sebster wrote:It's a website run by crazy people, linking to another website run by crazy people, over a bill I hadn't heard of before. I'm not saying there's nothing to worry about, but I'd really advise getting information from non-crazy people before panicking.

CptJake wrote:

ShumaGorath wrote:

Huge difference between the water torture the Japanese and the Inquisition did and the waterboarding done by the CIA. The methods are completely different, as are the results (no one died while being waterboarded by the CIA for example...)

Ooooh! Another check in the box for "people saying things that they couldn't possibly know". This has been a good day for that.

Bull crap, look it up.

Hint: Water Cure is what the Inquisition and the Japanese used. It is different from waterboarding.

CptJake wrote:Huge difference between the water torture the Japanese and the Inquisition did and the waterboarding done by the CIA. The methods are completely different, as are the results (no one died while being waterboarded by the CIA for example...)

The CIA did not do it to get info, they did it to break the prisoners will.

Once the prisoner was broken other interogation methods were used to get info. By the way, that info was then vetted through other sources to confrim/deny it. No one relies on a single source. It worked. Ask KSM.

Which is does very quickly, because it's torture.

Jihadin wrote:

Which is does very quickly, because it's torture.

So Psychological is the same as physical torture?

Jihadin wrote:

Which is does very quickly, because it's torture.

So Psychological is the same as physical torture?

Jihadin wrote:So Psychological is the same as physical torture?

Jihadin wrote:Yes which was explain to us clearly. As a way to break the mind and will. Combine that with actual torture which we both know goes against will power. Everyone has a breaking point. Seeing the 5 gal water and a towel I can brace myself. Seeing the 5 gal water container and a TA312 phone with DR8 wres will shock me.

ShumaGorath wrote:nagging phonecallls.

Jihadin wrote:Does it really? SERE School

mattyrm wrote: Don't worry lads, you can all move in with me, I live in Yorkshire where it is civilised and in my local it's 1.26 a pint.

I mean, that right there is reason enough to move. And I would live in any town on earth that had a sub pound pint.

Even if Hitler was resurrected and made the mayor, and the local police carried big spiky dildo's which they raped you with instead of issuing speeding tickets.

BEGONE, FOR YOUR ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!

I was a U.S. Army SERE Instructor. SERE stands for survival, evasion, resistance and escape. I graduated from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center SERE Instructor Course at Camp Mackall in 1984 when COL Rowe was still the commandant and was still teaching classes there. COL Rowe was held POW in Vietnam under the worst conditions for five years until, on a work detail, he managed to kill his guard and escape. Sadly, COL Rowe was assassinated in February 1989 by communist insurgents while serving as chief of the Army division of the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group in the Philippines.* He was a great man and I am proud to have served under him.

Over at Slate, William Saletan is discussing the fact that Khalid Sheik Mohammad was not subjected to any torture technique that U.S. military personnel are not routinely subjected to. The pain and discomfort Mohammad experienced was no worse than the pain and discomfort thousands of U.S. military personnel have experienced over the decades. Saletan, however, tells us that SERE training is akin to S&M but the same techniques used on al Qaeda constitute rape. Well.

Saletan argues that, since soldiers know it is training and terrorists know it isn’t, it is therefore psychologically far worse for terrorists. A psychologist points out that SERE students are being trained to defeat interrogation, not succumb. They also state that trainees know it will end on graduation day. They point out several ways that torture is psychologically easier on trainees that al Qaeda.

For the most part I don’t disagree. Knowing the guys pouring water on your face are fellow soldiers and trainers has to make it somewhat easier. He goes on to claim, however, that the most important difference is that students can quit if they so choose.


Fifth and most important, SERE is voluntary. “Students can withdraw from training,” Ogrisseg noted. In a report issued four months ago, the Armed Services Committee added that in SERE, “students are even given a special phrase they can use to immediately stop” any ordeal.

I disagree with this point. First and most obviously, the terrorists being interrogated can quit too. They can choose to start talking and the procedure will end. In fact, that is the very point of the exercise: talk and the water boarding will end. Terrorists, of course, don’t want to quit. I didn’t want to quit either.

As a matter of fact, SERE School is a very exclusive course. I went to great lengths to be allowed to apply for the course, to get accepted to the course and to pass the course. In the Army, voluntarily quitting a military schools is a very, very bad thing. Back in the 1980s when I served, quitting would get you what was called a “lack of motivation discharge” from the school. Woe be to the soldier who returned to his unit with an LOM discharge.

First would come the written counseling statements for your permanent record. That alone might very well bar you from reenlistment effectively ending your military career.

Secondly, you could forget having any and all good things to happen to you and expect many bad things to start happening. Once you are an LOM you are permanently a “gak bird” and gak birds get treated like, well, gak. You might never pass a field equipment inspection again causing “remedial training” exercises with the rest of the gak birds on Saturday mornings. You could expect your name to come up for nasty extra duty assignments way more often than can be explained by random chance. Essentially, life in the Army sucks for an LOM. It sucks to be you if you are deemed a gak bird.

By far the worst result of quitting would be the loss of social stature among your fellow soldiers. You would be seen forever more as a “non-hacker” who couldn’t be trusted when the gak gets deep. LOMs actually lose friends and are ostracized within their units. It is a special kind of hell that can make a soldier suffer in ways that are hard to explain and extremely hurtful. An LOM can change the trajectory of a young man’s life.

When I was subjected to the worst the trainers had to offer, I couldn’t quit. No way. Quitting would mean humiliation in front of my fellow soldiers: men from whom I wanted respect more than anyone else in the world. There was no way I could do the walk of shame into my unit headquarters carrying a lack of motivation discharge. I was a young man in my twenties and, at that point in my life, I am certain that I would have let them kill me before I would quit. Quitting was absolutely, positively out of the question. I have seen the same determination in hundreds of soldiers facing intense, harsh training.

The interrogations are no more physically painful for terrorists than for military trainees. The techniques are the same. You can argue, I suppose, that knowing that it is a training situation makes it easier on military trainees than it is on terrorist being interrogated. I do not believe, however, that for most military members who have been deemed proficient enough warriors to attend SERE training would find it any easier to quit than did Khalid Sheik Mohammad. At that time, at that age, I would have preferred death to failure. Quitting was a mortal sin that could not be contemplated. I didn’t quit. Mohammad did eventually quit.

I guess the final point I want to make from this former SERE Instructor’s perspective is this: I don’t really give a damn if KSM gets a little PSD if it saves American lives. If I could take harsh interrogation techniques, that ??$$y can too.

Jihadin wrote:Shuma...go to SERE School at Ft. Bragg

Jihadin wrote:Its not fun

Jihadin wrote:anyway. If I had I choice. I rather go through Enhance Interrogation then actual torture. Physical torture involes a lot of freaking pain but since few here knows SERE a brief idea on what it is like

Mannahnin wrote:There's a difference between being tortured against your will and voluntarily signing up for it as part of a training course. SERE instructors will tell you it's still torture:

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/waterboarding-is-torture-period-links-updated-9

we shouldn't tolerate our governments inflicting either of them on anyone.

You know mere bullets are ineffective aginst vampires right...

Don't worry, I'll make sure someone around here reads a book at some point. You wouldn't of anyway, so it'll be good to have a slightly more educated crowd in the area. we might get some indy films going, maybe play some "find the country on the map" the kinda stuff you wouldn't like.

So if torture is wrong, how do we get suspect terrorists who hide as civilians to talk?


Evidence I suppose.

When American soldiers were subjected to water boarding by their Japanese captors in WWII, there was little doubt that what they suffered was torture, and the Japanese soldiers who inflicted it on the American soldiers were hung for it.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed lasted two minutes before giving up.

Huge difference between the water torture the Japanese and the Inquisition did and the waterboarding done by the CIA. The methods are completely different, as are the results (no one died while being waterboarded by the CIA for example...)

The CIA did not do it to get info, they did it to break the prisoners will. Once the prisoner was broken other interogation methods were used to get info. By the way, that info was then vetted through other sources to confrim/deny it. No one relies on a single source. It worked. Ask KSM.

I went to high school, Torture isn't so bad.

Ooooh! Another check in the box for "people saying things that they couldn't possibly know". This has been a good day for that.

Bull crap, look it up.

Hint: Water Cure is what the Inquisition and the Japanese used. It is different from waterboarding.

The purpose of which is to make the victim feel like he is drowning, exactly the same as water boarding. The differences are minor and trivial

We executed Japanese men for being so sadistic

Does it really? SERE School

Christopher Hitchens claimed waterboarding wasn't torture, and lasted just a few seconds. He knew it was just rigged up for a story, he had complete control over the event and knew he could make it stop whenever he wanted. And despite that he suffers PTSD from the event to this day.

Here's a couple of choice comments from his article;
"You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning"

Then after they use the water they'll put the rest away, since apparently waterboarding is a hell of a lot harder to resist then electroshock or nagging phonecallls.

Yeah, but that's simulated. Students know very well that it's going to be over eventually, and that they still have their rights. When your chained up for months at a time, it really takes its toll...

