the first August 2002 OLC specified that it was acceptable to apply physical pain to a detainee so long as it was less than the sort of pain emerging from "organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death."
and that as long as your "purpose" was to get actionable intelligence, not to cause pain, you were in the clear.
However, the 5/10/05 memo tells us that during an initial phase called "transition to interrogation"
the interrogators take an"open non-threatening approach" but the detainee "would have to provide information on actual threats and location information on high value targets at large –not lower level information–for interrogators to continue with [this] neutral approach." If the detainee does not meet this very high standard
well then they get the crap beat out of them and other icky things like the bugs Spencer posted about.
Here’s the rub, when I was doing the whole prosecution gig, they sent me off to training in interrogation. We learned something called the Reid method, which has been SOP since the 1940’s–because it works so damn well.
The essence of the Reid method, and every other EFFECTIVE interrogation method I have ever heard of, is that you will almost never get the subject to "go for his own lungs" upfront. Nope, you have to coax him bit by bit down the slippery slope until, eventually, he tells you all you want to know.
Predicating not subjecting someone to "enhanced interrogation techniques" on them doing something that goes completely against human nature and decades of successful interrogations, means that the PURPOSE could not have been to gather actionable intel.
The PURPOSE had to be to inflict pain, for some other reason. What, to instill fear? To break down will to live?
I don’t know–and get too upset trying to guess. All I know is 5/10/05 eviscerates the "no liability if your PURPOSE was not the infliction of pain" defense.
Related posts:
- Gitmo Lawyer Says Detainee Treatment Mirrored Own Torture Training; Harsh Treatment Tears “Fabric of Who We Are”
- Hassan Ghul, Mystery Detainee 2, and the Three Bradbury Memos
- McChrystal: Detainee Abuse Initially Informed by Rumsfeld Memo
- Marcy Wheeler on Torture Prosecutions: Liveblog At NN09
- One Former Official Ready to Bust Others for Torture
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I’ve generally made the case that the purpose was to get the victims to say whatever the interrogators fed to them to say, in order to provide propaganda material that could be released to the media, and then used by the media to fan ever great levels of fear and bigotry among the public (and hence increase support for the shrub dictatorship). It was to provide raw material for Fox to be able to report: “terr’ists in custody confirm bio-weapon plot” or “terr’ists at Gitmo detail dirty bomb threat.” This was about fear and propaganda, not about actionable intel. And to obtain such propaganda, they had to break the will of the hapless prisoners we had in custody, to the point that they would simply regurgitate anything they were told to say.
What do we know was the practical effect of in the “intelligence” derived from tortured detainees? An article in the Washington Post in the last week or so stated that it caused investigators to spend millions of dollars- not to mention wasted time– chasing false leads.
Since we know this was the effect, perhaps it is not unreasonable to speculate that this was its purpose.
Dugg
dugg 2
We must get this monster Jay Bybee off the federal appeals court, now.
fair trials!
lots of them.
I don’t see what the point of that is. Why not just release the shit they wanted people top hear and skip the interrogation all together? No one would have been the wiser.
Just like our soldiers had fun piling up naked Iraqis and then covering them with feces, torturing was also fun in a perverted kind of way and was done just for the shear pleasure of it.
Of course, some soldiers coming back to America will go on to live normal lives. Some won’t.
My longstanding hypothesis is that this was engineered by Mr. Cheney as a theatrical tool to show that no matter what our enemies did, we would do worse to them and theirs.
Its purpose seems to have been the same as those from whom the US developed its SERE training – Maoist China and Soviet Russia. That is, to break the individual. Not in order to “brain wash” them into becoming moles in their own military. To break them, to destroy their personalities and therefore deprive them of the will to oppose us. (Or to think, feel or control their bodily functions.)
That torture only worked with the few in our possession, and increased our enemies geometrically, seems not to have occurred to Mr. Cheney or his best and brightest. But it surely has.
I would concur with Blub, above…and would add that (IMO) some power players within the Bush administration got off on it, psychologically.
The fact that it ran contrary to law and rationality added to their forbidden frisson of excitement.
Only TRAITORS Torture…
frisson
My word for the day. Thank you.
Where there live feeds ,via Mc Connell, from the torture chambers to the kings chambers?
Perpetual war for perpetual profits/power. Perhaps making enemies was exactly what he wanted.
I don’t know–and get too upset trying to guess. All I know is 5/10/05 eviscerates the “no liability if your PURPOSE was not the infliction of pain” defense.
