The Bucknuts Hot Spot

you need your own manboobs enhanced while being water-boarded. Maybe then you'd realize torture is a war crime.

dave, I believe you have the wrong guy. I'm on your side. In fact, I have up-voted you all night.

Menstrual,

Bush and Cheney = war criminals.

They were just not charged - for whatever reason. IMO, feel lucky Hilliary or Biden did not get elected president. Obama is too forgiving.

really Biden as President.......now thats a BIG FRICKEN STORY......war criminals really, on what grounds do u base that on?

I would really like if the US government took on a policy of enhanced interrogations on our real enemies, the global banking cartel, and stop chasing a few brown skinned boogie men.

First, of course enhanced interrogation works. If it didn't work they wouldn't do it. It would be a waste of time. There was debate about whether it produced unreliable results. That has also been proven to not be true. Well, not entirely. There is no perfect result and people can lie. But for the most part they get some good intel. Anyone who has ever taken a moment to learn about this has also learned that torturing to the point where someone would saying anything to get them to stop doesn't serve our purpose. So we don't do it. We want good intel. Not people screaming what they think we want to hear so we stop. Hence the reason why our interrogation methods are very precise. Assuming we are just torturing for the fun of it is wrong. There is a reason behind it. Anything that stands in the way of that reason is removed. So our interrogation practices ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY produce good results.

However, thats not the real issue here. The real issue is the distinction between what is or isn't torture and what is or isn't allowed. That is where the debate truly is. And I'm sure this board could debate that for years. I personally don't care. so I'm not going to engage on that. But I did want to clarify the above.

Obama and his drone war is better than anything our previous administration did.

It is hard to know whether it is effective or not. There are people in the intelligence community who swear that both sides of the argument are the truth. It is hard to see the truth through all of the political posturing. I personally doubt it does much good. They waterboarded some of them over 100 times and didn't get much of value. The problem with torturing people is that they will tell you anything to make it stop so there is a lot of time wasted chasing imaginary leads.

Here is a review of JR's book by Glenn L. Carle, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats, who worked with JR during the time JR was "torturing" people.

"Jose Rodriguez was the chief of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC), while I was Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats, during the tense years following al-Qa'ida's attacks on 9/11, in 2001. We worked together a bit, and he was helpful to me professionally on a couple of occasions. His new book, Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, alleges that EITs work, are responsible for many, if not most, of the signal counterterrorism successes of the GWOT, and that these measures made it possible to "bring justice" to the mastermind of mass murder, Osama bin Laden. The argument is that EITs are carefully controlled, necessary, humane, work, and are legal. Rodriguez uses his former position as head of CTC to buttress his argument, while the book is largely written with the help of Mark Thiessen, a former speechwriter for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney, who has set himself up as a putative expert on EITs because he had access to some telegrams on counterterrorism operations while working in the White House.

Rodriguez's assertions will be praised or condemned by the usual parties in the disputes about the efficacy and legality of EITs. On this debate I will make three observations.

Efficacy: While in the CIA, involved either directly in interrogation myself (see my book, The Interrogator, on how EITs corrupt our institutions and society), or much more broadly in my functions as a senior officer involved in assessing the validity of intelligence acquired from all sources subjected to EITs, I found that the CIA could trust no information obtained from EITs, that such information as was obtained from EITs was "recalled" for unreliability (the kiss of death in intelligence), and that no information was obtained from EITs that could not be obtained by the use of classic, legal, interrogation procedures. EITs, it turns out, for all the macho sense of control and power they imply, don't work and are unnecessary.

Legality: The legality of EITs rests on the legal casuistry of the infamous "torture memo" written by two Justice Department politically-appointed hacks, at the behest of the Office of the Vice President. But, our heritage, our laws, and our obligations as U.S. officials were, and remain, clear: The U.S. largely wrote the Geneva Conventions. The U.S. is signatory to the Convention against Torture. The U.S. is guided by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. All our government, in theory, embodies, preserves and protects the US Constitution's Fifth and Eighth Amendments ("due process of law" and "cruel and unusual punishments"). Habeas corpus underpins all our rights and freedoms, and has for 800 years. All of America's heritage and laws condemn the practices euphemistically referred to as EITs. Yet, now we are told, well, no, our heritage is wrong. EITs embody what it is to be an American and are necessary. But, the argument ("We also have to work... the dark side, if you will")* also known as Neocon "realism" is wrong, and endangers our freedoms.

Morality: Here the argument is, of course, that the ends justify the means. But we all should know that this is a spurious assertion. If you sell your soul, you forfeit what you live your life for. If the United States traduces the principles it embodies, and does so on false pretenses ("torture works"), then the United States destroys what it claims to be protecting: our freedoms, our safety, and what so many have taken oaths to preserve and protect.

But there is worse, and Rodriguez's book embodies it: Learned, respected U.S. officials, experts, and average American citizens now actually coolly debate the merits of torture. But, there is no debate to have, neither on the practical merits of torture, nor on its moral acceptability. The United States throughout its history has opposed such violations of human decency and law. The practice is antithetical to every value that Americans believe defines our society, and serves no purpose. Yet, Rodriguez and the political faction and administration which his book obliges, now assert what the facts contradict, and our values oppose. I worked on counter-terrorism issues with many good men and women in the CIA. Many of them were lastingly deluded about the nature of the threats we faced, acted in good faith, but with terrible errors of perception and policy. This book, however, does not seem so much deluded, as willfully misleading, a prop for the rear-guard Neocon advocates of and whisperers for policies now so roundly discredited that they are already relegated to the same place of infamy as the ante-bellum defenses of slavery, or place of derision as the apocalyptic visionaries awaiting the imminent-but-never-arriving end of the world prophesied in the Mayan calendar."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-l-carle/jose-rodriguez-hard-measures_b_1469051.html

Believe the neo-con propaganda all you want. Doesn't mean it is true. The overwhelming evidence indicates that torture seldom produces reliable results.

I can't shake the image of snakes fu*king...

Yet we have produced good intel. Plenty of it. There are testimonials from the military and the intelligence world saying "this produces good intel" and "if it didn't produce good intel, we wouldn't waste our time".

I'm not referring to political posturing and reports from anyone with political interests. I'm talking about reports from people with first hand knowledge who I have spoken with. I'm talking about interviews I have heard and read from those who actually do this.