The President Ties His Own Hands on Terror

[Homyrrh]

(from The Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123993446103128041.html))
The President Ties His Own Hands on Terror
The point of interrogation is intelligence, not confession.

By MICHAEL HAYDEN and MICHAEL B. MUKASEY

The Obama administration has declassified and released opinions of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) given in 2005 and earlier that analyze the legality of interrogation techniques authorized for use by the CIA. Those techniques were applied only when expressly permitted by the director, and are described in these opinions in detail, along with their limits and the safeguards applied to them.

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.

Proponents of the release have argued that the techniques have been abandoned and thus there is no point in keeping them secret any longer; that they were in any event ineffective; that their disclosure was somehow legally compelled; and that they cost us more in the coin of world opinion than they were worth. None of these claims survives scrutiny.

Soon after he was sworn in, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that suspended use of these techniques and confined not only the military but all U.S. agencies -- including the CIA -- to the interrogation limits set in the Army Field Manual. This suspension was accompanied by a commitment to further study the interrogation program, and government personnel were cautioned that they could no longer rely on earlier opinions of the OLC.

Although evidence shows that the Army Field Manual, which is available online, is already used by al Qaeda for training purposes, it was certainly the president's right to suspend use of any technique. However, public disclosure of the OLC opinions, and thus of the techniques themselves, assures that terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly and thus diminish the effectiveness of these techniques as they have the ones in the Army Field Manual.

Moreover, disclosure of the details of the program pre-empts the study of the president's task force and assures that the suspension imposed by the president's executive order is effectively permanent. There would be little point in the president authorizing measures whose nature and precise limits have already been disclosed in detail to those whose resolve we hope to overcome. This conflicts with the sworn promise of the current director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who testified in aid of securing Senate confirmation that if he thought he needed additional authority to conduct interrogation to get necessary information, he would seek it from the president. By allowing this disclosure, President Obama has tied not only his own hands but also the hands of any future administration faced with the prospect of attack.

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.

Which brings us to the next of the justifications for disclosing and thus abandoning these measures: that they don't work anyway, and that those who are subjected to them will simply make up information in order to end their ordeal. This ignorant view of how interrogations are conducted is belied by both experience and common sense. If coercive interrogation had been administered to obtain confessions, one might understand the argument. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, among others, and who has boasted of having beheaded Daniel Pearl, could eventually have felt pressed to provide a false confession. But confessions aren't the point. Intelligence is. Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known. Moreover, intelligence can be verified, correlated and used to get information from other detainees, and has been; none of this information is used in isolation.

The terrorist Abu Zubaydah (sometimes derided as a low-level operative of questionable reliability, but who was in fact close to KSM and other senior al Qaeda leaders) disclosed some information voluntarily. But he was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S. Details of these successes, and the methods used to obtain them, were disclosed repeatedly in more than 30 congressional briefings and hearings beginning in 2002, and open to all members of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress beginning in September 2006. Any protestation of ignorance of those details, particularly by members of those committees, is pretense.

The techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of the techniques discussed in these opinions. As already disclosed by Director Hayden, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations.

Nor was there any legal reason compelling such disclosure. To be sure, the American Civil Liberties Union has sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain copies of these and other memoranda, but the government until now has successfully resisted such lawsuits. Even when the government disclosed that three members of al Qaeda had been subjected to waterboarding but that the technique was no longer part of the CIA interrogation program, the court sustained the government's argument that the precise details of how it was done, including limits and safeguards, could remain classified against the possibility that some future president may authorize its use. Therefore, notwithstanding the suggestion that disclosure was somehow legally compelled, there was no legal impediment to the Justice Department making the same argument even with respect to any techniques that remained in the CIA program until last January.

There is something of the self-fulfilling prophecy in the claim that our interrogation of some unlawful combatants beyond the limits set in the Army Field Manual has disgraced us before the world. Such a claim often conflates interrogation with the sadism engaged in by some soldiers at Abu Ghraib, an incident that had nothing whatever to do with intelligence gathering. The limits of the Army Field Manual are entirely appropriate for young soldiers, for the conditions in which they operate, for the detainees they routinely question, and for the kinds of tactically relevant information they pursue. Those limits are not appropriate, however, for more experienced people in controlled circumstances with high-value detainees. Indeed, the Army Field Manual was created with awareness that there was an alternative protocol for high-value detainees.

