What this means for all of you who are having difficulty comprehending is that torture does work and that most who are opposed are opposed because they think it immoral not ineffective.

Of course, when you waterboard you get all the magic answers you want -because remember, the subject will talk. They all talk! Anyone strapped down will say anything, absolutely anything to get the torture to stop. Torture. Does. Not. Work.

We rejected the view that interrogators could merely "take off the gloves" and that information would somehow magically flow if we brutalized our "guests." This notion was uninformed and counterproductive, not to mention illegal, ...

Those who have not mastered these techniques fall back on the ultimate admission of incompetence and resort to brutality.

But legal or not, the important thing to remember is that torture doesn't work.

What does my religious status have to do with this thread?

I did not say anyone is condoning violence on our troops, ...

I did not see anyone denouncing tactics utilized on our own people, ...

I believe our country could learn alot from Israel in their interrogation methods,

And tell me when was the last time you can tell me someone died from water boarding?

YOu can say YOU look stupid, however I will not say that of myself.

what i said before you so ignorantly became rude and showed YOUR lack of education, is that ...

once you become rude and obnoxious, it opens the doors for others to do so, ...

denying someone of food and water for days on end is torture as well, it just doesn't leave marks :)

The Israelis figured all of this out a long time ago. For the last three years I have been in and out of Israeli jails interviewing members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Many of them had been in suicide bomber cells — just the kind of people the Israelis would want to extract every last detail out of. None of them, however, claimed to have been tortured. The Israelis found out what they needed to know using traditional, legal police methods. It simply isn't worth it for them to risk damaging their already shaky international reputation by torturing suspects on the slim hope they just may get a lead.

Dan Coleman, a retired FBI agent who worked on many counter-terrorism cases, says traditional police work and due process produce more concrete results than flashy rendition programs and rough interrogation tactics. Speaking to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, Coleman was scornful of former colleagues in the CIA who, he said, "seemed to think there were different rules" after Sept. 11, 2001."

Giving foreign terror suspects their rights under U.S. law actually made them more co-operative, in Coleman's experience. "The lawyers show these guys there's a way out. It's human nature, people don't co-operate with you unless they have some reason to."

Others agree. Tom Parker, a former British intelligence officer who teaches at Yale, said his country had learned hard lessons from its mistakes in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, when IRA suspects were subject to tough physical questioning. It didn't work, Parker said.

"The U.S. is doing what the British did, detaining people and violating their civil liberties. It did nothing but exacerbate the situation. You end up radicalizing the entire population."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/renditions.html

Guernica: Of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the 9/11 mastermind, you write: “But what is revealing about his life is that at one turning point after another, whatever inclinations he may have had to take a violent route were reinforced by his encounter with violations of human rights.” Can you actually point to such a pattern?

Schulz: You know, when I was researching the book I didn’t find huge numbers of studies of the personalities of too many terrorists. So it’s very hard to make generalizations. We know that in that particular case he had been tortured in Egyptian prisons, and we know that he had gone to Afghanistan and seen many violations that the Soviets had committed during the occupation. And in both cases, his friends report that those experiences radicalized him. And those experiences may have reinforced inclinations that he had before. But they provided an internal rationale for his then opting for a violent course. I mean, after all, this is someone who’s trained as a physician, and presumably at one point in his life saw his role as bringing healing to the people, and at some point made a decision that that role needed to be supplemented, if not replaced, by acts of enormous violence.

http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/27/the_fragile_scaffolding_of_hum/

Coalition comrades will pay in blood for this barbaric idiocy

It sickens me to see it. I have been in Abu Ghraib prison: I was taken there when I was captured fighting behind enemy lines during the first Gulf war. The place was truly terrifying, a monument to the animal brutality of Saddam's tyranny.

I was whipped by my "interrogators". They beat me with planks of wood. I wasn't electrocuted, it is true - but that was only because there was no electricity. Improvising novel methods of cruelty, the Iraqis would heat spoons on the paraffin heaters in the interrogation rooms and use them to burn my legs. I had my back teeth pulled out. I was stripped and forced to eat my own excrement. The humiliation was part of the torture.

