Part two of the MSNBC series is just as damning as the first. Some snippets:
The agents of the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, working to build legal cases against suspected terrorists, said they objected to coercive tactics used by a separate team of intelligence interrogators soon after Guantanamo’s prison camp opened in early 2002. They ultimately carried their battle up to the office of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who approved the more aggressive techniques to be used on al-Qahtani and others.
Although they believed the abusive techniques were probably illegal, the Pentagon cops said their objection was practical. They argued that abusive interrogations were not likely to produce truthful information, either for preventing more al-Qaida attacks or prosecuting terrorists.
And they described their disappointment when military prosecutors told them not to worry about making a criminal case against al-Qahtani, the suspected “20th hijacker” of Sept. 11, because what had been done to him would prevent him from ever being put on trial.
They never intended to do anything with him. Torture and indefinite detainment were the plan, not an unforuntate consequence of heightened tensions. And what they did with our soldiers is even worse:
By this time, law enforcement interrogators said, they had seen signs of coercive or abusive techniques being tried by the young, mostly inexperienced, military intelligence personnel: a cinder block left in the interrogation box, apparently used to hold a detainee in a stress position, called short shackling; a detainee wrapped from head to toe in duct tape. These techniques were not in the interrogation bible, the Army Field Manual.
The al-Qahtani plan went much further. The law enforcement agents began to hear a new term, SERE, an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. SERE training is provided to U.S. Special Forces and other military personnel to prepare them to withstand torture if they become prisoners of war. It includes mocking of their religious beliefs, sexual taunting, and a technique called water-boarding, which induces water through the nose to make a prisoner feel like he’s drowning.
Intelligence interrogators had the idea to “reverse-engineer” SERE, to use its techniques to pry information out of the suspected al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists. Pentagon e-mails seen by MSNBC.com show that at least a half dozen military intelligence personnel from Guantanamo, including at least one medical adviser, went to Fort Bragg, N.C., on Sept. 16-20, 2002, for SERE training. It was an experiment, apparently not unlike what the CIA had been trying on the few high-value detainees kept at secret locations.
Read the whole thing, if you can. I am furious.
Pixie
But Joooohn,
These are terrorists who want to kill you and your family! /snark
Steve
I’m glad we’re torturing the 20th hijacker. Maybe we can persuade him to give up the other 19.
Anderson
I liked the part about Gonzales, Addington, Haynes, Yoo, and other future Hague defendants* flying down to Gitmo to admire the abuse. Man, what a missed opportunity for a plane crash.
*Reminds me of the NYT article the other day on how Russians have to look to a European court outside their own borders for justice. I know the feeling, Boris.
Ugh
I liked the part about Gonzales, Addington, Haynes, Yoo, and other future Hague defendants* flying down to Gitmo to admire the abuse.
Yoo is a former professor of mine, the thought of him flying down to Gitmo with a bunch of Marines running around and terrorist detainees is hilarious.
And Pixie beat me to the snark. If we can’t give up everything we stand for and become an international pariah in the eyes of civilized people around the world, then the terrorist will have one.
Dear President #44, this entire mess will be handed off to you by the current one, please find the courage to do the right thing and not give in to the scare mongerors.
Tax Analyst
John, I saw the MSNBC, Part II, piece this morning and was similarly enraged. I was very close to biting through my lip as the anger rose within. The whole thing…but especially the part about Gonzales, Addington, Haynes, Yoo, et al flying down to Gitmo. I wondered if they actually watched any of the torture they were sponsoring taking place…did they stand there dispassionately, perhaps behind a one-way glass window? Did John Yoo count the screams to determine if what they were viewing, was, in fact, torture…or just an exercise in administering discomfort? One thing they DIDN’T do was listen to professional interrogators telling them that torture techniques were of dubious value, at best, and that there were more effective methods that would not throw our world-wide reputation into the toilet. Tell you what, sir…I wouldn’t give ONE Soldier’s life for the whole lot of these creeps. They are truly a pimple on the Ass of America.