In addition, there were those who believed that the U.S. deserved what it got on Sept. 11, 2001. Such people, and many who purport to speak for world opinion, were resourceful both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks in crafting reasons to resent America's role as a superpower. Recall also that the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the punctiliously correct trials of defendants in connection with those incidents, and the bombing of the USS Cole took place long before the advent of CIA interrogations, the invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or the many other purported grievances asserted over the past eight years.

The effect of this disclosure on the morale and effectiveness of many in the intelligence community is not hard to predict. Those charged with the responsibility of gathering potentially lifesaving information from unwilling captives are now told essentially that any legal opinion they get as to the lawfulness of their activity is only as durable as political fashion permits. Even with a seemingly binding opinion in hand, which future CIA operations personnel would take the risk? There would be no wink, no nod, no handshake that would convince them that legal guidance is durable. Any president who wants to apply such techniques without such a binding and durable legal opinion had better be prepared to apply them himself.

Beyond that, anyone in government who seeks an opinion from the OLC as to the propriety of any action, or who authors an opinion for the OLC, is on notice henceforth that such a request for advice, and the advice itself, is now more likely than before to be subject after the fact to public and partisan criticism. It is hard to see how that will promote candor either from those who should be encouraged to ask for advice before they act, or from those who must give it.

In his book "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith describes the phenomenon we are now experiencing, and its inevitable effect, referring to what he calls "cycles of timidity and aggression" that have weakened intelligence gathering in the past. Politicians pressure the intelligence community to push to the legal limit, and then cast accusations when aggressiveness goes out of style, thereby encouraging risk aversion, and then, as occurred in the wake of 9/11, criticizing the intelligence community for feckless timidity. He calls these cycles "a terrible problem for our national security." Indeed they are, and the precipitous release of these OLC opinions simply makes the problem worse.

Gen. Hayden was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009. Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.

[Homyrrh]

No thoughts on "torture"?

[QUENTIN]

No thoughts on "torture"?

Only that this thread title is inflammatory, inaccurate, and ridiculous, Obama for once did exactly the right thing in releasing this with only the agent's names redacted, and you should be ashamed of yourself for putting quotation marks, politicizing, and speaking so glibly of what is absolutely undeniably torture.

[Homyrrh]

Only that this thread title is inflammatory, inaccurate, and ridiculous, Obama for once did exactly the right thing in releasing this with only the agent's names redacted, and you should be ashamed of yourself for putting quotation marks, politicizing, and speaking so glibly of what is absolutely undeniably torture.
...fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations.

Good enough for me.

[Reigh Kaufman]

Good enough for me.

I can't be fucked reading the whole thing, but I surmise from QUENTIN's post that you are condoning torture if it gets results?

One quick question:

What about those that are innocent?

[Homyrrh]

I can't be fucked reading the whole thing, but I surmise from QUENTIN's post that you are condoning torture if it gets results?

One quick question:

What about those that are innocent?
With the release of the memo, and specifically regarding both the scant number of subjects and how much less intensive the techniques were that I (or others) had thought, I indeed condone the monitored and contained torture of known terrorists to gather information immediately pertinent to saving victims' lives.

I should note, however, that until recently, I was under a strong impression that the results from torture were mostly invalid. If I were tortured, I would also consider vocalizing the first thing that came to mind to get back to my cell. Apparently Hayden has proof for the contrary; after all, the only reason the CIA would consider torture is to obtain lifesaving intelligence.

[Reigh Kaufman]

With the release of the memo, and specifically regarding both the scant number of subjects and how much less intensive the techniques were that I (or others) had thought, I indeed condone the monitored and contained torture of known terrorists to gather information immediately pertinent to saving victims' lives.

