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Link to PDF here:

Basics:
Lists out various enhanced interrogation techniques including the usual, water boarding, sleep deprivation, etc.
Number of captives it was used on
Captives included our own informants. (Go team?)

My comments:
I'm seeing lots of hay made about the CIA torture report. Lots of people defending it seem to want to list Johnny Jihad's various tortures and what have you, the issue I take with that is that we're supposed to be the good guys. Not just "Well we're better then a bunch of goat fether religious extremists!" but we play ourselves off on the world stage as the bonafide guy in the white hat. Reading the report, more then a few times we got the wrong guys, we even got some of our own guys and tortured them too. Shouldn't that mean we have reason to question our methods? Absolute bottom line? We broke our own rules and we violated our own morals. So we need to take a look at ourselves because of that. I give not one single feth what some mouth breathing, camel jockey does in comparison to my own government, they're not my government. To those who seem to think this excuses this failure on our part, I just want to ask... Should sink to their level? Be the animal you hate so much? Or should we maintain our standards and fight like warriors? Yeah it's hard being the good guy. It's supposed to be. It's not easy to maintain your morals and standards in the face of scumbags who have none, but when you become them, when you abandon your standards, you've already lost.

Now I have been informed, mostly by guys who look like they spend more time with airsoft guns and at the local sammich shop then in the military, studying geopolitics and the methods and theories of armed conflict between nation states and non-state actors, that my ideals of upholding our convictions the right way, and not stooping to the level of the gaks we're fighting is a pipe dream. How about that? Apparently, to defeat the enemy, we need to wallow in that mud, throw out our humanity, take a leak on any concept of honor and just start glassing countries. Now I will absolutely joke about glassing the Middle East. That Ground Zero Ocean meme has to be over a decade old now and I giggle every time, but there's a lot of people in the Middle East, and even with the rise of ISIS not even a majority of them desperately need a case of acute onset lead poisoning. I even know some of them. I have friends in Jordan and Kuwait that I treasure greatly. I've even read the book a lot of people are so damn hung up about over there, and you know... with all the men I've buried, I still haven't seen, heard or read one damn thing that makes me say to myself "Yeah, feth it. Let's go burn a village and torture some fethers and see if anything comes out of it. Not like it matters."

Maybe I'm just outdated though.

And then the OP was likely the best post we're going to see on the matter.

Well said.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:

Maybe I'm just outdated though.

Nope. Not at all.

The problem is there are too many racists in the world who think that "they" are less important than "us". This was no way for any country to act, no matter what the "enemy" had done. The US and it's allies need to take a long hard look at what they have done. Both in the actions of the CIA and the complicity of the US armed forces, it's allies, both in active participation, providing assistance and support, and in the passive complicity either by looking the other way or refusing to act earlier to condemn what we knew was happening.

We should be better than this, even ignoring the amount of people who were not "enemies", just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (i.e. living in a warzone).

I'm amazed that someone who thinks war is "cool" and running around with a BB gun in the woods makes them an expert on guns (Nothing wrong with airsoft, it's fun, but it's about as close to combat as playing table tennis) thinks that they can tell a Marine that he is being unreasonable to think we can uphold those ideas.

I'm an airsofter, and I agree 100% with KM.

But you can't hold a whole government responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole country? And if the whole country is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our Western institutions in general? I put it to you, Steve Stevenson - isn't this an indictment of our entire Western Civilization? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth table tennis.

Table Tennis is about as close to playing Tennis as playing tiddlywinks. Tally Hoo!

 Ahtman wrote:
But you can't hold a whole government responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole country? And if the whole country is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our Western institutions in general? I put it to you, Steve Stevenson - isn't this an indictment of our entire Western Civilization? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth table tennis.

This isn't about the actions of a few, but the authorization of those actions by an arm of the government. This is not a few rogue CIA agents, but the CIA as a whole where senior officials authorized those actions, and the actions of both the US government and other governments, including the UK, in either facilitating or ignoring this, and the current attempts to pretend that it is ok to say "Well, make sure you don't do it again".

It is an indictment of most western governments. Wether it is an indictment of our civilization or not depends on how people react now, how it is dealt with and what the outcome is.

If this was the actions of a few sick twisted individuals working outside what they were authorized to do, then it would be a different issue.

 notprop wrote:
Table Tennis is about as close to playing Tennis as playing tiddlywinks. Tally Hoo!

Boris plays Wiff Waff, not table tennis.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our captives party guests - we did.





Honestly I don't have anything to add OP didn't already say, but when someone attacked table tennis's ability to recreate combat I thought of this scene.

Table Tennis to recreate combat?
We we're whacking tennis balls into a mine field (Russian) over the fence line. Guess we were depth charging for Insurgent submarines..

Some highlights.

