Text 7338, 81 rader
Skriven 2005-01-11 13:47:04 av EARL CROASMUN (1:10/345)
     Kommentar till en text av GARY BRASWELL
Ärende: comments
================
 EC> I heard that Arlon Spector asked that very question today of the
 EC> three "expert" witnesses the Democrats called.  He asked them what
 EC> should you do if you have a terrorist in your hands and you have
 EC> reason to believe that 100 thousand Americans will be killed by a
 EC> ticking bomb if you don't get from him where it is and disarm it
 EC> within the hour.  Ahem! <g>


-> I would agree then all bets are off, but torture would not be the
-> best way to get it out of him, chemical interrogation would. Barring
-> the availability of that, rip him up.

I ran across an interesting article on just how LIMITED our
interrogators are and how BROAD the definition of "torture" is.  It is
long, but a good read.  Here's the URL, and then some scattered
excerpts:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_terrorists.html

Some of the al-Qaida fighters had received resistance training, which
taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question
prisoners. Failure to cooperate, the al-Qaida manuals revealed, carried
no penalties and certainly no risk of torture—a sign, gloated the
manuals, of American weakness.

Even if a prisoner had not previously studied American detention
policies before arriving at Kandahar, he soon figured them out. “It
became very clear very early on to the detainees that the Americans were
just going to have them sit there,ö recalls interrogator Joe Martin (a
pseudonym). “They realized: ‘The Americans will give us our Holy Book,
they’ll draw lines on the floor showing us where to pray, we’ll get
three meals a day with fresh fruit, do Jazzercise with the guards, . . .
we can wait them out.’ ö

...

The FBI took the most conservative position. When a bureau agent
questioning Mohamedou Ould Slahi—a Mauritanian al-Qaida operative who
had recruited two of the 9/11 pilots—was getting nothing of value, an
army interrogator suggested, “Why don’t you mention to him that
conspiracy is a capital offense?ö “That would be a violation of the
Convention Against Torture,ö shot back the agent—on the theory that any
covert threat inflicts “severe mental pain.ö Never mind that district
attorneys and police detectives routinely invoke the possibility of
harsh criminal penalties to get criminals to confess. Federal
prosecutors in New York have even been known to remind suspects that
they are more likely to keep their teeth and not end up as sex slaves by
pleading to a federal offense, thus avoiding New York City’s Rikers
Island jail. Using such a method against an al-Qaida jihadist, by
contrast, would be branded a serious humanitarian breach.

...

The most controversial technique approved was “mild, non-injurious
physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger,
and light pushing,ö to be reserved only for a “very small percentage of
the most uncooperative detaineesö believed to possess critical
intelligence. A detainee could be poked only after review by Gitmo’s
commanding general of intelligence and the commander of the U.S.
Southern Command in Miami, and only pursuant to “careful coordinationö
and monitoring.

...

Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the military has made public nearly
every record of its internal interrogation debates, providing al-Qaida
analysts with an encyclopedia of U.S. methods and constraints. Those
constraints make perfectly clear that the interrogator is not in
control. “In reassuring the world about our limits, we have destroyed
our biggest asset: detainee doubt,ö a senior Pentagon intelligence
official laments.

Soldiers on the ground are noticing the consequences. “The Iraqis
already know the game. They know how to play us,ö a marine chief warrant
officer told the Wall Street Journal in August. “Unless you catch the
Iraqis in the act, it is very hard to pin anything on anyone . . . . We
can’t even use basic police interrogation tactics.ö 


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