Well-argued, clearly presented. Thanks

here’s a cookie, please tell me where osama is.. pretty please, pretty please with sugar on top.. how about another cookie??

These people were/are mass murders, I have no problem with making them uncomfortable as part of getting valuable information. I salute our military members on a job well done in killing Bin Laden. I salute our interrogators on a job well done in getting ANY information, by the means they used.

How do we know that the humane approach is better? How many people did not “cross-over” even though they were treated in a “kind manner?” There is no way of really knowing what works better because each situation and each person is different.

And what about the urgency of the matter? Knowing the location of a bomb that is set to detonate (24)is much different than tracking down a courier.

The arguments about “torture” not helping find bin Laden are worth discussing, but not without weakness. What is torture and who gets to define it anyway? Pulling out their finger nails? Placing electrodes on their genitals? Waterboarding? Is it only physical? Or does it also include mental? Forcing them to listen to awful music 24/7? What about sensory deprivation (isolation to one extent or another)? Placing them on a bland and unpalatable diet? Denying them shower privileges? Maybe constant and repeated interrogation by Mr. Rogers should be considered torture, too.

I think these arguments aren’t worthy of debate based on a few anecdotes. You first have to define terms. Then you have to test your hypothesis. Only then can you offer argument – either way.

A number of people have alluded to two arguments in suggesting that torture or abuse may be an effective way to elicit information from detainees.

1. Being nice is never going to get the bad guys to talk.
2. It is not clear what torture is or where to draw the line.

My sense from talking to interrogators is that most detainees who “break” don’t do so because they fear for their physical safety. In many cases they are concerned about the safety of their families and some sort of credible guarantee that the US and its allies can guarantee their safety can win cooperation when it matters most. Eric Maddox, the interrogator who found Saddam, scoffs at the use of waterboarding. Its unprofessional and ineffective, he says. To learn more about how interrogation really works, I recommend his book “Capturing Saddam: The Hunt for Saddam Hussein.”

As for the debate about what constitutes torture and what is simply abuse, we could argue about the semantics for hours. But it doesn’t really matter. The real pros say that the bad guys are not going to “break” if you pull out their fingernails or keep them awake for three days in a row. Remember these are determined people who are often willing to die for their cause. A little pain is unlikely to turn them into what Cloonan calls a “traitor” to their cause. The trick is to figure out what motivates their hatred and what do they really care about in the world. Once you know these things you are in a position to bargain for whatever useful information they may possess. Jack Bauer tactics, professional interrogators say, are very unlikely to get you from here to there.

One beautiful Tuesday morning our world was changed forever when a group of Islamic Extremists, with years of planning and preparation, hijacked four planes of innocent passengers. They piloted 3 of those planes into building filled with more innocent people, the fourth plane contained courageous men and women who, knowing they would die, stopped the terrorists from their target, The White House.

While America has never been loved by most foreigners, for a short time the world mourned with us. From that moment on we went after those responsible.

Every day our military fights for us, for the freedom that is America, for the right of freedom of speech. I thank every member of the military and their families who give, and give and give. As the mother of a daughter in the Army I want our government to use whatever it takes to keep her safe while she works to keep us safe.

For the person who was “Embarrassed” by our military who condone certain interrogation techniques, how despicable you are. If you or your loved one was in the hands of Islamic Extremists I’m betting you would want our military to do whatever it takes to save you.

The next time the National Guard is called in to help with yet another disaster, border problem, riot, etc., imagine those men and women have to drop everything to help others. Our military is all over the world, helping, fighting, saving, stopping bad guys and so many give their lives. If we have to use certain interrogation techniques on terrorists, I’m all for it.

Unfortunately for those who claim that torture doesn’t work, it did.

No one can now deny that subjects who were initially unhelpful (one of whom — KSM — was described as “superhuman” in his resistance to standard interrogation) later revealed information that ultimately led to the capture of bin Laden. Indeed, based on the evidence we now have, without the “mere nickname” shared by KSM, the chain of information that ultimately led to bin Laden’s death would never have begun.

In fact, this completely undermines a meaty portion of the claims made in this article.

Said above: “If you gave the detainee any reason not to trust you, there is no negotiation, Cloonan explained. The detainee won’t be willing to bargain with giving up his knowledge in exchange for something the interrogator can provide. He simply won’t trust you. Torture, Cloonan says, shatters any possibility for trust. “It changes the dynamic,” Cloonan said. “And once you have gone down that path, in my experience there is no going back.””

Wasn’t KSM given a reason not to trust his interrogators? After all, they tortured him, repeatedly. But this same article argues against the efficacy of torture by saying that he gave the most important information (regarding the courier of bin Laden) years after he was tortured. So, quite obviously, we have at least one very important example of a man who was unhelpful, then was tortured, then later gave up important information under standard interrogation techniques. But I thought that the harsh techniques destroyed all chance of establishing trust in the future and getting information from a detainee? It seems that you can’t claim that BOTH 1) KSM didn’t reveal his information because of torture, since it came later AND 2) Once you’ve tortured someone, you cannot expect him to provide useful information. That’s exactly what this article claims, but held together with the known facts (ie, KSM talked after being waterboarded), they form a contradiction.

