Ve Have Vays of Making You Talk!

[rucky]

http://www.msnbc.com/news/956061.asp?0cv=KB10&cp1=1#BODY

(snip)“We won’t know, will we, until we have an opportunity to visit with him?” CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid told the expectant press when Chemical Ali’s capture was announced. “After that we’ll know a little bit more.”
But how do you make a man like this talk? We Americans have ways, it would seem, and they were recently outlined by none other than Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. No need to get out the battery cables or fingernail pliers, it seems. The only thing Jacoby tortures is prose. “Interrogation is the art of questioning and examining a source to obtain the maximum amount of usable, reliable information in the least amount of time to meet intelligence requirements,” Jacoby writes in a legal brief. “DIA’s approach to interrogation is largely dependent upon creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator.”

If that doesn’t work, the treatment can get rough. But you have to read between Jacoby’s lines to figure that out. Because the enemy in the war on terror is so hard to identify and doesn’t fight the kind of war the United States spent trillions of dollars to wage, Jacoby tells us “innovative and aggressive solutions are required.” A “robust program” has been put in place during which “interrogations have been conducted at many locations worldwide by personnel from DIA and other organizations in the Intelligence Community.”...
...As one of Jacoby’s subordinates in the U.S. Navy explained to me, the idea is to keep most of the important players out of the United States. Apparently there is no shortage of black holes in which to soften up the bad guys, although only a few are publicized. “The most interesting thing about interrogations is how the U.S. government and military capitalizes on the dubious status (as sovereign states) of Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and aircraft carriers to avoid certain legal questions about rough interrogations,” my friend told me. “Whatever humanitarian pronouncements a state such as ours may make about torture, states don’t perform interrogations, individual people do. What’s going to stop an impatient soldier, in a supralegal location, from whacking one nameless, dehumanized shopkeeper among many?”
Not the law, certainly. But should we complain?

[Maple]

1. Under torture

people will say anything.

It's not only unreliable information, it's barbaric.

[gratuitous]

2. But it's okay if the U.S. does it

Because we're the Good Guys, right? No reason anyone should get their panties in a bunch or their turban in a knot just because some interrogator or one of our proxies got a little enthusiastic or aggressive, is there?

I thought the United States was supposed to be against these sorts of things. That's one of the things that was supposed to make us better than other countries. Instead, we've become the New York Yankees on steroids cruising the sandlots and picking on 10 year olds. Disgusting and disgraceful.

[the masses against the classes]

3. people will say anything

that is for sure...people actually believe Bush is President...

[starroute]

4. How long till Americans start showing up as movie bad guys?

I can only assume the main reason they haven't already (at least not much) is that the US still dominates the worldwide film industry and is a major market for non-US made films.

But what happens when filmmakers discover that arrogant, sadistic Americans are the perfect equivalent for the sadistic Nazis of 60 years ago or the sadistic Russians of 30 years ago? Will US distributors work to keep those films from being shown in this country? Or have them declared illegal in some obscure manner?

Are Americans ever going to wake up enough to notice we aren't the good guys anymore?

[DuctapeFatwa]

5. Does he have a family? What are they doing to them?

Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in." Such tactics are justified, he said, because, "It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A54345-2003Jul27¬Found=true

[StandWatie]

6. I really don't get it..

I don't think you are going to get much out of torturing people other than misinformation and exactly what you want to hear.

I was thinking about this today listening to these Iraqi kids talking to US soldiers and they are saying "US Good, Saddam donkey" and the reporter was making a big deal out of it.

I read a report by someone in the Plain of Jars in Cambodia back in the day and he's asking the women (the men were noticeably absent and presumably guerrillas) if they like the guerrillas. "Oh no, we hate the guerrillas, we love the US". What do the guerrillas want? "Nothing, they are just crazy". Do you mind when the US bombs "No, it's good" . Even when they bomb your own house? "Yeah, US is good".

Which is more likely, that these people really love the US or that they aren't going to say so in front of people who either are US soldiers (or percieved to be) or that they will say damn near anything if they think their life is in danger.