as long as it saves one american life anywhere in the world i'm all for it...

watched the news

Condoning behavior like torture means you are not a decent human being."
No, it means I"m realistic and not living in la-la land of peace and harmony while lighting candles and smoking pot.

Please don't refer to bush and FDR in the same sentence I may vomit!This administration has circumvented the law so many times it is like a bad novel.

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 126 S. Ct. 2749 (2006), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that military commissions set up by the Bush administration to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay lack "the power to proceed because its structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949."[1] Specifically, the ruling says that Common Article 3 of the Third Geneva Convention was violated.

"How low will you go?"

Are we talking about doing the Conga? Or Torture?

yes I agree noone should support torture, but coersion in the form of 40 seconds using the cellephane method of waterboarding is a different story

That is your opinion but it's obvious you are only open to one side
here, and that makes you narrowminded, so what is actually worse here?
Twisted Sensibilities? Or narrowminded thinking?

Both could be
equal I suppose. If you were TRULY open to other sides, you would
see that both you and I support our nation, but from different sides,
instead of seeking middle ground here, you are off on some tyrant,
that's ok, for I stand on my side supporting torture of enemy combatants,
it's that simple, and my simple point that no one will address is this,
if torture does not work, then why is our nation along with others
still using it?

Actually, anybody who has done research on the subject knows that people can, and do, die from waterboarding

It seems that rather than take the steps necessary to get up to speed on the thread and post fact-based arguments to support your opinion

I cannot support such actions on moral grounds.

Condoning behavior like torture means you are not a decent human being. Not an attack on you, but your principles. If we condone behavior like torture, then the attacks of terrorism against us are justified.

because I would rather die to protect my country's integrity, than to sacrifice the high moral ground we should have

It didn't work against John McCain, it didn't work against Adm. Stockdale

There is no middle ground. If you condone torture, you are complicit in War Crimes.

I respect all opinions, but I can state that I do believe that
where our opinions are different, my opinion is more realistic
than yours, and I speak from a side of reality, not hopeful dreams.

Fort Hunt's Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII

"We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice," said John Gunther Dean, 81, who became a career Foreign Service officer and ambassador to Denmark.

The interrogators had standards that remain a source of pride and honor.

"During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone," said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. "We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity."

Exactly what went on behind the barbed-wire fences of Fort Hunt has been a mystery that has lured amateur historians and curious neighbors for decades.

The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners' cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/
10/05/AR2007100502492.html?hpid=topnews

t was a quotation from a resistance fighter. He said, as I recall, that it was the sheer dread of the Gestapo members that made him decide to join the fight against them. His utter disgust at Gestapo methods hinted, rumored or actually used was enough for him to secretly do what he could to bring down the Nazi order. He hated them with a black passion that was not deterred by the fear. The fear made him, and thousands of others join the fight against the Nazis. Who, then, was saved by the methods used?

Whether a system "works" in the short term never considers its effect on the man or woman required to apply it. The torturer is marked forever, with Macbeth-like blood which only they can see. They become secret sociopaths, alcoholics, drug users or worse. They do so to make the pain go away, if only for a while, because the memories never do.

I often wonder why two Germans I met confessed to me their awareness of such practices. One described a chance encounter with a former classmate who told him in a drunken rage in 1942 how "we are shooting them all" in torture fields of Poland. Another suffered in postwar years under a father whose drunken rampages displaced, at least for him if not for his child, the wartime interrogations he conducted in the Ukraine and Holland.

What 22-year-old American soldier and his yet-to-be-born children will suffer as well someday, the same way? We may even know him. How will today's interrogators be recognized someday for their work? Will they seek comfort in fine words, such as those spoken by CIA Chief Michael Hayden?

Hayden, when directly asked if waterboarding was torture and would the United State continue to use it, answered: "Judge (Michael) Mukasey (attorney general nominee) cannot nor can I answer your question in the abstract. I need to understand the totality of the circumstances in which this question is being posed before I can give you an answer."

The men who interrogated Nazis at Fort Hunt would have no problem answering that question. They know what torture is.

We can be proud of our men at Fort Hunt. They never compromised their humanity. The men at Fort Hunt helped reveal secret German weapons programs, strategies and plans. Their Nazi enemies were at least as brutal as those who confront us today. Our men overcame them with intelligence, not bestiality.

