Bush's book

[elder999]

1st off, voluntarily submitting to waterboarding and being stripped, bound and tortured with it are two different things.

Kinda like the difference between rough sex and rape.


And now, from the more than satisfactory Merriam Webster Collegiate English Language Technical Manual (That's engineerspeak for dictionary):

torture

verb
tor·turedtor·tur·ing\ˈtȯrch-riŋ, ˈtȯr-chə-\
Definition of TORTURE

transitive verb
1
: to cause intense suffering to : torment

2
: to punish or coerce by inflicting excruciating pain

3
: to twist or wrench out of shape : distort, warp

And, from the CIA WEBPAGE:

As I read the volume, my thoughts drifted back to James J. Angleton, the CIA's chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974. In 1975, Senator Frank Church of Idaho led a Senate investigation into alleged intelligence abuses. I was his special assistant on the committee, and one of my assignments was to spend time with Angleton, probing his views on counterintelligence. At Angleton's suggestion, he and I met weekly for a few months at the Army-Navy Club in Washington DC. One of the key principles of counterintelligence interrogation, he emphasized to me, was this: if you torture a subject, he will tell you whatever you want to hear. The infliction of pain was a useless approach-- "counterproductive," as some of the authors in this anthology would put it. Angleton also had little regard for the polygraph or for chemicals as instruments of truth-seeking. He was not above using some forms of discomfort, though, such as Spartan quarters for the subject, along with sleep deprivation, time disorientation, and exhaustive questioning by way of a "good cop, bad cop" routine. Like some of the authors in this volume, he believed in using a combination of rapport-building (the good cop) and the engendering of some fear (the bad cop--although not one armed with a pair of pliers).

If Angleton had been able to read this book, he would have discovered a considerable corpus of research that suggests that the induction of sleep deprivation, fatigue, isolation, or discomfort in a subject merely raises the likelihood of inaccurate responses during subsequent questioning. As for the polygraph, researchers in this study tell us that this approach has definite shortcomings, but "there is currently no viable technical alternative to polygraphy."

The entire document is here: Educing Information


So we have a comprehensive scientific study of over 40 years of data compiled by the intelligence community and generated under the Bush administration pretty much says what Senator John McCain and others have said for years:Torture doesn't work.

Interestingly, wateboarding was used to elicit false confessions in Missippi, back in 1926, and the Missisippi Supreme court overturned a confession of murder, and called waterboarding torture.

Waterboarding was also used by U.S. soldiers in the Phillipines in 1898, and it caused something of a scandal at the time, though feelings were....mixed, those on both sides of the controversy called it torture.

The Japanese and the Gestapo used waterboarding on U.S. troops during WWII. Many Japanese and Germans were convicted of war crimes, including waterboarding, which was classified at the time as torture.

Waterboarding was declared illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam, and U.S. soldiers were forbidden from using the practice to get information. At least one U.S. soldier was court martialed for participating in waterboarding.The U.S. generals called it torture.

The Chilean Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture called the practice of waterboarding by the Pinochet regime torture.

Most interestingly, though, waterboarding is used in the SERE school because it was specifically used by Communist regimes-North Korea, Red China and North Vietnam-to elicit false confessions from American POWs. Consequently, one can conclude that, just as John McCain-a victim of torture himself-has said:torture doesn't work-the subject will say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear to make it stop.

What's waterboarding? Stupid,really stupid. It makes us look bad, and it doesn't work.

And it's torture.

Heree's what Brigadier Genreal David Irvine had to say about torture:

No one has yet offered any validated evidence that torture produces reliable intelligence. While torture apologists frequently make the claim that torture saves lives, that assertion is directly contradicted by many Army, FBI, and CIA professionals who have actually interrogated al Qaeda captives. Exhibit A is the torture-extracted confession of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al Qaeda captive who told the CIA in 2001, having been "rendered" to the tender mercies of Egypt, that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda to use WMD. It appears that this confession was the only information upon which, in late 2002, the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state repeatedly claimed that "credible evidence" supported that claim, even though a now-declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report from February 2002 questioned the reliability of the confession because it was likely obtained under torture. In January 2004, al-Libi recanted his "confession," and a month later, the CIA recalled all intelligence reports based on his statements.

and a former FBI interrogator says about torture:

former FBI agent said some of the most aggressive interrogation techniques in dispute are rarely effective anyway.


