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William Saletan

The case for torture: Ex-CIA officials explain “enhanced interrogations”

1. The detention program was a human library. The panelists didn’t use that term, but it reflects what they described. After detainees were interrogated, the CIA kept them around for future inquiries and to monitor their communications. Sometimes this yielded a nugget, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s message to his fellow detainees: “Do not say a word about the courier.” Rodriguez said this incident shows “the importance of having a place like a black site to take these individuals, because we could use that type of communication. We could use them as background information to check a name.” …

4. We had tested EITs on ourselves. Rodriguez said he quickly accepted the use of EITs in part because “I knew that many of these procedures were applied to our own servicemen. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers had gone through this.” If these methods were safe and moral to use on Americans, weren’t they safe and moral to use on our enemies?

5. Freelancing was forbidden. Rizzo outlined some rules for EITs: No interrogator was allowed to use a waterboard without first submitting written justification, and only the CIA director could approve it. So, for what it’s worth, there were internal checks on the practice, at least because the CIA would be politically accountable for what its interrogators did.

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So White boy, where did you bury your guns? TALK! Our we will have to use our special techniques.

Bulletchaser on January 31, 2013 at 4:26 PM

lol, some real Leftist Looney Tunes commenting at the link. The word “felon” is being regularly tossed around.

killing UBL was not worth the damage that the torture did to the USA and our reputation worldwide.

The information was valuable in a limited way for a limited time. But the picture we gave to the world of Americans torturing helpless captives will last for a hundred years.

If the NAZIS had done this (and I am sure they did), we would have hanged them. And I am sure we did.

These felons want to have it every way except the way that remotely accords with the law and morality.

These people have built their livelihoods around torture. Just because they are evil doesn’t mean they’re nihilistic. Of course they, like everyone else who shapes their life around a job, think they are doing something meaningful with their time.

Once we start torturing people, we’ve lost the moral battle. We might as well just start shooting children in Afghanistan because they’ll grow up to be terrorists one day.

the CIA uses a friggin’ fake vaccination program to take out bin Laden. That idiotic decision may end up costing more lives than 9/11.

The central thesis of this disgusting piece was that these “revelations” could or should change how we view torture.

Dang, these poor idiots are angry. One would never know they just won an election.

Del Dolemonte on January 31, 2013 at 4:34 PM

From a comment c/p by Del

These people have built their livelihoods around torturemurdering unborn babies. Just because they are evil doesn’t mean they’re nihilistic. Of course they, like everyone else who shapes their life around a job, think they are doing something meaningful with their time.

tom daschle concerned on January 31, 2013 at 4:40 PM

I especially like this part:

2. EITs were used to break the will to resist, not to extract information directly. Hayden acknowledged that prisoners might say anything to stop their suffering. (Like the other panelists, he insisted EITs weren’t torture.) That’s why “we never asked anybody anything we didn’t know the answer to, while they were undergoing the enhanced interrogation techniques. The techniques were not designed to elicit truth in the moment.” Instead, EITs were used in a controlled setting, in which interrogators knew the answers and could be sure they were inflicting misery only when the prisoner said something false. The point was to create an illusion of godlike omniscience and omnipotence so that the prisoner would infer, falsely, that his captors always knew when he was lying or withholding information. More broadly, said Hayden, the goal was “to take someone who had come into our custody absolutely defiant and move them into a state or a zone of cooperation” by convincing them that “you are no longer in control of your destiny. You are in our hands.” Thereafter, the prisoner would cooperate without need for EITs. Rodriguez explained: “Once you got through the enhanced interrogation process, then the real interrogation began. … The knowledge base was so good that these people knew that we actually were not going to be fooled. It was an essential tool to validate that the people were being truthful.“

It’s important to know that the moonbat infants crying over inaccurate information obtained during intense torture sessions had no clue how an interrogation regimen works. You don’t hurt them until they squeal, but rather, you wear them down on a strict schedule and either reward them for cooperating between sessions, or trick them into giving up information with social engineering methods that they are too exhausted and weary to recognize.

The method whereby they only ask questions that they already know the answers to in order to give the impression of omniscience works, too, but takes a bit longer to achieve results. Thinking that they won’t be punished if they press the green button works wonders if you can make them think they’ll be punished 100% of the time for pressing the red button.

mintycrys on January 31, 2013 at 4:50 PM

I can’t believe this was published in Slate.

novaculus on January 31, 2013 at 6:21 PM

Ahh the CIA when it had some stones….I miss those days..Obama has destroyed what was good about it

4. We had tested EITs on ourselves. Rodriguez said he quickly accepted the use of EITs in part because “I knew that many of these procedures were applied to our own servicemen. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers had gone through this.” If these methods were safe and moral to use on Americans, weren’t they safe and moral to use on our enemies?

This is great also..how many soldiers have been water boarded? did we torture them also ?

sadsushi on January 31, 2013 at 9:04 PM