

Spies, torture and terrorism

The dark pursuit of the truth


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Without oversimplifying a complex matter such as this one, please try to imagine yourself in the following situation: the guy with whom you have been through thick and thin for quite some time now, fighting shoulder to shoulder against those who keep proving their intent on destroying our civilization, your buddy was just taken hostage by the latter. What do you do next: 1) regard this as an opportunity to philosophize about “the art of war” or 2) do everything in your power to rescue your buddy from the hands of his abductors immediately? Ninety nine percent of the people who have their priorities straight will act on the second option! Of course, you can extrapolate on this simple example and elaborate on added complexities, however, all it boils down to at the end of the day is the action you did (or did not) take to save your brother! And always remember, as history is unequivocal in this respect, barbarians did conquer advanced civilizations exactly because the latter allowed them to pillage, torture and murder thus scaring them into submission (sorry, killremoval, history leaves no room for “maybes” there!). Whether playing an armchair general or taking some high philosophical ground remember that it is also in great part due to those men and women working in our civilization’s intelligence agencies, sometimes at great peril for themselves (including from their fellow citizens), that we can still do that freely and in the open!

Stephan O

It seems to become quite clear that the Bush administration went far beyond the necessary, and it is not surprising.
These excesses were driven by an angry "how dare they" attitude. during Bush all reason went out the door.

remember how they shut down any dissent? just imagine what they did to one of those guys who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time...

yes, you go after those that attack you but you dont have to take half the world with you, just because you are angry. sounds too much like crazed drug-lords...

Jumping Flapjack


Ok I got 1 guy who will sacrifice 1000 innocents and his own child so he can say "Gee I'm a swell guy and just keep those bombs coming. We got plenty of milk and cookies"

Yeah those embarrassed naked killers at Abu Gharib having their picture taken kept me up sleepless at night.

You are wrong. It is not "way, way complicated" at all.
We are not talking about cutting off body parts and gouging out eyes. No sane person advocates that because its useless.

These are killers not houseguests. I do not care if their feeling are hurt. Sleep deprivation and waterboarding are uncomfortable but cause no damage.

I guess you would just let terrorists go do as they will and take the moral highroad to the graveyard. Saves you from having to make uncomfortable choices.

Maybe we can get a Kumbaya songbook and a guitar and send you on a peace mission to the N.W. Provinces in Pakistan. I'm sure AlQuida would be glad to see you.


Some people, including the author of this article, sometimes seem to justify the use of torture with the information gotten from the torture.
I'm certain that most of these "interrogation sessions" gave absolutely no valuable information at all.

Imagine a person, falsely accused of having committed a crime, being tortured and at the same time told exactly what the torturer wants him to admit. The prisoner will, sooner or later, figure out that he can admit to these charges in order to get the "interrogator" to stop torturing him.
Imagine what will happen if the prisoner were to answer one of the interrogators' questions with "I don't know". The interrogator will naturally keep on torturing the prisoner until he gets the information he wants. Then imagine that the prisoner actually doesn't know anything of value to the interrogator. Instead of being ruthlessly tortured for information that you don't have, a lot of people would lie about actually knowing things in order not to be tortured. Since the prisoners know exactly what the interrogator wants them to say, it's easy to find a way out of the torture. The torture fails, not only by itself, but being used by a really bad interrogator it actually makes the interrogators job harder instead of helping him. The interrogator, already being bad at his job, will take the fake information as proof and it will get him nowhere since it's not true.

The torture probably works, with the intended results, on people who actually has exactly the information the torturer wants out of them, but let's be honest, how often do you think that has ever happened?

The failure of torture is not just that it is completely inhumane but that it's also worthless when it comes to interrogating and extracting information out of prisoners.

I am certain that a trained torturer can get anyone to say whatever he wants them to say. A skilled interrogator, trained in a psychological way, doesn't have to treat the prisoner like a punching bag and still gets a lot better intelligence out of him.

"The question that nobody can answer is how much of this [information] could have been obtained without torture."

Without the torture the intelligence staff wouldn't have to treat all the prisoners the way they did and they wouldn't have to deal with all the bad intelligence they got when torturing the prisoners. That's all there is to it.

