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CIA Agent Says Waterboarding is 'Torture, But Necessary'
frodus
Member Posts: 2,396
It would appear that torture realy works after all.....
A retired CIA agent who led the team that interrogated a key Al Qaeda operative early in the war on terror told ABC News that a technique commonly known as waterboarding was torture, but necessary.
According to the ABC News report, John Kiriakou, the CIA officer whose team captured Al Qaeda Chief Abu Zubaydah, said his team subjected Zubaydah to waterboarding, and that the technique "broke" the terror leader in "less than 35 seconds."
In the report, set to air Monday on ABC's "World News With Charles Gibson" and "Nightline," Kiriakou said he believes waterboarding is torture, but said the need for intelligence that would help prevent future attacks justified the technique.
"The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks," Kiriakou said of the information Zubaydah provided.
"What happens if we don't waterboard a person, and we don't get that nugget of information, and there's an attack," Kiriakou said. "I would have trouble forgiving myself."
The CIA secretly recorded the interrogation of Zubaydah, then destroyed the tapes. Kiriakou told ABC he had no idea that the CIA was taping the session, or that the tape had been destroyed.
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In response to Kiriakou's statements, the CIA issues a statement to ABC, stating in part,
"the United States does not conduct or condone torture. The CIA's terrorist interrogation effort has always been small, carefully run, lawful and highly productive
Trade in material assumptions for spiritual facts and make permanent progress.
Comments
LoL i love this bit America doesant Conduct Torture but they do it anyway
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Retired from: Neocron, Everquest, Everquest 2, Guild Wars, RF Online and Final Fantasy VII
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i love how we called it a war crime back in 1947 but now its perfectly fine. And in the constitution doesnt it say "no cruel or unusual punishment"?. You know i would always let stuff like this just pass by but for some reason this really pissed me off.
I see you are back after having your head handed to you a few weeks ago with your asinine logic. Well lets see what other professional interrogators have to say
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2302-2005Jan11.html
...It is easy to find experienced U.S. officers who argue precisely the opposite. Meet, for example, retired Air Force Col. John Rothrock, who, as a young captain, headed a combat interrogation team in Vietnam. More than once he was faced with a ticking time-bomb scenario: a captured Vietcong guerrilla who knew of plans to kill Americans. What was done in such cases was "not nice," he says. "But we did not physically abuse them." Rothrock used psychology, the shock of capture and of the unexpected. Once, he let a prisoner see a wounded comrade die. Yet -- as he remembers saying to the "desperate and honorable officers" who wanted him to move faster -- "if I take a Bunsen burner to the guy's genitals, he's going to tell you just about anything," which would be pointless. Rothrock, who is no squishy liberal, says that he doesn't know "any professional intelligence officers of my generation who would think this is a good idea."
Or listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the "batting average" might be lower: "perhaps six out of ten." And if you beat up the remaining four? "They'll just tell you anything to get you to stop."
Worse, you'll have the other side effects of torture. It "endangers our soldiers on the battlefield by encouraging reciprocity." It does "damage to our country's image" and undermines our credibility in Iraq. That, in the long run, outweighs any theoretical benefit.
hmmm what a shocker...
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