Daniel DiRito
Now that the President has the authority he sought, see a tongue-in-cheek visual of the Grand Opening of “Tortureland”…here:
http://www.thoughttheater.com
Punchy
I just read both parts. Holy crap, what a fucking mess.
Here’s what I don’t get, and it’s SO logical–what kind of intelligence could they POSSIBLY get in 2004 from prisoners they picked up in 2001? And what kind of info is/can the detainee give up on the 56th attempt to torture him that he wouldn’t give up on the 29th attempt?
SO, are they still–today–“interrogating” these guys down in Gitmo, guys they got 5 years ago? Wouldn’t that be the biggest waste of time?
HyperIon
This is so depressing.
And have you noticed how these accounts are no longer the subject of rountine vehement denials? For a while ANY accusation of torture was roundly denounced by the usual “enablers”. It was proclaimed an absurd charge that revealed more about the individual making it.
But now the veracity of torture claims is no longer actively disputed. It seems to have diffused gradually into the american consciousness as the number of accounts rose. It has been some months since blanket denials have been issued.
Now I don’t think that this change has yet trickled down to the average person-in-the-street (given the MSM’s leaden response time on tricky matters like this) but online opinions have converged on this topic IMO. This piece re-enforces that idea.
What is pernicious about this process is there is never a moment when an “enabler” has to admit: “yes, americans DID torture.” instead they just fade into the background as the new reality emerges.
leefranke
I’ve given up on this issue. I was very angry at first when it occurred and then incredulous when the despicable bill passed the Senate.
Now I have come to realize that this is the new America. No politcian will have the fortitude to stand up for what is right, bascially because they are all cowards. Eventually we all will have to learn with what we have become.
leefranke
Eventually we all will have to learn with what we have become.
should be:
Eventually we all will have to learn to live with what we have become.
Tsulagi
No, there’s no torture unless you mean only getting just one type of fruit or no lemon on your chicken one night. Hannity and libertarian O’Reilly have said so.
It seems the SERE techniques got their start first at Bagram in AF in 11/01 after the arrival of Col. Morgan Banks, the chief psychologist for the SERE program. Banks later went to Gitmo to help train people there, who then with some from Bagram later went to Iraq.
Here’s some of the results detailed in a NYT story based on an Army investigation. Like a 22 year-old taxi driver who died after days of
torturealternative interrogation techniques while chained to a ceiling. Later they pretty much concluded the taxi driver was innocent, just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Good they cleared that up.We have a gutless, lying sack of shit for a president who proves daily he has no shred of honor or integrity. Seems he thinks the military should follow his lead.
I could not believe McCain when he turned his back on those in uniform when he went along with the Save the Torture/Shred the Constitution legislation. For what? The chance to give Dobson and the retardocons who pretend they’re Jack Bauer a blow job.
Andrew J. Lazarus
C’mon guys. George Bush used to (?) blow up frogs with firecrackers up their asses. It took you till today to realize the Bush crowd want alternative interrogation videos as stroke material?
Anderson
Here’s my favorite mindfuck from the MSNBC story (1st part).
The real cops were trying to use rapport-building interrogation, which has the small merit of actually working time & again, whereas the “intelligence unit” was a bunch of goofs who went to Interrogation Summer Camp and didn’t know shit.
That right there calls for thought. Believing on what basis? That they weren’t responding to the dimwitted “interrogations” by divulging what the interrogators wanted to hear? I suspect that’s the answer. I mean, how else do you infer “training in resisting interrogation”?
Torture is about getting the answers you want, not the real intel. These kids weren’t getting the “right” answers (from people who often knew nothing), so they wanted to be able to abuse the prisoners into talking.
But get a load of what kind of training al-Qaeda guys are actually told to expect:
That is, pretty much what the “intel unit” was seeking permission to use in order to overcome the “resistance.”
Whereas the FBI guys got results with a cheeseburger & fries.