"Generally speaking, those don't work," said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI agent and an ABC News consultant.


"I think water boarding is one we've all heard about, and I think the public understands what the term means," Cloonan told Bill Weir on ABC News' "Good Morning America Weekend." "We sort of fake drown somebody."

 

[billc]

From Courting Disaster:

"Ali Soufan, the FBI agent and CIA critic,says:' " When they are in pain, poeple will say anything to get the pain to stop. Most of the time, they lie, make up anything to make you stop hurting them...That means the information you're getting is useless."

"What this statement reveals is that Soufan knows nothing about how the CIA actually employed enhanced interrogation techniques. As Former National Security Advisor Steve Hadley explains, "The interrogation techniques were not to elicit information. So the whole argument that people tell you lies under torture misses the point." Hadley says the purpose of the techniques was to "bring them to the point where they are willing to cooperate, and once they are willing to cooperate, then the techniques stop and you do all the things the FBI agents say you ought to do to build trust and all the rest." According to Mike Hayden, as enhanced techniques are applied, CIA interrogators would ask th detainees questions to which the interogators already know the answers-allowing them to judge whether the detainees are being truthful and determine when the terrorists had reached a level of compliance...Once interrogators determine a terrorist has reached a point of compliance, the techniques stop, and traditional non-coercive methods of questioning are used.

 

[billc]

From Courting Disaster:

"One thing the U.S. government learned from SERE training is that waterboarding is highly effective. According to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, by 2001 all the military services except the Navy stopped using the waterboard in Sere training because it was too effective. In his May 2005 memo to the CIA, the OLC's Steve Bradbury wrote that "the use of the waterboard was discontinued by the other services not because of concern about possible physical or mental harm, but because students were not successful at resisting the technique and, as such, it was not considered to be a useful training technique. If waterboarding was found to be this effective against our millitary personnel, it strains credulity to argue that it would not be effective against captured terrorists as well."

 

[Bob Hubbard]

http://lawreview.wustl.edu/slip-opinions/waterboarding-is-illegal/

Long read, lots of citations, references to treaties, US law, etc. Couple of highlights, bolding mine.

Three major treaties that the United States has signed and unambiguously ratified prohibit the United States from subjecting prisoners in the War on Terror to this kind of treatment. First, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which the Senate unanimously ratified in 1955, prohibits the parties to the treaty from acts upon prisoners including “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; . . . outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”[18] Second, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the Senate ratified in 1992, states that “[n]o one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”[19] Third, the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, which the Senate ratified in 1994, provides that “[e]ach State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction,”[20] and that “[e]ach State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture . . . .”[21]

The United States has enacted statutes prohibiting torture and cruel or inhuman treatment. ... the Torture Act,[23] the War Crimes Act,[24],and the laws entitled “Prohibition on Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of Persons Under Custody or Control of the United States Government”[25] and “Additional Prohibition on Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.”[26] The first two statutes are criminal laws while the latter two statutes extend civil rights to any person in the custody of the United States anywhere in the world.

...

There is no doubt that waterboarding is illegal under the plain language of each of these four statutes. When it is practiced in other countries, the State Department characterizes waterboarding as “torture.”[46] ... Finally, American courts have ruled that when prisoners in the United States are subjected to waterboarding, it is a violation of the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments, and therefore it would be a violation of 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000dd and 2000dd-0 prohibiting cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.[49]

So, waterboarding is legally considered torture, and torture is a violation of law, both US and international. Regardless on if it works, it's illegal, and as such should not considered acceptable for use by US forces.

