They believe that a relatively healthy and sane captive is taken to the waterboarding site, the procedure is performed with a doctor present, and that the interrorgators just shout questions at the captive while he feels like he is drowning, and disoriented, and thus has trouble lying. Then they are taken back to their comfy cell.

The right does NOT believe that this is combined with isolation and physical discomfort effects like extreme cold and lack of sleep. The right does not believe that this happens with any frequency or repetition, that the captive is told exactly when it will stop, and so forth. They believe that the people being waterboarded are just being disoriented for a bit like if you were spun until dizzy.

I’ve read this on blogs, argued with them that it isn’t so. I’ve told them that if what they believe is true, then it would not even be effective at what it claims to. I’m ‘crazy’ and ‘unrealistic’ and have no idea what is going on, to them.

First, doesn’t the practice of extraordinary rendition essentially deny the US of ever getting any accurate intelligence from these individuals in the first place. You are submitting these individuals not only to the absolutely coercive interrogation practices of these regimes…but there is another problem.

The information/confessions, etc. are then controlled as a “product” by those same intelligence services.The Saudis for years covered up the Al Qaida involvement in the 1996 attacks on the Khobar Towers. For years they tried to lead the CIA and FBI into believing that the suspects captured were IRANIAN. Pakistans SIS has also been involved in some great misdirections. In some cases they try to pin threats on people that they desire to be marginalized, while in others they cover up the involvement of those affiliated with the government or who might embarass them. Sometimes they extract confessions and broker that information to third parties.

How can that information be trusted in the least from despotic states?

My second query relates to completely shifting the interrogation process away from coercive methods entirely. I recall that the interrogators of the Nazis before the Nuremburg Trials simply used long, quiet interactions (like playing chess) to open up the sources to talking about their actions. It apparently generated large amounts of accurate information.

My understanding is that there are now promising techniques using CAT-scans and PET-scans that could be used, with intelligent interrogation to detect when a “source” is being deliberately evasive or when they are being forthright and open. The method actually requires that the individual not be placed in any sort of physical pain when they give their responses. Ironically, instead of putting our resources into researching such non-coercive interrogations. The subject can’t be beaten, they can’t be drugged. They have to be well-fed and treated.

The interrogator asks a series of questions that eventually indicates inaccurate responses in the geniculate cortex and other centers requiring rational inhibition of normal processing pathways. If they do this the investigator can focus on why the individual is actively avoiding “honest” responses.

But if the individual is forthright, they will process answers without proceeding through inhibition areas, which likely would result in many individuals who are not guilty being exonerated (and without carrying the tales of abuse with them). In either case, actionable intelligence can be obtained.

Yet there seems to be no interest in developing these neurophysiological methods of evaluation. Instead we must be spending hundreds of millions of dollars in extraordinary renditions and mind-destroying brainwashing experiments in Guantanamo. But if we really wanted to obtain accurate information from terrorist suspects THIS would be the way to go.

he’s a great humanitarian.

Amnesty International is a brit organization.

Maybe they get human rights there a bit better.

Grey is a great american