New GOP Argument: Torturing People is Sign of Stength

Hayward Maberley

The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq.
Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype.
In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.
"How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq" by Matthew Alexander & John Bruning
See full article entitled
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11
@ http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick04272009.html

Rush-is-Right

"Karl Rove says that failing to torture prisoners only encourages al-Qaeda."

Well he's right isn't he? AQ recruiters can now say "Look here lads, this is the worst the infidels can do to you. And in any event we can train you to prepare yourselves to resist it."

And perhaps it's worth reminding you, Alex, that the "advanced interrogation techniques" used against AQ insurgents are used in training on US soldiers, as a means of hardening them up.

And by the way, the Geneva Conventions apply to soldiers in uniform. AQ insurgents are neither.

David

The GOP core have simply become morally corrupt. The party needs a purge.

David

"Well he's right isn't he? "

No. Aside from the moral arguments, torture is a spectacularly unreliable method of getting information, and is likely to be even less so when dealing with a group of people happy to commit suicide to cause you pain.

"the "advanced interrogation techniques" used against AQ insurgents are used in training on US soldiers, as a means of hardening them up."

That is, of course, voluntary. If they don't want it, they don't join up. If I'm into S&M, the fact that I am being whipped by my partner is not an assualt. On the other hand, a complete stranger coming up and hurting me is. The difference is quite clear and reasonable.

Unless you are saying we chould ask prisoners if they consent to such treatment.

Ronnie

So, Rush-is-Right, the Geneva Conventions only apply to the treatment that uniformed soldiers recieve, not their behaviour while in uniform?

Rush-is-Right

Well David, let's clear a few things up. "The GOP core have simply become morally corrupt. The party needs a purge." Please let me refer you to Nancy Pelosi. Together with Gorbals Mick she is a founder member of the Corrupt and Incompetent House Speakers Club. It has now been made abundantly clear that she (together with other senior Democrat elected officials) was in on the interrogation from the very beginning. It now suits her to say she didn't know about it, but the simple fact is that she knew it was going to happen before it started, and she knew about it while it was happening and said nothing at the time. It's only now that it's unfashionable to be in favour of waterboarding that she claims to have been against it.

In the days before the Dems dreamed up their strategy of doing everything they could to secure the USA's defeat in Iraq (at any rate for as long as GWB was President) they were all in agreement that waterboarding was perfectly ok. The main problem in the USA is that the Democrat Party, like Labour in the UK, is more concerned with party advantage that with the good of the Nation.

As to "torture" (not that waterboarding should be so described) not being a reliable way of getting information, that's not the recent history. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, principle organiser of the 9/11 outrage, sang like Dame Nellie Melba. As to the reliability of what he said, I don't know and neither do you. My inclination is to think that, taken in conjunction with other information the leads provided will have been at the very least useful to the professional intelligence services.

You mention that there is a moral argument (without saying what it is). I don't think the so-called moral argument is anything more dignified or sensible than a rationalisation for squeamishness.

The 1949 Geneva Convention says, inter alia, that its protection applies to those wearing uniform carrying their arms in the open. It should not be necessary to point out that these essential preconditions are not met by insurgents.

During WW2 sabateurs on both sides were executed. The Americans participated in this policy and I don't see a lot of difference here. In fact the sabateurs whom they caught, interrogated and executed were innocents abroad compared with the present situation. They had after all been issued their training, instructions and equipment by a legitimate government of a nation state to which they owed loyalty. AQ doesn't fall into that description. It's a gang of bandits knowing no international boundaries or any concept of law.

I detect in the comments here a 9/10 mindset. There are people who do not acknowledge that the civilised west is in a war with primitive and barbarian hoards, which are not open to reason or persuasion about anything. Treating these people as if they were ordinary criminals (as the Clinton administration did) gets you nowhere.

Alf Tupper

Hayward Maberley.

"the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib."

So nothing to do with their hatred of infidels then?

They were being interrogated and they were giving the interrogators something which would sound viable without giving up the real goodies.

Basic. You know all this surely?

Hayward Maberley

Mr Tupper,
What exactly is your expertise, knowledge and training in interrogation methods?
Here is someone with extensive experience.
Ali Soufan, who obtained crucial intelligence about the 11 September attacks, has testified to a hearing on Capitol Hill that the harsh methods were not successful.
He is a former FBI special agent; a one-time undercover Al Qaeda operative who interrogated one of the 11 September plotters. Testifying to a Senate committee from behind a screen to protect his identity, he stated that his personal experience shows that harsh interrogation techniques do not work. He interrogated Al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah, the terrorist suspect who was captured in Pakistan, taken to a secret CIA prison in Thailand and who's now at Guantanamo Bay. Ali Soufan says his questioning of Abu Zubaydah yielded a key piece of intelligence, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 11 September attacks.
“These techniques, from an operational perspective are slow, ineffective, unreliable, and harmful to our efforts to defeat Al Qaeda. Waiting 180 hours as part of a sleep deprivation stage is time we cannot afford to waste in a ticking-bomb scenario. When we interrogated him using intelligent interrogation methods, within the first hour we gained important actionable intelligence."

Important actionable intelligence is what it is all about, Mr Tupper, not the "so called intelligence" of Five Deferment Dick et al.