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The unholy myth that torture ‘works’
Washington Post ^ | May 4, 2011 | by Susan Brooks Thistlethwank

Posted on 05/04/2011 8:52:21 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer

The torture apologists are at it again, trying to perpetuate the unholy untruth that “interrogation of high-value targets” (torture) helped “give us victory” and thus yet again try to insinuate that it is justified. It doesn’t work, it didn’t help us one wit in getting bin Laden, and it is never justified. We cannot let torture apologists get any traction again on this corrupt myth.

But they are trying. Liz Cheney and others at the Keep America Safe Foundation got out a quick statement following President Obama’s announcement of the successful operation against Osama bin Laden. The balance of their argument is that this “victory” was due in larger part to our “intelligence services who, through their interrogation of high-value detainees, developed the information that apparently led us to bin Laden.” President Obama’s leadership in this daring effort against terrorism isn’t even mentioned.

How quickly they come back out of the woodwork, the torture apologists. Jane Mayer, the author of The Dark Side: How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals has said, “It may have taken nearly a decade to find and kill Osama bin Laden, but it took less than twenty-four hours for torture apologists to claim credit for his downfall,” citing the Keep American Safe Foundation statement.

Much has been made of ”getting the courier’s name” from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), for example, said earlier this week that we obtained information “about the courier…obtained that information through waterboarding…vital information which directly led us to bin Laden.” In fact, as experts have noted, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did not reveal the courier’s name that led the U.S. to bin Laden under torture. He gave up those names many months later under standard interrogation.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; War on Terror
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Moral arguments against torture I understand, even respect. But the campaign to declare it inefficient or useless is just beyond ludicrous. If we’re human beings, we understand fully that indeed it does work. What’s bullying, if it’s not torture? Does it work? My guess is yes, since the libs want it prosecuted.

Did it work in the Hanoi Hilton? Well, let’s see . . . the “bounce-back” philosophy that most POWs claimed got them through the long spells of “discomfort” that would make waterboarding feel like scarfing down a happy meal consisted of the simple premise that eventually ANYone can be broken. The challenge, and the cure, was to 1) recognize publicly the guilt of breaking and 2) when you’re called back for a follow-up “quiz,” start from scratch, and make the torturers work harder for the same piece of information or anything in addition to it. If torture elicited only false or no information, there would have been no need to face the personal guilt of breaking, no need for “bounce back.”

What I’d really love to test is the ability of any one of these idiots to resist supplying exactly the information required by the mildest of “tortures.”


41 posted on 05/04/2011 9:35:17 AM PDT by Mach9
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To: US Navy Vet; Oldeconomybuyer

Here’s the writer’s web site. Professor at the Chicago seminary of the United Church of Christ.

http://www.ctschicago.edu/index.php/mnuacademicprograms/faculty/85-susan-thistlethwaite


42 posted on 05/04/2011 9:35:38 AM PDT by Cicero
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To: Cicero
Every single member of that crowd would break before you could really get started with the rough stuff.

That's their defense against the utility of torture ~ that they, themselves, have no moral grounding.

43 posted on 05/04/2011 9:38:09 AM PDT by muawiyah
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Thistlethwaite = political hack desguised as a REV. (another one)

******

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite’s hatred and bigotry

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, the (thankfully) former President of the Chicago Theological Seminary, is promoting a religious litmus test for Presidential candidates and revealing her deep bigotry towards people who don’t share the same faith as she does. Her latest post on the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog should put her comfortably in the company of other bigots like David Duke and Louis Farrakhan. Maybe that’s overstating it a bit... Duke and Farakhan have an audience (however small) that takes them seriously while nearly no one knows who Thistlethwaite is or cares what she thinks

She starts off this week’s post with...

“Wives be subject to your husbands, as unto the Lord.” So says the Christian scriptures in Ephesians, 5:22. What I would like to know, first of all, is who is going to have the final authority as Vice-President if Sarah Palin is elected, Palin or her husband? In fact, I think the first order of business with Palin is to ask her to give the same kind of speech that was demanded of John F. Kennedy re his Catholicism. Kennedy said he would obey the Constitution over the Pope. Will Palin obey the Constitution over her husband?

Palin, the presumptive Republican vice-presidential candidate, belongs to an Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. Members of the Assemblies of God believe that the Bible in its entirety is verbally inspired by God, is the revelation of God to humanity and is “the infallible, authoritative rule of faith and conduct.” That means, in a literal reading of scripture, that the authority in the Palin family rests with her husband.

The “evangelical base” who are reported to be so “energized” by Palin’s nomination as vice-president need to ante up here. Do they believe in the literal word of scripture or not? And if they believe in the literal word of scripture, then they need to demand that the we vet not only Sarah Palin, but more importantly, her husband, Todd Palin. Todd, by the way, works for British Petroleum.

http://tinyurl.com/3br3y94

And Thistlethwaite, by the way, works for GEORGE SOROS!


44 posted on 05/04/2011 9:38:27 AM PDT by kcvl
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

I would have liked OBL to have been captured, taken to GITMO and waterboarded for the vast amount of information he would have been good for. BUT, I guess a bullet to the head beats torture!