Does this imply that any such actions taken after the 5/10/05 memo was circulated, no one who knew about it could claim to be “just following orders”?
that’s always the purpose since you cannot get more information through torture and every single professional knows this
a person being tortured will tell you whatever they think you want to hear
whcih is of course incorrect and it does not serve us at all to even acknowledge that this statement is nothing short of depraved
yet even if it were true, and it clearly is not, (there is STILL no reason to torture since you do not get more actionable information you get less
every person you torutre creates more terrorists, ten fold, every relative, every friend, every friend’s friend becomes a terrorist against your cause
even if you did happen to stop an event, (where you would have stoped frar more with other methods) through each person you torture you have created dozens if not hundredss and then thousands more events
and anyone who agreed with your cause before your policies of torture would with no doubt NOT inform you of events for fear of being tortured themselves
THE ONLY PURPOSE OF TORUTER IS TO PERPETUATE INSURGENCY, that is the ONLY purpose and they knew it
true, and clearly only traitors fail to prosecute traitors
looseheadprop, has the environment yet grown ripe for the disbar of yoo?
Hear, hear! Sooner than later. Bye bye Jay Bidee. Keith Obermann is on it.
Good.
Why did Cheney leave? Who stopped him? Did he leave? This is a maniac who has no boundaries. Did someone eventually stand in his way? Was it the military?
Hey Buddy … keep yer fancy, frilly, french words out of America ! Capiche !
Honest question: Who has the power to remove him ?
Perfidious snowback! Why, I oughta…
;>)
for the same reason that they wrote these incriminating memos. To provide a measure of arse coverage – well, if a real terr’ist in custody gave us confirmation on the bomb, then there must be a bomb and we can use that info to scare the masses. They either figured the torture memos would never get out in the way they are getting out now or that they were sufficiently deluded into thinking that the public wouldn’t care… perhaps cause they thought that the terr’ists would attack again… and again (heck, they were praying for that to happen).
This is actually a tried and true strategy of despots – use torture victims to corrobate fearmongering accusations of plots against the state, leading to still more people to arrest (on false charges) and hence more people to torture, for still more fearmongering accusations, leading to more raids and more people to torture, etc, etc., creating a frenzied atmosphere of paranoia and constant, mind-numbing sense that the enemy is among us and about to blow us up.
As a historical note, this is precisely what Pinochet and Galtieri did, thus creating the plausible appearance of a communist conspiracy against their rule. There never was such a conspiracy, but they got enough tortured people to point the finger at other people who could also be tortured to confirm the alleged conspiracy, that a lot of people in the general public were gulled into thinking that the commies would take over if the generals restored civilian rule.
I can see Dick and shrub taking this particular page from their fascist playbook, quite consciously. Heck, the School of the Americas probably wrote the manual on some of these tactics. Simply making the shite up, as you put it, only goes so far. You need a face or at least a name to the source of the fear to make it palpable. These are not good or sane people..
You have to read in context of the CAT, which makes it clear that if the abuse is delivered up with an intention to get someone to confess to certain acts or give information, that’s one of the specific intents for which there is liablity.
How can we claim to be a country of laws if we are just going forward…since mostly crimes happen in the past.
Could this start a new defense for criminals. I know I robbed the bank and my gun accidentally went off and killed a guard but going forward I am going to catch up on my house payments.
I did a post on the SERE techniques back in July last year. I don’t believe that main purpose was to cause pain, I believe it was to illicit FALSE confessions (which would then be used to justify the existence of GITMO and the torture program.) It was well known that these techniques were developed by Chinese in the Korean War to illicit false confessions.
My full post is here: http://dastinct.blogspot.com/2008/07/gitmo-2.html
and I paste it below.
GITMO torture designed to illicit FALSE confessions
Why did we really institute policies to torture “detainees”? An interesting read from Scott Shane on GITMO torture in the NYT today sheds some light on that question.
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”
Lets recap:
1. The Chinese developed torturous “brainwashing” techniques during the Korean War and used them on American prisoners. This caused much concern, not just because of torture, but because it was successfully used to illicit FALSE CONFESSIONS. As John McCain’s confession showed, those same techniques remained successful during the Viet Nam War.
2. The US Air Force did a study of those techniques in 1957.
3. Near the end of the Korean War the Air Force used that study to create SERE, a training program for military personnel (primarily pilots) for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.
4. In 02-03 SERE trainers went to GITMO to present to interrogators “the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training.”
Did we really forget that the reasons those techniques were developed was to illicit FALSE confessions?
Certainly that seems highly unlikely. A significant part of the SERE training was resistance; learning how to resist torture when it was being used to illicit FALSE confessions. Surely the SERE trainers knew that when they went to GITMO to teach US interrogators the Chinese torture techniques. Just as surely those who tasked the SERE trainers to GITMO knew that as well.
These are not simply War Crimes; but the now obviously false claim that they were used to get actionable intelligence makes it clear that they are also crimes against American Democracy; High Crimes and Misdemeanors if you will.
It takes a special kind of person to order these things and to do these kinds of things.
From Deliverance: