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Actually there's a pretty extensive timeline of the CIA agents and officials telling each other to spin the effectiveness of the torture at every opportunity, no matter what the actual effectiveness might have been.
Alright! Anecdotes.
So if the CIA is so proud of what they did and the results they got, why destroy the video evidence? Surely their incredibly and undeniably effective methods should be preserved and shared with any authority that wants information from anyone. Every policeman and parent should use it if they feel it is important enough. That's the standard the chicken hawks want to use, so let all the information out.
Including the videos.
Be proud.
Actually there's a pretty extensive timeline of the CIA agents and officials telling each other to spin the effectiveness of the torture at every opportunity, no matter what the actual effectiveness might have been.
The Bush administration stopped many of the methods themselves, Darrin.
Why do you think they did that?
Thats just chump dumb.
'
Lets release the after action videos and pictures of all the dead and maimed bodies from drone attacks and conventional combat casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc.while we are at it.
Provided in the CIA Director's rebuttal to the report. And, according to them, these facts have been known to Congress since the time when they were being extracted from terrorists using the techniques described -- of which, they also say, Congress was aware.
If I had to guess -- and this is stipulating the video tapes were destroyed illegally -- they probably wanted to avoid people like you and Dianne Feinstein using it for political hay, somewhere down the road.
You're an idiot for equating the two.
Strawman.
Here's an anecdote for you, Chump:
Ex-CIA counterterror chief says Pelosi ‘reinventing the truth’ about waterboarding
Maybe you should be asking for the release of that cable. I know I'd like to see it.In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.”
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
So we’re left with a “he said-she said” standoff? Not at all. Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Diminishing returns
Plus, they quit sending prisoners there. No new oranges to squeeze.
Why not?
So you're ashamed and afraid to show what we do to purportedly protect ourselves. That says it all to me.
Great, did they show them the video evidence of everything working so well?
What hay would be made? It worked perfectly and so well and so legally -- those videos were the proof and they destroyed them. Kinda stupid.If I had to guess -- and this is stipulating the video tapes were destroyed illegally -- they probably wanted to avoid people like you and Dianne Feinstein using it for political hay, somewhere down the road.
Not at all. The only criteria for using torture was how important the information was to the torturer. You set the bar. What is your argument against using it against common criminals and badly behaving teens -- after all, you claim its perfectly safe and effective with no lasting effects whatsoever.You're an idiot for equating the two.
Strawman.
I know you want to make it about politics.
That's all you really care about.
I am fine with shining a light on all of it. You are not. Because you are a partisan hack.
You can torture anywhere.
We probably still are. Just letting the Afghani's, Iraqi's Yemeni's etc. do it.
Confirmed: Pelosi Lied About CIA Briefing on Waterboarding
From the first link above:The evidence against Pelosi was so strong that her tale could only be explained one of two ways: Either (a) she was lying, or (b) a vast conspiracy had constructed a web of deceit to ensnare her. Occam's Razor revealed the truth, of course, but my column was premised on describing just how implausible the 'anti-Pelosi witch hunt' theory really was. As of that writing, we knew that two separate members of the House Intelligence Committee had personally attested to her presence at a private 2002 briefing, at which EITs were thoroughly described. A contemporaneous CIA report also confirmed Pelosi's presence at the briefing, specifying that members were informed about the existence and use of these EITs. A 2007 Washington Post account corroborated these facts. And yet, Pelosi stuck to her story. She claimed that she was not -- repeat: was not -- told about any of this, further asserting that the CIA had lied by explicitly assuring her that waterboarding had not been used. In case any shadow of doubt remained, a final piece of this puzzle has fallen into place. The former CIA counterterrorism chief who conducted the briefing in question has at last spoken out:
That's not merely Rodriguez's personal recollection; his memory is affirmed by yet another do ent:In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Jose Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.” “We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.” How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used.
