LISNews: Librarian News

Yes this type of treatment of prisoners can be characterized as heartbreaking, within the context of enemy combatants as soldiers, not cowardly murderers unwilling to extend Geneva conventions on their own behalf. But your second conclusion here, that this is counterproductive is unfounded. Unless of course you are privy to information otherwise unknown to Americans. And therein lies the dilemma for those using secrecy/coercion, (that would be Bush et al.) in justifying the use of such means. Their methods preclude making the public aware of their success. What we as Americans can deduce is that we have not been hit with a major act of terrorism since 9/11. So,we may never know how many innocent American lives may have been saved using such means. Speaking for myself and family, and refusing to establish a moral equivalent with Islamic fascists, Lenin had it right. The ends justify the means.

The Defense Department also had pamphlets telling soldiers not to get VD. We didn't have soldiers with the VD after those things came out.

What if the world really is an episode of "24"? What then?By the way, I hear that the FBI and local police departments are taking their law enforcement cues from "Starsky and Hutch" and "S.W.A.T." Look for handlebar mustahces and white-dude afros to win the Global War on the Brown.

9/11 sounded like the plot to a bad tv show (box cutters, terrorists and airliners); however, I believe there are a couple of buildings missing in NYC. Suicide bombers blowing themselves up in pizza parlors also sounds like something from a movie.

It sounds like you don't think these scenarios are within the realm of possibility or probablity. Good thing chuck is not in charge of anything.

But Chuck the fact still remains that you cannot say with any degree of certainty that coercion, since 9/11, has not been a successful tool for thwarting planned terrorist acts. We can agree on this?

Another measure of the President's policy to reduce terrorism globally would seem to be reducing or holding steady the number of global fatalities from terror incidents. At least that is what is implied by constant Administration assertions that we are building a safer world.The Terrorism Knowledge Base http://www.tkb.org has records of terrorist fatalities back to 1968. And they tell a grim story - for the current Administration. From January 1, 1968 to December 1, 2001, 17,062 people had their lives snuffed out by terrorists -- approximately 3,000 of those just on 9/11.But since 9/11 and the Global War on Terror, $450 Billion later and over 30,000 people killed by our direct actions in Iraq to this date 24,240 people have been killed by terrorists. Think about that -- more people have been killed by terrorists in the last five years than in the prior 33 years.Those kind of results aren't worth throwing out our Christian values or traditional notions of human rights for. Even if the ends justified the means, the President's means are not achieving their ends.

Hi Tomeboy,First, let me thank you for being the only person on the pro-coercion, pro-prisoner mistreatment side who has written so far who did more than just toss cliches at me. It is appreciated.I have dealt elsewhere in comments with why I don't believe the lack of terror attacks on US soil since 9/11 can be considered proof of the efficacy of the administration's interrogation methods.My main claim for why "threats, torture, or other forms of coercion" and "Attacks upon the personal dignity of any captive or detainee, such as humiliating or degrading treatment" are counter productive is based on a reading of history, and not of current classified information (if such exists!). The Army staff didn't believe in it or they wouldn't have wrote in a manual back in 1977. Further history is replete with examples of the ineffectiveness of torture and other forms of coercion and mistreatment.The examples below are drawn from this paper, presented at a military ethics conference:http://www.usafa.af.mil/jscope/JSCOPE03/Arrigo03.h tmlA Consequentialist Argument against Torture Interrogation of TerroristsJean Maria Arrigo, Ph.D.Joint Services Conference on Professional EthicsJanuary 30-31, 2003, Springfield, Virginia

