Posted on 02/05/2002 2:38:22 PM PST by dennisw
Making Terrorists Talk
America doesn't use torture to get information out of terrorists. Perhaps we
just need to use the magic word: "Mossad."
by Victorino Matus
01/29/2002 12:01:00 AM
IN A STUNNING article in the Washington Post magazine entitled "Bust
and Boom," Matt Brzezinski reports on a terrorist plot in the Philippines
that was foiled by Manila police in January 1995. Authorities had been
notified about a fire alarm going off in an apartment complex and decided to
check it out. When they entered the apartment, they stumbled across a vast
array of bomb-making materials--chemicals, watches, and fuses.
One of the suspects, Hakim Abdul Murad, was apprehended while trying
to flee (he tripped on an exposed tree root and fell flat on his face). The
authorities took him to Camp Crame, just outside Manila. According to
Brzezinski, "Philippine intelligence put the screws to Murad. . . . By the
time he was handed over to the Americans, interrogators had extracted
everything they thought they needed to know."
That's putting it lightly. The Philippine National Police Intelligence
Group came down hard on Murad--quite literally--and subjected him to "TI" or
"tactical interrogation": They hit him using a piece of wood. They broke his
ribs. They threw chairs at his head. And then they made him sit on ice cubes
naked.
They were just getting started.
The officers took a water hose and forced it in his mouth. I asked a
source familiar with such tactics (this source had witnessed much of it
himself) and he nodded with familiarity. "They stick that hose in your
mouth," he said, "and when they turn it on, you got water coming out of
every hole in your body." But Murad was a stubborn suspect. He refused to
name names. So the officers started putting out cigarettes on his
body--including on his genitals. And they told him he would be raped
repeatedly, and, as a report in Newsweek noted, "that he'd never see the
light of day in Manila."
But Murad was resilient, even defiant. According to subsequent court
transcripts, Murad told his interrogators, "The United States is the first
country in this world making trouble for our, for Muslims and for our
people. Killing Americans . . . This is my--the best thing. I enjoy it." The
Filipinos were astounded. They would yell at him, "You want to get treated
bad again?" But Murad would just yell back, "If, if you treat, treating me
bad, treat me." And treat him they did--for 67 days.
Still, nothing seemed to make him talk, until one day, when
interrogators walked in wearing masks, telling Murad they were agents of the
Mossad. They told him they were ready to take him back to Israel for further
"questioning." At this, Murad broke down and spilled everything: He and his
roommate Ramzi Yousef, both wanted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,
were planning to assassinate the pope. Murad had ordered a cassock, which he
would use to slip past security. But there was more. Murad also talked about
the plot to bomb 11 American jetliners. And finally, he admitted that with
his pilot's license, he was hoping to fly a plane filled with explosives
into CIA headquarters. Brzezinski mentions that there were secondary targets
too, including Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon. "The only
problem . . . was that they needed more trained pilots to carry out the
plot."
Brzezinski's article goes into the failures within the U.S.
intelligence community from the time of the confession to September 11. But
another interesting aspect is how the word "Mossad" instilled more fear in
Murad than the water hose, the cigarettes on the genitals, and the
possibility of being raped to death.
The Mossad was established in 1951 by Israel's first prime minister,
David Ben-Gurion. Its mission was to protect Israel, which, said Ben-Gurion,
"since its creation has been under siege by its enemies. Intelligence
constitutes the first line of defense . . . we must learn well how to
recognize what is going on around us." And as the first line of defense, the
Mossad, or "The Institute," has done whatever it takes to protect the
homeland--even if it means assassination and physical interrogation.
There are eight departments within the Mossad, ranging from
intelligence-gathering to technological innovations (gadgetry) to
propaganda. But the most feared, by far, is the Metsada, also known as the
Special Operations Department, responsible for psychological warfare,
sabotage, and assassinations. Metsada was responsible for the 1960
kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was abducted in
Argentina and brought to Israel where he stood trial and was later hanged.
In 1990, Metsada supposedly killed American scientist Gerald Bull, who was
helping Iraq develop a "Super Gun."
So what was it that Murad was expecting the Mossad would do to him?
For starters, there's sleep deprivation and starvation. Then it gets
physical. The Washington Post reported on Palestinian prisoners lucky enough
to survive Mossad interrogations. Some of the tactics include "binding and
gagging them in painful positions, forcing them to wear hoods soaked in
vomit or urine, . . . and subjecting them to blasts of cold air and loud
music." Another method mentioned is "violent shaking."
Upon reading this, the first thought that ran through my head was: Big
deal. I used to know nuns who specialized in violent shaking. But the
reality of it is much more serious. "Imagine being shaken for a long
time--it's like your brain is being scrambled," says one intelligence
expert. "Unlike other forms of torture, there is no focal point when you are
being shaken violently."
As bad as that sounds, it still doesn't seem much worse than having a
water hose shoved down your throat or cigarettes burned on you. (During the
Marcos regime, tearing off fingernails was routine, as was the applying of
electrodes to the genitals.) In his painfully honest assessment of torture
in National Review Online, John Derbyshire wrote about the four elements of
torture: pain (all of the above), disgust (the Khmer Rouge's spoonfuls of
excrement), despair ("No one cares about you"), and love (torturing of
family members).
But with Murad's reaction to the mere mention of Mossad comes the
element of fear. It is an element U.S. interrogators should consider
carefully when figuring out how to extract information from suspected
terrorists, a number of whom are still refusing to talk. And if that doesn't
work, we can always buy them a one-way ticket to Israel.
Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly
Standard.
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So can you if you screw up the courage dooooooooooooooood....
Well, the Liberals would be screaming bloody heck if word got out that our Special Forces were doing these kinds of things. Remember the recent story about the terrorist in our custody who wasn't talking, and word got out that he might be given truth serum? We've got a Liberal talk show host in our area, and she was having fainting spells over the idea...
The Mossad isn't so constrained...
I had it to check on why i was having dizzy spells, they thought it was Meneire's Disease 7 years ago. They shoot water into your ear to induce dizzyness. With electrodes attached to your head, the doctors monitor how long it takes for you to recover from the induced dizzyness.
It was torture. If someone did that for how long they wanted, the extreme nausea that is created would be making you cry in less than 5 minutes and begging them to stop. I had to have them stop several times so I could re-adjust to the nausea. Good thing they tell you not to eat breakfast for that morning!
Not to make light of your ordeal. I know where you stand on this all :)
That's because we restrain them.
They have all sorts of interesting truth extracting devices.
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