- Torture is worse than useless as an intelligence-gathering tool. We've known it for sixty years, the CIA knew it twenty years ago, and it's just been proven again that torture gets you no actionable intelligence, corrupts what once might have been viable sources of intelligence and produces false intelligence. Since it doesn't actually help us do anything, anyone who says that we "needed" to torture anyone is a fething idiot.

- The CIA tortured at least two prisoners to death - one by beating him to death, one by use of exposure to the elements as a torture device.

- The CIA tortured two of their own spies for 24 hours before they bothered to translate the messages they had been sending to the CIA and realised who they were torturing.

- The CIA was recruiting abusers to act as torturers - these are not hard men making hard decisions for the good of the country, they are sick bastards who like inflicting pain on people who can't fight back.

- Waterboarding is torture, but anyone who tells you that this is the worst thing the CIA did to these people is lying. To paraphrase one particularly odious quote from the report, CIA medical officers wrote "Sure, an IV is a safe and effective way of hydrating prisoners who refuse to drink, but we're impressed with how subjecting them to anal rape makes them stop refusing to drink."

The CIA's torturers produced no useful intelligence, produced a lot of white noise, destroyed sources of intelligence, raped, killed, turned allies into enemies and broke international and American law. They have used no methodology and produced no intelligence that could benefit us by being kept classified to keep it out of the hands of the enemy, and deserve to be remembered as men who sold their souls - and were subsequently executed - for nothing.

 Ahtman wrote:
But you can't hold a whole government responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole country? And if the whole country is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our Western institutions in general? I put it to you, Steve Stevenson - isn't this an indictment of our entire Western Civilization? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth table tennis.

if you can blame a whole country, then Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan would have been radioactive by 1.00PM EST on 9/11/2001, and Germany, Japan, and Italy would be nothing but lush farmlands populated by settlers from the Allies. The impact on good beer production would be unforgivable.

I'll be honest, I don't give a gak. This is the Senate Democrats on the Intelligence Committee trying to rewrite history that they are as innocent as the driven snow.
Meanwhile Isis is beheading people for kicks on Youtube and offering to sell the bodies of Americans back to their familes. My give a gak meter for these murdering bastards is nonexistent.
burn in bacon covered hell.

One million to get Foley back

As I said yesterday, the report makes for grim reading, but a lot of people seem to have missed the point entirely, in my view.

Torture is just a symptom of a wider malaise, and that malaise is the war on terror.

A trillion dollars wasted, thousands dead, American influence in the ME on the wane, and the world as unsafe as its been for years. It's been a shambles from start to finish.

I understand and sympathise with the American desire for justice and vengeance after 2001, but...

 Frazzled wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
But you can't hold a whole government responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole country? And if the whole country is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our Western institutions in general? I put it to you, Steve Stevenson - isn't this an indictment of our entire Western Civilization? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth table tennis.

if you can blame a whole country, then Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan would have been radioactive by 1.00PM EST on 9/11/2001, and Germany, Japan, and Italy would be nothing but lush farmlands populated by settlers from the Allies. The impact on good beer production would be unforgivable.

I'll be honest, I don't give a gak. This is the Senate Democrats on the Intelligence Committee trying to rewrite history that they are as innocent as the driven snow.
Meanwhile Isis is beheading people for kicks on Youtube and offering to sell the bodies of Americans back to their familes. My give a gak meter for these murdering bastards is nonexistent.
burn in bacon covered hell.

What Isis are doing is completely irrelevant to this... This is about the CIA kidnapping, torturing and killing people. "Well they do it too" is not a justification. We, in the west, are supposed to be the good guys.

 Frazzled wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
But you can't hold a whole government responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole country? And if the whole country is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our Western institutions in general? I put it to you, Steve Stevenson - isn't this an indictment of our entire Western Civilization? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth table tennis.

if you can blame a whole country, then Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan would have been radioactive by 1.00PM EST on 9/11/2001, and Germany, Japan, and Italy would be nothing but lush farmlands populated by settlers from the Allies. The impact on good beer production would be unforgivable.

I'll be honest, I don't give a gak. This is the Senate Democrats on the Intelligence Committee trying to rewrite history that they are as innocent as the driven snow.
Meanwhile Isis is beheading people for kicks on Youtube and offering to sell the bodies of Americans back to their familes. My give a gak meter for these murdering bastards is nonexistent.
burn in bacon covered hell.

Frazz, this one of the rare times when you exhibit a whole load of common sense.

As I've said before, America really needs to take a good, long hard look at Britain and see the damaging effects the Middle East can have on a global empire. It's a graveyard for empires.

I honestly don't understand the American fixation with the ME

With fracking and shale oil, you don't need ME oil any more, and as for Israel, it'd be easier just chucking money and weapons at them to fix any problems they might have.

