They haven't released the memos either. Who knows what they might reveal.

Because **** Cheney said so right?

No, because the release of selective memos might not tell the whole story.

There is a lot of information gathered over a long period of time that would indicate that torture does not yield accurate information. As previously stated, the subject will say whatever he thinks the other side wants to hear.

The US has its limits in what it has been willing to do for moral purposes. Other nations, over many centuries, have used other methods which have worked well on many subjects.

Russia had a brief period of terrorism and still has some episodes today. One technique that they used was to simply round up the family of the subject and kill them one by one in front of the subject. It worked rather well and was used by the Romans and others throughout history.

Would the US do this? I don't think so.

A second thought. Regan did something similar to Kadafi with an air strike that killed part of kadafi's family. Didn't get any more trouble out of him after that.

easy answer you take them to new york

and ask again

should have already been in new york doing the interrogation

and if they are religious you put them in a situation that would cause them to question their after life transformation

nuclear attack would take them out as well but make sure you keep them where it would not be instant and make sure they know they will suffer radiation poisoning for days weeks and maybe even months b4 they die

maybe to find and dis arm said device

The OP was that accepted methods of interrogations have not worked. I think what you suggest might be included in that blanket statement.

not so sure of that

example.................

Religious disrespect - or even a perception of disrespect - can be an explosive matter in Islamic countries. In recent days, thousands took to the streets in violent protests in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and at least three other nations, reacting to a news report, not yet substantiated, that American personnel desecrated the Koran during interrogations at Guantánamo. The US has promised an investigation and insists disrespect for the Koran will not be tolerated.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0516/p11s02-usmi.html

Actually if you study the psychology of t0rture there are extreme limits to it. The best interviewers used guile, which works best in the long term. Also, psych works better than physical, for example, the Soviets would capture someone's family, how often have you heard the Soviets being victims of terr0rist (well now they are, because they have lost much of their cajones)

The "Ticking Bomb" Argument For Torture

The argument goes like this: A nuclear bomb has been planted in the heart of a major American city, and authorities have in custody a person who knows where it is located. To save possibly millions of lives, would it not be justified to torture this individual to get the information? Is not this lesser evil justified?

Of course it is. And this argument is a wonderful means to comfort those who have moral problems with torture. The beauty of this argument is that once you concede there are circumstances were torture might be justified, morally and legally (through what criminal law calls the defense of necessity: that an act is justified to save lives), you are on the other side of the line. You've joined the torture crowd.

Those who've invoked the argument range from Alan Dershowitz, to the Israeli Supreme Court, to the Schlesinger Report on Abu Ghraib, to the Robb/Silberman Pre-Iraq War Intelligence Report.

Most recently, and eloquently, the argument was set forth in the pages of The Weekly Standard, by Charles Krauthammer. His powerful essay, "The Truth about Torture: It's time to be honest about doing terrible things," received wide circulation on the internet.

With all these great minds, and moral authorities, relying on this argument, it is with some trepidation that I point out that it is phony. I do so for a number of very real reasons.

Fallacies In The "Ticking Bomb" Argument -- The Clock Does Not Work

It is a rhetorical device. It is seductively simplistic, and compellingly logical. It is also pure fantasy. The conditions of ticking bomb scenarios are seldom real.

No one has more effectively probed the fallacies of this argument than Georgetown University School of Law professor David Luban. Writing in the Washington Post, in a piece entitled "Torture, American-Style," Luban explains why, while it makes good television melodrama, this scenario does not produce critical thinking.

Professor Luban surgically dissects this argument at greater length in the October 2005 Virginia Law Review. His essay "Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb" is very much worth the read. Citing moral philosopher Bernard Williams, Luban writes that "there are certain situations so monstrous that the idea that the processes of moral rationality could yield an answer in them is insane," and "to spend time thinking what one would decide if one were in such a situation is also insane, if not merely frivolous."

Indeed, shouldn't the President, the Vice President, and those members of the Senate and House embracing the power to torture without justification, without court oversight, and without limits, look, instead, at what they are doing to us as a society? As professor Luban notes, "McCain has said that ultimately the debate is over who we are. We will never figure that out until we stop talking about ticking bombs, and stop playing games with words."

Which brings us to the present situation.

Resolution Of The McCain Amendments

The House of Representatives, as far as the Republican leadership was concerned, was not willing to accept the McCain Amendments. No surprise there. Last year, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert tried to slip a provision into a law authorizing the CIA to torture. But he got caught, and the effort died.

The House GOP leaders wanted to avoid letting this matter come to a recorded vote in the House. How many members would dare to vote for torture? Even though public opinion polls are all over the lot, as Maggie Gallagher found, when Gallup asked more specific questions, Americans recoiled.

For example, Gallup asked, "Would you be willing, or not willing, to have the U.S. Government torture known terrorists if they know details about future terrorist attacks in the U.S.?" Fifty-nine percent were not willing.

