100 Days In, A Hard Look At Torture

CBS Evening News: Some Experts Say Torture Isn't Even The Best Way To Get Information From Terror Suspects

(CBS)  At his news conference Wednesday night, President Obama said once again that waterboarding is torture and that there are other ways, more consistent with American values, to get information from terror suspects.

But intelligence experts remain divided on this issue, reports CBS News correspondent David Martin.

There was no cleaner break with the Bush administration - on his second full day in office President Obama ordered the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba closed and renounced harsh interrogation tactics, a decision he defended last night.

"Waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture," the president said during his primetime news conference.

Next he released top secret memos describing methods the CIA used against top al Qaeda operatives like Khalid Sheik Mohammed. We now know exactly how many times he was waterboarded: 183.

But we still don't know if that's the only way he would have talked. How can we know that less coercive techniques couldn't have produced the same results?

"Why would you care? If we get the information we needed and America is better protected, who cares?" replied former CIA officer Michael Scheueur. "These are not Americans."

But former State Department counselor Phillip Zelikow disagrees.

"You don't need to break our laws and debase ourselves to get the good intelligence," he said.

Even opponents of the coercive techniques like Zelikow acknowledge they can extract valuable information.

"The question is, might alternative methods have given you equal or maybe even greater value in some respects over time?" Zelikow said.

"I don't believe there's any way to use fear productively in an interrogation," said "Matthew Alexander" (a pseudonym) a former interrogator and author of "How to Break a Terrorist."

Alexander was the interrogator who came up with the lead to the whereabouts of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the most feared and wanted terrorist in Iraq.

"At the time that we were hunting him he was a higher priority than Osama bin Laden," Alexander said. Alexander got the info by persuading a captured al Qaeda operative to cooperate.

"I said to him, 'I want to work with you. I want to give you a role to play in the future of Iraq, together with me,' and he accepted that and together we started to work towards finding Zarqawi," Alexander recalled.

The captive identified Zarqawi's spiritual adviser who was put under surveillance and followed to a house where Zarqawi was spending the night. An F-16 dropped 500 pound bombs and Zarqawi's bloodied body was pulled from the rubble.

"All in all it was about less than three months from the time we started that chain of events to the time we found Zarqawi," Alexander said.

His motto was: "If you use coercion, you'll get a detainee to tell you the location of a house. But if you use cooperation, he'll tell you if the house is booby-trapped."

[inachu1]

Lets just make this simple:
Let the rest of the world practice what the USA practice and the moment someone in USA squeaks about actions against usa citizens in another country then those USA squealing can be charged with war crimes as they have done exactly the same thing.

USA can dish it out but can't eat it mentality

[Westernesse]

leahylevin.txt

Dear Sirs,

During 2004, I grew increasingly incensed by the way that the supposed "liberation" of Iraq (which I supported in principle) was fast turning into a brutal occupation. The absurd US Viceroy, Kissinger Associates' former MD Paul Bremer, had dismissed the entire Iraqi Police Force, and the entire Iraqi military, leaving no "eyes and ears" on the ground in Iraq. The 'remedy' to this self-created problem turned out to be massive arrests of entirely innocent people, who were "turned" into active informants ('snitches') by being shown CD Slide-shows on laptops, displaying scenes of torture and degradation and abuse by the thousands...
Ordinarily, this should have been impossible, because -- under US Military Law -- ALL interrogations must be supervised by two Judge Advocate General officers (the US Military Justice Corps).

JAG officers are now under standing orders to discuss this situation with no-one.

They are VERY unhappy about this state of affairs....

The US War Crimes Act [1996] enacts into US Federal Statute Law ALL the protections described by the Geneva Conventions.

In an attempt to circumvent the United States Constitution, and to provide "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards to high US Officials (not lowly and expendable soldiers and CIA operatives), John Ashcroft's US Department of Justice faked "opinions" asserting that torture and murder of detainees was "lawful."

This contention cannot possibly survive the US Supreme Court, of course (unless the US Supreme Court was first 'packed' with servile and compliant Justices. The Constitutional and moral and legal Bright Lines are so clearly drawn that they would dazzle the sight of anyone trying to overlook them...

