Not Only Is This Illegal and Immoral, It's Stupid. Six Days Without Sleep Doesn't Produce Useful Information.
By Susie Madrak Thursday Aug 27, 2009 4:00pm
Not only is this illegal, it's immoral and just plain crazy. Keeping someone awake that long induces psychosis, and how does that give you useful information? Sounds like the Bush Administration was getting some kind of sick gratification from torturing people.
But of course, the Cowboy Administration was more interested in starring in their own action movie than in following our laws:
A year after the Bush administration abandoned its harshest interrogation methods, CIA operatives used severe sleep deprivation tactics against a terror detainee in late 2007, keeping him awake for six straight days with permission from government lawyers.
Interrogators kept the unidentified detainee awake by chaining him to the walls and floor of a cell, according to government officials and memos issued with an internal CIA report. The Obama administration released the internal report this week.
Though the detainee's name and critical details are blacked out in the memos, there is only one detainee known to have been in CIA custody at that time: Mohammed Rahim al-Afghani, an alleged al-Qaida operator and translator for Osama bin Laden.
The documents show that even as the Bush administration was scaling back its use of severe interrogation techniques, the CIA was still pushing the boundaries of what the administration's own legal counsel considered acceptable treatment.
The documents describe two instances in 2007 in which the CIA was allowed to exceed the guidelines set by Bush administration lawyers allowing prisoners to be kept awake for up to four days.
The first episode occurred in August 2007, when interrogators were given permission from the Office of Legal Counsel to keep an unidentified detainee awake for five days, a U.S. government official confirmed. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the report's details.
According to the documents, the sleep-deprived prisoner was kept awake by being forced to stand with his arms chained above heart level. He wore diapers, allowing interrogators to keep him chained continuously without bathroom breaks.
The second incident occurred in November 2007. After again asking permission from Justice lawyers to keep a detainee awake an extra day, interrogators pressed to extend the treatment for another 24 hours, depriving the prisoner of sleep for six straight days.
It is unclear from the documents whether the two incidents involved the same detainee. CIA spokesman George Little would not provide the identity of the prisoner referred to in the document.
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I am totally convinced the Bush-Cheney Torture Regime had absolutely nothing to do with gathering intelligence.
Intimidation of Muslims in general.
Sadistic pleasure.
Appearing to do something about the 9-11 they didn't prevent.
Driving to insanity those detainees who knew too much.
But NOTHING to do with gathering intelligence.
Before you gather something, don't you need to recognize it?
goodness MountainMan23, are you pretending to be naive'?
I had you pegged as someone who knew that 9/11 was an inside job and knew that these torture forced confessions were needed to help cover the real perpetrators asses!
.
The main reazon of the IMFAMOUS torture programs was to make the PATSIES to confess of what they did not do.
In any case what we have seen it is just the tip of the iceberg of what really happenned, that's why they destroyed all tapes even after they were told not to do it.
In court, what value would you put on the testimony of somebody who had been waterboarded six times a day for a month.
I still reckon that the CIA/WH was running day/weekend pleasure training trips to Gitmo for TLA officials and interested PNAC types to observe waterboarding, its merely hours away by exec jet.
This to be true... That is the facts that one can see...
What in the h.ll is Obama infatuation with the republicans..
Are we sure Obama is not a blue dog plant...
We , democrats are being hit by every single fanatic group there is in this country. Back by the news media..
Why is Obama and the democrats being blame for this economical destruction to our country//
We progressives have been yelling this for 7 years now... So now the news media , corporations and the republicans are going to blame democrats with the crimes and destruction from the prior 8 years of dictatorship...
My complains about Obama are from a view of why he is not getting his promise to us..
Stop the d.. war in Iraq,,,,
Stop the Illegal spying,,,,
Renegotiate the free trade bill ,,
Stop the outsourcing of American jobs ,,, especially the ones that government is contracting to Canada , Britain and other countries.
Stop the tax welfare which Bush's administration gave to the top wealthy in this country..
Start the investigation into torture , treason for prosecution.... Bush and Cheney has publicly told of their crimes...
If Obama would keep his promises on these issues we would not be talking about cutting our health care and other social programs in this country..
No one likes this item because they expect to get many million votes for it,,,, but the illegal Americans should be SENT HOME.... Let their country pay their health care and salaries they have drained our.
Democrats bitch about illegal when it came to Bush , Cheney , Rumsfeld , Ashcroft and others , yet they say nothing about illegal immigrants...
There must be a fire sale on stupid.
First of all, you can barely write.
Second, your half-articulated views on the problems of undocumented migrant workers in this country are so dumb that you are actually giving me a headache.