America should be looking at the far east. You have countries such as South Korea and Japan that actually like the USA, have tons of bases over there, and in China, America is facing a far bigger threat to its global and economic hegemony than the ME will ever be.

Forget the Arabs, keep your eye on the Red Dragon.

Think the Bear is more concern with the Red Dragon then the Eagle who keeping watch from a distance.

 Steve steveson wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
But you can't hold a whole government responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole country? And if the whole country is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our Western institutions in general? I put it to you, Steve Stevenson - isn't this an indictment of our entire Western Civilization? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth table tennis.

if you can blame a whole country, then Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan would have been radioactive by 1.00PM EST on 9/11/2001, and Germany, Japan, and Italy would be nothing but lush farmlands populated by settlers from the Allies. The impact on good beer production would be unforgivable.

I'll be honest, I don't give a gak. This is the Senate Democrats on the Intelligence Committee trying to rewrite history that they are as innocent as the driven snow.
Meanwhile Isis is beheading people for kicks on Youtube and offering to sell the bodies of Americans back to their familes. My give a gak meter for these murdering bastards is nonexistent.
burn in bacon covered hell.

What Isis are doing is completely irrelevant to this... This is about the CIA kidnapping, torturing and killing people. "Well they do it too" is not a justification. We, in the west, are supposed to be the good guys.

Blah blah blah blah
There are no good duys. Just us.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
But you can't hold a whole government responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole country? And if the whole country is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our Western institutions in general? I put it to you, Steve Stevenson - isn't this an indictment of our entire Western Civilization? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth table tennis.

if you can blame a whole country, then Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan would have been radioactive by 1.00PM EST on 9/11/2001, and Germany, Japan, and Italy would be nothing but lush farmlands populated by settlers from the Allies. The impact on good beer production would be unforgivable.

I'll be honest, I don't give a gak. This is the Senate Democrats on the Intelligence Committee trying to rewrite history that they are as innocent as the driven snow.
Meanwhile Isis is beheading people for kicks on Youtube and offering to sell the bodies of Americans back to their familes. My give a gak meter for these murdering bastards is nonexistent.
burn in bacon covered hell.

Frazz, this one of the rare times when you exhibit a whole load of common sense.

As I've said before, America really needs to take a good, long hard look at Britain and see the damaging effects the Middle East can have on a global empire. It's a graveyard for empires.

I honestly don't understand the American fixation with the ME

With fracking and shale oil, you don't need ME oil any more, and as for Israel, it'd be easier just chucking money and weapons at them to fix any problems they might have.

America should be looking at the far east. You have countries such as South Korea and Japan that actually like the USA, have tons of bases over there, and in China, America is facing a far bigger threat to its global and economic hegemony than the ME will ever be.

Forget the Arabs, keep your eye on the Red Dragon.

I agree completely. I'm very very fine with getting out and staying out.
But that applies in most regions. Time for being the global policeman has psssed. Now its back to just making money.

I don't think it is ethical to torture another human and deprave of them of their basic human rights.

Though I could see why they would do it. It doesn't make it any right. Just because your doing it in the name of god and country doesn't make an evil deed any better. Am I surprised this is happening though?

No. It happened during WW2 and WW1, on both sides of the war.

Though I wouldn't say it was reasonable to do. Nothing in war or in a conflict is ever reasonable. Anytime you kill a human being the more likely it is unreasonable and insane.

The current issue though being that people outwardly support it so. ITs one thing to advocate for the use of drones, but it is another to advocate for the torture of other human beings, no matter how depraved or 'evil' that they may appear.

 Asherian Command wrote:
I don't think it is ethical to torture another human and deprave of them of their basic human rights.

Though I could see why they would do it. It doesn't make it any right. Just because your doing it in the name of god and country doesn't make an evil deed any better. Am I surprised this is happening though?

No. It happened during WW2 and WW1, on both sides of the war.

Though I wouldn't say it was reasonable to do. Nothing in war or in a conflict is ever reasonable. Anytime you kill a human being the more likely it is unreasonable and insane.

The current issue though being that people outwardly support it so. ITs one thing to advocate for the use of drones, but it is another to advocate for the torture of other human beings, no matter how depraved or 'evil' that they may appear.

Why? A drone takes everything a man has and everything he'll ever be. Just because its at a distance doesn't make it better. To think otherwise is to be a hypocrite.

I don't like this one bit. I wish I could be angry about this. I wish that my anger would mean anything. My own well being was some small part of what used to justify the unjustifiable and I don't have any choice but to accept it.

KM did a good job.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
Link to PDF here:

Basics:
Lists out various enhanced interrogation techniques including the usual, water boarding, sleep deprivation, etc.
Number of captives it was used on
Captives included our own informants. (Go team?)

