Interrogatees who are withholding but who feel qualms of guilt and a secret desire to yield are likely to become intractable if made to endure pain. The reason is that they can then interpret the pain as punishment and hence as expiation. There are also persons who enjoy pain and its anticipation and who will keep back information that they might otherwise divulge if they are given reason to expect that withholding will result in the punishment that they want. Persons of considerable moral or intellectual stature often find in pain inflicted by others a confirmation of the belief that they are in the hands of inferiors, and their resolve not to submit is strengthened.Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex "admissions" that take still longer to disprove. KUBARK is especially vulnerable to such tactics because the interrogation is conducted for the sake of information and not for police purposes.If an interrogatee is caused to suffer pain rather late in the interrogation process and after other tactics have failed, he is almost certain to conclude that the interrogator is becoming desperate. He may then decide that if he can just hold out against this final assault, he will win the struggle and his freedom. And he is likely to be right. Interrogatees who have withstood pain are more difficult to handle by other methods. The effect has been not to repress the subject but to restore his confidence and maturity.
I have been engaged in the hunt for al-Qaeda for almost two decades. And, as I once wrote in the Daily News, I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people - as we trained our own fighting men and women to endure and resist the interrogation tactics they might be subjected to by our enemies. I know waterboarding is torture because I have been on the giving and receiving end of the practice.This was during the last four years of my military career, when I served at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school. Working there, and helping protect our servicemen and women, was my greatest pride. We especially emphasized escape, because captivity by al-Qaeda's Jihadis would be severe, if not, final. Our methods of instruction were intense, but realistic and safe.Now, at long last, six years of denials can now be swept aside, and we can say definitively: America engaged in torture and legalized it through paperwork.
Worst of all was that an agency advising the Justice Department, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, knew that these coercive techniques would not work if captives devoutly trusted in their God and kept faith with each other. Yet those two characteristics are pre-qualifications for being allowed into al-Qaeda. Other non-coercive methods - the central focus of which is humanely deprogramming them of their religious ideological brainwashing - are now turning al-Qaeda members in Indonesia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But they were never considered. Perhaps they were not macho enough.
Nance is the Founding Director of the International Counterterrorism Center for Excellence at Hudson N.Y. and author of "The Terrorist Recognition Handbook - A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activity."
Here's someone who knows more than anyone here:I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people - as we trained our own fighting men and women to endure and resist the interrogation tactics they might be subjected to by our enemies. I know waterboarding is torture because I have been on the giving and receiving end of the practice.As forr the numbers of terrorists you give- can you give us any cites or cases? I've tried hard to give you solid material to work with, and would appreciate an effort at reciprocation.
The stuff from emptywheel.Sorry but what they have done is pull something not only out of context, but they pulled it out and applied it out of sequence of the report.Such as their claim about "but never more than 40 seconds". That is not what was said.It says "at periods of at most 40 seconds. This sentence is not in the context of them telling the CIA it is limited to only that amount of time as emptywheel is trying to evidently claim. The context it what was said is one relaying what was told to them in how the technique is done. The next sentences actually do go into detail by the writer in how the technique can be applied and for how long.The waterboard may be authorized for, at most, one 30 day period, during which the technique can actually be applied on no more than five days. Further, there can be no more than two sessions in any 24 hour period. Each session--the time during which the detainee is strapped to the waterboard - last no more than two hours. There may be at most six applications of water lasting 10 second or longer during any session, and water may be applied for a total of no more than 12 minutes during any 24 hours period.As you can see nowhere in how they tell them it can be done does it say its limited to only 40 seconds at a time.Alsoof note in all of this KSM had said the US population was weak and lack resilience and would be unable to do what was necessary to prevent terrorists from succeeding in their goals. He dared us and we proved him wrong.
Leave aside for a moment the policy debate over torture in the abstract. From the very beginning, that has been largely moot. Why? Because even if you believe that the president has the duty to torture terror suspects, under the constitution, he has no legal right to do so without Congress' passage of legislation repealing the laws and treaties governing such torture. The use of torture is part of the laws of war and only Congress has the constitutional authorityTo declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and waterIt can't really be clearer than that. And the reason, of course, is the colonists' memory of the power of the monarch, especially with respect to torturing and mistreating prisoners of war. Now no legal authority in human history would judge the waterboarding of a prisoner 83 or 183 times in one month as anything but torture. If it were done to a US soldier, would Dick Cheney refuse to call it torture? Of course not, although it is telling that no reporter has ever asked him this obvious question directly.And so it is simply an empirical fact that president Bush broke the law and violated his oath of office by ordering the torture of prisoners.
Note that this wasn't an emergency moment, or a ticking time-bomb scenario. It was a decision to torture made months after the 9/11 attacks and re-asserted years after the 9/11 attack, and set up as a program, with elaborate rules, staffing and bureaucracy, to torture prisoners for the indefinite future.Now fast-forward to February 2007 when the International Committee of the Red Cross notifies the president of the United States that it believes that his administration has engaged in what was unequivocally torture of prisoners. At that point, the president is required, by law and by treaty, to open an investigation and prosecution of the guilty parties. The president failed to do that, another breach of the law. Moreover, any president privy to that information is required to initiate an investigation and prosecution - or violate the law and the Geneva Conventions.And so Obama's refusal to investigate war crimes is itself against the law. And so torture's cancerous route through the legal and constitutional system continues, contaminating the future as well as the past, rendering the US incapable of upholding Geneva against other nations, because it has violated Geneva itself, and giving to every tyrant on the planet a justification for the torture of prisoners.In this scenario, America becomes a city on a hill, where the rule of law is optional and torture acceptable if parsed into legal memos that do not pass the most basic professional sniff-test.America becomes a banana republic.
Emptywheel is trying to find a way to get to 183 sessions in a month under the Bush/Cheney approved guidelines. He could only get to 90 by making assumptions that I agree aren't warranted. When I read it I am left thinking that at the most someone would be waterboarded 10 times: twice in a day/5 times a month. Yet KSM gets it 183 times in a month. You can't follow these guidelines and get to 183. I don't think you can get past 10 (I don't know why you'd need to do it more than once).
By Philip ZelikowI first gained access to the OLC memos and learned details about CIA's program for high-value detainees shortly after the set of opinions were issued in May 2005. I did so as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's policy representative to the NSC Deputies Committee on these and other intelligence/terrorism issues....The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail. In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.
Cuba is certainly not a county jail in the US.What you seem to forget is the memos cite a vast array of legal rulings, conventions etc etc etc which support that what was done was legal and it was still within the scope of those rules, laws and treaties set forth by Congress. It would be up to those opposed to cite legal rulings disputing each and everyone of those that are within those memos. That isnt being done.
I might add:Whole story at:http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=46949CIA Confirms: Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style Attack on Los AngelesThe Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) -- including the use of waterboarding -- caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.
What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument), is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" (italics mine). A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up (italics mine) a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.
The house of cards is crumbling and the hearings haven't even begun.
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