different beliefs. i know i still have the diaries that where passed down through the generations in my family. we first came here in the 1600's.
eric1964...Say what? Do you mean Norsemen? Cause if you're referring to the first English settler's, they were Christians...Puritans in New England...or were you thinking of Jamestown? Christians also. Maybe the Spanish? Christian also. All of the early European settler's were Christians.
You are correct in that many, but not all were escaping religious persecution. The folks down South (Virginia, North Carolina, etc.) were actually motivated by trying start a new and profitable life and were less motivated by religion than the Puritans in Massachusetts.
puritans where considered Calvinist's not Christians, there is actually a big difference between the two. they actually advocated that their religion be separated from all other christian religions, they wanted to be autonomous from Christianity.
Why is this a topic? Were they tortured? Were they not tortured??? Question is do we give a crap if they were? My answer is if they were then clearly not enough.
They are evil killers. Who gives a @!$%# about their quality of life? Rights? They have no rights not only in this country but as humans. They are a sub-species, apes.... They have simply not evolved.
Look the Middle East is what 5,000 years older than the United States (probably older than that)?? Yet look at how we have progressed and how they still live in the desert. Look at Russia, China, Japan, United Kingdom, Any other developed nation. Some areas have progressed and we no longer make a fire with wood and sparks from stone; some areas of the world... well they have not. Not politically correct but its simply true. Overstated? I don't know.. go visit the middle east. See what it looks like, how the act, what they eat?
no rights.... You come kill our people we dispose of you, its simple. Go to South Korea, japan, Russia.. Pull that crap. I promise you they would not be alive today to complain about their rights.... And these areas I mention are not behind the times. They are not unintelligent; these are some of the greatest places on the planet. The people are smart, the food is amazing! At the same time they don't negotiate their territory.
The United States used to be like that but today we are to damn worried about offending someone. Or the guy that just killed your daughter, he has rights? See how offended you are when its your family member that is tortured and killed by one of these people, see how much time you will spend talking about their rights then!
P.S. I am not some redneck, I don't live in a mountain. I am very well educated. 6 figure salary and work in an office. At the same time I guess I just don't subscribe to this politically correct, everyone has rights mentality. I am very go with the flow. I don't care if you are gay (I have a couple friends that are), I don't care if you are religious (I am not)... I DO care if you hurt my family first and second I DO care if you come from some other land and hurt my neighbors and fellow countrymen because. And I don't care a damn thing about your rights if you are involved with any aspect of this process; you have earned much more than our government is willing to give you. Done with my rant. Sorry if I offended anyone of sound mind ;)
Of course many of the people we tortured were factually innocent, including some we tortured to death like the Afghan named Dilawar.
And as a number of interrogators have noted, the torture at best delayed the opportunity to retrieve useful information, corrupted memories, and yielded numerous false confessions.
And yes you do sound like a redneck.
I think they should have one of these virgins p*ss on their faces maybe they will have the pleasure of confessiing a lot faster. Now all of you stfu! and watch this Oscar of a movie.
A shame the US has been unwilling and unable to enforce its own laws against torture and conspiracy to torture, 18.USC.2340 and 18.USC.2441, to say nothing of the convention against torture which the US wrote and signed on to.
A greater tragedy that one of those torture conspirators is now a federal judge with a lifetime appointment, another conspirator is teaching law at one of our premier law schools, and two others are living happily in Texas and Wyoming with a lifetime pension and secret service detail.
But at least the names of James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen are forever stained and they'll never be able to practice psychology again. Hopefully action will still be taken against other APA members who were involved in the torture conspiracy, including John Leso, Larry James, and the former president of the APA, Martin Seligman.
So, Skrekk, how do you feel about murder by drone of untried victims and the perpetrators?
Sounds like an entirely separate topic, Greg, and an attempt at deflection.
During war the torture of prisoners over whom you have complete control is a far more serious matter than the intentional killing of combatants and the unintentional killing of civilians, and a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture - as well as our own domestic laws.