It has been said evil men are always amazed that good people can be clever, too.

These members of "the Greatest Generation" seemed to grasp intuitively that torture creates enemies. It doesn't stop them.

Torture breaks everyone involved. No amount of double-talk makes the pain go away.

If neither the head of the CIA nor the prospective attorney general can say categorically that waterboarding is torture, we have crossed an eddy of the river of no return.

Torture kills souls. The only cure for such spiritual pain is confession.

John Davis of Athens works for the federal government in Huntsville.

http://blog.al.com/bn/2007/11/torture_breaks_everyone_includ.html

Despite the considerable skills of the communist interrogators, they were not always able to get the information, or confessions, they wanted. World War II saw an enormous amount of torture. The Nazis, who openly admired the superior interrogation skills of the Soviets, were more prone to use poorly trained investigators who went to physical torture quickly. The results were often dismal. Thousands of Russian and Allied victims took their secrets to their (usually unmarked) graves. The Soviets proved that, if you have the time (weeks or months) and skilled interrogators, you can break just about anyone. As for the few who resisted everything, a bullet in the back of the head was the usual result. The Soviet interrogators were not good losers.

http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles2002/20020429.asp

Truth Extraction

A classic text on interrogating enemy captives offers a counterintuitive lesson on the best way to get information

Six months before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison broke into public view, a small and fairly obscure private association of United States Marine Corps members posted on its Web site a document on how to get enemy POWs to talk.

The document described a situation very similar to the one the United States faces in the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan: a fanatical and implacable enemy, intense pressure to achieve quick results, a brutal war in which the old rules no longer seem to apply.

Marine Major Sherwood F. Moran, the report's author, noted that despite the complexities and difficulties of dealing with an enemy from such a hostile and alien culture, some American interrogators consistently managed to extract useful information from prisoners. The successful interrogators all had one thing in common in the way they approached their subjects. They were nice to them.

Moran was writing in 1943, and he was describing his own, already legendary methods of interrogating Japanese prisoners of war. More than a half century later his report remains something of a cult classic for military interrogators. The Marine Corps Interrogator Translator Teams Association (MCITTA), a group of active-duty and retired Marine intelligence personnel, calls Moran's report one of the "timeless documents" in the field and says it has long been "a standard read" for insiders. (A book about the Luftwaffe interrogator Hans Joachim Scharff, whose charm, easygoing manner, and perfect English beguiled many a captured Allied airman into revealing critical information, is another frequently cited classic in the field.) An MCITTA member says the group decided to post Moran's report online in July of 2003, because "many others wanted to read it" and because the original document, in the Marine Corps archives, was in such poor shape that the photocopies in circulation were difficult to decipher. He denies that current events had anything to do with either the decision to post the document or the increased interest in it.

In his report (written in the form of a letter of advice to interpreters newly assigned to interrogation duty) Moran stressed that he would usually begin an interrogation by taking almost the opposite tack.

I often tell a prisoner right at the start what my attitude is! I consider a prisoner (i.e. a man who has been captured and disarmed and in a perfectly safe place) as out of the war, out of the picture, and thus, in a way, not an enemy … Notice that … I used the word "safe." That is the point: get the prisoner to a safe place, where even he knows … that it is all over. Then forget, as it were, the "enemy" stuff, and the "prisoner" stuff. I tell them to forget it, telling them I am talking as a human being to a human being.

Every soldier, Moran observed, has a "story" he desperately wants to tell. The interrogator's job is to provide the atmosphere that allows the prisoner to tell it.

Begin by asking him things about himself. Make him and his troubles the center of the stage, not you and your questions of war problems. If he is not wounded or tired out, you can ask him if he has been getting enough to eat; if he likes Western-style food … You can ask if he has had cigarettes, if he is being treated all right, etc. If he is wounded you have a rare chance. Begin to talk about his wounds. Ask if the doctor or corpsman has attended to him. Have him show you his wounds or burns. (They will like to do this!) …

On [one] occasion a soldier was brought in. A considerable chunk of his shinbone had been shot away. In such bad shape was he that we broke off in the middle of the interview to have his leg redressed. We were all interested in the redressing, in his leg, it was almost a social affair! And the point to note is that we really were interested, and not pretending to be interested in order to get information out of him. This was the prisoner who called out to me when I was leaving after that first interview, "Won't you please come and talk to me every day." (And yet people are continually asking us, "Are the Japanese prisoners really willing to talk?")

