Psienesis wrote:
Just going to post this here. Though there's a lot of things I don't agree with Sen. McCain on, this pretty much sums up my thoughts on the entire situation, and far more eloquently than I am ever likely to be.

http://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=1a15e343-66b0-473f-b0c1-a58f984db996

 d-usa wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:
Just going to post this here. Though there's a lot of things I don't agree with Sen. McCain on, this pretty much sums up my thoughts on the entire situation, and far more eloquently than I am ever likely to be.

http://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=1a15e343-66b0-473f-b0c1-a58f984db996

I still remember somebody telling McCain (during his 2008 run I think) that he just doesn't understand torture...

 Psienesis wrote:
Just going to post this here. Though there's a lot of things I don't agree with Sen. McCain on, this pretty much sums up my thoughts on the entire situation, and far more eloquently than I am ever likely to be.

http://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=1a15e343-66b0-473f-b0c1-a58f984db996

 Jihadin wrote:

 d-usa wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:
Just going to post this here. Though there's a lot of things I don't agree with Sen. McCain on, this pretty much sums up my thoughts on the entire situation, and far more eloquently than I am ever likely to be.

http://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=1a15e343-66b0-473f-b0c1-a58f984db996

I still remember somebody telling McCain (during his 2008 run I think) that he just doesn't understand torture...

That was Santorum

HH: Now your former colleague, John McCain, said look, there’s no record, there’s no evidence here that these methods actually led to the capture or the killing of bin Laden. Do you disagree with that? Or do you think he’s got an argument?

RS: I don’t, everything I’ve read shows that we would not have gotten this information as to who this man was if it had not been gotten information from people who were subject to enhanced interrogation. And so this idea that we didn’t ask that question while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded, he doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative. And that’s when we got this information. And one thing led to another, and led to another, and that’s how we ended up with bin Laden.

 Ouze wrote:
In other news, today I learned you can still lie to Congress without consequence.

 Ouze wrote:
In other news, today I learned you can still lie to Congress without consequence.

 whembly wrote:
You do know that report was ginned up by Senate Democrats...right? You do know that the investigators did NOT interview the actual CIA operatives and their superiors.. right?

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is a 31-year veteran of the CIA.

The men and women of my former organization, the CIA, are accustomed to frequent and sudden reversals of direction from their political leaders. But the latest twists and turns are especially dramatic.

In one ear they hear the public, the media and members of Congress raising alarms about the terrorist threat from the Islamic State: Do something! Do it now! Why didn’t you do something sooner? Politicians from both sides of the aisle are saying that the militant group is an enormous challenge and must be prevented from bringing its brutality to America’s shores. The president assures us that the United States will “degrade and ultimately destroy” these terrorists, while the vice president doubles down and says we will follow the Islamic State to “the gates of hell.”

But shouting in CIA officers’ other ear are people such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) regarding the 500-page summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the agency’s interrogation efforts, which is expected to be released next week. The report’s leaked conclusion, which has been reported on widely, that the interrogation program brought no intelligence value is an egregious falsehood; it’s a dishonest attempt to rewrite history. I’m bemused that the Senate could devote so many resources to studying the interrogation program and yet never once speak to any of the key people involved in it, including the guy who ran it (that would be me).

According to news accounts of the report, Feinstein and her supporters will say that the CIA violated American principles and hid the ugly truth from Congress, the White House and the public. When the report comes out, I expect that few of the critics who will echo Feinstein’s charges will have read it — and far fewer will read or understand the minority response and the CIA’s rebuttal.

The interrogation program was authorized by the highest levels of the U.S. government, judged legal by the Justice Department and proved effective by any reasonable standard. The leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and of both parties in Congress were briefed on the program more than 40 times between 2002 and 2009. But Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tried to deny that she was told in 2002 that detainees had been waterboarded. That is simply not true. I was among those who briefed her.

There’s great hypocrisy in politicians’ criticism of the CIA’s interrogation program. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, lawmakers urged us to do everything possible to prevent another attack on our soil. Members of Congress and the administration were nearly unanimous in their desire that the CIA do all that it could to debilitate and destroy al-Qaeda. The CIA got the necessary approvals to do so and kept Congress briefed throughout. But as our successes grew, some lawmakers’ recollections shrank in regard to the support they once offered. Here are a couple of reminders.

On May 26, 2002, Feinstein was quoted in the New York Times saying that the attacks of 9/11 were a real awakening and that it would no longer be “business as usual.” The attacks, she said, let us know “that the threat is profound” and “that we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.”