That's ok, it wasn't real torture.
No worries. Now, if they'd done what the Soviet Union used to do to people, sure.
Funny thing about that......the SERE program and Bush's torture conspiracy were both based upon a Chinese torture manual from the 1950s which was designed to elicit false confessions for propaganda purposes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html
Skrekk, Your "far greater tragedy" is a door into thr topic of responsibility for war crimes and an opening for introduction of tools and involvement of the current administration to economically dispose of perceived threats regardless of legitimacy.
"Deflect" all you want and blame history's actors for injustice but, don't exempt your own for reinforcement of your political and ideological agenda.
Geneva is an agreement of the willing only and as this and previous administrations have shown is not binding.
federal judge= torture conspirator...???? you are a fool. It was like trying to prosecute John Yoo...that's what lawyers do..they advocate..to say that a legal opinion makes one a conspirator and open to potential prosecution is nonsense..If you have a beef, its with those who impliment or approve the policy...but then I guess I'll wait for you to say that Eric Holder ought to be arrested for Fast and Furious or that Brennan,Holder,Obama are part of the drones for muder conspiracy...but I won't hold my breath on that...
Too bad for your side that the US supreme court disagrees with you, eh?
Jay Bybee never would have been confirmed by the senate had they known of his role in the torture conspiracy, as Senator Leahy and other senators on the Judiciary Committee have said:
Too bad it's a lifetime appointment - we now have a guy who committed a serious felony and war crime sitting on the 9th Circuit.
How did he commit a felony? what was his serious war crime? Guilt by writing a brief? What about Obama's use of drones, government spying and Holder re fast and furious..?
It's called "conspiracy to torture", and it's a felony under 18.USC.2340 and 18.USC.2441.
And as the DoJ inspector general found, both Yoo and Bybee were both unethical and profoundly negligent as well. The original report recommended sever sanctions against both, and a criminal investigation.
Skrekk, You are ignorant of reality.
The problem with these torture techniques is that they are largely ineffective, and often counterproductive. Former CIA operatives who were actually at Guantanamo and involved in these proceedings have reported far better interrogation results from non-torture means.
Unfortunately US politicians and our public are led to believe in the effectiveness of torture because we see it work on bad guys in every Hollywood movie, where the bad guy buckles in under 30 seconds under torture, and somehow, miracoluosly, the information given is always right.
They're very effective. You can find people to back them up to match every one of the detractors who don't like them.
Real torture breaks most people. Our mild interrogation methods served up some good leads.
That's not what military interrogators or credible psychologists say.
In fact our entire torture program was modeled after a Chinese torture program which was used to elicit false confessions for propaganda purposes.
Jose Rodriguez of the CIA, former CIA director of operations, and leader of the Clandestine Service among others, disagrees. No one gives a shi'ite what pyschologists say.
Look, the whole point of torturing, when it's not done for fun, and when real torturers do it, is to get info. If it didn't work, they wouldn't do it.
In the Soviet Union or some place like that, they'd break someone's fingers with a hammer, and get a confession out of him, and tell him, they would check it out, and if it wasn't true, they come back and break all his toes.
You can't falsify confessions in most instances---like the interrogators aren't able to check?
In Vietnam, the Commie vermin couldn't use all their methods because they didn't want mistreated prisoners to hurt them propaganda wise, but they still used a lot and it broke some of our guys.
And this wasn't the full methods they could have used.
Pain makes most people talk. If you give a false confession, you better hope the interrogator is dumb enough to ask you only questions he can't verify. Because if he finds out you lied, well, it's going to be worse the next time. And he'll probably tell you that before you think about lying.
I'm not surprised he disagrees......he's the guy who illegally destroyed videotape evidence of CIA torture so that he could avoid prosecution for torture conspiracy, and did so in direct violation of a court order.
He's still trying to cover his butt and justify the crimes he committed. And just an FYI, the CIA inspector general disagreed with Rodriguez after he investigated Rodriguez's program, and said that there's no evidence that the CIA's torture program yielded any useful intel. The Senate Levin report said the same thing after its investigation.