The poll asked if the following activities were right or wrong: forcing prisoners to remain naked and chained in uncomfortable positions in cold rooms for several hours: (79 percent said this was wrong); having female interrogator make physical contact with Muslim men during religious observances that prohibit such contact (85 percent said this was wrong); threatening to transfer a prisoner to a country known to use torture: (62 percent said this was wrong); threatening prisoners with dogs (69 percent said this was wrong); using the technique of waterboarding, which simulates drowning (82 percent said this was wrong). The only 50/50 split came on sleep deprivation.

Senator McCain has been in negotiations with the House, and with the White House. Then Congressman John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) forced the issue in the House, calling for a motion to instruct the House conferee to accept the language of the McCain Amendments. "No circumstance whatsoever justifies torture. No emergencies, no state of war, no level of political instability," Murtha, a heavily decorated and much respected veteran, said.

Only one lonely voice dared to speak on the House floor against this motion. Congressman C.W. Bill Young of Florida opposed the McCain amendments because he did not believe terrorists should have the protection of our Constitution. The argument was absurd. They already have that protection, and McCain's amendments do not change the existing law. Young's contention went nowhere. The vote sent a clear message to Bush and Cheney. The motion carried by 308 yeas and 122 nays. Those are 122 members of the House who have shamed themselves.

The Congress has given the Bush/Cheney White House no choice: Back down. Both the Senate and the House have told the President, if you veto, we will cram this down your throat. As Mr. Murtha put it: "No torture and no exceptions."

Since **** Cheney is so keen on torture, maybe he will give the nation a demonstration of waterboarding, which he does not seem to believe is cruel, inhumane, or degrading. No doubt he could be given a ticking clock to keep with him under water as well.

John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president.

Aren't there memos now approving , even before anyone was captured? And did the guy who had KSM say that he spilled all the info before the waterboarding?

Under the neo-conservatives’ thumb, the United States have legalized the use of torture for the first time in their history. An amendment by Senator McCain (Rep.), which aim is to bring the country back to compliance with international law, is currently being discussed in Congress. Ray McGovern, the spokesperson for a group of former intelligence officers, has lent his support to this initiative. He explains the Voltaire Network readers that the heart of the matter for U.S. representatives is not to find a compromise between national security and human rights, but it is rather about defending – or forgetting - Democracy’s core values.


Sen. John McCain and his Senate colleagues have provided Congress a chance to redeem itself in a small but significant way for its craven abdication of responsibility three years ago, when it gave the president what Sen. Robert Byrd warned would be a “blank check” for war on Iraq.

With some remarkable help from then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and hired legal hands at the Justice Department, Vice President **** Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stretched that blank check to include authorization for torturing detainees by CIA and U.S. military personnel. McCain, himself a victim of torture in Vietnam, is trying to bring the U.S. into compliance with international norms, while the Bush administration is trying desperately to leave the door open for CIA and contract interrogators to act beyond those norms without threat of prosecution.

McCain has tacked onto the defense authorization and defense appropriation bills an amendment that would require Defense Department personnel to observe the strictures in the Army Field Manual for Intelligence Interrogation. As for CIA and other non-defense department personnel, the amendment would prohibit “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of detainees “regardless of nationality or physical location.” Cheney has been waging an open campaign to defeat or alter the amendment. He lost the first round when, despite Herculean efforts on his part, 89 senators joined McCain in voting for it.

This presents a direct challenge to Cheney, and to the president whom, one assumes, is being kept informed. The House versions of the defense bills do not include the McCain language, so final agreement on the torture provision is now in the hands of conferees from the House and Senate working to resolve differences between the bills. On Monday, President George W. Bush said he was “confident” that agreement could be reached with McCain, but Democrat Sen. Carl Levin said the House so far has refused to accept McCain’s language and that this was “unacceptable” to the Senate. Yesterday’s lopsided vote in the House to instruct House negotiators to include McCain’s language, word for word, will make it still more difficult for the White House to prevail.

The defense bills are must-pass legislation, so Cheney and Bush may have to weigh whether to go through with their oft-stated threat to veto. This, of course, would precipitate a worldwide public relations disaster, but that kind of consideration has not deterred such action in the past. Besides, even if they care about the U.S. becoming even more of a pariah abroad, Bush and Cheney may harbor the forlorn hope that spinner-in-chief Karen Hughes can deal with that. And, sadly, they may also be encouraged by recent polling suggesting that many Americans have become fearful enough to accept torture as regrettable but permissible in use against “suspected terrorists.”

No effort has been made to disguise what is behind the opposition to McCain. Even Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a lawyer who has been considered a moderate on the issue of torture, has conceded that the “problem” is to find a way to protect interrogators who go too far. To this non-lawyer at least, it does not seem possible to square this circle. I am still trying to accustom myself to the fact that, alongside the “we-do-not-torture” rhetoric, our country has for the first time in its history openly embraced the use of torture.

Who Will Blink; Cheney or McCain?
Supporters of the Cheney school of thought have been taking to the airwaves using the bogus “ticking-bomb doomsday scenario” rationale to, well, rationalize torture. And this seems to be having some impact. According to an AP-Ipsos poll conducted in late November, 61 percent of Americans surveyed believe torture is justified at least on rare occasions; only 36 percent said it can never be justified. A January 2005 poll conducted by Poltronics involving over two thousand telephone interviews found that 53 percent of Americans thought some torture is acceptable, with 37 percent opposed. That poll also found that 82 percent of FOX News Channel viewers said that torture is acceptable in “a wide range” of situations.