 

[billc]

Well, I have to go so I will leave this idea out there. The terrorists just tried to blow up cargo plains. If we capture some of them I hope that we use some really, really stern questioning to get these hardened religous fanatics to give us the information we need to stop them. I know, maybe we should take the advice of Monty Python's flying circus because noone can withstand...the Comfy Chair. May the next victims of terrorism rest in peace.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Maybe we need to address the causes of terrorism? Maybe we need more efficient security to stop them before they get in position to act?

Tell me, have all these people who were water boarded actually terrorists? Not 1 innocent person in the mix? I wonder what Canadian Maher Arar would say to that. Oh wait, the US turned him over to Syria for just under a year of "questioning", where he was "questioned" by a steel cable, and other "enhanced questioning methods". Oh, he was found innocent.

Over 3,000 people have been "disappeared" and "questioned" since 9/11. How many were actually innocent?

Or, should we accept a few innocents as "acceptable losses" as we "fight to keep our freedom and rights"? I wonder, are -you- an "acceptable loss" should you be mistaken for a suspect and "questioned"? Am I? Are any of us?

Personally, as I said, 2 wrongs don't make a right. You can not strip me of my legal protections and justify it as a means to support those same protections any more than you can destroy the village in order to save it. Didn't work in Vietnam, doesn't work today. When you do this, when you violate your core values, your laws and your rights, the terrorists DO win. In fact, they have won, and the culture of fear, of security theater, of sanctioned molestation at air ports, of justifying rights and property violations have done more to destroy US that any dozen planes could have done. Somewhere, in a cave, is a 6 ft US funded terrorist laughing at his victory. All it cost him was ten grand and 20 men...we did the rest ourselves.

As a side bar, 1-2 books vs 50 different sources that agree does not build a winning case. Might want to gather additional support material to strengthen your side of the debate. :asian:

 

[elder999]

Well, I have to go so I will leave this idea out there. The terrorists just tried to blow up cargo plains. If we capture some of them I hope that we use some really, really stern questioning to get these hardened religous fanatics to give us the information we need to stop them. I know, maybe we should take the advice of Monty Python's flying circus because noone can withstand...the Comfy Chair. May the next victims of terrorism rest in peace.

Perhaps, rather than offering the anonymous and unsubstantiated-or the shrill shills of Bushites locked in march step-you could offer just one example of a terrorist plot being foiled by intel obtained through "enhanced interrogation techniques."

 

[WC_lun]

I have to ask this again, since it hasn't been answered. If we do not follow our own laws, resoting to things such as torture, how are we so different than the terrorist? You can't be a nation of laws and at the same time break them when it suites you.

 

[billc]

From Courting Disaster:

"Some of these plots, which the Inspector General said the agency did not know about before KSM and other detainees told them, included "plans to [Redacted]; attack the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan; hijack aircraft to fly into Heathrow Airport...[and] hijack and fly an airplane into the tallest building in California in a west coast version of the World Trade Center attack'" "According to the report, "Khalid Shaykh Mohammed, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, innacurate, or incomplete." After undergoing the waterboard, however, the report says that KSM became "the most prolific" of the detainees in CIA custody: "He provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha, and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen whom [KSM] planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks [REDACTED]" And this is only a small fraction of the actionable intelligence KSM provided after being water boarded."

In fact only 3 terrorists were waterboarded.

"Zubaydah began to provide information on key al qaeda operatives, including information that helped the CIA find and capture more of those responsible for the 9/11attacks...Zubaydah'a questioning after the application of enhanced interrogation techniques led directly to the capture of Ramzi bin-alShibh. Bin al-Shibh was a big catch. According to theOffice of the Director of National Intelligence, he was the primary communications intermediarybetween the 9/11 hijackers in the United States and the al qaeda leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan..."

"The bottom line? Before KSM's interrogation, just two operatives in the West Coast plot were in custody and hadtold us nothing about their plans. After Ksm's interrogation, some nineteen terrorists involved in the plot were in custody, and we knew the details of their plans to fly a plane into the Library tower."

