Tortured Reasoning
David Rose has an article at Vanity Fair – Tortured Reasoning on the USA’s use of coercive techniques on War on Terror suspects.
The article concludes:-
In an interview in London in April 2008, I remind F.B.I. director Robert Mueller of the attacks planned against targets on American soil since 9/11 that his agents have disrupted: for example, a plot to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and another to wreak mayhem at army recruiting centers and synagogues in and around Torrance, California. These and other homegrown conspiracies were foiled by regular police work. The F.B.I. learned of the Fort Dix plot from a Circuit City store where a technician raised the alarm when asked to copy firearms-training videos, while the Torrance cell was rounded up when cops probed the backgrounds of two of its members after they allegedly robbed a local gas station.
I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?
“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”
Well worth a look. In Adam’s view history would tend to suggest that overall such techniques do not yield the ‘benefits’ claimed for them.
It seems to Adam that by resorting to such techniques and the curtailment in many countries of personal rights since 9/11, our governments have in effect yielded a victory to the terrorists as it is they not us who have won the victory.
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Adam,
If you have clever interrogators who could pick the truth from a non tortured person, then you surely have interrogators who can pick the truth from a person being tortured.. it also stands to reason that the US was able to get useful information from “enhanced interrogation” from WW2 to the present day.. else it wouldn’t be done.
Democracies have virtues even in torture.. the procedures are carefully discussed in terms of effectiveness, legality and physical harm and well discussed. For instance, both US senior democrats and Republicans were briefed some 40 times on enhanced interrogation from 2002-2008. These sessions included detailed descriptions so that George Tenant the CIA director and those who followed him could cover their butts. So when Dick Cheney calls for the results of the torture sessions to be made public you can be damn sure that whatever enhanced interrogation was carried out was effective enough.
Do these interrogators know when to stop? Yes.. the sessions are carried out under medical and psychiatric supervision and will stop before unacceptable harm is done regardless of whether the “truth” has been identified.
From what I can see, these tortures are as much mental as physical and whilst repulsive I’m not about to say they are ineffective.
JC
“In Adam’s view history would tend to suggest that overall such techniques do not yield the ‘benefits’ claimed for them.”
How do we know?
The Obama regime is refusing to release the details of successes claimed as a result of enhanced techniques. But its instructive that Obama has signed executive orders to retain and perhaps increase the policy on renditions.
http://tinyurl.com/cvowdk
The obvious explanation is that he wants his dirty work done further away from home.
JC
This from the article:-
And this reference again from Rose’s article:-
Let me add this posting on the economics of torture.