I should note, however, that until recently, I was under a strong impression that the results from torture were mostly invalid. If I were tortured, I would also consider vocalizing the first thing that came to mind to get back to my cell. Apparently Hayden has proof for the contrary; after all, the only reason the CIA would consider torture is to obtain lifesaving intelligence.

A simple 'yes' would have sufficed.

[Preston_79]

Torturing terrorists to get information that saves lives. Sweet.

[Potter82]

I think the recent disclosures today cast serious, serious doubt on the effectiveness of these techniques.

Case in point, if waterboarding is so damn effective, why did they use the procedure 183 times on one suspect? Not once, not twice, not even three times - but 183!! That's frankly absurd.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30302830/

Unless they asked him 183 separate questions and he immediately cracked everytime, then I would seriously think twice before I considered it to be an effective technique.

How in the name of god can something be "effective" if you were required to do it 183 times? Unless of course, it isn't....

If someone waterboarded me that many times I would admit to pulling off 9/11, blowing up the Challenger space mission, killing Kennedy, shooting Reagan, being responsible for Pearl Harbour and I would admit to all unsolved murders committed in the last few decades.

This is why torture doesn't work, a rational person will do anything to get the pain to stop, especially telling the interrogator what they want to hear. It's just common sense.

As a law student, this infuriates me on general principle. All of the damn evidence given under duress is tainted and could be complete bullshit for all we know. And not only is this wrong on general principle, it's also dangerous - Bad intel can cost lives & I'm absolutely sure that such techniques provide more bad intel than good.

Before people think of these techniques in the context of "24" again (and honestly I think most people do) just ask yourself - has Jack Bauer ever had to waterboard someone 183 times?

[QUENTIN]

Hommyrh,

First, you trust Michael Hayden's word, when he has an obvious political and personal motive as the top Intelligence man under Bush, as Director of the NSA and CIA while they were torturing, illegally wiretapping, and committing many other high crimes and misdemeanors. You take at face value the word of a man who has every reason to lie to maintain his own legacy, the legacy of conduct under his watch, and to attempt to assure that the intelligence community can continue to act outside the law. Discounting I suppose that the intelligence community has never in its history voluntarily given up any power and has a long and well documented history of rampantly breaking the law, violating human rights, and acting without any kind of moral or legal code when it finds it more convenient, you even hilariously suggest that "the only reason the CIA would consider torture is to obtain lifesaving intelligence," which really flies in the face of... well, everything modern history has shown us and any keen sense of logic, understanding, or healthy skepticism would immediately discredit.

You say this is "good enough for you," the unverified claims of a man with every reason in the world to lie who is about the least trustworthy person on the planet when it comes to this subject, as he oversaw the implementation of techniques that are illegal, the US has an obligation in its Constitution to prosecute, and which now the DOJ is forced to pursue and most Americans want investigations into.

Accepting his word would not pass muster in any other situation, Homyrrh, so why now? If I quoted Blagojevich saying "I took no part in any wrongdoing" or LBJ saying the Gulf of Tonkin was a grave threat to the US that necessitated war as "good enough for me" in justifying my belief in their claims, you'd laugh me out of here and you'd be right for doing so.

Coincidentally enough, I helped organize a forum and Q&A just this past monday with Matthew Alexander ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Alexander ), the pseudonym of the Air Force counterintelligence agent hand-picked to lead interrogations in Iraq after the scandal at Abu Ghraib and the bombing of the Golden Dome Masarra mosque dramatically increased violence and further hindered detainee cooperation.

Alexander was the lead interrogator during the interrogation of over 300 Al Qaeda and insurgent captives and supervised the interrogation of well over a thousand such detainees in his time in Iraq. He personally interrogated all five of the men who eventually led to the whereabouts of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq and an even higher priority for the intelligence community than Osama Bin Laden.

In his long, prolific, and highly successful service as an interrogator, he did not meet a single detainee he was not able to break and extract intelligence from. He is one of the foremost opponents of torture for one very simple reason: It doesn't work. At all. It is counterproductive. It not only will not produce reliable or beneficial intelligence, it makes any future acquisition of such intelligence from a detainee nearly impossible, and is the single most cited and widely used recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. This is all according to the man in charge of interrogating high value Al Qaeda detainees and who is personally responsible for finding Zarqawi.