JoeTx
Until Fox news starts covering this shit, the 33 percenters will continue to worship the ground Bush slithers on. As for the rest of us, lets vote these bums out of office…
TBone
You’re furious because you’re ignorant of the whole truth. You have no concept of what SERE school is, nor what interrogators did or didn’t do at Gitmo. I attended SERE school, did you? I interrogated terrorists, have you? There is always more to the story, but you are too short sighted to realize it, aren’t you? You are all like a bunch of little Pied Pipers following the media over the cliff.
As far as coercive techniques go, they may seem awfully scary to some, but they pale by comparison to what you will receive at the hands of the terrorists that capture you. Coercive techniques work too…just ask Sheik Khalid Mohammed…wait you can’t. Nor will you ever be able to talk to the hundreds of other Al Qaeda assholes who have been nabbed since the war began. Nor will you see the reams of intelligence reporting exposing plot after plot hatched by the terrorists but never completed. Damn that National Security Act and classification of intelligence.
Screw the terrorists, and anyone else if they are too weak to stomach the fact that we need to beat those fuckers down to stop them. They understand and respect force, and laugh at you if you are weak. I suppose you think if we said, “Please Mr. Terrorist man, would you PLEASE tell me about your plans to kill us? No? Okay, thank you Mr. Terrorist man, you can continue to read your Koran and play soccer now. Have a nice day” that we would break them, huh? Give me a break. It would be like Pee Wee Herman fighting Mike Tyson if you had it your way.
I can already hear the replies from all you idealistic softies out there in Balloon Juiceland – weeping and gnashing of teeth, etc. will be forthcoming. The same people who marginalize fellatio in the Oval Office, approve of abortion, and rationalize appeasing terrorists will be the first people to be “furious” at military people actually trying to defeat the enemy. All I can say is that you will get a real dose of reality one day soon, and then it will be too late. And don’t pop off with that bullshit about the war making more terrorists either. You need to try to remember 9/11; remember Daniel Pearl; remember Nick Berg; remember the USS Cole, Khobar Towers, African Embassy bombings, Marine Barracks bombings, etc., etc. All of that happened well before the war. The war was a response to their long time provocation and hate of the US. So don’t be so naive my friends, the next terrorist act might be closer to home. What will you do then?
jcricket
Yoo’s far worse than the decider, because he’s educated enough to know better.
And I hope there is a special place in hell for John Yoo. Any lawyer/professor that provides legal “support” for torture and whose copy of the constitution (perhaps it’s the King James version?) apparently includes an “ignore this document in its entirety during whatever period of time the president declares we’re at war” clause clearly needs to turn in his law license.
This goes double for the medical professionals who participated in or sanctioned the torture at Gitmo.
Oh, and assuming TBone isn’t a spoof, the answer to the question is: Continue to support the non-torture based prosecution of terrorists, including whatever domestic and foreign FBI and police investigations can and should be undertaken within the framework of existing laws (including FISA and NSA restrictions on distribution of classified information).
The FBI brought down the Klan without torture, we fought and beat Hitler without torture and even the IRA eventually disarmed, without torture (any torture the British committed actually made it worse). Even Israel, in its 30 year fight with far more active terrorists than the ones that threaten us, doesn’t torture its Palestinian prisoners.
I see no reason to abandon the core principles of America because you and your pathetic bed-wetting friends are so deathly afraid of the current batch of terrorists.
We’re furious not because we don’t know the whole picture, but because we do, and it’s just now sinking in.
Beej
“. . . .they pale by comparison to what you will receive at the hands of the terrorists who capture you.”
Oh, well, that makes it alright, then! After all, the United States of America, the standard for western civilization, the nation that leads by an example we want the whole world to follow, is only about half? one-third? as bad as the murderous, barbarous scum of the earth. I feel better already.
Beej
This November, for the first time in my 38 years as a registered voter, I will, like John, be voting a straight ticket. And that ticket will be Democratic. And if the Democrats win the Congress and don’t IMMEDIATELY take steps to stop the torture, oh excuse me, “aggressive interrogation techniques”, I will get up on my creaky, arthritic knees and march to my state capital, to Washington, anywhere it might do some good, to get this sort of thing stopped. You’re not doing this to my country! You’re not sinking the United States of America to the level of the Bataan Death March or the glory days of the Soviet Union. Because if that’s what we’ve become, they what the hell is there that’s left to protect?