Actually it makes most people willing to say anything to stop the pain. That's why KSM confessed to over 30 false plots, wasting many thousands of hours of FBI and CIA time trying to track down bogus plots.
Pain and stress also interfere with memory and cause confabulation, which is one of the main reasons psychologists say that torture is counterproductive. That's a big reason that effective interrogators like Sherwood Moran and Matthew Alexander don't use it.
Lol, you're going to take the word of the inspector general over the head of the CIA operations division and Clandestine service.
The inspector general is there to count pennies, moron.
Actually his role here was to investigate crimes and assess whether the use of torture was effective. And note, it was ethical interrogators and ethical CIA agents who reported the crimes to the CIA in the first place.
Again, it's no surprise at all that Rodriguez knew he'd be found guilty of war crimes and decided it would be better to destroy the video evidence of those crimes.
no, he knows nothing about harsh interrogation and has no role in it.
Jose Rodriguez has been called one of the key people behind most of the victories we had in the War on Terra. Which is obvious given the posts he had as Deputy CIA director of Operations and head of the Clandestine service.
The Inspector general does nothing except check up on the people doing the real work, and knows nothing of what worked and what didn't.
His word is worth 0 and Jose Rodriguez's obviously carries a lot of weight.
I'm glad you scumbag lefties don't have videos of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammed being waterboarded because you would paint him as a victim, and ignore all the hundreds of thousands of people he and people like him have murdered in America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere the last 12 years.
We saw what you did with Abu Ghraib while the other side in Iraq did worse every day of the war. Best not to let you traitorous, terrorist-loving vermin have something that will let you trash the US again, and let the real villains off the hook.
Funny that Rodriguez was so ashamed of what he did that he illegally destroyed the evidence, which included thousands of hours of interrogation data. If it was so valuable and the right thing to do, why did he destroy it?
Since 911 was clearly an inside job, (the demolition of Building 7 being the absolute SMOKING GUN) the rest of the 911 investigation is an obvious sham presented for our misinformation. The CIA is without question the biggest terror organization on planet earth.
Hi Alex
Since conspiracy theorists are clearly nut-jobs, (Building 7 was damaged like many other nearby smaller buildings from the collapse of the enormous Twin Towers), the rest of what they have to say is of little value. Alex Jones is without question the dumbest fat guy on the planet.
who's alex?
Your fat whackjob hero. Go back to Prison Planet.
And torture makes us so much better than them..................HOW!?!?!?!
Best method of torture....never fails and it leaves no traces:
Expose prisoners to Rap music from 12 midnight to 12 noon
then
Country and Western from noon tol midnight....they'll break after two days..
I like country and western.
Looks like nobody wants Tebow. Don't worry, Fox News will hire their creation.
Off topic, but it's because he's a quarterback who can't throw. I'm sure he will be working on Fox or CBN in no time.
The use of torture by a government is always regrettable and self-demeaning, in my opinion, but for Cheney to even propose to use torture on duly surrendered enemy POW officers to obtain the alleged location of Iraqi munitions the existence of which, in the first place, was fabricated by the Bush-Cheney propaganda machine, is truly odious and an unequivocal breach of the Geneva Conventions.
Thank goodness CIA refused Cheney's request.. or maybe not, because if they had done it, we'd probably get to see Cheney prosecuted.
no, the existence of chemical and biological weapons was agreed on by the majority of both parties before the war, even in Britain.
You can keep lying all you want (like all lefties do) but Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, George Tenet (who served both presidents), famous anti-Iraq war Labour MP Robin Cooke, Nancy Pelosi are all on the record pre-war saying they thought Saddam had at least chemical and biological weapons.
Lefties are inherently stupid and emotional people who need a dumbed down slogan that their feeble brains can handle.
So the prevailing opinion of the West about Saddam having WMD's from the time he used them in the 1980's thru 2003 became "Bush made up the WMD story".