• In 1979 the [TNP] team captured Nalan Gurtas. She had personally killed 32 Turkish National Police officers.... Trying to obtain intelligence out of one of the most violent people on earth is a bit of trouble.... She screamed, spat, kicked, ripped up her holding facility, refused to talk....She tried to cut her wrists with a plastic knife; she ran full force with her head onto the wall. She threw feces at all of us. Then the word came down to go to Level 1 [i.e., potentially fatal torture]. .... She stayed silent.... [During transport] she tried to jump from the speeding vehicle...after laughing she loved shooting police and Americans. She was between the car and the ground when they fired 32 rounds into her, which was one hell of a hard shot to make.....
• Even under the Nazis, torture interrogation failed to break dozens of high state officials and military commanders involved in late-war plots to assassinate Hitler. According to Peter Hoffman’s History of the German Resistance: 1933-1945:[27], "Six months from the start of their investigations the Gestapo still had nothing like precise knowledge of the resistance movement.......This lack of information and knowledge is all the more astounding in that Himmler's men employed every means to extract confessions.... Moreover all forms of torture were used without hesitation...."
• Closer to home for Americans, during the months and years of North Vietnamese torture of American POWs, Commander James Stockdale estimated that under 5% of his 400 fellow American airmen succumbed to North Vietnamese demands for anti-American propaganda statements.[28] These examples expose the bigotry in the expectation that key enemy terrorists will readily give up their plans and associates under torture.
• The French General Paul Aussaresses, chief intelligence officer in the Battle for Algiers from 1955 to 1957, credits his large-scale, merciless, torture interrogation campaign with crushing the Algerian insurgency and stopping terrorist bombings. Aussaresses’ name is often brought in to support the ticking bomb argument, but his memoir records cases of terrorists dying under torture with their secrets or exasperating him to the point of murdering them himself.[66] He did not run a small-scale, precision, torture-interrogation program, as envisioned by advocates in the U.S. He had an informant for each city block in the native section of Algiers. Altogether, thirty to forty percent of the men were arrested and interrogated during the war, frequently under electrical shock to the sexual organs.[67] Aussaresses ran a dragnet interrogation program, which swept up the peripherally involved and the uninvolved along with terrorist leaders.
• experimental studies find that the short-term success rate of professional lie catchers—police officers, detectives, prison guards, customs officers, and the like—falls mostly in the 45% to 60% range, where 50% is the chance rate. In these experiments, professional lie catchers only differ from nonprofessionals in their high level of confidence! The professionals’ unwarranted confidence has been traced to lack of feedback in the workplace regarding the accuracy of their judgments and to their false reliance on behavioral signs of deceit, such as gaze aversion. In fact, behavioral signs of deceit differ across liars and constitute only a small effect. Accuracy of lie detection has been raised to the 70% to 85% level through arduous technical methods, such as film analysis of micro-facial expressions, content analysis of testimony, polygraphy by independent examiners, etc. Yet even these methods can be counteracted by trained subjects[74] or may fail due to individual differences.Ã[75] Torture, which exaggerates physiological variability in subjects, may complicate objective lie detection.

In addition to the historical worthlessness of torture, there is also to problem of what systematic mistreatment interrogations does to the people carrying it out:

Training programs have been studied through interviews with former torturers in Greece,[54] Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay,[55] Nicaragua,[56] and Israel,[57] to name a few. As a composite picture, trainees are typically selected on the basis of their ability to endure hardship and pain, for correct political beliefs, trustworthiness, and obedience. Often the young, the lower class, or the poorly educated are recruited, or even kidnapped. Brutal training at the outset desensitizes trainees to their own pain, suffering, and humiliation. Confinement and initiation rites isolate them from prior relationships. Constant physical and psychological intimidation instill obedience. Trainees first learn torture through social modeling in witness and guard roles. They usually experience tension between their new roles and their previous values, and they variously resort to denial, psychological dissociation, alcohol, or drugs. The efficacy of shame tactics tends to lead, as with the Israeli General Security Services treatment of Palestinians, to sexual tortures, which in turn contribute to stigmatization and corruption of torturers. Training programs use dehumanization and scapegoating of victims to relieve the bad self-image experienced by many torturers.

If the techniques used by the administration didn't work in the past, they're likely not working now. And they've cost us so much in honor and integrity they are doubly not worth it.

I'm sure it did. It was wrong then and it's wrong now.

Hey, Greg! When ARE you going to enlist? I've seen your pic over in Shush World or whatever it is and you look fairly healthy to me. Get with it and enlist! We need you over there!