Alexander told us of his first interrogation in Iraq, of a man named Abu whose first words to him were "If I had a knife, I would cut your throat." Instead of relying on "walling" (slamming a person's face into a wall), "cramped confinement" (placing a person into a sealed coffin), "placing insects in a confinement box" (just what it sounds like), or "waterboarding" (simulated drowning) -- all torture techniques explicitly banned by the Convention Against Torture, Geneva Convention, and US Constitution, but implemented based on the advice from the OLC, and which we are now legally compelled to prosecute -- to procure information from this America hating terrorist, Alexander wanted to understand the man and asked the detainee why he wanted to kill him.

What he heard was a fairly reasonable answer, from a victim of the violence not a perpetrator of it. Abu explained that he owned a business with his brother and had a family he was comfortably supporting in Iraq. He was happy when we ousted Saddam and was looking forward to new leadership. Then the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army and allowed a state of lawlessness in which Shiite militias freely ran rampant, killing, raping, stealing, rioting, and forcing people out of their homes without any sort of intervention by the occupying and well-equipped Army. Abu was a Sunni, and as such was told by the militias that he had to leave as they were confiscating his business and home and making the neighborhood pure for Shiites. This was the same home he was raised in, where his work, his mosque, and his neighbors all were. On these grounds, Abu first he first refused to leave, then they killed his brother.

So Abu moved and, now unemployed, found a new mosque where he was quickly and easily recruited by Al Qaeda to help kick out the Americans. He was charming and relatively well educated, so he became a recruiter himself. He was eventually captured by the Army in a safe house with six other people, five suicide bombers preparing their bombs, and an Imam who blessed the bombers.

Alexander listened to this man's story and urged him to continue at every turn. What he felt naturally for the man was compassion at his plight and empathy for his circumstances, and as a representative of the United States, he sincerely apologized for the mistakes of the American government that had led Abu to lose his home, his business, and his brother. A seemingly hardened terrorist ,who only moments before had threatened to kill Alexander, broke down in tears upon hearing an apology from an American and that same day offered up another such safe house that led to the capture of five more suicide bombers, some of whom were that very day planning to explode themselves in public places and murder civilians or American personnel.

Alexander said that first interrogation deeply informed the way he conducted the next several hundred interrogations and that in every one, the way he was able to extract valuable, life-saving information was via relationship building, engendering trust, offering a mutual respect, and exercising compassion. No physical contact, no stress positions, no torture. All techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual, and almost all of them the less severe, more psychologically-driven practices.

Conversely, he says that he saw a lot of torture when he initially arrived and had to personally stop the torture of many detainees he discovered being interrogated in the manner outlined in these OLC memos. These techniques were never effective, he said. Not only was so much of the information gleaned from sessions relying on torture unreliable or outright lies, some of it directly led to the deaths of Americans as when one detainee gave an address of a safe house to his torturing interrogator that turned out to be booby-trapped, killing two soldiers and wounding several others.

Beyond that, Alexander says the foremost reason he heard from anti-American fighters themselves for their joining Al Qaeda or the insurgency was America's torture of its detainees. A majority of the people killing American troops were doing so because of these techniques you now defend, which were also ineffective and detrimental in their own right.

Torture simply does not work. It doesn't procure good, and certainly never reliable, intelligence. It also causes tremendous harm to the moral standing of America, the military forces of America, the safety of Americans at home and abroad, and is patently and plainly so illegal that it is actually itself a crime not to prosecute its known commission. The fact that Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey, two people firmly on the record for torture whose careers and reputations are on the line, as is the ability of their former bosses and employees to avoid prosecution for committing crimes, both now advocate torture and decry the release of non-secret memos any transparent government is compelled to release is no surprise and means essentially nothing. It is the equivalent of Rush Limbaugh criticizing the latest move by Obama or Rahm Emanuel defending it, the expected, partisan reaction and attempt to shape public perception by those with a personal and professional stake in the matter.