Beej
This November, for the first time in my 38 years as a registered voter, I will, like John, be voting a straight ticket. And that ticket will be Democratic. And if the Democrats win the Congress and don’t IMMEDIATELY take steps to stop the torture, oh excuse me, “aggressive interrogation techniques”, I will get up on my creaky, arthritic knees and march to my state capital, to Washington, anywhere it might do some good, to get this sort of thing stopped. You’re not doing this to my country! You’re not sinking the United States of America to the level of the Bataan Death March or the glory days of the Soviet Union. Because if that’s what we’ve become, then what the hell is there that’s left to protect?
Aaron
Yes Tbone, tell us about the miracle of all the AQ plots that have been foiled by the Decider (dmm dmm dmmmm…) . We all love to hear some good fiction.
Also, perhaps you might give a link to the white house press
release about said foiled plots.
the white house loves to issue statements and press releases, so Im sure you will have lots of links for us.
Meanwhile its worth noting that the SERE techniques were based on Communist techniques that werent designed to produce usefull intelligence so much as beat the subject into submission until he could be coerced into making a phony confession video for propaganda purposes.
Lee
See Tbone, I’m an astronaut and a fireman and a lumberjack so I don’t have to worry about things like that.
/snark off
On the internet, Appeals to Authority are sooooo 1990’s
Jill
Can you imagine if these guys were our founding fathers?
Punchy
Nowadays, I’m pretty sure Pee Wee wins this.
EL
Tbone, if they work so well, why does the military oppose their use?
As I recall, the military lobbied against approving their use. So did some other well known veterans forget what they knew – are McCain, Powell, et al. so ignorant of military matters that they’re incapable of understanding?
Also as I recall, SERE school is to train our guys to resist torture techniques the bad guys may use. Am I wrong about that? Please link to supporting information.
This country has never been about being slightly better than torturers and terrorists. It’s been about the principles of democracy and law. George Washington directed that captured British troops be decently treated. Want to argue with him?
Sorry for the long post, but from the Christian Science Monitor:
Tax Analyst
EL – good post and not a word too many as far as I’m concerned. From what I’ve read you are correct about SERE’s mission. In his rant above this “TBONE” character never mentions that many of the detainees we have held for 5 years now were apparently not guilty of anything other than perhaps being in the wrong place at the wrong time…Sir, I don’t see where torturing innocent taxi drivers does anything to deter terrorism. You say that the “terrorists understand and respect force”, but I would have to say that based on what I’ve read of them and seen of their handiwork that they don’t respect anything about us…and the frantic, confused and contradictory actions of this administration in actually HANDLING Iraq (as opposed to their “spinning” for US Public consumption) have been so ineffective and muddled that I can’t imagine their opinion has been changed. But it’s not the “Terrorists” opinions that matter in this…those opinions aren’t going to change…it’s the people who might be able to HELP us deal EFFECTIVELY with the Terrorists. Yes, that includes Muslims…a great many of them who undoubtedly detest the the hellish future those folks would impose. If the “rank and file” of Iraq had seen a rational and effective program that maintained order and showed a well-thought out rebuilding plan that demonstrated real promise towards creating a positive environment that could endure they would probably have turned in most of the “Terrorists”. But the current reality of their existence remains a daily crapshoot to stay alive…and with the strong likelihood that the “Terrorists” will be present in their lives for far longer than Uncle Sam’s soldiers I would imagine that turning in those folks might amount to signing their own (and their family’s)death warrant. At any rate, I don’t see how torturing captives advances our position in any respect…and as Punchy pointed out, whatever information these captives might have had has most likely exceeded any conceivable “shelf life”, being as how they have been out of whatever information loop they might have been in back in 2001.
les
Here, tbone, check out how the baker we tortured for a year and a half, before checking out his alibi and sending him home to Pakistan, is the recruiting poster for Taliban and Al-Qaeda on the Afghan border. Keep pimping the policies that are creating terrorists and killing American soldiers, you gutless sleaze.
tBone
I’m not furious at military people. I’m furious at their worthless civilian leadership and dimwitted enablers like you.
