Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al Qaeda suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning.
Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview Tuesday with WDAY Radio in Fargo, N.D.
It was the first time that a senior Bush administration official has confirmed that U.S. interrogators used water-boarding against important al Qaeda suspects, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged to have been chief architect of 9-11. Mohammad was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003, and was turned over to the CIA.
Conservative talk show host Scott Hennen told Cheney that listeners had asked him to "let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives." - dfw, msnbc
The problem is, people lie to avoid pain and death, so you get BAD INTELLIGENCE from water boarding. If you want real information, it is easy to get. The reasons to torture are: 1) because you are sick and you like to see people suffer and die, and/or 2) because you yourself are guilty and you want to torture other people into giving false confessions for your crimes. Damn, some of these people disgust me.
"The CIA also asked to use "mock burial," in which a top Qaeda captive would be led to believe he was going to be buried alive." - msnbc
Not everyone in the CIA wants "mock burials", thank god. A "mock" anything can and does become real.
The line gets blurred. Oops. Do they have mock rapes? Would the devil have such a thing? Well, yes. Read about the sere program."The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession. " - nytimes
Please note that al-Libi was tortured and gave BOGUS information. Torture does not save American lives. I don't think torture has saved even one life. It has certainly caused many deaths. Al-Libi's false confession extracted with torture, for example, was used by Condi to justify the killing in Iraq and that has resulted in 2808 dead American soldiers and 44,779 US non-mortal casualties (wounded, disease, etc.) plus an estimated 655,000 dead Iraqi civilians who were killed as a result of the invasion since coalition forces arrived in March 2003.
"... in March 2003, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said there was ?a very strong link to training al-Qa'ida in chemical and biological weapons techniques, we know from a detainee that ? the head of training for al-Qaida, that they sought help in developing chemical and biological weapons because they weren't doing very well on their own. They sought it in Iraq. They received the help." Those statements were based on statements from Ibn al Shaykh al-Libi, a detained senior al-Qa?ida operative." - senate.gov
If someone tells you torture saves lives, tell them the United States Senate Intelligence Committee's PostWar findings disagrees with them. Page 108 says simply and clearly:
"[al-Libi] fabricated more information in response to physical abuse and threats of torture."
Cheney knows this, right? Perhaps he doesn't care about correct information. Perhaps he just wants to torture his pet captured human slaves? Anyway, there are different examples from other sources.
"... as human rights lawyer Michael Ratner told FRONTLINE, after undergoing a year and a half of coercive interrogation at Guantanamo, his clients known as the "Tipton Three" admitted to being present at a speech by Osama bin Laden at an Al Qaeda training camp. British authorities later uncovered evidence that the men were in the U.K. at the time they had admitted to meeting bin Laden. "
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