If these memos don't result in an independent investigation into those who advocated and approved of these crimes, then the Obama DOJ will be complicit in them and there will be no question that we have in America a two-tiered system of justice in which our political elites are immune from prosecution even for the most egregious crimes. The release of these memos is the first truly laudable action of the Obama Administration, while his continued assertion that we must "look forward, not backward" and the promises of immunity for proven criminals is more of the same atrocious affronts to justice.

Regardless of the outcome of their release, there can be no serious question or debate that torture is not only wrong but seriously detrimental, not beneficial to our cause.


More from/on Matthew Alexander:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Break-Terrorist-Interrogators-Brutality/dp/1416573151

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,460944,00.html

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Former_interrogator_speaks_out_against_torture_120 4.html

http://i4.democracynow.org/2008/12/3/us_interrogator_in_iraq_says_torture (a long and substantive interview)

and an article he did for the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802242.html

I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq
by Matthew Alexander

I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.

I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.

Violence was at its peak during my five-month tour in Iraq. In February 2006, the month before I arrived, Zarqawi's forces (members of Iraq's Sunni minority) blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq's majority Shiites, and unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Reprisal killings became a daily occurrence, and suicide bombings were as common as car accidents. It felt as if the whole country was being blown to bits.

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

But Zarqawi's death wasn't enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there's the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material -- including passages copied verbatim from the Army's unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army's own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don't even want the public to hear them.

My experiences have landed me in the middle of another war -- one even more important than the Iraq conflict. The war after the war is a fight about who we are as Americans. Murderers like Zarqawi can kill us, but they can't force us to change who we are. We can only do that to ourselves. One day, when my grandkids sit on my knee and ask me about the war, I'll say to them, "Which one?"

Americans, including officers like myself, must fight to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them. Other interrogators are also speaking out, including some former members of the military, the FBI and the CIA who met last summer to condemn torture and have spoken before Congress -- at considerable personal risk.

We're told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations -- and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.

I'm actually quite optimistic these days, in no small measure because President-elect Barack Obama has promised to outlaw the practice of torture throughout our government. But until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning. Zarqawi is dead, but he has still forced us to show the world that we do not adhere to the principles we say we cherish. We're better than that. We're smarter, too.

howtobreakaterrorist@gmail.com

Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of "How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq." He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.

There should be no doubt that Alexander, an incredibly successful leader of an incredibly successful team of interrogators who is responsible for finding the single highest value target we've found in the War on Terror is an immeasurably better source for information and valuable opinion than Michael Mukasey or Michael Hayden, who have never participated in interrogations and who have a lot to lose from the potential backlash of these revelations.

[Homyrrh]

Yeah, you're right about Blagojevich, etc. And you're right about the self-fulfilling failure torture almost always is. You're even right about Hayden, though possibly not entirely (regardless of who says what, the CIA doesn't apply acute pain simply to see how their detainess respond). And I'll tell you are completely correct in agreeing with Alexander and his mission. In fact, I really can't argue much, if any of your post.

As I've mentioned, I condone torture when it provides tangible results. If Hayden's words are truth, and lives were saved because of the volume of knowledge obtained from these interrogation tactics, I feel certain levels of torture are acceptable. Hypothetically, if a very lethal bombing were to be prevented, a tortured jihadist is acceptable. However, that individual would indeed have to be a jihadist, Hayden would have to be right, and revenge would have to be avoided. Not sure.

[The Heart Collector]

Who gives a shit what Michael Hayden thinks.

[The Heart Collector]

Seriously, the tenacity of that article.

"The effect of this disclosure on the morale and effectiveness of many in the intelligence community is not hard to predict."

Waaaaahhhhhhhhh people won't like me anymore because i'm a torturer waaaaaaaahhhh. You think that'll affect your morale? Try waterboarding. See how that affects your morality.