Nice to know that you put Clinton’s blowjob on the same moral level as torture, though. Pretty much tells me everything I need to know about you.
tBone
Please tell me you’re not talking about Iraq here.
Ah, what am I saying? Of course you are, because you’re just that stupid.
EL
Tbone, I don’t see your answer to the points I made above.
I’ll boil it down for you:
1. Torture is against our founding principles as evidenced by actions of our founding fathers, who were in a desperate struggle. They were in a far more precarious postion than we are today, but held to their principles. It’s not the effect on the them, but on us that’s at issue here.
2. Torture is counter productive. Whatever information we get from people is unlikely to be worth its usefulness as a recruiting tool for terrorists. Especially when we torture people later shown to be innocent. Since you say you have military experience, you undoubtedly know that counter-insurgency doctrine says you’ve got to get the populace on your side. Torture isn’t going to help us to do that.
emix
TBONEhead
You are a fucking coward. You and your kind should each buy a crate of adult diapers and keep your slimy hands off moral and patriotic Americans freedoms and principles.
Move to a brutal dictatorship “daddy” state that might protect you.
Tax Analyst
Question here…are we talking to two DIFFERENT “T-bones” here? I see one post under “TBone” and the other two under “tBone”.
HyperIon
yes, one is a rabid “kill’em all” type.
the other i often tend to agree with.
like you until i noticed the difference/contrast, it was confusing.
the good news is the maniac posts here infrequently.
Tax Analyst
Hyperion – Thanks! For a moment I was taken aback by that first “TBone” post…like…”hmmm…when did HE catch rabies?”.
Tax Analyst
OOPS! Sorry, got your name wrong – Hyperlon…Old eyes.
TBone
When some of you talk about pie-in-the-sky American values, quoting George Washington and such, you fail to remember American actions like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I guess President Washington never imagined us vaporizing thousands of Japanese, did he? Or firebombing cities in Europe? Wow, those are surely noble actions aren’t they? Surely Americans can smack around a terrorist or two if they can destroy whole cities with atomic bombs.
Many of you appear to be relativists who selectively apply morals if it backs your argument. Your comments seem a little disingenuous to me. Not every military man agrees on the exact definition of “torture” but it’s clear very few believe we should use pull-out-the-fingernails brand of torture. That kind of activity is certainly illegal, but to equate all things coercive with torture is just plain dishonest. Prison guards in American prisons certainly don’t adhere to Geneva-like conduct towards prisoners for example – they can beat the shit out of unruly prisoners if required. And although the Geneva Conventions seems noble when we put it in the context of one nation fighting a war against another “civilized” nation; when we change the context it doesn’t make sense. The writers of the Conventions didn’t address every conceivable predicament.
Americans aren’t now (and never were) the arbiters of truth and justice in the world. Nor were we the “kinder” and “gentler” bringers of happy-happy nice-nice. To suggest that we are morally superior to all others is absurd. We have conquered many nations through brute strength and violence…look it up. Quit being naive.
As far as the “coward” statement above… I served my (and your) nation faithfully for 22 years as a member of the military. I have been on four separate combat tours and have participated in direct combat operations on three of them. I have probably seen more adversity and danger than you ever will, so don’t presume to know me, and call me names.
I speak my mind in this forum because I know there is another side of the story that many of you are either ignorant of, or don’t have the guts to accept. My opinions are my own, but are shared by a great many of my military comrades. I speak from my own experiences, knowledge, and bias – just like the rest of you – and am entitled express my opinion. You might not like it, but I really don’t give a shit.
tBone
I need to change my handle. “tBone the Relatively Sane and Non-Torture-Enabling,” maybe?