I can understand how people believe that torture actually can be a good interrogation technique. Especially after the war on terror started it's been easier for people to justify it as well, I understand that. The point is that anyone would say anything being submitted to torture. How do you know which intelligence is good? The majority of the intelligence you get from the camps is probably wrong, seeing how many people was sent in there on no solid grounds. Finally, I have to respond to what Jumping Flapjack wrote.

"1000 innocent lives are at stake if the bomber wont tell you where a bomb is planted. He's already refused to talk after being offered milk and cookies."

The problem isn't that he's not talking, the problem is that you have no idea if he's the bomber after having sent people into camps without no solid proof whatsoever. If you were completely, 100% sure that this guy is the bomber, than the torture will probably work fine. But how many times do you think that the interrogators were completely sure? Judging by how many detainees having been released with no charges I'd say that the interrogators haven't had the chance to be completely sure a single time.
Besides, in the real world you hardly ever have the bomber next to the bomb and he's the only one who knows how to defuse it. In the real world, you have a thousand people in a camp far away from the war and the information you want from them is "I'm in Al-Qaeda".


It's shocking that the [supposedly] brightest American legal minds could issue such "regulations", that look like a page straight out of a Gestapo rule book. The US constitution is pretty clear about prohibiting "cruel and unusual punishment". It's pretty sure the founding fathers did not mean to say boarding is OK, as long as it's one with potable water, or that sleep deprivation is OK, as long as prisoners get 8 hours/sleep per 180 hours session, or that torture with dogs is OK, as long as they get their teeth checked etc. Here we are, 300 years later that such barbarian acts are performed (with clear "torture rules", approved by the White House, no less!) by people wearing the uniform of the United States. Disgusting!!! If respect for the spirit of the constitution means anything, these people should be persecuted with highest priority.


You only believe them if you must go go and look what happened in real. Do not watch TV, chatting, net trading or read fake informations in news. They are also spies, special spies. And ofcoures, you must save your things, save everything ! If you believe the peoples ask you to invest them, buy them, sure, you are going to hell !

It is life.


Actually Jumping Flapjack, it is way, way, way more complicated. When you create a system that accepts torture (I can agree that waterboarding is not the worst in the world, but let us be honest here, it is not where US stopped) it will escalate. Armies has always tortured, and probably always will, but by making it legal it gets worse. When illegal every agent/soldier know that he will have to take consequences if it goes wrong and uses it with discretion, when it is legal they do not have take that precaution. Instead it makes a clear sign that all the human rights we so bitterly have been fighting for is not worth squat. Instead violence is the answer, and it will be misused both on a personal and systematic level, you can only see what happened at Abu Ghraib. The reason for me why we sometimes must fight is not to protect some strange concept of a country, but to protect the 100 % real right we as citizens in modern democracies have been granted. To sacrifice those in the fight is like selling the car to afford fuel.

It is not only about killing one to save a thousand, it is about drawing a line to save millions.

Jumping Flapjack



What is the moral choice?

Admit defeat and offer suspect a pillow and a nap.

Apply increasing levels of pressure to produce effect.

Simple as that. All else is a smokescreen. Make the moral decision and explain why.

BTW; Your kid is one of the thousand.


"Barbarians torture, advanced nations don't."

Maybe that's why Barbarains have often been successful in conquering and destroying advanced nations.


Just because peoples never stop to get profits. They want more, more and more. The more sweet words spies have used, the more dangerous things are coming.


Terrorists, Criminals also torture people. If the Government abstains what are going to be the alternatives?

Even though Pres. Obama banned torture, on the other hand the Obama Administration sided with the LTTE Terrorist Organization of Sri Lanka and tried to sabotage Sri Lanka's war against terrorism. They did not crack down on terrorists operating in the U.S.

In other words the Obama Administration has not provied much of a solution.

Whether Governments ban torture or not, they should have the capability of at least being firm against crime and terrorism, if not having the capability of fighting against it.



I did SV-80 at Fairchild AFB. It was actually a lot of fun, but expect 16 hour days even during academics. Based on contemporary definitions of torture, yours will start day one, since you aren't going to get a whole lot of sleep or be able to watch much TV. I also hope you like MREs. The field portion is probably the most fun, like camping but without the food or booze. The resistance portion is, as you know, classified, but you can expect to be treated very harshly. It's definitely an eye opener. Good Luck!