[Homyrrh]

Who gives a shit what Michael Hayden thinks.
To put things in perspective, he was Director of Central Intelligence. Right or wrong, he's more important by position than either of us.

[QUENTIN]

To put things in perspective, he was Director of Central Intelligence. Right or wrong, he's more important by position than either of us.

To put things in perspective, his conduct as Director of Central Intelligence largely invalidates his opinion.

Just as Jay Bybee's opinion on the Constitution isn't worth any more than ours, despite his credentialed position nor Bernie Madoff's opinion on how to invest, having achieved a high position in life doesn't necessarily mean you should be trusted or listened to. It absolutely doesn't mean that if what you've done with that position is fuck up spectacularly.

The idea that experts' opinions are necessarily worth more than the rest of us, "right or wrong" is a major contributing factor to the reason we're now embroiled in an economic depression, pointless and seemingly endless war, and are stuck in bureaucratic stasis on most domestic issues.

[Potter82]

"Opponents of last week's release of memos detailing CIA interrogation techniques argue that they will provide enemies of the United States with a training manual to prepare their operatives for capture. The irony is that the U.S. military appears to have done the exact opposite, taking a training program that had been designed to prepare American soldiers to withstand torture by communist regimes seeking to extract false confessions, and twisting it into a highly controversial interrogation manual.

The story of that mutation emerges in disquieting detail in a new report by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. It shows how U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and camps in Afghanistan based some of their interrogations on techniques taken from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program. These techniques included water-boarding, walling (slamming detainees into a flexible wall), sleep deprivation, hooding and using dogs to inspire fear. (See pictures of life inside Guantanamo)......

.....In the summer of 2004, JPRA was even considering sending trainers to Afghanistan, prompting another SERE psychologist, Col. Kenneth Rollins, to warn his colleagues by e-mail: "[W]e need to really stress the difference between what instructors do at SERE school (done to INCREASE RESISTANCE capability in students) versus what is taught at interrogator school (done to gather information). What is done by SERE instructors is by definition ineffective interrogator conduct. Simply stated, SERE school does not train you on how to interrogate, and things you 'learn' there by osmosis about interrogation are probably wrong if copied by interrogators.

The final irony: The torture techniques around which the SERE training was devised were used by Chinese interrogators during the Korean War, not to gather actionable intelligence but to force false confessions from captured U.S. soldiers — confessions that could then be used in anti-American propaganda. "

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1893015,00.html?xid=rss-fullnation-yahoo

[Homyrrh]

To put things in perspective, his conduct as Director of Central Intelligence largely invalidates his opinion.

Just as Jay Bybee's opinion on the Constitution isn't worth any more than ours, despite his credentialed position nor Bernie Madoff's opinion on how to invest, having achieved a high position in life doesn't necessarily mean you should be trusted or listened to. It absolutely doesn't mean that if what you've done with that position is fuck up spectacularly.

The idea that experts' opinions are necessarily worth more than the rest of us, "right or wrong" is a major contributing factor to the reason we're now embroiled in an economic depression, pointless and seemingly endless war, and are stuck in bureaucratic stasis on most domestic issues.
No. His opinion is more important because of his position, because more people will be subject to it, because more people will carry it out, and because more people will be affected by it. This is no matter of torture or the CIA or Gen. Hayden or morality. Our opinions are as important as which and how many people we know. President Obama's opinion is more important than mine because it is what is like to happen, and not mine.

[QUENTIN]

No. His opinion is more important because of his position, because more people will be subject to it, because more people will carry it out, and because more people will be affected by it. This is no matter of torture or the CIA or Gen. Hayden or morality. Our opinions are as important as which and how many people we know. President Obama's opinion is more important than mine because it is what is like to happen, and not mine.

If by "important," you mean consequential, then sure. The opinions of people in power will have a greater effect and impact, of course.

It seemed to me like you were offering Hayden's status as a reason we should trust his opinion though with your perspective comment. My point was just that their opinions are not necessarily any more valid, informed, reasonable, or correct just because they're in positions of power and forgetting that, trusting our "experts" merely because one would think someone in their position should be right about their area of expertise has caused us a slew of problems lately.

