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US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

intelligence.senate.gov

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Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

#311

Post by forgotpasswd3x »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #290
dragonwriter wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Torture has been shown to be a reasonably good (though not always effective) means of getting people to tell torturers things that they think the torturers want to hear -- whatever the tortured person thinks is most likely to lead to the present cessation of the torture. Its also been shown to be a fairly poor technique, compared to other alternatives, to get accurate, actionable information. As the Senate report its…

The White House is apparently not taking a side in the debate over whether it works or not. Which frankly makes me think they believe it does. The easy political win is to say it doesn't, and they aren't taking it. https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/542382617711370240 "Obama official: White House won’t take sides between CIA, which says interrogations worked, and Senate, which says they didn’t."

Sure wish Obama could just grow a pair already.

Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

#312

Post by at-fates-hands »

dragonwriter wrote: post #161
at-fates-hands wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before you get on your Liberal high horse, you might want to check yourself. Extraordinary Rendition began under Clinton: https://www.aclu.org/national-security/fact-sheet-extraordin... Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspect…

> Before you get on your Liberal high horse, you might want to check yourself. Extraordinary Rendition began under Clinton This is not about extraordinary rendition -- which certainly is an extremely disturbing practice, and by all accounts seems to have included instances where prisoners were tortured by other countries with the knowledge and at least tacit consent of the US in violation of US obligations under inte…

>> There is certainly an extent to which it fits in with a common pattern with extraordinary rendition, but its not the same thing.

You must have missed this part of my post:

Let me be perfectly clear when I say this. It shouldn't matter which party started this, ITS WRONG.

Sure glad all the downvoters actually read my ENTIRE post before they started getting trigger happy with their downvotes.

Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

#313

Post by Anchor »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #303
ssmoot wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Real risk for real people has been created. It's not theoretical. Risk of what? > Actual innocent people have been placed in danger. Who? I'm not attempting to argue the point. I haven't read the report. It just seems a strong statement to make that innocent bystanders (with no connection to torture) have been put at risk (of what?). I'm curious how legitimate this claim is since to be honest it reads a bit like FU…

Risk of revenge attacks leading to severe injury and death. People working for the US government overseas. Or just Americans. Or even just westerners in general. Security is heightened, units are on alert worldwide. The risk is real and serious. Remember, radical elements killed people over a silly video on youtube. This is much more inflammatory.

McCain: Everyone knows we waterboarded. [1]

[1] http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/12/09/lv-mcc...

Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

#314

Post by jstalin »

Loughla wrote: post #10

Why do they insist on saying 'enhanced interrogation technique' instead of torture? Even when it obviously means torture: "Another senior CIA officer stated that COBALT was itself an enhanced interrogation technique." When talking about a physical place. That is so blatant word replacement that I find it hard to take it seriously.

Just like murdering jews was called a "resettlement operation." To sanitize the language.

Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

#315

Post by ericksonjon »

DevX101 wrote: post #41
Loughla wrote: post #10

Why do they insist on saying 'enhanced interrogation technique' instead of torture? Even when it obviously means torture: "Another senior CIA officer stated that COBALT was itself an enhanced interrogation technique." When talking about a physical place. That is so blatant word replacement that I find it hard to take it seriously.

"You can't be afraid of words that speak the truth. I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language. And American english is loaded with euphemisms. Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets wor…

George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" covers this subject well.

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."

Full Essay: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

#316

Post by rayiner »

anigbrowl wrote: post #306
rayiner wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying we shouldn't engage in torture because it's "bad"? It's okay to blow these same people up in the battlefield, but god forbid we throw water on them and put them in a slightly cold room?

You're being disingenuous here. It's like the difference between a police officer shooting an armed criminal on the street (which may be a matter of necessity, though recent examples highlight just how problematic such a standard can be) and beating them up in jail when they're already in a custodial situation and thus present no threat to the public. It's true that is the scale of awful behavior, the CIA's program w…

> You're being disingenuous here. It's like the difference between a police officer shooting an armed criminal on the street (which may be a matter of necessity, though recent examples highlight just how problematic such a standard can be) and beating them up in jail when they're already in a custodial situation and thus present no threat to the public.