Killremoval is right on. I agree 100%.

There is a common misconception on this board that we interrogate individuals to get them to confess or admit to certain crimes, and that, they will confess to anything because we waterboard them. In actuality we already know that they have committed those crimes or some crimes - we know who they are at the least. The point of waterboarding then, is not to get them to confess to anything, but to get them to tell us about what they have not yet done, but are planning.

The notion that Al-Qaeda has been victimized is borderline ludacris. While OBL will certainly argue that the west has waged another crusade against Islam, it is not that subjective, and I would be hard pressed to find anyone who labels Al-Qaeda as a victim other than those who have some identification with their cause or ideology, or who severely dislikes the US. These people are the types that fault the US for any and every problem erupting around the world.

Lastly, let's stop confusing torture with waterboarding. The debate is fairly balanced, but the Obama Administration has tried to seal the label of torture on waterboarding. Many people would disagree.

@kill removal
SERE school is part of my pre-deployment training, though I haven't deployed yet. I hear the training is awesome but the course sucks.


More on "soft" interrogations...

“Soft” Interrogation Yields the Best Results"



It would appear that a lot of people are using this as kind of an anti-american torture platform, but let me clear. If OBL captured General Petreus in Afghanistan, it would his moral imperative to get as much information out of him as possible in order to save the lives of his men. He would be remiss if he did not. This has nothing to do with choosing or ascribing morality to a given side, it's about winning a war while inflicting the least amount of damage possible. You, I, and OBL all know that Petreus has vast amounts of information on US military operations in the middle east. Wouldn't it be almost criminal for OBL to pass on getting that information, and saving the lives of his men, for the simple reason that some in the world found it morally unsettling? Hell no. You lean on him in every way possible, up to and inlcuding using those techniques that would cause permanent damage. If Petreus opts to divulge all his secrets without using coersion, that's fine too, but you don't just forgo that information because getting will require harming the one who has it. At the same time, the US would be remiss if they didn't fully capitalize on the propaganda value that would be produced by evidence that AQ was torturing it's detainees.

This argument becomes especially silly when you being defining "torture" as sleep depravation or waterboarding? What's next, any unpleasantry that detainees may be subject to. That's what I would do if I had the same sort of public media outlet available to the current crop. "not letting me eat the food I want to eat! That's torture...they're making me shower in 2 minutes instead of five! that's torture...They don't let me wear the clothes I want to wear...etc."

It may have even gotten to the point where domestic criminals are subject to harsher interrogation or internment conditions than dudes that are actually devoted to destroying the west. Wow.


It's intresting you bring up the Nazis, because they pretty much perfected the art of the non-coersive interrogation. Hanns-Joachim Gottlob Scharff is almost universally regarded as the best military interrogator in history. He did so not through the use of violence, which he was very much opposed to, but by building repoire and, in many cases, making a friend of the POW. In at least one instance he allowed an allied fighter pilot to take a German fighter out on a joyride.


What made this possible were the similarities between members of the German and American militaries, which resulted in a form of comraderie. That was not the case with the Japanese military, which looked upon non-Japnese as being cattle (I think Gaijin may be the word, but I might also be confusing it with the hebrew word Goyem, which does mean cattle and is often used derisively towards non-Jews.) Most Japanese chose to commit suicide rather than cooperate with american forces. It would appear to me that AQ and Taliban forces have more in common with the Japanese than with the Germans.

"In conclusion their feelings of superiority is not the problem. Their sense of desperation and victimization is. Add to that the decades of humiliation and alienation and you have the perfect mix for a sustained AQ recruitment. Then came the campaign against the Soviets during which they gained valuable experience and help, leading to what we have now."

Victimization, humiliation, alienation? How? How do you convince someone they are clinging to a false paradigm? Osama bin Laden is no more a victim that George W. Bush. It's always funny when the elites of the world decry how they have been victimized. Bin Laden is certainly not the first. He was preceeded by Marx, Lenin, Che, and Castro at the very least. Even if the US did leave Afghanistan, they'd still be dirt poor and ignorant. Islam can't fix that.


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