After extraordinary CIA efforts, aided by information obtained through the enhanced-interrogation program, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan. Shortly afterward, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, appeared on CNN’s “Late Edition” on March 2, 2003. Rockefeller, who had been extensively briefed about the CIA’s efforts, told Wolf Blitzer that “happily, we don’t know where [KSM] is,” adding: “He’s in safekeeping, under American protection. He’ll be grilled by us. I’m sure we’ll be proper with him, but I’m sure we’ll be very, very tough with him.”

When Blitzer asked about how KSM would be interrogated, Rockefeller assured him that “there are presidential memorandums that prescribe and allow certain measures to be taken, but we have to be careful.” Then he added: “On the other hand, he does have the information. Getting that information will save American lives. We have no business not getting that information.”

And that’s not all. Blitzer asked if the United States should turn over KSM to a friendly country with no restrictions against torture. Rockefeller, laughing, said he wouldn’t rule it out: “I wouldn’t take anything off the table where he is concerned, because this is the man who has killed hundreds and hundreds of Americans over the last 10 years.”

If Feinstein, Rockefeller and other politicians were saying such things in print and on national TV, imagine what they were saying to us in private. We did what we were asked to do, we did what we were assured was legal, and we know our actions were effective. Our reward, a decade later, is to hear some of these same politicians expressing outrage for what was done and, even worse, mischaracterizing the actions taken and understating the successes achieved.

I’m confident that my former CIA colleagues who are still on the job will do what is necessary to protect the nation from new Islamic State and continuing al-Qaeda threats. But in the back of their minds will be the nagging thought that, as they carry out legal, authorized and necessary actions, they may be only a few years away from being criticized and second-guessed by the people who today are urging them onward to the “gates of hell.”

 whembly wrote:
You do know that the investigators did NOT interview the actual CIA operatives and their superiors.. right?

 Ouze wrote:
Some housekeeping - Do you guys think the CIA torture report needs it's own thread or is this one close enough?

Also, I was wondering.

I'm not a historian, and this is a actual question.

Is it normal, or at least typical, for societies to trend more authoritarian over time, or does that thing sort of wax and wane with international pressures and events?

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is a 31-year veteran of the CIA.

 Psienesis wrote:

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is a 31-year veteran of the CIA.

And a traitor to the very ideals of America. Put him up against the wall.

 Ouze wrote:

I'm not a historian, and this is a actual question.

Is it normal, or at least typical, for societies to trend more authoritarian over time, or does that thing sort of wax and wane with international pressures and events?

 Jihadin wrote:
Report mention NO INTEL was gain, None, nada, zip, zero, and/or nothing leading to anything...is that what the Democrats are saying? Even though no CIA official was interviewed I heard?

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
Report mention NO INTEL was gain, None, nada, zip, zero, and/or nothing leading to anything...is that what the Democrats are saying? Even though no CIA official was interviewed I heard?

The CIA had their chance. If they actually had actionable intelligence gained from torture, they should have given it to someone to use it to take action. At best, what you are suggesting is that the CIA used torture to learn something important... and then just sat on it.

Osama Bin Laden was found despite the CIA torturing people into providing false leads. The CIA tortured people into pretending they had intelligence regarding attacks that never existed. Nothing the CIA's torturers did had any positive benefits, no matter what that goat fether Rodriguez says.

 Jihadin wrote:
Detainee's mention the name of OBL messenger runner from what I understand.

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
Detainee's mention the name of OBL messenger runner from what I understand.

No, they did not. A foreign intelligence service told the CIA the name of Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed, not any of the people they were torturing.

Identification of al-Qaeda couriers was an early priority for interrogators at CIA black sites and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, because bin Laden was believed to communicate through such couriers while concealing his whereabouts from al-Qaeda foot soldiers and top commanders.[23] Bin Laden was known not to use phones after 1998, when the U.S. had launched missile strikes against his bases in Afghanistan and Sudan in August (Operation Infinite Reach) by tracking an associate's satellite phone.[24]

By 2002, interrogators had heard uncorroborated claims about an al-Qaeda courier with the kunya Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti (sometimes referred to as Sheikh Abu Ahmed from Kuwait).[23] One of those claims came from Mohammed al-Qahtani, a detainee interrogated for 48 days more or less continuously between November 23, 2002, and January 11, 2003. At some point during this period, al-Qahtani told interrogators about a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti who was part of the inner circle of al-Qaeda.[25] Later in 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged operational chief of al-Qaeda, stated that he was acquainted with al-Kuwaiti, but that the man was not active in al-Qaeda.[26]

In 2004, a prisoner named Hassan Ghul revealed that bin Laden relied on a trusted courier known as al-Kuwaiti.[27] Ghul stated that al-Kuwaiti was close to bin Laden as well as Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Mohammed's successor Abu Faraj al-Libbi. Ghul revealed that al-Kuwaiti had not been seen in some time, which led U.S. officials to suspect he was traveling with bin Laden. When confronted with Ghul's account, Mohammed maintained his original story.[26] Abu Faraj al-Libbi was captured in 2005 and transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006.[28] He told CIA interrogators that bin Laden's courier was a man named Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan and denied knowing al-Kuwaiti. Because both Mohammed and al-Libbi had minimized al-Kuwaiti's importance, officials speculated that he was part of bin Laden's inner circle.[26]

In 2007, officials learned al-Kuwaiti's real name,[29] though they said they would disclose neither the name nor how they learned it.[26] Pakistani officials in 2011 revealed the courier's name as Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed; he was from Pakistan's Swat Valley. He and his brother Abrar and their families were living at bin Laden's compound.[30]

Since the name Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan appears in the JTF-GTMO detainee assessment for Abu Faraj al-Libbi released by WikiLeaks on April 24, 2011,[31] there was speculation that the U.S. assault on the Abbottabad compound was expedited as a precaution.[32] The CIA never found anyone named Maulawi Jan and concluded that the name was an invention of al-Libbi.[26]

A 2010 wiretap of another suspect picked up a conversation with al-Kuwaiti. CIA paramilitary operatives located al-Kuwaiti in August 2010 and followed him back to the Abbottabad compound, which led them to speculate it was bin Laden's location.[23]

The courier and a relative (who was either a brother or a cousin) were killed in the May 2, 2011, raid.[26] Afterward, some locals identified the men as Pashtuns named Arshad and Tareq Khan.[33] Arshad Khan was carrying an old, noncomputerized Pakistani identification card, which identified him as from Khat Kuruna, a village near Charsadda in northwestern Pakistan. Pakistani officials have found no record of an Arshad Khan in that area and suspect the men were living under false identities.[34]

 whembly wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is a 31-year veteran of the CIA.

And a traitor to the very ideals of America. Put him up against the wall.

You can petition our Federal Prosecutor for this.

Have at it brah.

 Jihadin wrote:
Report mention NO INTEL was gain, None, nada, zip, zero, and/or nothing leading to anything...is that what the Democrats are saying? Even though no CIA official was interviewed I heard?

 Psienesis wrote:

 whembly wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is a 31-year veteran of the CIA.

And a traitor to the very ideals of America. Put him up against the wall.

You can petition our Federal Prosecutor for this.

Have at it brah.

I'm working on it. The wording needs to be just right.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Jihadin wrote:
Report mention NO INTEL was gain, None, nada, zip, zero, and/or nothing leading to anything...is that what the Democrats are saying? Even though no CIA official was interviewed I heard?

Senator McCain was a Republican the last time I looked.

*checks*

Yep, still an old-school Republican.

Dec 09 2014

Washington, D.C. ­– U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) today delivered the following statement on the floor of the U.S. Senate on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on CIA interrogation methods:

“Mr. President, I rise in support of the release – the long-delayed release – of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s summarized, unclassified review of the so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that were employed by the previous administration to extract information from captured terrorists. It is a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose – to secure actionable intelligence to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies – but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.

“I believe the American people have a right – indeed, a responsibility – to know what was done in their name; how these practices did or did not serve our interests; and how they comported with our most important values.

“I commend Chairman Feinstein and her staff for their diligence in seeking a truthful accounting of policies I hope we will never resort to again. I thank them for persevering against persistent opposition from many members of the intelligence community, from officials in two administrations, and from some of our colleagues.

“The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless.

“They must know when the values that define our nation are intentionally disregarded by our security policies, even those policies that are conducted in secret. They must be able to make informed judgments about whether those policies and the personnel who supported them were justified in compromising our values; whether they served a greater good; or whether, as I believe, they stained our national honor, did much harm and little practical good.

“What were the policies? What was their purpose? Did they achieve it? Did they make us safer? Less safe? Or did they make no difference? What did they gain us? What did they cost us? The American people need the answers to these questions. Yes, some things must be kept from public disclosure to protect clandestine operations, sources and methods, but not the answers to these questions.

“By providing them, the Committee has empowered the American people to come to their own decisions about whether we should have employed such practices in the past and whether we should consider permitting them in the future. This report strengthens self-government and, ultimately, I believe, America’s security and stature in the world. I thank the Committee for that valuable public service.

“I have long believed some of these practices amounted to torture, as a reasonable person would define it, especially, but not only the practice of waterboarding, which is a mock execution and an exquisite form of torture. Its use was shameful and unnecessary; and, contrary to assertions made by some of its defenders and as the Committee’s report makes clear, it produced little useful intelligence to help us track down the perpetrators of 9/11 or prevent new attacks and atrocities.

“I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored.