My comments:
I'm seeing lots of hay made about the CIA torture report. Lots of people defending it seem to want to list Johnny Jihad's various tortures and what have you, the issue I take with that is that we're supposed to be the good guys. Not just "Well we're better then a bunch of goat fether religious extremists!" but we play ourselves off on the world stage as the bonafide guy in the white hat. Reading the report, more then a few times we got the wrong guys, we even got some of our own guys and tortured them too. Shouldn't that mean we have reason to question our methods? Absolute bottom line? We broke our own rules and we violated our own morals. So we need to take a look at ourselves because of that. I give not one single feth what some mouth breathing, camel jockey does in comparison to my own government, they're not my government. To those who seem to think this excuses this failure on our part, I just want to ask... Should sink to their level? Be the animal you hate so much? Or should we maintain our standards and fight like warriors? Yeah it's hard being the good guy. It's supposed to be. It's not easy to maintain your morals and standards in the face of scumbags who have none, but when you become them, when you abandon your standards, you've already lost.

Now I have been informed, mostly by guys who look like they spend more time with airsoft guns and at the local sammich shop then in the military, studying geopolitics and the methods and theories of armed conflict between nation states and non-state actors, that my ideals of upholding our convictions the right way, and not stooping to the level of the gaks we're fighting is a pipe dream. How about that? Apparently, to defeat the enemy, we need to wallow in that mud, throw out our humanity, take a leak on any concept of honor and just start glassing countries. Now I will absolutely joke about glassing the Middle East. That Ground Zero Ocean meme has to be over a decade old now and I giggle every time, but there's a lot of people in the Middle East, and even with the rise of ISIS not even a majority of them desperately need a case of acute onset lead poisoning. I even know some of them. I have friends in Jordan and Kuwait that I treasure greatly. I've even read the book a lot of people are so damn hung up about over there, and you know... with all the men I've buried, I still haven't seen, heard or read one damn thing that makes me say to myself "Yeah, feth it. Let's go burn a village and torture some fethers and see if anything comes out of it. Not like it matters."

Maybe I'm just outdated though.

The tragedy of this post is that I can only exalt it once.


....wait a sec... it looks like I can exalt it every time I refresh the page. Does that work? Because if so, I'm going to do some more exalting.

 Frazzled wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:
I don't think it is ethical to torture another human and deprave of them of their basic human rights.

Though I could see why they would do it. It doesn't make it any right. Just because your doing it in the name of god and country doesn't make an evil deed any better. Am I surprised this is happening though?

No. It happened during WW2 and WW1, on both sides of the war.

Though I wouldn't say it was reasonable to do. Nothing in war or in a conflict is ever reasonable. Anytime you kill a human being the more likely it is unreasonable and insane.

The current issue though being that people outwardly support it so. ITs one thing to advocate for the use of drones, but it is another to advocate for the torture of other human beings, no matter how depraved or 'evil' that they may appear.

Why? A drone takes everything a man has and everything he'll ever be. Just because its at a distance doesn't make it better. To think otherwise is to be a hypocrite.

Well. i don't agree with it. But I can see why. I am indifferent on the issue. until you know I see the numbers and reliable facts on the drone attacks.

I do think it is deplorable, it is one to kill someone, but to keep someone alive and torture them is something very different.

Killing someone is sometimes more mercyiful than torturing them for information.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
Maybe I'm just outdated though.

You just don't understand what war is like. You don't have the insight that one gets from 5 deferments.

 Ouze wrote:

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
Maybe I'm just outdated though.

You just don't understand what war is like. You don't have the insight that one gets from 5 deferments.

Good one.

 Ouze wrote:

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
Maybe I'm just outdated though.

You just don't understand what war is like. You don't have the insight that one gets from 5 deferments.

Zinger alert!

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
Maybe I'm just outdated though.

And no, you're not outdated. It is your opponents - who still believe that trial by ordeal is an effective means of discovering the truth and still assume that a person is no more than a single cog in the entity that is their race or creed - who are stuck in the middle ages.

No sympathy for them at all. You kill my friends, say you want to kill my family, then actually attack us? They got off light

Torture is wrong, no matter who does it, or who it is done to. By torturing them, you turn yourself into the monster you are trying to protect from.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
As I said yesterday, the report makes for grim reading, but a lot of people seem to have missed the point entirely, in my view.

Torture is just a symptom of a wider malaise, and that malaise is the war on terror.

A trillion dollars wasted, thousands dead, American influence in the ME on the wane, and the world as unsafe as its been for years. It's been a shambles from start to finish.

I understand and sympathise with the American desire for justice and vengeance after 2001, but...

Yes, this is 100% my view.

2996 people died in September 11th attacks. In the subsequent wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has lost 6,639 troops, while the UK has lost over 650 personnel, compared to 52 civilian casualties in the London bombings.

That's a pretty crap balance sheet by anyone's standards and that's before you even consider the civilian lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan as a direct consequence of the wars which run into the tens of thousands.