The book also discusses the other intel gathered from these terrorists that Ali Soufan was not privledged to know. These guys are not mob guys or bank robbers. They do not plan on stopping, there is no mercy in their souls. Look through this book and see all the other plots that were discovered and stopped. I can't keep typing the whole book. I hope there is enough here to show that the spin on what the CIA is doing will eventually cause a lot more deaths.

 

[billc]

We are not terrorists because we are not intentionally targeting civillians. We would stop fighting if the terrorists stopped killing innocent people. If we stop fighting they will just keep killing innocent people. They use real torture to enforce Shariah, killing non-believers, gays, Hindu's,christians, Jews etc. If you cannot see the difference between a free democratic nation defending itself, then my original example holds. No police officer should ever use violence to stop a criminal act, once he used violence he would be no better than the criminal. Any fire fighter who burned forest to create a fire break in a national forest would be no better than any other arsonist and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Any doctor who intentionally took a knife to cut a seriously wounded person should be prosecuted for attempeted murder. Isn't that what murderer's do, cut people with sharp objects?

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Critics comment on "Courting Disaster"

This is to be expected. As Mayer points out, Thiessen is "neither a journalist nor a terrorism expert," rather he is a frantic, torture-thrillist PR hack of the highest order, and the book "has become the unofficial Bible of torture apologists."

The Huffington Post

Thiessen’s book, whose subtitle is “How the C.I.A. Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack,” offers a relentless defense of the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies, which, according to many critics, sanctioned torture and yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit. In addition, Thiessen attacks the Obama Administration for having banned techniques such as waterboarding. “Americans could die as a result,” he writes.

Yet Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is “completely and utterly wrong,” according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006. “The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.,” Clarke said, adding that Thiessen’s “version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006.” Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London’s public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, “used exactly the same materials.”

The New Yorker


Wikipedia offers this bit on the controversy:

Book

Thiessen's first book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack (ISBN 1596986034), was published by Regnery Publishing in January 2010. The book is endorsed by the former Vice President Dick Cheney,[6] former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,[7] and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey.[8][9] It reached the No. 9 spot on the New York Times Best Sellers list for hardcover nonfiction in February 2010.[10]

Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, a book which Thiessen says has fundamental errors of fact,[11] heavily criticised Courting Disaster in a book review, claiming it is "based on a series of slipshod premises."[12] In a long response, Thiessen defended the accuracy of his book and said Mayer's review contained many factual errors and omissions. For example, Mayer quoted the head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism branch in 2006 as saying the book's account of the Heathrow plot is "completely and utterly wrong";[12] in reply Thiessen quoted a former senior CIA official as saying that the CIA liaises only with MI6 and MI5, so the Scotland Yard official "would have no way of knowing what intelligence the CIA shared with MI6 or MI5, much less the ultimate source of that intelligence". Thiessen added, "The week her article appeared in The New Yorker, former CIA director Mike Hayden handed it out in his class at George Mason University's School of Public Policy as an example of all that is wrong with intelligence journalism today."[13] (Hayden had earlier written a positive review of the book for The Daily Caller.[14]

Matthew Alexander, a former military interrogator and author of How to Break a Terrorist, characterises Thiessen's book as 'a literary defense of war criminals'[15].

Thiessen's promotional tour for Courting Disaster included confrontational interviews with CNN's Christiane Amanpour and MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, and an interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, an uncut version of which was posted online.[16]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Thiessen


The Ends Do Not Justify The Means.

 

[elder999]

"He provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha, and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen whom [KSM] planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks [REDACTED]" And this is only a small fraction of the actionable intelligence KSM provided after being water boarded.".

Well, the book's pretty bogus.

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri was arrested in a routine traffic stop in Peoria, Illinois, in December of 2001, and transferred to New York as a material witness. It was ALi Soufan (FBI guy who says torture doesn't work) who's interrogation of another terrorist led to charges against al-Marri, in 2002.