In war, we justify things a lot more morally ambiguous than a police officer shooting an armed criminal that's an imminent threat. Workers at a munitions factory who are just carting things around? Those folks get killed in war in airstrikes that are totally consistent with international conventions. Is waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed worse than blowing up some sap who just showed up to work on the wrong day? I just find it ridiculous to play that line drawing exercise.

I agree 100% with the rest of your analysis, though. Whatever the moral case may be, we shouldn't engage in enhanced interrogation because it yields low-value or even misleading information at the cost of tremendous political capital.

Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

#317

Post by justin66 »

rayiner wrote: post #277
reitanqild wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, be serious: Most of us would much rather prefer to be shot dead or blown up in a split second than being even slightly tortured and locked up indefinitely. If not it must be because we don't know what we are talking about.

Throwing water on someone and leaving them in a 59-degree room is worse than shooting them dead? Keeping someone awake until they hallucinate is worse than shooting them dead? Really? I can imagine torture that's worse than death. I don't think any of the things revealed in the article qualify. Which is precisely what I'm getting at. If you're not a pacifist and you think it's okay to kill people in war, I think you…

IIRC, Solzhenitsyn notes in one of the early volumes of The Gulag Archipelago that you can kill a guy by tossing him in a room and throwing cold water on him. I don't know what it is about hypothermia that doesn't seem serious until you experience it personally but that must be what's going on here.

Reading Solzhenitsyn in the context of today's news might be worthwhile for people. If people can read all that, note the similarities between the NKVD's tactics and attitude toward the law and the CIA's, and walk away contentedly thinking to themselves "but our guys have good intentions and are a lot more selective!" we are hosed as a country.

Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

#318

Post by anigbrowl »

DevX101 wrote: post #41
Loughla wrote: post #10

Why do they insist on saying 'enhanced interrogation technique' instead of torture? Even when it obviously means torture: "Another senior CIA officer stated that COBALT was itself an enhanced interrogation technique." When talking about a physical place. That is so blatant word replacement that I find it hard to take it seriously.

"You can't be afraid of words that speak the truth. I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language. And American english is loaded with euphemisms. Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets wor…

As a European I think this has deepcultural roots, probably in religion. I'm struck by the way many elecators don't go to the 13th floor, or the 13th in a series of numbered streets is often called something else (eg in SF you have 12th Avenue, Funston Avenue, 14th Avenue...). People prefer to say someone 'passed' (presumably to the afterlife) rather than that they 'died'. And of course there's no swearing on TV - although this only applies to American swear words, it's OK to use words that are considered quite rude in English or Australia.

I have a theory that this is part of the American fondness for TV shows featuring English detectives (Elementary, Forever, Constantine and just about every mystery show on PBS): by speaking the same language but coming from a quite different cultural context, they're able to engage in narrative truth-seeking because of their obliviousness to or disregard for implicit American cultural mores.

Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

#319

Post by Omniusaspirer »

jstrate wrote: post #202
Omniusaspirer wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we can't hold ourselves to a higher standard than religious terrorist groups then something is very wrong with this country.

Can you really not make a distinction between cold shower and televised beheading/castration. I agree there is something very wrong with this country if that is the case. I've spent enough Karma today.

"Cold shower" is a joke of an understatement. These men were kept awake for over 7 days at a time, subjected to sustained waterboarding, slapped and thrown around, left to suffer with festering bullet wounds, etc etc. All that while being told that their families were going to be raped, tortured, and killed.

I know if I was personally subjected to those things I might not be so averse to having my head cut off.

Re: US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

#320

Post by ck2 »

rdtsc wrote: post #25

> Interrogation techniques such as slaps and "wallings" (slamming detainees against a wall) were used in combination, frequently concurrent with sleep deprivation and nudity. Records do not support CIA representations that the CIA initially used an "an open, non-threatening approach," or that interrogations began with the "least coercive technique possible" and escalated to more coercive techniques only as necessary.…

BTW the two guys who researched and advised most of these techniques walked away with $80 MILLION

https://www.google.com/search?q=cia+$80+million

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