Of course what the Americans did to their Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib was not as bad as that. But the photographs of the Americans taunting and insulting their Iraqi prisoners, stripping them naked and forcing them to undergo mock-executions and to simulate sex with each other, will have convinced thousands of Iraqis that the Americans are just as bad as Saddam's torturers. If there were any Iraqis who believed the coalition's claim that they were benign liberators, there won't be many now.

The soldiers responsible for the abuse have guaranteed thousands of new recruits to the organisations such as al-Qaeda which want to kill as many coalition troops in Iraq as possible. The images of torture they have created will have stiffened the resolve of the Iraqi militants and encouraged those Iraqis who were wavering to join the resistance against the coalition. So more young American soldiers will be blown apart by booby-trapped cars and shot by snipers. Their unnecessary deaths will have been caused by the stupidity of their own comrades.

There have been claims that the US interrogations resulted in valuable information. I doubt this. Whatever was going on when those pictures were taken, it was not the interrogation of prisoners by the US Army. It was some stupid kids bullying their captives for the sheer hell of it. You can tell that by the smiles on the faces of US soldiers - and indeed by the fact that there are any pictures at all of what happened. Those soldiers are anyway too young to be trained interrogators. Moreover, the woman wears a watch, which no serious interrogator ever does, because denying your victim any sense of time is an essential part of any properly-conducted interrogation.

No, this was just a group of fools determined to have fun by humiliating their prisoners. That they were allowed to do it is an indictment of the discipline and leadership in their unit. I hope someone sorts the mess out soon - otherwise something similarly horrible will happen again. And the Americans will lose Iraq permanently, with dreadful consequences for the rest of us.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=
/opinion/2004/05/02/do0201.xml

Wow, I am h onestly beginning to believe you have serious problems, you do not answer points made to you, in fact, all you do is make up silly insults wh ich honestly make no sense, you are becoming very creepy really fast.

you have not proved anything, I honestly wish you would, that is what makes debates, not your childish insults

uh huh, once again, you do not address anything, it's obvious you can't and quite frankly is not worth responding to anymore, you failed to prove any of your points within this topic, the only thing you have been successful in proving is how ignorant you are. Thank you and have a great night.

I see your points, but where we can say that there are these adverse documented facts of people literally changing dispositions due to past tortures in which they have received, are you speaking out against torture as a whole? Or on individual basis? The reason I ask your opinion on this particular question, is that I do understand that this happens, but there are times where information does need to be gained, and quite frankly, merely asking does not work, therefore, what would be a solution to torture in your eyes?

So once again, Israel tortures and DOES torture, therefore, you are wrong in your statement of Israel NOT torturing or does not believe in doing so.

For the last three years I have been in and out of Israeli jails interviewing members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Many of them had been in suicide bomber cells — just the kind of people the Israelis would want to extract every last detail out of. None of them, however, claimed to have been tortured.

.... if the enemy did torture me, I would have endured as much as humanly possible and they would have had to drag it out of me while screaming....

As I understand current US military training (and I certainly am no expert in the matter) after incidents like the Hanoi Hilton ( and troops tortured to death while not talking) the standard procedure is to allow for a relaxation of "name , rank, and serial number" given a life and death situation.

Like McNab, one is allowed to give additional information that is not tactically relevant to the big picture, to save one's life. That's my understanding of it, anyway.

There is even evidence as of Aug 2007 that Israel is STILL torturing Palestinians.

Where this worked for McNab with that particular situation, more times to none soldiers are not that lucky, more have died in the hands of enemy interrogators than those who were just "lucky", I do not find that this man's tactics would work for all soldiers or military members, largely due to the fact, it depends on the compassion of the interrogator's or their stupidity, and most are not either.

This is common sense, it's a known fact that just lying to interrogators does not always work. It more times to none depends on the interrogator's, and in case you have not watched the news at all during the ongoing war, many a person or military member was beheaded, regardless of what they said or did. Therefore, this is fact.