“I know, too, that bad things happen in war. I know in war good people can feel obliged for good reasons to do things they would normally object to and recoil from.

“I understand the reasons that governed the decision to resort to these interrogation methods, and I know that those who approved them and those who used them were dedicated to securing justice for the victims of terrorist attacks and to protecting Americans from further harm. I know their responsibilities were grave and urgent, and the strain of their duty was onerous.

“I respect their dedication and appreciate their dilemma. But I dispute wholeheartedly that it was right for them to use these methods, which this report makes clear were neither in the best interests of justice nor our security nor the ideals we have sacrificed so much blood and treasure to defend.

“The knowledge of torture’s dubious efficacy and my moral objections to the abuse of prisoners motivated my sponsorship of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which prohibits ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ of captured combatants, whether they wear a nation’s uniform or not, and which passed the Senate by a vote of 90-9.

“Subsequently, I successfully offered amendments to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which, among other things, prevented the attempt to weaken Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and broadened definitions in the War Crimes Act to make the future use of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ punishable as war crimes.

“There was considerable misinformation disseminated then about what was and wasn’t achieved using these methods in an effort to discourage support for the legislation. There was a good amount of misinformation used in 2011 to credit the use of these methods with the death of Osama bin Laden. And there is, I fear, misinformation being used today to prevent the release of this report, disputing its findings and warning about the security consequences of their public disclosure.

“Will the report’s release cause outrage that leads to violence in some parts of the Muslim world? Yes, I suppose that’s possible, perhaps likely. Sadly, violence needs little incentive in some quarters of the world today. But that doesn’t mean we will be telling the world something it will be shocked to learn. The entire world already knows that we water-boarded prisoners. It knows we subjected prisoners to various other types of degrading treatment. It knows we used black sites, secret prisons. Those practices haven’t been a secret for a decade.

“Terrorists might use the report’s re-identification of the practices as an excuse to attack Americans, but they hardly need an excuse for that. That has been their life’s calling for a while now.

“What might come as a surprise, not just to our enemies, but to many Americans, is how little these practices did to aid our efforts to bring 9/11 culprits to justice and to find and prevent terrorist attacks today and tomorrow. That could be a real surprise, since it contradicts the many assurances provided by intelligence officials on the record and in private that enhanced interrogation techniques were indispensable in the war against terrorism. And I suspect the objection of those same officials to the release of this report is really focused on that disclosure – torture’s ineffectiveness – because we gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer. Too much.

“Obviously, we need intelligence to defeat our enemies, but we need reliable intelligence. Torture produces more misleading information than actionable intelligence. And what the advocates of harsh and cruel interrogation methods have never established is that we couldn’t have gathered as good or more reliable intelligence from using humane methods.

“The most important lead we got in the search for bin Laden came from using conventional interrogation methods. I think it is an insult to the many intelligence officers who have acquired good intelligence without hurting or degrading prisoners to assert we can’t win this war without such methods. Yes, we can and we will.

“But in the end, torture’s failure to serve its intended purpose isn’t the main reason to oppose its use. I have often said, and will always maintain, that this question isn’t about our enemies; it’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world.

“We have made our way in this often dangerous and cruel world, not by just strictly pursuing our geopolitical interests, but by exemplifying our political values, and influencing other nations to embrace them. When we fight to defend our security we fight also for an idea, not for a tribe or a twisted interpretation of an ancient religion or for a king, but for an idea that all men are endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights. How much safer the world would be if all nations believed the same. How much more dangerous it can become when we forget it ourselves even momentarily.

“Our enemies act without conscience. We must not. This executive summary of the Committee’s report makes clear that acting without conscience isn’t necessary, it isn’t even helpful, in winning this strange and long war we’re fighting. We should be grateful to have that truth affirmed.

“Now, let us reassert the contrary proposition: that is it essential to our success in this war that we ask those who fight it for us to remember at all times that they are defending a sacred ideal of how nations should be governed and conduct their relations with others – even our enemies.

“Those of us who give them this duty are obliged by history, by our nation’s highest ideals and the many terrible sacrifices made to protect them, by our respect for human dignity to make clear we need not risk our national honor to prevail in this or any war. We need only remember in the worst of times, through the chaos and terror of war, when facing cruelty, suffering and loss, that we are always Americans, and different, stronger, and better than those who would destroy us.

“Thank you.”

 Psienesis wrote:
You reposted the same McCain speech that I posted earlier in this thread. As I mentioned then, there are few things on which I agree with the Senator, but this is one of them.

What else do you expect the report to say? We, the United States of America, engaged in the action of torture. This is inexcusable, and unjustifiable.

 Jihadin wrote:
All I am saying why is the report one sided. None of the CIA officers were interviewed.