To recap: Roughly one year after 9/11, Nancy Pelosi and other select members of Congress were told in great detail about a program of EITs that US interrogators were employing to wring actionable intelligence out of captured terrorists. No one objected. Years later, when Democrats were indignantly denouncing "torture" as an inexpiable sin of Bush and the Republicans, Pelosi disavowed any knowledge of the meeting she had attended. She deliberately lied about a sensitive national security question in order to score the cheapest of political points, tossing the American intelligence community under the bus in the process. This is absolutely shameful.Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
From the second link above:Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.
Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:
-- The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.
-- We understood what the CIA was doing.
-- We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.
-- We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.
-- On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.
I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately -- to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president's national security adviser -- and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.
From the third link above:Specifically, the CIA timeline states that on Sept. 4, 2002, Pelosi and Goss received a "Briefing on EITs (enhanced interrogation techniques) including use of EITs on (alleged al-Qaida operative) Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed."
That briefing came a month after the CIA began using Justice Department-approved enhanced interrogation techniques — including the drowning simulation technique known as waterboarding — on Abu Zubaydah, according to a Justice Department memo released in March 2009.
The CIA version is backed up by Goss, who resigned from Congress in 2004 to become CIA director under President George W. Bush, a post Goss held until 2006.
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
...
"In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic," said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. "But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The at ude was, 'We don't care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.' "
Only after information about the practice began to leak in news accounts in 2005 -- by which time the CIA had already abandoned waterboarding -- did doubts about its legality among individual lawmakers evolve into more widespread dissent. The opposition reached a boiling point this past October, when Democratic lawmakers condemned the practice during Michael B. Mukasey's confirmation hearings for attorney general.
Unfortunately, waterboarding is the least of what is in the report.
People who apologize for torture really make me ashamed of my country. Deeply ashamed.
I'm not apologizing for torture.
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/11/370022...-whos-doing-it
What Is Torture? Our Beliefs Depend In Part On Who's Doing It.
Researchers are studying how nations and individuals react when they given information that members of their own group have harmed other people, such as through torture. It takes some nimble thinking.
Copyright © 2014 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now let's explore what we talk about when we talk about torture. This week's Senate report on U.S. interrogations is the latest stage in a decade-long debate. Americans have talked about torture in different ways, including debating whether to call it torture at all. The Bush administration avoided that language after 9/11 partly because the United States had signed on to a U.N. treaty banning torture. There may be another reason people avoid such a loaded word. Some research suggests this debate is difficult because it affects our sense of our own national iden y. NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam is here. Hi, Shankar.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: What's the research?
VEDANTAM: Well, the research finds people very quickly understand that accusations of torture reflect poorly on them, and so this clashes with feelings of loyalty we have towards members of our own group.
INSKEEP: Meaning members of our own country - citizens of our own country.
VEDANTAM: Exactly, and a wide range of research finds that people often respond defensively when they're confronted with this kind of information. And we employ a variety of strategies to deal with this threatening information. I spoke with Nyla Branscombe; she's a psychologist at the University of Kansas. She told me the first response people have when they're told about their own groups carrying out torture is the first response we often have to traumatic situations or situations involving grief, which is we deny the bad thing is actually happened. In the case of torture, this often involves changing the criteria for what's considered torture. Here's Branscombe.
NYLA BRANSCOMBE: We found people change the standard, the criteria, for deciding the severity of harm-doing that's been done when it's their own group's iden y that's at stake.
INSKEEP: This is something you can do ent in the record. The Bush administration years ago argued for calling it enhanced interrogation. Maybe it wasn't quite torture. It was something a little off to the side of torture.
VEDANTAM: That's exactly right. We've had these semantic wrestling matches for several years now - is this technique torture, or is it a stress position? You know, when it no longer becomes possible to deny that torture has happened, people then move to the next strategy, and that's to minimize the harm that's done. So we say, how can keeping somewhat awake for three or four days be torture? It's just sleep deprivation, and they can sleep it off and then they'll be fine afterwards.