If I had I choice. I rather go through Enhance Interrogation then actual torture.

So...how do we get terrorists to talk?

Sunday Forum:
Two problems with torture
It's wrong and it doesn't work, according to interrogation expert
STUART HERRINGTON
Sunday, October 21, 2007

Recently revealed White House memos have raised the ugly question yet again: Is torturing prisoners captured in the Global War on Terrorism an effective and permissible use of our nation's might?

I served 30 years in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer, which included extensive experience as an interrogator in Vietnam, in Panama and during the 1991 Gulf War. In the course of these sensitive missions, my teams and I collected mountains of excellent, verified information, despite the fact that we never laid a hostile hand on a prisoner. Had one of my interrogators done so, he would have been disciplined and most likely relieved of his duties.

Since my retirement, I have twice answered the Army's call, journeying to Guantanamo and Iraq to evaluate interrogation procedures. Subsequently, when the terrible tsunami of verified reports of detainee torture by American soldiers overwhelmed the dikes, the Army asked me to assist in training a new battalion of Iraq-bound Army interrogators in non-coercive interrogation techniques.

As regular readers of these pages may recall, I am a native Pittsburgher, the product of a superlative education at Mt. Lebanon High School and Duquesne University. I was commissioned through Army ROTC at Duquesne after completing a liberal arts curriculum. Fundamental concepts of right and wrong were basic building blocks of this education.
Stuart Herrington is a retired Army colonel, an expert in interrogation and counterinsurgency operations and the author most recently of "Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher's World" (stuh38@yahoo.com).

Forty-plus years ago, as fall winds coursed across the Bluff, ethics professor Dr. Arthur Schrynemakers, in a voice of Dutch-accented English that still rings in my memory, declared to my freshman class that ethical principles were absolute. Right was right; wrong was wrong. When he pointed his finger at those of us in the front row and thundered that it was ethically impermissible to commit an evil act and attempt to justify it because that evil act might lead to some future good, we listened -- and some of us remembered.

Coming from this background, it has been disappointing to observe the ongoing debate about torture in interrogation, usually carried out be people who have never interrogated a soul. Nor is it easy to accept that the current debate is framed pragmatically by the question, "Does torture work or not?"

In a recent interview with NPR's Terry Gross, I told her that 10 years ago the notion we would even be having such a dialogue was unthinkable. Somehow, perhaps blinded by the horrors of 9-11 and its aftermath, or by that barrage of chilling video footage of hooded executioners snuffing out the lives of journalists, civilians and soldiers, we have lost sight of other equally relevant questions: Is torture right or wrong? Is the brutalizing of helpless prisoners a practice that will advance or harm our nation's position as it wages a just war against Islamist extremists?

One can almost hear the late Dr. Schrynemakers expound on this question. Wagging his finger, he would note that government sanctioning of mistreatment of prisoners by its intelligence officers is an essentially evil act committed in the name of self-defense, which has propelled our great country down a slippery moral slope and imperiled us further.
Treat captives as guests

I and other authentic practitioners of the interrogation art respect our adversaries, however wrong we may deem their cause. We know that obtaining information from a captive who is motivated by his beliefs, his country, his honor or perhaps by the very human desire to live a full life with his family, is an elusive task that requires a patient, systematic approach.

One has to "go to school" on each captive. Who is he? Can I communicate with him in his language? What are his core beliefs? His loves? Hates? Fears? Where do his loyalties lie? Does he have a family, an inflated ego, perhaps some other core vulnerability? Does he have a hobby or some passion that might get him talking? What do we know about his activities before he fell into our hands? What about his religion? Sect? Tribe? Culture? Or the history of his movement? What have other captives in our hands said about him? Did he have documents or a computer that were seized with him? What drives this unique individual?

Professional interrogation is thus a developmental process, requiring extensive preparation. It requires in-depth assessment of the prisoner, all complemented by a healthy measure of guile, wits and patience.

Seasoned interrogators know that an important first step is to disarm one's adversary by resorting to the unexpected. Treat a captured general or colonel with dignity and respect. Better yet, treat a sergeant like he is a colonel or general.

In interrogation centers I ran, we called prisoners "guests" and extended military courtesies, such as saluting captured officers. We strove to undermine a prisoner's belief system, which we knew instructed him that Americans are unschooled infidels who would bully him and resort to intimidation, threats and brutality. Patience was essential. We rejected the view that interrogators could merely "take off the gloves" and that information would somehow magically flow if we brutalized our "guests." This notion was uninformed and counterproductive, not to mention illegal, and we made sure our chain of command understood that bowing to such tempting theories would result in bad information.