I contacted fifteen FBI Offices so as to file formal statements drawing the FBI's attention to this appalling malpractice amounting as it does to treason to the Constitution. The reactions of the FBI Officers and Agents I spoke with ranged from furious outbursts, assertions that that "America is up to its armpits in terrorism" (truer, perhaps, than the furious outbursters might want to know) to miserable, lamentable apologies that the internal integrity of the FBI to uphold the Laws and the Constitution of the United States had been destroyed, and any attempts to address the problems were "pointless."

Eventually, one brave FBI Officer at the Washington, DC Field Office took the statement, which was confirmed in writing afterwards. This statement showed that John Ashcroft and his officials were in clear violation of the US War Crimes Act [1996]. I copied the statement to Mrs. Laura Bush at the White House. Ashcroft was the only senior Cabinet Officer dropped from President Bush's Second term.

Mrs. Laura Bush is an intelligent, feisty and principled woman, and I admire her immensely.


Clearly, the Coup planners desperately needed tidily packaged "confessions" from Arab and Moslem individuals who could not possibly have been guilty of the Coup d'Etat plotters' evildoing.

Mr. Heimbach of the FBI's Counter-Terrorism Staff recently publicly thanked Mr. Richard Gage, an Architect with architects and engineers for 9/11 Truth, a highly reputable organization of professionals, and his assistants, for meticulously documenting evidence showing that the WTC skyscrapers were in fact destroyed by massive sequenced detonations of explosives, rather than the relatively minor fires which have never in history brought down steel-framed skyscrapers, let alone three in one day...

Pilots for 9/11 Truth, which includes amongst its eminent members Jeff Latas, former President of the United States Air Force Accident Investigation Department, has meticulously documented the glaring deficiencies of the Official Conspiracy Theory, which is now lying on its back like Kafka's beetle, feebly waving its legs in the air. They have also meticulously analyzed and documented the actual fate of the jetliners and their hapless passengers and crew on that fateful day.

I strongly recommend that your readers study Alexander Solzhenitsyn's prescient Nobel Prize Speech, "One Word of Truth..." http://www.STARGATE.uk.net/nobel.txt



They will then be much better equipped to dare to use their own intelligence (rather than being deceived by official lies and the mendacity of some partisan "journalists", who should have known better their duty to the truth).

"One Word of Truth Can Change The Whole World."

Ad it will. Just watch...

Yours Sincerely,

Tony Hollick

www.STARGATE.uk.net/agora/

------------ * * * * * ------------

"The Secret of Happiness is Freedom; and the Secret of Freedom is Courage."

-- Thucydides, Classical Greek philosopher and General, 2,500 years ago

------------ * * * * * ------------

[Westernesse]

For Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft & Co....

http://www.PAINGATE.com

They'll LOVE all this...

From Westernesse

[edgemaster--2008]

Under rules that we wrote - and were the first to prosecute, convict and execute people under - torture is a crime against humanity. We defined these as crimes so grave, there is no immunity or statute of limitations for them.

Our president authorized them. Therefore he must be brought to justice. If we are too cowardly to do so, he must be sent to the Hague. This is not a political issue, it is a legal one.

To NOT prosecute these highest of all crimes makes us all complicit in them.

[Tu_eres]

nancy_naive = d-u-m-b-a-s-s

[lucy20081]

Our country has a long history of having violent bigots. It is sad that the party of Lincoln stopped being "of Lincoln" many decades ago. It is sad that the Republican party that took over the Southern states of the lost cause, made a pact with ignorance, violence, and arrogance. It is sad that the Republican party is now corner cased into a party of pink white men with southern sentiments of anti-immigrants, anti-"non-white", anti- "know-anything", while beating the drums made of stretched-thin biblical leather. It is sad that those who yell for the need to torture and support it are these same people. The same people who are supposedly Christian. They are vengeful and mean-spirited in the same vain as their emotionally disfunctional and mean Old Testament tribal god of goat herders. They are not followers of Jesus of Nazarus, a man who taught love, kindness, turn the other cheek, and give to the poor and sick. Both Emerson, Tolstoy, and Gandhi followed Jesus. These people of torture are anti-Jesus.

[Tu_eres]

100 Days In, A Hard Look At Torture
But there is only 3 years and some "change" left.

[CLoverNYC1]

Instead of closing Gitmo we should have forced the prisoners to listen to President Obama's speechifying preachifying non-stop for weeks, empty promises promises promises about transparency while blaming the former administration for the current situation ad infinitum

They'll talk then. Or die.