All of that doesn't matter, though, because KSM WASN'T CAPTURED UNTIL MARCH,2003.
not going to even bother anymore....

 

[Bob Hubbard]

We are not terrorists because we are not intentionally targeting civillians. We would stop fighting if the terrorists stopped killing innocent people. If we stop fighting they will just keep killing innocent people. They use real torture to enforce Shariah, killing non-believers, gays, Hindu's,christians, Jews etc. If you cannot see the difference between a free democratic nation defending itself, then my original example holds. No police officer should ever use violence to stop a criminal act, once he used violence he would be no better than the criminal. Any fire fighter who burned forest to create a fire break in a national forest would be no better than any other arsonist and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Any doctor who intentionally took a knife to cut a seriously wounded person should be prosecuted for attempeted murder. Isn't that what murderer's do, cut people with sharp objects?

Your comparisons of cops, firefighters and doctors using accepted and LEGAL procedures as a defense of representatives of the United States using an ILLEGAL procedure is flawed.

Waterboarding is torture. US Law says so. International law says so.
Torture is illegal. US Law says so. International law says so.
Rape is illegal. It -was- used as an "enhanced interrogation technique". It was regularly used by the Iraqis, the Nazi's, and the Soviets, as a means of torture, to instill fear and punish. It is illegal. We as a culture abhor it.
Why should that be ok to use against our enemies?

You are defending the use of an illegal, unethical, unsuccessful and immoral action, under the false premise that "its ok to do to the bad guys because we're the good guys.". Under that same logic, it should be ok for your local cop to do the same to your kid to get him admit he stole that CD from the music store. After all, it's "safe" right?

There have been over 50 sources cited against this procedure.
You've cited 1.
Again, more sources supporting your position other than continuing to quote a book that in our eyes has been debunked and discredited would better defend your position.

 

[billc]

Hey, rape was never used as an enhanced interrogation technique, it is a war crime. The techniques used against these terrorists do not apply to prisoners of war, of which they are not. Tell me. How do we get these hardened, religous zealots, who kill children, in front of their parents, to give up information.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

You sure rape wasn't used? I've seen a number of reports that say it was, and still is.

A reading of the various treaties, laws, etc would clearly show that -regardless- of their classification or non-classification as POW's, that torture is still illegal, and that -regardless- of their classification or non-classification as POW's that waterboarding was still legally classified by US and international law and treaty as torture.

As to how you get them to talk, you obey the law and work within it using legally allowed methods and procedures. What those are, I don't know, not my job to know, and don't really care.

Anyone who engaged in waterboarding, anyone who authorized it, should be brought to trial for the authorization and engaging in illegal torture, in violation of US and International law.

I would seriously suggest that Mr. Bush never visit Brattleboro and Marlboro Vermont where a warrant exists for his arrest for his crimes. Similar warrants exist in several nations, his admittance of guilt in his book is sure to be used against him, should any of those warrants ever be enforced.

 

[billc]

The reality is that we are not prepared to fight this enemy and they know it, especially with the new Commander in Chief. Your notion of using these techniques against civillian non-combatants is not even what the terrorists do. Waterboarding isn't even the starting point for these monsters, they start with the nail pulling right out of the gates. I would authorize waterboarding without blinking an eye, knowing that it in no way jeopordizes the American ideal of a democratic nation. I can't convince you, you will not convince me, we will just have to sit back and watch the carnage on television. I would, however, suggest that you stay out of major cities. If you saw the documentary, "Terror in Mumbai," you will know what will eventually happen here. There is already "chatter" about this coming from al-qaeda's online magazine. We won't know about it till it happens. We can feel happy in the knowledge that our hands are clean and not sullied by waterboarding. The hands of first responders will, of course be a lot less clean. Blood does wash off hands, it just stains clothes pretty bad. I would suggest a good pre-soak for all you first responders out there.