And the rap music, cold temperatures, and in three cases, waterboarding of high value targets became "torture", as if we do what they do in North Korea.
LOL! Why didn't we get this Fact-based article on Harsh Interrogation methods from the Liberal Media in 2005 during all the hubbub over phony torture? We get it in 2012, 4 years after Bush is gone.
Now, they bother to actually report the process that went into using military techniques on high value targets, and the legal judgements they made on what was permissible and what wasn't.
The last 7 years, the emotional and stupid Left has been lumping the Bushies in with the guys who cut out tongues (Saddam), stick needles under fingernails, mutilate genitals and much worse.
What is missing ,,,,, the fact that a doctor in pakistan handed Usama over to us & we served him up to the paki government where he now sits rotting in prison , if in fact he is still alive ,,,, shame on this administration.
invented BS
Based upon some recent discoveries by neuro-scientists working in Japan and Germany,
(i.e. Japan's ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories - Dr. Kang Cheng, of the RIKEN
Brain Science Institute) using torture to obtain relevant and VALIDATED intelligence (HUMINT)
will be a thing of the past simply by using portable MRI's (I know! a 30 Tesla fMRI machine is still
kinda big) to map blood flow into the visual cortex in real-time to obtain ACTUAL IMAGERY of what
was seen by the suspect.
Human memory PROBABLY uses a technique call Iterative Numeric Transform (aka a fractal equation)
which stores only keyframes of IMPORTANT "Moving Video" and then predicts the in-between
"Video Frames" based upon emotional impact and context. This neural data is now "Read"
by a machine (usually an fMRI - Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system) and
reconstructed into "Bits and Bytes" by measuring both the blood flow to specific areas of
the visual cortex, long-term memory, and the resulting brainwave patterns as suspects
are "Reminded" of previous events by interrogators.
By analyzing the resulting data, a pixel-based rather fuzzy-looking moving image map is
created that is reasonably able to be interpreted by experienced intelligence analysts.
Basically, we're "Reading" people's minds. It's a very recent development and very "fuzzy"
at this stage in time only because neuro-scientists don't understand the ACTUAL mathematics
behind the storage of visual data in the human brain, which is SUSPECTED TO BE very similar
to a Fractal-based keyframe and vector-based inter-frame predictive encoding very similar
to the MPEG-4 video compression techniques used to storage huge video files on servers
at your local cable company.
Since we are measuring only blood flow and brainwave patterns AS MEMORIES are being recalled
rather than reading the actual "Bits and Bytes" of the stored memories, this does give rise to
recalled visual data that may be modified on-the-fly as it's being emotionally interpreted by a
suspect, but on the whole, such techniques are VERY VALID to at least NARROW DOWN possibilities
IF THEY ARE CROSS-REFERENCED with other HUMINT (Human Intelligence) data.
What it also missed is that the entire Seal Team DIED in a mysterious plane crash about a month after the mission, and no one has seen the body who is not part of the official line.
source?
More Gay Conspiracy lies.....none of the Seals involved in the Bin Laden raid died in the helicopter crash, the military has reported. And one guy retired and wrote a book about it and he's still around.
This is how the Retarded Conspiracist Mind works:
"mysterious plane crash"------helicopter crash in Afghanistan, one of several we've had where large numbers died. Not even the first Seal team crash. Nothing mysterious about it.
"the entire Seal team died"----the Seals who died in the helicopter were from Seal Team Six, so conspiracy faggots turn that into "they were the same Seal Team Six people on the Bin Laden raid", which is false. The military has reported that none of the Bin Laden people were on that chopper, and we know the Seal who wrote the book on the Bin Laden raid is still alive and retired.
This is what all the conspiracy faggots are about, they try to tie together little tidbits of facts and invent huge portions of their claims out of thin air, even though they can be easily disproved by someone who doesn't have the brains of a barnyard cow.
The keyboard Commandos are out in force today
We should send the terrorists to camp cupcake and give them three hots and a cot like we do with the rest of the criminals in this country
What a joke
Or we could do what our military interrogators very effectively did during WWII, and interrogate our prisoners ethically.