Moran spoke fluent Japanese, but more important, he was thoroughly familiar with Japanese culture, having spent forty years in Japan as a missionary. He used this knowledge for one of his standard gambits: making a prisoner homesick. "This line has infinite possibilities," he explained. "If you know anything about Japanese history, art, politics, athletics, famous places, department stores, eating places, etc. etc. a conversation may be relatively interminable." Moran emphasized that a detailed knowledge of technical military terms and the like was less important than a command of idiomatic phrases and cultural references that allow the interviewer to achieve "the first and most important victory"—getting "into the mind and into the heart" of the prisoner and achieving an "intellectual and spiritual" rapport with him.

Moran's whole approach—and Hans Joachim Scharff's, too—was built on the assumption that few if any prisoners are likely to possess decisive information about imminent plans. (And as one former Marine interrogator says, even if a prisoner does have information of the "ticking bomb" variety—where the nuke is going to go off an hour from now, in the classic if overworked example—under duress or torture he is most likely to try to run out the clock by making something up rather than reveal the truth.) Rather, it is the small and seemingly inconsequential bits of evidence that prisoners may give away once they start talking—about training, weapons, commanders, tactics—that, when assembled into a larger mosaic, build up the most complete and valuable picture of the enemy's organization, intentions, and methods.

Moran's report had an immediate impact. The Navy and the Marines recruited second-generation Japanese-Americans to teach an intensive one-year language course for interrogators that included a strong emphasis on Japanese culture. James Corum notes that the graduates of this course were among the most effective interrogators in the Pacific Island campaigns of 1944 and 1945: Marine interrogators deployed to the Marianas in June of 1944 were able to supply their commanders with the complete Japanese order of battle within forty-eight hours of landing on Saipan and Tinian.

One of the most striking points Moran made was that those interrogators who tried the hardest to break down the morale of POWs were actually revealing their own fear—"fear that the prisoner will take advantage of you and your friendship." This, he noted, was "the same idea that a foreman must swear at his construction gang in order to get work out of them."

Of course there always is the danger that some types will take advantage of your friendliness. This is true of any phase of life, whether you are a teacher, a judge, an athletic trainer, a parent. But there is some risk in any method. But this is where the interpreter's character comes in … You can't fool with a man of real character …

Moran was saying that an interrogator who is genuinely tough has the confidence to know that he will always keep the upper hand, even while being nice. "Enlightened hard-boiled-ness," he called this attitude. And he concluded that "strange as it may seem to say so," the most important characteristic of a successful interrogator is not his experience or even his linguistic knowledge; it is "his own temperament" and "his own character."

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200506/budiansky

So, in an effort to back up Bush's earlier boasts, and after Bush inquired as to the efficacy of the "harsh methods" used by interrogators, Tenet's CIA proceeded to employ those "aggressive interrogation" techniques including water-boarding, threats of imminent death, withholding medication, sleep depravation, etc. to a mentally unstable individual already physically weakened by the multiple gun shot wounds he suffered during his capture. From a Washington Post review of Suskind's book:

Under that duress, [Zubaydah] began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each...target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

None of those leads panned out - despite the "strong" approach taken during his interrogation. Nevertheless, actionable intelligence was eventually extracted from Zubaydah - but observe the method that finally yielded results:

Then there was a small break. A CIA interrogator...was skilled in the nuances of the Koran, and slipped under Zubaydah's skin. The al Qaeda operative believed in certain ideas of predestination - that things happen for reasons preordained. The interrogator worked this, pulling freely from the Koran. Zubaydah believed he had survived [his violent capture], when several of his colleagues were killed, for a purpose. He was convinced that that purpose, in the fullness of time, was to offer some cooperation to his captors, something a dead man couldn't do.

Zubaydah provided his interrogators with the name and whereabouts of Jose Padilla and none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - the planner of the 9/11 attacks itself. It was a major breakthrough. As Suskind notes:

On the issue of interrogation, Zubaydah represented a first test, with results that could now be reviewed. It seemed as though the FBI - and those inside the CIA advocating a gentler model of interrogation - might be right.

http://tianews.blogspot.com/2006/06/fear-of-fear-itself.html

Where these points of opinions by these credible characters is true, it still does not answer the question that if these particular people are Majority, then why is torture still being used?