"Has it really been known to yield vital and life saving information ?"
That all depends on who the prisoner is, and what he is made of.
Veto it President Bush and then veto the spending bills, any bduget that doesn't include drilling in ANWR and any pork laden crap coming down the pike.
As I understand it, "Outlaw," from our old western history, meant "Outside the protection of the law."
The issues and solutions are the same.
THe problem here is the definition...Hate to say it, but it depends on what the word "torture" is...degrading? as mentionned on another thread, that word means different things to different people. Putting panties on someone's head could be viewed as degrading....changing the temperature in the room between extremes could be viewed as "cruel" by some.
This bill is yet another hinderance in our prosecution of the war. Even if we as a country agreed that we would not torture these people, why on earth would you ever let the enemy know that option is off the table?
I also love how the conclusory statement "torture doesn't work" is used as support for the bill. What basis is there for the statement? Last week's episode of Commander-in-Chief.
If passed into law, you will see these words used in their most liberal sense.
McCain is a loose phaser. I believe his thinking on the subject, in face of the potential consequences of a massive terror attack, is unsound.
Ping
It seems to me that if a terrorist knows that a lead which proves to be false will be severely punished, he will think twice before lying. If, on the other hand, there is no penalty for lying or remaining silent, then there is no incentive to cooperate. Additionally, when dealing with Islamofascists, who are contemptuous of kindness and interpret it as weakness, I believe it is a fatal mistake to exclude severe punishment (torture) from our options.
Army Field Manual 34-52 Chapter 1
"The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized
nor condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation.
Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say
whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."
http://www.amnestyusa.org/stoptorture/officersquotes.html
Don't know what we've learned through classic torture techniques, but I'd like to bring up two very important caveats that this article seems to ignore.
One is that, regardless of whether or not the CIA has an internal policy banning torture, the THREAT of torture must never be taken off the table. By passing a publicly-known bill that explicitly prohibits torture, that tells not only the American people, but also the prisoners, that the worst thing a prisoner will face in an American prison is a lack of basic cable TV.
The other is that "torture" covers a wide range of coercive techniques, some of which include direct manipulation of the prisoner's psychology. Sleep deprivation and "truth serum" are the most famous such techniques, but medical science - especially neuropharmacology - has come a long way since the 1960s. We have the abilitiy, for example, to selectively deplete a prisoner's serotonin levels, completely wrecking his mood and morale. If a prisoner is resisting interrogation, we can measure the lack of rise of cortisol levels as he moves into his "happy place", and we can artificially disrupt those levels, making sure that he feels exactly as much stress as we wish him to feel no matter what he might be quietly telling himself to calm himself down. If a prisoner is trying to come up with a convincing lie, we can both monitor and disrupt the activity of creative and visualizational portions of his brain, rendering him neurologically incapable of coming up with anything but the truth.
I am disgusted. Anyone who has authorized torture, secret prisons or participated in their cover-up should face a long prison sentence.
The way I see it. If a nuke is planted in a major City and it took torture to find out where the nuke was planted then I would say yes, then do it.
This isn't really about torture. This is about subjecting military personnel, during wartime, to civilian courts.
Its a mistake. The civilian courts are pushing for jurisdiction over US foreign policy and US military operations. You can see it coming, it is transparent.
It is also transparent that there is a push to subject US foreign policy and military operations to international courts, and if we go down that road the results will be disastrous.
We don't use torture, and if we do, our people are subject to military courts martial. We have a tradition that people should be judged by their peers, and in wartime, soldiers should only be judged by other soldiers. Any effort to put soldiers on trial in civilian courts for actions undertaken in a warzone is a grave mistake.
If you threaten to feed someone into a wood chipper, they'll tell you all kinds of things. Maybe true, maybe not. Tactics like that are both barbaric and inaccurate. That's not what the CIA is looking for.
One problem with this debate is that "torture" is a loaded word. It can apply to -
1. Inflicting pain to gain information.
2. Inflicting pain for no reason whatsoever.
3. Inflicting pain as punishment or to terrorize others.
4. Depriving someone of sleep and then asking them questions in a rapid-fire manner.
If you're for any of the above, then you are for 'torture'. Incidentally, all of the above are used in survival training in SERE school for military personnel. We can't even do to terrorists what we do to service members during training.