You might want to read up on Sherwood Moran to see why he refused to use torture. He's the guy who wrote the army's manual on interrogation.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/06/truth-extraction/303973/
Skrekk
I actually agree with you and I am opposed to torture, which is universally known to be ineffective
And before the nuts say anything, I am a former Marine with combat experience
I just find the hypocrisy in this country pretty amusing sometimes
Lol @ Ignorant Skrekk citing WW2 treatment of prisoners favorably against the Bush era!
Lol, we used to beat SS prisoners senseless in WW2 as a matter of course. And many times we killed them outright.
Not one prisoner in WW2 got a trial before the end of the war, which is what liberals were demanding for the terrorist vermin in Gitmo while the Afghan and Iraq wars were ongoing.
Yeah imagine that........I actually cited the folks who knew how to interrogate effectively and ethically.
Too bad you're willfully ignorant and won't read the article I cited which discusses the guy who wrote the army's manual on interrogation.
I dont think there is one person in America that cared what was done, to who and in what matter the day after 9/11.........Do You? If you would have had a certain area where all the people who were responsible for this were in one area we would have nuked em........unfortunaltely in EVERY country the majority of HUMAN beings are surrouding this fanatics, so basically we are all HUMAN SHIELDS. Now having said that, as a person am I repulsed by the use of these tactics ABSOLUTELY........Do I understand why they used these methods ...ABSOLUTELY.......Just go on UTube and load 9/11....and watch all the people jumping from a 110 stories and this story wont seem so squemish!
Seldom has so much been written about so little..what the waterboarding of 2-6 people..all of whom are the epitome of evil.. Why don't you lefties comment on Fast and Furious or Obama's use of drones to kill in unprecendented numbers..in excess of 2,500 at last count..including a couple of American citizens..or the expose in the NYT about the collection of information and dossiers on American citizens without any showing of cause by this Adminstration, or the Obama adminstration's unprecendented spying on American citizens through the internet again without any showing of cause..or the domestic drones and cameras..or the expanded wiretapping...Your sanctimony and hypocracy is unbelievable..always situational ethics by you guys on the left that is why you have no credibility.
Waterboarding is a JOKE; it is not torture.
Compare it to caning for robbery in Singapore. There, they take a 10 foot bamboo pole, take a running start, and bring it down on you overhead onto your backside. It easily breaks the skin and most people pass out after 5 strokes. This is way worse than waterboarding, not considered torture, and is for robbery, not terrorism.
Let me give you some actual examples of torture: making you stand own in the snow until your fingers and toes get frostbite and the tissue dies (the Japanese did this to Chinese during WWII); pulling out your teeth by pliers; electrocuting you through your genitals with a cattle prod; breaking your arm, re-setting it, and breaking it again.
In response to John-338250, we could also TRY what the Mexican Drug Lords do,
like peeling the entire skin off of the face and back of "Rats" while they're still alive (i.e. flaying)
which contains so many nerves, that the pain truly IS unbearable! Add a does of
Formic Acid (Ant or Bee Sting Venom) to the exposed flayed areas and that'll hurt REAL BAD!
...OR...
for good measure...ask a question of suspect...you don't like the answer, SMASH
one finger with SLEDGE-HAMMER until all ten are broken and then START on the toes...
it usually only takes about TWO finger smashes until the suspects SCREAM FOR MERCY!
..AND FINALLY...one for The Gipper...
Injection of needles/tiny wiring that DIRECTLY wraps around or touches the nerve roots
of the spine at Lumbar L1 to L3 or the upper cervical spine at C1 and down vertabrae so that
once electrical current is applied, the resulting muscle contractions and spasms are
utterly excruciating...DO this for HOURS on end and NO HUMAN could live through it
...NOW THAT IS A VERY EFFECTIVE TORTURE TECHNIQUE...not that I'm giving y'all
ideas or something...I'm just sayin'!
---END_SARCASM