Your parents should put a password on their computer.
This just in, "Uhhh...mommy, I don't want to go to school today..."
They just aren't nice.
:(
seem uncomfortably restrictive sometimes do they not?
"The second incident occurred in November 2007. After again asking permission from Justice lawyers to keep a detainee awake an extra day, interrogators pressed to extend the treatment for another 24 hours, depriving the prisoner of sleep for six straight days."
That would be six.straight.days.
Fills you with pride don't it?
had no problems sleeping at night.
I wonder if they borrowed Vitter's diaper to put on this guy?
As to why they did it, Bush probably just wanted to see if this guy could beat his personal best when he was on a week-long coke-bender.
The people who order torture have no problem what so ever doing so, these people are monsters, to them its either a religious crusade or some maniac game. On the other hand the grunts and contractors will suffer the subtle effects of PTSD after a while and for the rest of their lives. And these people are returned to the US to go back into law enforcement and various other petty gov jobs, pity poor us.
...releasing this so called "internal report"
all the while doing nothing to prosecute people who were involved in admitted torture and rendition programs.
...not what they need to hear.
What goes around comes around. Military personnel are no longer protected by the understanding that the US will humanely treat captives. By lowering the bar to such an abysmal level Cheney and his co-conspirators have put every soldier of the US and its allies in the gravest danger. Remember those two soldiers in Iraq that were captured by insurgents a couple of years ago? We didn't hear much about what actually happened to them, but the reports implied that they were hideously tortured to death.
For this and so much more Cheney and all his friends should be dangling from ropes on the WH lawn with all the world's cameras lined up to record their death throes. However, I am on principle opposed to the death penalty, so if they spent the rest of their miserable lives in tiny cages that would suffice.
Torture over death? We already know that serves no purpose whatsoever. Shame on you.
Ever heard of a jail?
Sensory deprivation will get you the same results and talking nicely will get you the best results.
Brad Blog: For Those Kool-Aid Drinkers Duped Into Defending Torture in Our Name... 8/28
This would've been more effective torture:
http://fashionablygeek.com/wp-content/uploads...
Damn, I confess just to get him outta of that thing using my teeth.
torture and temptation.
:=[)
Never worn a corset, have we?
it was a back brace. A silky,silky back brace. Oh Oh Those were supposed to be inside words.
this wasn't for information. it was to heighten the war(s). it was propaganda to prolong and rationalize occupation. it had a cause and effect here in the states.
Not Only Is This Illegal and Immoral, It's Stupid. Six Days Without Sleep Doesn't Produce Useful Information.
they didn't want useful information, they never did from these programs, everyone knew then as they know now, you get less useful information through torture, less actionable information, you waste assets and you create more terrorist events, more terrorists
for every person you torture, all their friends, all their family, all their friends friends become your enemies
you also lose information that would have been volunuteered by those sympathetic with your cause
all of these points are and were well known
the only reason to initiate programs of torture is to perpetuate unrest and the insurgency, you do NOT want "to win their hearts and minds" you want the reverse
they are sociopaths, they are war profiteers, they are sick and depraved, they are the maniacle members of the sick fraternity calling themselves the pnac
getting tiresom. Do the Obama people think it's better to be TRYING Bush/Cheney IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION?
The PROBLEM with this effort is that there ARE NO FEDERAL PRISON SENCTENCES in the court of public opinion!
its stuff like this that makes me wish tarring and feathering would make a comeback. being ridden out of town on a rail would also be satisfactory
They have none. The pictures of grinning fools like Lindy clearly shows it was done purely for pleasure.
came from, they were NG/Reserve and from the US prison system, which is where a lot of them learned their trade. Plus the outside CIA/intel-contractors who came in and took over their chain of command from the army, those Abu Gharib grunts were taking orders from the intel people at that point, the army officers had made themselves absent and gone golfing to avoid knowledge of the illegal activities. This little forgotten nugget of fact came out in some of the testimonies and in the media.
The sad fact is that there are millions of people in this country who have absolutely no problem with this.
I think you are wrong, more likely tens of millions.
Man, after six days of sleep deprivation, I could make up the craziest damn shit you ever heard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48DgA5xS914
I know some guys, future officers in the Canadian Forces, who had been on a training exercise and for assorted reasons had been up for 4 days straight. When they finally got a break and were sitting down at their camp after a night march, one guy came back from the can and announced he'd just seen an elephant and was going to see where it went. Three of the others promptly agreed it was a good plan and would join him. Mind you, this was in New Brunswick, where elephants are somewhat rare on the ground.
