Who Is IOZ?: Entranced Interrogation

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Entranced Interrogation

Consider, for example, the CIA program that Bush created to detain and question senior leaders captured in the war on terror. Many of these terrorists, including Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, refused to talk -- until Bush authorized the CIA to use enhanced interrogation techniques. Information gained using those techniques is responsible for stopping a number of planned attacks -- including plots to blow up the American consulate in Karachi, Pakistan; to fly airplanes into the towers of Canary Wharf in London; and to fly a hijacked airplane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles.

-Mark A. Thiessen

Yeah, this was the same Sheik Mohammed who said he was responsible for every terror attack from A to Z, from anthrax to blowing up the moon.

14 comments:

Montag said...: what good does this "intelligence" do? wasn't there intelligence that terrorists wanted to use planes as missiles against targets within the united states prior to 9-11?

it's not like we changed the protocol for the handling of plane hijackings as a result.; 12:44 PM
bh said...: Thisessen cont:
"On Tuesday, George W. Bush told a cheering crowd in Midland, Tex., that his administration had left office without another terrorist attack.When Barack Obama returns to Chicago at the end of his time in office, will he be able to say the same?"

So he's giving Obama a freebie then?; 12:50 PM
la Rana said...: The dishonesty is oppressive.

It is flatly untrue that information obtained through the use of torture has led to the prevention of any attack, anywhere in the world, nor even the arrest of other terrorists. Pay careful attention, for you will never, ever, hear HOW exactly information extracted from these men led to the successes claimed. It is an utterly false narrative that only exists in a culture bereft of sufficient shame.

The elisions on torture are similarly, depressingly, false. Waterboarding has been a recognized form of torture for centuries. There are photos of it in the Pnom Pehn torture museum. The U.S. has itself prosecuted people for it. To pretend that it and other enhanced interrogation techniques are not torture is to abandon any pretense of honesty. The contention is literally unsupportable by anything other than bald assertion.

The least dishonest thing in the piece is the assessment that Bush has protected the country from attack for 2,688 days. In addition to the false narrative described above, there have been innumerable attacks on US embassies, buildings, and personnel the world over, and despite their attempt to hide it, even the State department conceded that during Bush's reign terrorism throughout the world rose significantly. There has not been an attack within the US borders - aside from 9/11 (probably Clinton's fault, but in any event definitely not the fault of the person who was in charge at the time), the Antrax attacks, the numerous anthrax copycats, the random grenade attacks in NYC, etc. etc. - but for that matter there have been no attacks within the borders of Iowa. It is an accurate statement only so far as it is accorded its own definitions. Furthermore, the US is nearly an entire continent, surrounded by two oceans and two compliant states. To claim victory in there not being an attack on the US is like claiming to have successfully failed to win the lottery.

The saddest part is not that there is an entire class of people that literally lie for a living, but that most Americans believe them. What a cowardly, ignorant people we are.; 1:26 PM
Daniel Koffler said...: This is gonna be one of those things where even though we now know KSM didn't provide any valuable information we hadn't already more or less obtained without committing crimes against humanity, and did provide lots and lots of garbage information (which is worse than if we'd never interrogated him; see, there's this thing called opportunity cost) -- but because President Democracy-Promotion repeatedly lied about it, the meme that the KSM case so much as illustrates a serious trade-off is never going to die.

Why, by the why, does KSM receive so much more attention than the Ibn al Libi case -- you know, the semi-retarded camp commandant who was tortured into fabricating the whole African uranium episode of 24 that became one of the big public selling points for the invasion of Iraq? Wait, don't answer.; 1:27 PM
littlehorn said...: I just want to copy la Rana cause I like his (her?) paragraph:
It is flatly untrue that information obtained through the use of torture has led to the prevention of any attack, anywhere in the world, nor even the arrest of other terrorists. Pay careful attention, for you will never, ever, hear HOW exactly information extracted from these men led to the successes claimed. It is an utterly false narrative that only exists in a culture bereft of sufficient shame.; 2:13 PM
Anonymous said...: "The writer, who served in senior positions at the White House and the Pentagon from 2001 to 2009, was most recently chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush."

So he's the one who doesn't know how to spell anything.; 2:17 PM
Christopher said...: During Bush's time in office, we had one of the deadliest incidents of biological terrorism in our history, and we also had one of the deadliest terrorist attacks period.

It's amazing to me that people have turned that into a stellar record of preventing domestic terrorism, especially since the same people will, as is made clear here, call Obama a massive failure if the same thing happens while he's Presidenting.

Thiessen's justification of torture makes him scum, by the way.; 3:21 PM
cb said...: Yeah, this was the same Sheik Mohammed who said he was responsible for every terror attack from A to Z, from anthrax to blowing up the moon.
And those are just the attacks he admitted to being responsible for -- just imagine how many others he did that we don't yet know about!!!!; 4:03 PM
Anonymous said...: Oh my Lord, how can you even read that crap?; 4:51 PM
TGGP said...: I think torture worked in Algeria, but they were more competent than the bunch of yucks we have running Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.; 8:22 PM
Anonymous said...: 'I think torture worked in Algeria' (TGGP)
You mean the French won and got to keep Algeria?; 7:16 AM
periscopedepth said...: Isn't the efficacy of torture secondary to a whole host of other concerns? We can debate all day whether chopping off a thief's hand is an effective means of stopping him from stealing, or whether he can just as easily learn to steal with the other hand, but at the end of the day: seriously. Dudes. Chopping people's hands off.; 12:14 PM
BrianM said...: "but at the end of the day: seriously. Dudes. Chopping people's hands off."

It makes them a little damp just THINKING about it.; 1:30 PM
MandT said...: Including a stink bomb in Bergdorf's 'rest facility' while disguised as a Saudi Sheik.; 3:51 PM

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Entranced Interrogation

14 comments:

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