 

[Ken Morgan]

Terrorist leadership may be fanatical, but they are not generally stupid, far from it. From what I’ve read everyone breaks under torture, which is why you tell your people as little as possible about the organization, its finance and future operations. Also people will say and/or admit anything to make the torture stop, hence the information you retrieve is of little value because how do you separate the chaff from the wheat?

The Brits and the Israelis have proven the best way to fight terrorist organizations is through intelligence, infiltration, covert operations and hitting first & hitting hard. Eventually after all that, you need to sit down and talk with them.

 

[billc]

Finally, for those interested, Marc Thiessen in his book discusses the careful, meticulous and medically safe way the CIA conducted waterboarding on the 3, 3 high value terrorists and then goes through the actual way the inquisition and the Kmer Rouge did it. He points out that the torturer of the kmer rouge tortured more than 14,000 people, men women and children and only 7 survived. There is no comparison between the monsters who actually torture people and the men and women in the CIA waterboarding actual monsters to keep innocent men, women and children safe. Check out this book and see for yourselves. There is no comparison and the people who are trying to make it are being dishonest with the public and they are making us and our loved ones vulnerable to the next attack.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Stay out of the high rises too, never know when another plane might get hijacked.

Flying? Get used to being groped, stripped, swabbed, irradiated and molested. Cuz it makes us safer.

Better invest in breathing gear, seal your house, and plan on living in your basement on recycled air until it's safe to come out again. You know, in case they poison our water, air and soil.

Yes, I can do the 'crazy extremist' talk too, but there's no need here. My position is backed by law, the views of experienced experts, and the US Constitution. Your's is backed by fear and a need to justify barbarism for the illusion of safety.

The US likes to claim to be the good guys. Well, the "good guys" don't shoot helpless pow's. They even made it a focal point of at least 1 WW2 movie how the evil Nazi's slaughtered a bunch of helpless US GIs. Of course, you never hear about the US doing the same. How MP's under Patton shot German POW's rather than escort them back for questioning. You don't hear about the Canicattì, Dachau, or Biscari massacre. You don't hear about US Generals authorizing "No Quarter". But, we're the "Good Guys". The good guys who chopped off parts of dead Japanese troops as trophies.

But that was then. We're supposed to be "Better" now.

How are we better if we do to them, what they do to us, in violation of the law, of morality and common decency?

I repeat my question, should local police be allowed to use the "safe and harmless" method of waterboarding to question you, your wife, or your kids?

Show me where it is stated that waterboarding is NOT torture. Not in some hack's book, but in a law, treaty or court decision.

You can't, because the experts and laws agree, it's torture, it's illegal and it's ineffective. So, you are right, neither of us will budge in our position.

You do "everything and anything" to defend. When it's over with, I'll thank you by putting you on trial in front of a jury of your peers, and if found guilty of violating those laws, they will thank you by teaching you to dance on air after treating you to a nice meal.

I don't believe that it 'will' happen here. Despite my own belief that the current and former occupier of the CIC seat are incompetents, I do not share that belief when it comes to the men and women in the front lines of actually defending the nation and my city. I trust them to take care of things, so that I don't have to plastic wrap my house and stock up on MRE's out of fear, uncertainty and doubt. When we give in to fear, when we justify lawlessness and barbarity, when we surrender our freedoms and rights to save them, then the terrorists will have truly won, and America will be truly dead.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Terrorist leadership may be fanatical, but they are not generally stupid, far from it. From what I’ve read everyone breaks under torture, which is why you tell your people as little as possible about the organization, its finance and future operations. Also people will say and/or admit anything to make the torture stop, hence the information you retrieve is of little value because how do you separate the chaff from the wheat?

The Brits and the Israelis have proven the best way to fight terrorist organizations is through intelligence, infiltration, covert operations and hitting first & hitting hard. Eventually after all that, you need to sit down and talk with them.

Funny you mention the Israelis. If ever there has been a nation under constant and direct assault for years, it's that one.