And so, incredible though it may seem, torture survivor McCain runs the risk of appearing soft on torture with the Republican base, whose support he will need if he hopes to win the Republican nomination in 2008. Accordingly, despite the strong support he enjoys among Senate colleagues and despite his uncompromising stance until now, there is still a chance that McCain will acquiesce in compromise wording—words that would enable the administration to assure CIA and contract interrogators that they will enjoy immunity from prosecution if they keep “the gloves off,” as erstwhile CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black described the CIA’s approach post 9/11.

>From the administration’s point of view, “enhanced interrogation techniques” have certainly come in handy in promoting the war in Iraq and the “war on terror.” We now know, for example, that the bogus information included in President Bush’s key speech of October 7, 2002, just three days before the Congress voted on the war, about Iraq training al-Qaeda operatives in explosives and chemical weapons was extracted from the captive Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi by the Egyptian interrogators to whom we “rendered” him. Al-Libi has since recanted, claiming his statements were coerced.

And when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft needed to advertise a success in the “war on terrorism,” José Padilla was produced on the basis of the testimony of none other than 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whose interrogation included waterboarding. Padilla’s “dirty bomb” charge was dropped after he spent over three and a half years in prison.

It’s Torture Just Watching
My colleague Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and I can scarcely believe what we are watching. While I admire Sen. McCain for taking a stand, it strikes me as odd, for example, that he cites damage to the U.S. image abroad as the primary reason why torture should be banned. Our tarnished image is a serious problem, but it is, in my view, among the least compelling of a long list of reasons to throw torture out of our toolbox. Others that come to mind, in ascending order of importance, are:

Torture puts our own troops, as well as those of other countries, in jeopardy of “reciprocal” treatment.

Torture brutalizes not only the victim but also the brutalizer. (Talk, as I have, to those who took part in, or merely witnessed, torture in Iraq or Afghanistan.)

Information acquired by torture is notoriously unreliable. Experienced interrogators know that torture is as likely to yield misinformation as accurate information, since torture victims will say anything to stop the pain. In the past, torture fell into disuse primarily because it did not work.

Torture is morally wrong. It inhabits the same category as slavery, genocide, rape, incest—always, intrinsically wrong. Civilized societies have long opposed torture since it is widely recognized as an intolerable affront to the inherent human right to physical integrity and personal dignity. That is why there are so many laws against torture. But torture is not wrong because there are laws against it; there are laws against it because it is wrong.

A Corollary of “The Supreme Crime”
The use of torture before and after the invasion of Iraq points to an even larger crime; namely, the attack on and occupation of Iraq for reasons other than those given. The war is, pure and simple, a war of aggression. The post WW-II Nuremberg Tribunal, largely a creature of the United States, declared:

“To initiate a war of aggression...is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has called the war illegal, as have the International Commission of Jurists and the preponderance of legal experts around the world. As for the “accumulated evil of the whole,” torture comes immediately to mind. There is no getting around it. Torture is a war crime; a crime against humanity. And, assuming the polls have it right, also part of the “accumulation” is the fact that a majority of our fellow citizens have been frightened into believing that it is permissible to dehumanize others to the point of torture.

Our country’s leaders, including those who represent us in Congress—indeed, all of us—must open our eyes and step out of what Nazi war criminal Albert Speer called “moral contamination.” We are only too willing to close our eyes and let our institutions do our sinning for us.

At the Nuremberg Trial, Speer, number three in the wartime Nazi hierarchy, was the only defendant to accept full responsibility not only for his own actions but also for those of the regime. Speer confessed that he had become “inescapably contaminated morally:”

“I did not see because I did not want to see...there is no way I can avoid responsibility...It is surprisingly easy to blind your moral eyes. I was like a man following a trail of bloodstained footprints through the snow without realizing someone had been injured.”

Letter to John McCain
Last week, 33 of us retired intelligence officers sent a letter to Sen. McCain expressing strong support for his amendment to reinforce the ban on cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees by US personnel around the world. McCain’s office has distributed the letter widely on the Hill, and a press release was issued, but so far mainstream media seem to have missed it. The letter says, in part:

“Those who press for ‘flexibility’ to abuse prisoners have been willing to forsake both effectiveness and our values as a nation on the misguided belief that abusive treatment will produce vital intelligence. But interrogation in the real world rarely resembles what we see on television and in the movies...Thankfully, the choice between our values and success against the terrorist enemy is a false one. We must not be seduced by the fiction that adherence to our ideals is what stands between our great nation and the security it deserves.”

Much depends on whether Sen. McCain will stand on principle and resist watering down his amendment. Such a display of integrity would certainly set him apart these days in Washington.

It is also pure fantasy. The conditions of ticking bomb scenarios are seldom real.

911 wasn't real, huh.

I think the scenario gets more and more realistic everyday.

What es me off is these "blank cheques" Our lat real declared war was WWII; police actions, Gulf of Tonkin, etc, etc. Congress should not abdicate its responsibility to provide checks and balances and oversight.