I have some advice for the anti-torture folks. You can make a decent argument based on the immorality of the techniques, or that the damage it causes to our image outweighs the information that can be gained, or perhaps even that it’s a very risky technique. But you cannot say that it doesn’t ever work, or that it doesn’t ever provide true information. It does. This really cannot be argued now that we have the facts. And we’ve known this for a quite some time. UBL’s courier was a tiny (but important) fraction of the information these men gave us only after resisting standard interrogation and later being waterboarded.

I leave you with this:

“the first terrorist to be subjected to enhanced techniques, Zubaydah, told his interrogators something stunning. According to the Justice Department memos released by the Obama administration, Zubaydah explained that “brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.” In other words, the terrorists are called by their religious ideology to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know.

Several senior officials told me that, after undergoing waterboarding, Zubaydah actually thanked his interrogators and said, “*You must do this for all the brothers.*” [emphasis added] The enhanced interrogation techniques were a relief for Zubaydah, they said, because they lifted a moral burden from his shoulders — the responsibility to continue resisting.

The importance of this revelation cannot be overstated: Zubaydah had given the CIA the secret code for breaking al-Qaeda detainees. CIA officials now understood that the job of the interrogator was to give the captured terrorist something to resist, so he could do his duty to Allah and then feel liberated to speak. So they developed techniques that would allow terrorists to resist safely, without any lasting harm. Indeed, they specifically designed techniques to give the terrorists the false perception that what they were enduring was far worse than what was actually taking place.” – Courting Disaster

BTW, this is the same guy that resisted our efforts at standard interrogation, but — after enhanced interrogation — gave up the codename Mukhtar. Because he gave up this codename, analysts were able to piece together the information that led them to KSM (and from KSM — after enhanced interrogation — to the courier, and from the courier to bin Laden.)

Hmm, another link in the chain that led to UBL, that would not have existed had “torture” been avoided.

“Yes, that would be wonderfully easy. But then, after you spit out some grudging scraps of info, you would come to realize that I still want more from you, and am not going to actually kill you(In fact there is a simple arithmetic here–If you believe that I actually will eventually kill you(a CRITICAL supposition for this method to yield much of anything), then each time I ask you for information, you are more reluctant to yield any, fearing that you might finally give me the thing that I want, and end your usefulness to me. Therefore, each bit of info you give will be calculated to be less likely to be valuable than the last. This alone causes the torture methodology to fail the timeliness test.) Once you know I will not kill you, you are free to play along, mis-informing, tossing out scraps to end each torture session, settling into the dynamic, realizing that YOU are actually in control.”

Your post betrays a critical misunderstanding of the nature of the CIA program. You’re probably right that if death were the ultimate threat, then the system would not be as reliable as it has proven to be.

But death was as far as we know not on the table for the terrorists in question. If you’re interested in debating the issue, take the time to read in detail the memos that our Fearless Leader so helpfully released to the world, including our enemies.

If death was the ultimate threat, it’d likely have been seen as a release and goal for these men, or it might have led to the scenario that you describe above. But it wasn’t. Instead it was ongoing and severe physical and especially psychological pressure. The CIA never let on all that it knew and constantly interspersed questions they knew the answers to with questions they actually needed answered. In fact, that was also part of the breaking process. Each time the terrorist tried to do what you claim, ie, toss out “scraps” or lies or half truths, the CIA would return with just enough information to show that they knew the truth. They played prisoners’ information against one another to insure that a high percentage of a prisoner’s information was accurate ONCE THEY WERE BROKEN. There are known examples of the CIA going back and forth from terrorist A to terrorist B to terrorist C and back to terrorist A again each time building their information enough to challenge the terrorist with more truth to derive still more accurate information. The terrorists soon learned that they couldn’t often lie, and stopped withholding. KSM even went on to request a blackboard and gave “seminars” to the officers.

You really should either read the memos or read something like Courting Disaster (that summarizes the information.) It seems that you (like most who make similar arguments) are imagining medieval or Jack Baur-like torture sessions. The system was *always* designed to have two separate phases: 1) Interrogation (/”torture”) was meant to psychologically break the terrorist so they would cooperate. 2) Debriefing would come only after the terrorist was broken, this is when the CIA would really start to seek accurate information.

Your entire argument is in a sense unfortunately unfalsifiable. We can’t “know” whether a given terrorist might have given information using normal tactics *eventually*. But what we do have is the evidence that the techniques did work as designed. We know of many terrorists that were not cooperating at all (or very little) under normal interrogation, who then spilled their guts during debriefing only after harsh techniques were used to break them. Many, many arrests came through the use of harsh interrogation from suspects who had completely refused to submit to normal interrogation (eg, one terrorist masturbated each time the interrogators showed up, refusing to say a single word.)

Where is your *evidence* that the other tactics would have worked better? Every single time waterboarding was approved for use against a terrorist (that’s a total of three terrorists btw), that terrorist had refused to provide any more information, and then, after the interrogation, provided more.