Fortunately one of the training sergeants happened by, found out they were going out to hunt elephants (with no ammunition save blanks) and ordered them to sleep.
You jest.
wasn't aware that nothing counted as an incident nowadays.
n/t
because they never existed.
After six days without sleep I bet I could imagine a few of them.
you've imagined a million of them. The problem is that if there had been one real credible incident where torture had stopped a terrorist operation the facts would have been leaked and turned into a movie by now. The mint would have been working overtime coining medals for everyone involved right down to the janitor who mopped the blood off the floor.
as a graduate of the USAF Survival School, it doesn't take even 24 hours before you are close to fucking nuts.
Especially with the already additional stresses of being a prisoner and the various methods normally used to break you.
How can one actually support torture? Even if you don't see that it is immoral and illegal, then you should at least know that it does not gather any usefull intel! Those tortured will confess to anything to make the pain stop.
you don't know WHAT will make the pain stop. Even the truth sometimes doesn't work as interrogators don't always know exactly what they are searching for, especially low level operatives in the early stages of capture and imprisonment.
For me there's no question torture works and that's the reason the Bush Administration used it. The real question is "What does it achieve when it works?" or, put another way, "What are the goals of the torturer?". That's where people who debate this topic lose their way.
First of all, let's be clear. I'm not a right-wing ghoul. If your point is that torture doesn't produce truthful testimony I agree with you. It absolutely does not. Anyone using torture for that purpose will fail and you're correct to say it doesn't work for THAT purpose. But is that why torturers torture in the first place? No, it is not. So the point is moot. If you were to tell a torturer, "Hey, that's no way to get someone to tell the truth", the first thing likely to run through his mind would probably be, "So what?" Then he'd probably regale you with whatever bullshit justification he had prepared for you.
That's because the entire history of torture in the world is a story of torture being used to elicit a DESIRED RESPONSE, which does not necessarily and most likely doesn't mean THE TRUTH. When men like John McCain were tortured by the Viet Cong and paraded in front of television cameras to denounce the United States does anyone here believe it was done to get at the truth? When the Inquisitors of midieval Spain tortured Jews to get them to renounce their faith do we believe it was all an attempt uncover the truth? When young black boys in the Jim Crow south were beaten to within an inch of their lives until they signed confessions pre-written by their abusers was that done to get at the truth???
No! Finding the truth is NOT why people torture. It's not what torture is for and it's not what torturers expect to get from it.
TORTURE IS USED TO MAKE PEOPLE SAY THINGS THAT THE TORTURER WANTS TO THEM, TRUTH BE DAMNED. The goal may be propaganda, it may be a form of lazy police work and, as we've seen, it may be a way to start a war for which there is no justification. But it is almost NEVER, EVER used to get at the truth. That's the last thing a torturer wants. Don't believe the movies.
Once you understand that the torture was designed not to uncover evidence but to CREATE IT you'll have a much better handle on why torture works. And it worked in this case. They made guys say crazy things. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad claimed responsibility for everything but the Lindberg Baby. That's what the Bushies wanted. It worked. Torture works.... for generating propaganda. It's what the Inquisitors knew. It's what the Viet Cong knew. It's what Bush and Cheney know. That's why they used it. How else could they have started that war?
-ep
!
domestic or occupied, pure and simple. All the horror stories from past regimes around the world point this simple fact out the most.
the biggest sellout by obama , I want to look forward crap it is pure bs .
"Six days without sleep doesn't produce useful information."
I beg to differ. The information they got was very useful. Unreliable, very probably false, made up in the moment to appease the
torturerinterrogator - but look what they did with it once they had it. It was used to terrify us into giving away our rights. It was blatant terrorism, and the prisoners weren't the intended target - we were.Its been the tagline of anon gov (dept & agency) spokespeople for eight years or more, these pretend whistleblowers are anon to the reader, but not to the mass journalists at the public press conferences, who are taken aside we assume into maybe small groups and handed out 'secret' briefings.
We see this 'not authorized' tagline coming from officials in DC, around the US, and from officials in places like Iraq at US gov press conferences, whenever theres information to be disseminated and they are too cowardly to put their name to the lie/truth.
This sentence in the article (near top): :But of course, the Cowboy Administration was more interested in starring in their own action movie than in following our laws:"
Hell, these a*sholes didn't have the balls to "star" in their own action movie -- they only wanted to write the script and produce it. They didn't have the guts to even star in their own creation.
They wrote it and told others what to do -- down to the lowest-ranked enlisted people and then, when the movie bombed, blamed it on bad acting. What can you expect of yellow-bellied chickenhawks?
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