[quote]dhickey wrote:
pushharder wrote:
I’d like to hear others, especially those who abhor waterboarding in any shape, form, or fashion against anybody at any time, respond with their feelings to my above hypothetical question.
I say this because I distinctly hear and understand both sides of this argument. But when you draw it up so that it hits really close to home it becomes a no-brainer to me.
So let’s start with oh…let’s say…the Salzburg Kid. Orion, ol’ chum, how do you answer the specific question, “IF your child or someone very close to you were threatened with death by someone(s) whether by terrorist attack or anything whatsoever, where would you draw the line on what you’d do to extract the necessary information from them to save your kin’s life?”
This is a specific, personal question and yes, it is slightly off the beaten path of the thread, just slightly, but indulge me, por favor.
The rest of you chime in too, please.
I can tell you that i would skip right past waterboarding. but I doubt I would be very effective in extracting useful information unless luck interviened. I would frame the question a bit differently. Let’s assume that professionals would be doing the extracting, I mean torture. [/quote]
That’s the thing. The professionals, human intel careerists who actually have done hundreds or thousands of interrogations, are AGAINST torture.
For example, Colonel Stuart Herrington, talking to hack of hacks Hugh Hewitt (I have posted this before):
SH: I think the first piece of advice for anyone who really wants to understand interrogation is to zero out and ignore virtually everything that theyâ??ve ever seen on either television or in Hollywood movies, because thatâ??s not interrogation as we know it, as professional interrogators, at all.
HH: And Colonel, how many interrogations have you conducted?
SH: I couldnâ??t begin to count, but between my service in Vietnam, my interrogation centers that I ran in Panama, another one in Desert Storm, and my current job where I do a lot of interrogation and debriefing, itâ??s in the thousands.
HH: All right. And youâ??ve trained a lot of the current American military interrogators who are deployed around the world as well. From the time you began in this human and counterintelligence business to today, how much of the techniques changed as to effective interrogation?
SH: Well, we thought we had it pretty well on track, and that there was a consensus in the discipline that interrogation is a very professionally demanding discipline that requires an understanding of human nature, and essentially how to outsmart and outfox a source who has information that he really doesnâ??t want to tell you, but itâ??s your job to get it. And Iâ??d thought for some time that we had a good consensus on that until the Iraq thing came along, and something happened, and people took a wrong turn at the intersection, if you will.
HH: And how did they do that?
SH: Well, there became a notion of what, and I think part of it was because of official policy emanating from the Department of Defense, and then part of it was just that plus osmosis plus the influence of television and the overall pop culture, that interrogators are inquisitors, and that the best way to get information out of people is to â??take off the gloves.â?? And thatâ??s the wrong turn that we took, and itâ??s a very serious wrong turn, because for a whole variety of reasons, torture and brutality in interrogations is counterproductive.
…
HH: A little bit more background on Col. Herrington. His military awards include the Distinguished Service Medal, five awards of the Legion of Merit, two Bronze Stars, the Air Medal, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with two Bronze Stars. He was also twice awarded the CIAâ??s Agency Seal Medallion in connection with key national counterespionage cases in his actions during Operation Desert Storm. Heâ??s the author of several books, including Stalking the Vietcong: Inside Operation Phoenix, and Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catchersâ?? World. Colonel, is it true you were on the Embassy roof in 1975 in Vietnam?
…
SH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, when a guy is captured, heâ??s stressed, he is frightened, and heâ??s probably expecting to be mistreated, because in most societies in the world, thatâ??s the way it works. Disarming him psychologically, by treating him in a manner the opposite of what he expects, extending decent, humane treatment to him, showing concern for himself, his needs, being nimble in assessing and evaluating the person, and recognizing that getting information from someone is developmental, i.e. you wonâ??t get information from someone, generally speaking, just by saying okay, Iâ??m the captor, youâ??re the prisoner, tell me what you know. You earn it. I like to say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed probably didnâ??t give up a lot of the information that he gave up because somebody started water boarding him and beating him up. Instead, they used a very clever approach, and played to his ego and his psychological need to be recognized as the architect of 9/11, and the guy talked. In all of the successful interrogation projects that Iâ??ve ever had anything to do with, extending fundamentally decent treatment to the detainees, we even used to call them guests. And you know, the guards would salute a prisoner if he was an officer, and we give them good food, and we would tell them it was unconditional, regardless of whether they chose to talk with us or not. And that type of an approach has a very high batting average.