The interesting thing here, Steve, is that we do this selectively, we employ these strategies only when it's our group that's responsible. Branscombe told me there's another strategy. In some ways, I think of this as a third stage of how we deal with these accusations. Once we accept that torture was carried out and that it harmed people, we then say the harm was in some ways justified. So we move the ethical goalpost.
In one study, Branscombe and colleagues in Britain asked American and British volunteers to judge torture carried out by Americans and by British. The British volunteers justified the harm that was done when the harm was carried out by British operatives. The American volunteers excuse the harm that was done when it was carried out by American operatives. Here's Branscombe again.
BRANSCOMBE: Whenever it is your national group that's said to have perpetrated this illegitimate harm, then people will attempt to justify it as one way of dealing with that threat.
INSKEEP: So the essence of this research then is that when your own country is engaged in behavior that might be considered questionable, you really have to struggle to look at that in a particular way, to look at that critically. What happens, though, Shankar Vedantam, when time passes because we're talking about things that happened after 9/11, in many cases, more than 10 years ago?
VEDANTAM: So clearly I think, Steve, with the passage of time, people are better able to come to terms with what happened because they're also able to distance themselves from what actually happened. But time and memory might also be the final defense mechanism. There was another study that I came by by Katie Rotella and Jennifer Richeson. Volunteers were told about harms perpetrated against Native Americans. The catch was some of the volunteers were told the harms were carried out by European settlers and others were told the harms were carried out by early Americans.
INSKEEP: We're talking about the Colonial period here, OK?
VEDANTAM: Exactly. Now the European settlers and the early Americans are identical, they're the same...
INSKEEP: Same people.
VEDANTAM: They're the same people. But when the volunteers were told that the perpetrators were early Americans, they were far more likely to forget the information that they had learned about the harms perpetrated against Native Americans compared to when they learned the identical information but the perpetrators were European settlers.
INSKEEP: Well, Shankar, thanks for reminding us of this.
VEDANTAM: Thanks so much, Steve.
INSKEEP: NPR's Shankar Vedantam.
Torture doesn't work.
Waterboarding is torture.
If you don't think so, volunteer for a few dozen sessions of it, or anything else done to the detainees in our custody.
Further, such things directly endanger Americans.
Ineffective, immoral, and outright harmful to our country.
You can't have it both ways.
If the "terrorists" are so evil the only way to get information out of them is to torture them, than they're too evil to trust anything they say.
BTW, speaking of liars, the government lies. The CIA lies most of all--it's an agency of SPIES--lying is in the job description. Those former CIA directors are all paid professional liars. You can't believe a word that comes out of there mouths.
From what I've seen of that report, waterboarding is the least of what went on.
Waterboarding resulted in actional intelligence, it worked.
Why? I'm not aligned with a group responsible for the murder of 3,000 innocent people. Nor do I have knowledge of future imminent attacks or the the whereabouts of those responsible.
Those subjected to these techniques did.
Partisan reports calling those who did what they were asked to do to prevent a second wave of attacks, torturers, does more to endanger Americans and harm this country than subjecting a few terrorists to harsh interrogations.
There is a lot of sincere outrage about this report.
Sorry, I don't care which political party anybody making excuses for torture is from.
Past generations have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for the principles that immoral persons such as yourself would have us so readily give up.
I opposed them after 9-11 and I oppose them now, I don't care if myself or my family become the victim of an attack. Somethings are greater than myself.
Don't give in to the fear, although I can't blame you for being afraid. Death is scary.
Evil more so.
Admitting and vetting the misdeeds of our government do more to provide us with moral authority than any other thing we do.
It proves to everybody that we stand for the things we say we stand for, and mean what we say.
When we do things like this, regardless of party, we make the world an arguably worse place.
Unless, of course you don't believe in basic human rights?
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