45 posted on 05/04/2011 9:43:21 AM PDT by New Jersey Realist (Congress doesn't care a damn about "we the people")
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Torture does work. Victims will tell you anything to get it to stop - and anything includes the truth!
Interrogation is seldom done in a vacuum. There is usually enough corroborating evidence to sort out the intelligence items from the garbage.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it should be used casually, but for terrorists, using a reasonable definition of terrorist (that doesn’t include say, Tea Party members, Boy Scouts and NRA members), I’m okay with it.

Of course, I’d like to know if we tried “chemically enhanced” interrogation and how well lit worked?


46 posted on 05/04/2011 9:45:26 AM PDT by Little Ray (The Gods of the Copybook Heading, with terror and slaughter return!)
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To: Romulus
Its use and portrayal as acceptable virtually guarantees the long term danger that it will be used against American military personnel and eventually even civilians.

You mean like civilian Daniel Pearl, where he was tortured and then beheaded on video camera?

Did our enemies see the USA do that or was it just in anticipation of the water boarding that was to come?

Don't be so naive, the muzzies have been torturing and murdering civilians since the 7th century, and regardless of what we do, the only way to stop them is to kill them... all.

47 posted on 05/04/2011 9:47:46 AM PDT by USS Alaska (Nuke the terrorist savages.)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

TIME : ex-CIA says waterboarding was key in finding Bin Ladin

Time Magazine ^ | 05/04 2011 | drzz

A former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, who was investigated last year by the Justice Department for the destruction of videos showing senior al-Qaeda officials being interrogated, says the harsh questioning of terrorism suspects produced the information that eventually led to Osama bin Laden’s death.

Jose Rodriguez ran the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center from 2002 to 2005, the period when top al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and Abu Faraj al-Libbi were taken into custody and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) at secret prisons overseas. KSM was subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques. Al-Libbi was not waterboarded, but other EITs were used on him. “Information provided by KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libbi about bin Laden’s courier was the lead information that eventually led to the location of [bin Laden’s] compound and the operation that led to his death,” Rodriguez tells TIME in his first public interview. Rodriguez was cleared of charges in the video-destruction investigation last year.

(Excerpt) Read more at swampland.time.com ...


48 posted on 05/04/2011 9:49:54 AM PDT by kcvl
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To: Romulus

We talking about torturing people who like to saw off the heads and mutilate the bodies of their prisoners. I don’t see any risk of an escalation against our troops. Torture and murder are already the enemy’s default responses.
Also I don’t see extending Constitutional protections to foreign terrorists capture in foreign lands.. .


49 posted on 05/04/2011 9:50:18 AM PDT by Little Ray (The Gods of the Copybook Heading, with terror and slaughter return!)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

If torture is so ineffective, why has it been so popular over the years?


50 posted on 05/04/2011 9:51:08 AM PDT by jmcenanly ( "We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him." -Samuel)
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To: New Jersey Realist

I would say we killed him and buried him at sea - then smuggle him somewhere where can be “rigorously interrogated” for loooong time. I’d dispose of his mangled corpse somewhere lonely - like the Mariannas Trench.


51 posted on 05/04/2011 9:54:44 AM PDT by Little Ray (The Gods of the Copybook Heading, with terror and slaughter return!)
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To: Romulus
There is the separate issue of defining torture down.

Being kept in a cold cell or a warm cell, being kept in solitary confinement, being fed only a sufficently nutritious but very bland and unvarying "loaf", being denied personal visits, being denied reading materials and recreation, being denied sunlight, being woken in the middle of the night, etc. are all now described as "torture."

This isn't the rack or the thumbscrews or bamboo slivers under fingernails.

52 posted on 05/04/2011 9:56:48 AM PDT by wideawake
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

HOw come we can kill ‘em but we can waterboard ‘em? Which is worse?


53 posted on 05/04/2011 9:57:46 AM PDT by Dudoight
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To: kcvl

That picture, and the organizational name within, speak volumes.


54 posted on 05/04/2011 9:58:02 AM PDT by andy58-in-nh (America does not need to be organized: it needs to be liberated.)
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To: Dudoight

I meant...how come we can kill ‘em but CAN’T water board ‘em. I’d rather be water boarded.


55 posted on 05/04/2011 9:59:08 AM PDT by Dudoight
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To: Oldeconomybuyer
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said,

Have these genius writers considered the possibility that (if true) KSM revealed info under standard interrogation to avoid further waterboarding?

56 posted on 05/04/2011 10:06:14 AM PDT by Will88
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To: Dudoight

Waterboarding and Photos - BAD
Double Tap to head and heart - GOOD

The liberal mind at its finest.


57 posted on 05/04/2011 10:08:38 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer (The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer
Leon Penetta thought it worked pretty good. However, the US Navy gave UBL the ultimate water board off the aircraft carrier. Shoulda used the catapult!
58 posted on 05/04/2011 10:11:55 AM PDT by SERKIT ("Blazing Saddles" explains it all......)
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To: Dudoight

LOL!

It’s the exact same logic that determines smoking and drinking during pregnancy is really really bad - but the same woman deserves a police escort into an abortion clinic.


59 posted on 05/04/2011 10:15:43 AM PDT by Scotswife
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To: Romulus

Our military & contractors who’ve been captured by these non-uniformed terrorists could have wished they were just waterboarded. What we do or don’t do to KSM & his ilk isn’t going to improve how our troops & contractors are treated.


60 posted on 05/04/2011 10:16:33 AM PDT by Belle22
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