HH: Now at Guantanamo Bay, there are some pretty hard cases, people who have been trained, obviously, who are motivated not by ideology but by religious fanaticism, and I distinguish between secular are religiousâ?¦
SH: Right.
HH: And theyâ??re not talking, are they, Colonel?
SH: Thereâ??s a lot of talking going on at Guantanamo. I canâ??t give you firsthand, you know, a matrix of successes and how many sources, but thereâ??s a lot of talking going on down there. And my own take on it is that in talking with sources, youâ??ve got to be developmental, and youâ??ve got to understand that when theyâ??re religiously motivated and fanatical, as a lot of the Islamists are, your batting average might not be what our batting average was in Vietnam, Panama, or Desert Storm. And by the way, our batting average was always 80-90% talked.
HH: And that means credible, reliable information that proved accurate?
SH: Credibleâ?¦thatâ??s right. Instead of spitting in your eye and saying you know, Iâ??m a general officer in the army of Iraq, and I donâ??t talk to my captors, Iâ??ll give you my name and my service number, as opposed to that approach, the person agrees to talk, engage in a dialogue, talks day after day after day, never sure what you donâ??t know and what you do know, and in doing that, he makes your day, because basically, youâ??re gathering excellent assessment data about him as a person, youâ??re being able to evaluate what a good approach might be to get further, and you get information. When youâ??re dealing with religious fanatics, letâ??s just say the batting average goes down to say four out of ten, instead of eight or nine out of ten that we traditionally got, the reason being the fanaticism and the religious motivation. You know what? Four out of ten, you know, when Ted Williams hit four out of ten, he was a hero. Four out of ten for an interrogator is a very good batting average. Heâ??s getting good information.
HH: Col., Iâ??m getting a couple of standard questions. Number one, from pilots who have gone through water boarding training in their survival courses, why do you consider it torture?
SH: Well, water boarding is very much like another technique that was used during the Vietnam War by the Vietnamese, where they put a poncho over the head of the person, and then poured water through the poncho into the mouth, simulating drowning. Itâ??s an inhumaneâ?¦itâ??s inhumane treatment, itâ??s the kind of treatment that is essentially trying to extract information from someone by creating a fear of imminent death, not unlike and analogous to mock executions. We will have made progress in this arena when people realize that the way you get information from someone is to outsmart them, and use guile and stealth and chicanery to trick them into information, or secondarily, and the best way, is to persuade the person that itâ??s the right thing to do to talk.
HH: Is it effective? Is water boarding effective?
SH: Boy, you know what? I canâ??t tell you that. Iâ??ve never practiced it. I consider it to be abhorrent, a practice that shouldnâ??t be practiced by any professional interrogator, and youâ??re going to have to ask someone other than me. But I, generally speaking, know from experience that when you levy brutality against a person in order to get that person to talk, even if the person hasnâ??t got anything to say, or doesnâ??t know what it is that you want, theyâ??ll come up with something to say just to get you to quit doing it.
HH: Do you play on fears of family and their safety, not reprisal, but you know, going back to be with them? Is that effective?
SH: You know, the developmental approach involves engaging someone in conversation and evaluating them. And certainly, Iâ??ve had cases where family played a big part. I once had a prisoner in Panama, for example, who was on his second day of captivity, was in tears, and was depressed, and the guards told me they were worried about him. When I went to see him, it turned out that you know, heâ??d been captured for three days, his wife didnâ??t know if he was dead or alive. He had an 18 month old child at home, and he was just totally depressed and in a deep funk over it. I got a cell phone, and we called his wife. I was his friend for life after that.
HH: Now an e-mail. Mr. Hewitt, can you ask the Colonel if we would authorize torture regarding someone who knows of a nuke about to go off in minutes or hours.
SH: Yeah, thatâ??s the so-called ticking time bomb scenario. The difficulty with that is that that question poses a hypothetical which in my experience, I never ran into a hypothetical like that. If you pose the rectitude, or lack thereof, of torture based upon that hypothetical, youâ??re not really dealing in the real world. Thatâ??s my answer to that.
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HH: Okay, just checkingâ?¦San Diego, Frank. Youâ??re on with Colonel Herrington.
Frank: Yes, hello, Hugh, This is Miramar Frank. We havenâ??t talked in a while.
HH: Good to talk with you, Frank. Good to have you.