[QUENTIN]

As I've mentioned, I condone torture when it provides tangible results. If Hayden's words are truth, and lives were saved because of the volume of knowledge obtained from these interrogation tactics, I feel certain levels of torture are acceptable. Hypothetically, if a very lethal bombing were to be prevented, a tortured jihadist is acceptable. However, that individual would indeed have to be a jihadist, Hayden would have to be right, and revenge would have to be avoided. Not sure.

I want to touch on this too.

Nothing can work this way. "I condone torture when it provides tangible results." Well, you won't know whether it will produce tangible results until after the torture, will you? Advocating something on the condition that it produces a specific and unlikely result that can only possibly be known after the commission of that something... doesn't make much sense. Especially when all evidence points to it not providing tangible results, and instead being a major cause of our problems in the War on Terror.

The hypothetical you've provided is just that, a hypothetical. There are lots of known cases of properly interrogated detainees providing critical, life-saving information. There are no known cases of tortured detainees providing critical, life-saving information. It is known that torture has caused of lot of American deaths. It is not known whether torture has prevented any American deaths.

It seems the equivalent of saying, "I'd support raping a gang leader if it meant the gang would dissolve." As absurd as that sounds, it's no more absurd than torturing people and it's based on the same premise. "We'll commit some morally reprehensible, illegal acts and hope some good comes from them...continuing to do them even when time and again, nothing good comes from them and instead, they create more problems than we had to start with." Like supporting the Death Penalty or trickle down economics, we've given it more than a fair shot and we have unequivocally discovered it categorically does not produce the desired effect. So what justification can there be for continuing to condone it?

Torturing detainees in the War on Terror is not about acquiring valuable information, since it doesn't do that. It's about vengeance and retribution, plain and simple. American boys trained to think these men are violent, vicious, America-hating evildoers responsible for 9/11, and thus wanting to hurt and humiliate them. It's based on a cartoon caricature outlook on the enemy and it does us no good, aside from being blatantly illegal. The intelligence community doesn't want to follow the rules because they want ALL options on the table, they want to be COMPLETELY unregulated and unrestricted and resent ANY oversight and restrictions by their very nature.

So why the mealy-mouthed half-concession? What would it take for you to recognize that there isn't a good reason to practically condone torture?

[Badbird]

The whole "If there's a ticking timebomb" scenario is the lamest excuse ever for this stuff. It seems that people think real life is just like the show 24, and that Jack Baur will save us at the last minute.

The fact is, if there actually was a ticking timebomb, then the terrorists have already succeeded in their task. And even if you managed to get a hold of one of the guys who planted it, there's no way he's going to give up anything until it goes off. Besides the fact that these guys tend to be suicide bombers who don't use timers anyway.

[Jon Lyrik]

It's not even that torture is going on. Torture DOES happen, and will no matter what you do. BUT, it cannot be, under any circumstances, encouraged or ignored. If it gets out that we have people torturing, they should get shitcanned as soon as possible.

Doesn't anyone seem to realize what the consequences are? Fuck terrorist attacks, I'm more afraid of car accidents. What will ignoring the rules do? It only creates the notion that, indeed, the rules don't apply to the people in power. That is far more dangerous than anything al-Qaeda could conjure.

Jesus fucking Christ, are people really advocating torture and not being called out on it big time? What the fuck is wrong with us as a nation?

[Homyrrh]

I want to touch on this too.

Nothing can work this way. "I condone torture when it provides tangible results." Well, you won't know whether it will produce tangible results until after the torture, will you? Advocating something on the condition that it produces a specific and unlikely result that can only possibly be known after the commission of that something... doesn't make much sense. Especially when all evidence points to it not providing tangible results, and instead being a major cause of our problems in the War on Terror.

The hypothetical you've provided is just that, a hypothetical. There are lots of known cases of properly interrogated detainees providing critical, life-saving information. There are no known cases of tortured detainees providing critical, life-saving information. It is known that torture has caused of lot of American deaths. It is not known whether torture has prevented any American deaths.