>>>Question : What have we found out regarding torturing of prisoners ? Has it really been known to yield vital and life saving information?<<<
McCain admitted that when he was a POW he succumbed to torture and gave up military information.
The secret to using torture is the prisoner must understand that the torture will be 10 times worse each time he lies.
Suppose a nuclear bomb is primed to detonate somewhere in Manhattan, Levin wrote, and we've captured a terrorist who knows where the bomb is. He won't talk.
The playing of loud music, being placed in a very hot of very cold room, not being allowed more than two or three hours of sleep per night, and like at abu graib, panties on the head, barking dog, or being naked with other men **gasp** while not professional and not authorized by those few soldiers, is also NOT torture.
I argue that POWs who REALLY suffered torture at the hands of the nazis, the japanese, the koreans, chinese, the vietnamese, the soviets, and the muslim terrorists would cringe at the suggestion that what is being called "torture" today, is even close to comparable to what they endured, which was real torture. At least, my father argues that, as he was a prisoner of the vietnamese for a short time and told me last year he’d of gladly endured the worst of what was dished out at abu graib rather than what he got in Vietnam. What more can be said than that?
Also, in most cases, if you capture someone that is not specially trained to resist coercion and actual torture or just the threat of it, it is the THREAT of torture that leads to information extraction. As an example, my father has told me over the years, that there were times, when lives were on the line, that known VC prisoners were taken up in helicopters and asked information. If they refused to talk, hanging them half out the platform at 300 feet very much got them in the talking mood. Other times, you can literally just beat the snot out of them, like any good old bar room brawl, and they will talk. The average prisoner will tell you everything you want to know, and then make stuff up when they have nothing else to tell you. The result was, from my father's first hand knowledge, that the information extracted from such methods, definitely saved numerous soldiers and Marines. It allows the ambush of ambushes, the location of depots, location of officers, codes and other information, etc so on.
So the real bottom line is, nothing we have done to islamic terrorists is ANYTHING near as bad as they've done to our captured military personnel, who understand very plainly that surrender is not an option, because if they surrender, they will promptly be executed on he inter net, so I find it offensive when some people suggest that any kind of mental or physical torture makes us no better than the terrorists. To date, WE have not beheaded any terrorists. Televised or otherwise.
Further, if it was your spouse, parent, sibling, child, close friend, anyone you care about, and their life could be saved because the CIA, or someone in the military dangled a prisoner out a helicopter, smacked around, deprived him of sleep, stuck him in a hot or cold room, or even if they did put panties on their head, stripped them bare, or had a dog barking at them, to get his mouth running, and that information led to your loved one NOT being killed, which DOES HAPPEN, would you care that any of those things had to be done so long as your loved one was alive? I for one, would NOT!
It would be nice if the liberals in this country showed as much concern for our military personnel and our civilian population as they do for the "rights" of the terrorists, who, under the Geneva convention we shouldn't take prisoner at all and could shoot on sight with NO quarter being give, since they are un-uniformed enemy combatants, not fighting under a nations flag or as part of an army, and who are dressed as civilians making them "terrorists" under the Geneva conventions and giving them NO protections, allowing us to shoot them on sight ad never take them prisoner. From my perspective, we're being very generous and compassionate that we're taking them prisoner at all and not just killing them all when they give up, like the Geneva Conventions allow us to. Liberals only seem concerned about our military when more get killed so it adds to their precious body count.
I mean, considering our military has the clear right under international law and the Geneva conventions, which our enemies NEVER adhere to, to shoot all terrorists on sight and take NO prisoners, it is insulting for anyone to suggest that using intimidation, coercion, psychological techniques, and mild physical abuse is out of line and should not be allowed, when time has PROVEN that most of the time, such methods provide good intelligence and prevent the needless deaths of troops in the field. Furthermore, I argue that those who are against such techniques have never had anyone they love at risk in a combat zone. After all, the terrorists behead all prisoners, what more are they going to do to them if we use the methods I mentioned to extract information? Murder them TWICE? That's my take on it.