Frank: Yeah, good to talk with you. Listen, a couple of things. One, I wanted to touch on what Colonel Herrington was saying. I spent three years as a training officer at the Navy Survival Evasion Resistance Escape School. I did not conduct operational interrogations while I was there, but the Colonel will understand that I certainly had a great opportunity to conduct many simulated issues where we raised the bar for the young pilots and high risk personnel that go through there on interrogation techniques, and heâ??s absolutely right. Thereâ??s no doubt about it that the soft approach, though we donâ??t have as much time, months and months and months, but the soft approach often is much more effective, and I have water boarded, personally, several hundred people, and I can tell you over time, it is the ability toâ?¦itâ??s why itâ??s called intelligence. We need to take an intelligent approach to taking this interrogation, especially with the bad guys.
HH: Frank, thanks for your service. Iâ??ll give the last minute to the Colonel to respond to that.
SH: Well, Frankâ??s my kind of guy. Heâ??s from San Diego here. Itâ??s always good to get a vote of yeah verily on something like this. I would only say to all of your listeners that there is a very, very sophisticated way of exploiting human sources thatâ??s time tested as being the most effective, and it is not brutalizing people. And when we go the wrong road and we brutalize people, we take an episode, or a series of episodes at a very low level like that stupid Abu Ghraib prison, and we escalate the impact of that conduct to the detriment of our country. And look what has happened to our country and to the support for the war effort simply because of the stupidity of Abu Ghraib. So itâ??s right to do it the way Iâ??ve proposed, itâ??s worked, itâ??s time tested. Almost all professional interrogators know that. And we should go that way.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1783986/posts
Even better, the experience of the Marine Corps’ best interrogator in the Pacific, against an enemy that was equally fanatical to today’s jihadists:
Marine Major Sherwood F. Moran, the report’s author, noted that despite the complexities and difficulties of dealing with an enemy from such a hostile and alien culture, some American interrogators consistently managed to extract useful information from prisoners. The successful interrogators all had one thing in common in the way they approached their subjects. They were nice to them.
…
Part of why Sherwood Moran became such a legendary figure among military interrogators was his cool disregard for what he termed the standard “hard-boiled” military attitude. The brutality of the fighting in the Pacific and the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese had created a general assumption that only the sternest measures would get Japanese prisoners to divulge anything. Moran countered that in his and others’ experience, strong-arm tactics simply did not work. Stripping a prisoner of his dignity, treating him as a still-dangerous threat, forcing him to stand at attention and flanking him with guards throughout his interrogationâ??in other words, emphasizing that "we are his to-be-respected and august enemies and conquerors"â??invariably backfired. It made the prisoner “so conscious of his present position and that he was a captured soldier vs. enemy intelligence” that it “played right into [the] hands” of those who were determined not to give away anything of military importance.
…
Moran spoke fluent Japanese, but more important, he was thoroughly familiar with Japanese culture, having spent forty years in Japan as a missionary. He used this knowledge for one of his standard gambits: making a prisoner homesick. “This line has infinite possibilities,” he explained. “If you know anything about Japanese history, art, politics, athletics, famous places, department stores, eating places, etc. etc. a conversation may be relatively interminable.” Moran emphasized that a detailed knowledge of technical military terms and the like was less important than a command of idiomatic phrases and cultural references that allow the interviewer to achieve "the first and most important victory"â??getting “into the mind and into the heart” of the prisoner and achieving an “intellectual and spiritual” rapport with him.
Moran’s whole approachâ??and Hans Joachim Scharff’s, tooâ??was built on the assumption that few if any prisoners are likely to possess decisive information about imminent plans. (And as one former Marine interrogator says, even if a prisoner does have information of the “ticking bomb” varietyâ??where the nuke is going to go off an hour from now, in the classic if overworked exampleâ??under duress or torture he is most likely to try to run out the clock by making something up rather than reveal the truth.) Rather, it is the small and seemingly inconsequential bits of evidence that prisoners may give away once they start talkingâ??about training, weapons, commanders, tacticsâ??that, when assembled into a larger mosaic, build up the most complete and valuable picture of the enemy’s organization, intentions, and methods.
Read the whole thing.
Now all of that being said, I think it’s a disturbing commentary on 21st century America that we are even debating torture on utilitarian grounds. It’s wrong, it dehumanizes both the tortured and the torturer, it’s un-American. End of story.