Persuasive? I'd always thought so, and it certainly worked for us in contingency after contingency in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. But when I explained these immutable principles to an auditorium of young Army interrogators last year, one reaction puzzled me. "Sir," a young soldier queried, "that 'tender-loving-care approach' sounds all well and good, but it takes time. What do we do when the chain of command sends out a requirement and says they need the information by the end of the day, and that thousands of lives may depend upon it?"

The very question tells us that intelligence professionals have failed to educate their commanders that detainee interrogation is not like a water spigot. "Give the inquisitors the freedom to push the envelope of brutality and good information will follow" seems to have become the watchword since 9-11.

It also tells us that our young soldiers take away lessons from today's pop culture. Self-styled "experts" on interrogation frequently cite the "ticking bomb scenario" (featured on shows like "24") to justify the Jack Bauer-like tormenting of a prisoner. According to this construct, it is necessary and acceptable to torture in the name of saving an American city from "the next 9-11." This has a magnetic appeal to legions of Americans, among them future soldiers.

But the so-called ticking time bomb scenario is a Hollywood construct that I never encountered in my 30-year career. Even so, it has become the rallying cry of many well-intentioned but ethically challenged military and civilian personnel. And it has been hawked by a large constituency of senior government officials, from the White House to the Department of Justice to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and is most recently evidenced in the surfacing of a January 2005 memo, written almost a year after Abu Ghraib, that characterizes face slapping and waterboarding as acceptable conduct.
Keep the gloves on

When a professional interrogator sits across from a captured Iraqi general who possesses information about the Iraqi nuclear program, or who knows why Saddam did not toss nerve gas at our massed forces, the interrogator knows he is facing a formidable adversary, an educated, trained professional strongly inclined by his Iraqi patriotism and survival instincts to deny his interrogator such information. The interrogator's challenge in such situations is to assess and manipulate the situation, somehow persuading his captive to make disclosures in spite of the prisoner's visceral fear of the consequences if he helps the enemy. The role of the interrogator is, in essence, that of a recruiter. The prisoner must be convinced that if he reveals state secrets, his captor will handle his trust with discretion and take care of him.

Generations of professional interrogators have possessed such skills, and used them to obtain information vital to our country. Those who have not mastered these techniques fall back on the ultimate admission of incompetence and resort to brutality. Once this moral frontier is crossed, captives on the receiving end of such treatment respond to their survival instincts. Spurred by cunning and fueled by the hatred stoked by their tormentor's brutality, they respond as our American aviators responded in the Hanoi Hilton, showing their contempt by lying, invention, stalling -- anything to stop the abuse -- or by accepting death before dishonor.

For 30 years, I was fortunate to work with talented professionals. We benefited from good training, including the need to adhere to the law. We never felt pressured "to take the gloves off" and mistreat our captives. On the contrary, our chain of command encouraged good treatment, and there was never a thought of traveling down the wrong road.

Regrettably, such an approach may not have satisfied a number of our senior leaders since 9/11, but it would surely have pleased Dr. Schrynemakers. It was a good approach then, and it remains so.
Three men in custody

Question: What do these three men have in common?

• A wounded North Vietnamese Army sergeant, captured only after he exhausted his ammunition, brags that his Army is "liberating" the South and refuses to cooperate under harsh treatment by South Vietnamese interrogators. He then provides Americans with information about his unit, its missions, its infiltration route. He even assists in interrogating other prisoners. Granted amnesty, he serves in the South Vietnamese Army for the duration of the war.

• A captured Panamanian staff officer, morose and angry, initially lies and stonewalls his American interrogator but ultimately reveals his role in his leader's shadowy contacts with North Korea, Cuba, Libya and the Palestine Liberation Organization. He provides information about covert arms purchases and a desperate attempt to procure SAM missiles to shoot down American helicopters in the event of an American invasion.

• An Iraqi general, captured and humiliated during Operation Desert Storm, is initially frightened and defiant but eventually cooperates, knowing that Saddam Hussein's penalty for treason was certain death. Before repatriation, the general hands his captor his prayer beads and a scrap of paper bearing an address, saying with emotion, "Our Islamic custom requires that we show gratitude to those who bestow kindness and mercy. These beads comforted me through your Air Force's fierce bombings for 39 days, but they are all I have. When Saddam is gone, please come to my home. You will be an honored guest and we will slaughter a lamb to welcome you."

Answer: All three were treated by their American captors with dignity and respect. No torture; no mistreatment.

-- Stuart Herrington