It seems the equivalent of saying, "I'd support raping a gang leader if it meant the gang would dissolve." As absurd as that sounds, it's no more absurd than torturing people and it's based on the same premise. "We'll commit some morally reprehensible, illegal acts and hope some good comes from them...continuing to do them even when time and again, nothing good comes from them and instead, they create more problems than we had to start with." Like supporting the Death Penalty or trickle down economics, we've given it more than a fair shot and we have unequivocally discovered it categorically does not produce the desired effect. So what justification can there be for continuing to condone it?

Torturing detainees in the War on Terror is not about acquiring valuable information, since it doesn't do that. It's about vengeance and retribution, plain and simple. American boys trained to think these men are violent, vicious, America-hating evildoers responsible for 9/11, and thus wanting to hurt and humiliate them. It's based on a cartoon caricature outlook on the enemy and it does us no good, aside from being blatantly illegal. The intelligence community doesn't want to follow the rules because they want ALL options on the table, they want to be COMPLETELY unregulated and unrestricted and resent ANY oversight and restrictions by their very nature.

So why the mealy-mouthed half-concession? What would it take for you to recognize that there isn't a good reason to practically condone torture?
I think you're generalizing way too much. The Agency brass would not condone torture simply for stress relief and retribution. I had conceded that most of your views on torture are entirely right, especially that torture is illegal and does not produce legitimate intelligence. I had told myself torture was illegitimate because not only is it base, but it did not produce results by which we could measure success (i.e. - prevented catastrophes, saved lives, etc.). Again, HOWEVER, if Gen. Hayden is right, then the torture of an individual insurgent is worth the location of a jihadist cell and/or the "next target". This isn't some contrived, "24" analogy, but a reality: if it can be proven (not that it necessarily has) that extreme degrees of interrogation lead to measurable results, I can't see any basis on which to use very limited uses of physical initimidation and coercion.

*Also, yes, by "important", I had intended it to be read as either "impactful" or "consequential", etc.

[Potter82]

It's not even that torture is going on. Torture DOES happen, and will no matter what you do. BUT, it cannot be, under any circumstances, encouraged or ignored. If it gets out that we have people torturing, they should get shitcanned as soon as possible.

Doesn't anyone seem to realize what the consequences are? Fuck terrorist attacks, I'm more afraid of car accidents. What will ignoring the rules do? It only creates the notion that, indeed, the rules don't apply to the people in power. That is far more dangerous than anything al-Qaeda could conjure.

Jesus fucking Christ, are people really advocating torture and not being called out on it big time? What the fuck is wrong with us as a nation?

do you know what I find so incredibly frustrating about the torture issue? How willing people are to take the government's word at face value when they say this sort of thing is necessary to keep you safe - especially when you consider that many of these same people don't trust the government enough to properly administer health care or to provide other social services yet for some reason NEVER seem to doubt the government when it comes to saying things like torture is necessary for your safety.

It's amazing how quick people are to trust the government when it comes to matters of security. All they have to say is "such & such is necessary to keep you safe" and it seems like many people can't surrender their values, rights, and freedoms fast enough. It reminds me of this quote I saw by Hermann Goering, it's not hard to get people to surrender their rights & freedoms, just say that if they don't they may come to harm. It was true then and it's true now. Is there any other possible explanation but fear?

The way I see, the braver and less sheepish course of action is uphold your identity and values even if that means less security (and I still sincerely, sincerely doubt that torture is a very effective means of extracting accurate intel). If you surrender your values and freedoms for the sake of security, then what the hell are you protecting anyway?

[Jim H]

Hypothetically, if a very lethal bombing were to be prevented, a tortured jihadist is acceptable.

I know you're not making a direct reference to it here, but the general thing people point to when talking about the relevance of torture is some kind of "ticking time bomb" scenario. At the moment, I don't believe torture has ever been used to prevent this kind of event anywhere in the world at any point in history.

Can someone provide an example?

[Homyrrh]

http://www.hulu.com/watch/73016/lie-to-me-sacrifice

An interesting take from an interesting show.