[ReallyMeanIt]

So the messiah is telling us what is torture and what is not huh. Guess it's tough being a narcissis, got to constantly making sure our thinking matches yours. Just keep in mind that we are not one of your followers barrack, we can think for ourselves.
Your administration so far provides pretty good comic relief to a bleak outlook. Your press secretary have a bright future in comedy.....he's liked Baghdad Bob during the Iraq war. Your people seems to be very familiar with a certain river in Egypt. Keep up the good work because we're on the Titanic too.

[notblue]

The intelligence people claim waterboarding gleened imortant intelligencethat saved American lives. The left in this country are under the mistaken belief that if we somehow gain the moral high ground or apologize to the world or if we disclose and abandon previous interrogation techniques or if we elect a liberal president the Islamic extremists, dictators, despots and enemies of freddom those that would destroy America nad it's citizens will somehow change and a new eutopian world will follow. you people nedd to get a clue! The enemies of America previously had these actions and techniques to fear but not anymore. Furthemore if you people believe the enemy gives one hoot who is president or which ideology America is embracing then you are NAIVE. nONE OF THAT PETTY POLITICS MATTERS TO THOSE WHO WOULD DESTROY US WITH ANY MEANS POSSIBLE OR ATTAINABLE AND I FEAR THIS GENTLER KINDER APPROACH IS MUSIC TO THEIR EARS AND THEY WILL USE THESE POLICY CHANGES AGAINST US.

[inventagod]

In 1983, the Justice Department prosecuted a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies for waterboarding prisoners to get them to confess to crimes.

The deputies were sentenced to four years in prison and Parker pleaded guilty to extortion and federal civil rights violations and received a 10-year sentence. Parker admitted that he had operated a ?marijuana trap? on U.S. Highway 59, arrested suspects, and, according to court documents, subjected ?prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions.

?This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning,? the complaint said, which referred to the technique as ?water torture.?

Yet nowhere in the four ?torture? memos released by the Justice Department last week that authorized the CIA to waterboard detainees do the attorneys who drafted the legal opinions mention the federal case U.S. v Parker et al, in which San Jacinto County Sheriff James Parker and three deputies? Carl Lee, Floyd Allen Baker and John Glover?were found guilty of torturing at least six prisoners between 1976 and 1980 in a rural part of the state 60 miles outside of Houston.

[blog_fever2]

Have any of you experienced torture? How can you honestly say you are for/against anything you haven't experienced first hand? People argue that info was obtained that would otherwise not be obtained at all. This is all fiction used to justify actions/views; This is sad where we as a nation have come to.

[omnibus66]

Basically, those who support torture consider themselves either Republicans, Christian fundamentalists, or both. Those against torture generally do not belong to those groups. It's a clean distinction.

[Dgunner]

I could never ever be the man to do the water boarding.---- I would get upset and drown the SOB. Then we wouldn't get anything out of them. Im much better at making them quite than getting them to talk.

[hamiltongrad]

GET A GRIP


How many people were water boarded ?? 3.


/// How many lives have been saved ? Thousands.... Breaking up 1. The Attack on London by Plane. 2. Padilla attack in Chicago. 3. The Attack on LA and Asian Flights , all arrested.

While the Left accuses the Right of thinking in Black and White, it is most often the left who makes absolutes, and the right who can see shades of gray and make wise decisions, that have saved lives.

[whitemale08]

I bet you like Star Trek movies huh?
Posted by Stuart2560 at 8:15 PM : Apr 30, 2009

[TeabagBandit]

I read a report on a study done on how the right wing religious crowd felt about torture,
and the more religious you are the more you are to approve of inhumane treatment of people you deem your foe,
is this backwards or what?

[patilee3]

All I can say is, I'm enchanted!

[thebob-bob]

Even during the Blitzkrieg, with London being the destroyed, The Brite didn't torture because it doesn't work, lowers the torture to animal level and leads to bad intel. Civilized people don't torture. Only extremist ideologues and religious fanatics do. Torture does NOT make you safer.

Republicans have devolved into the pro-torture party. Good luck with that.

[mark7sys]

My wife and I felt that tonight?s report by David Martin was one of the best pieces of evening news journalism we had ever heard. We rarely tune in CBS News, but the quality and usefulness of this report encouraged us to do so more often.
We created an account on this site just so we could send CBS our thanks.