Agreed.

How do you think the families and relatives of those who worked at The World Trade Center felt when they saw what could have been their loved ones leap over eighty floors to their deaths because they were burning to death and suffocating with no other place to go. Can we equate that torture with intimidating prisoners with dogs, undergoing the cultural disdain of a female superior, and making them parade around in their underwear? I got my answer, you have yours.

Was that torture for the people that leaped to their certain instant death instead of undergoing a slow, painful, torturous death of breathing super heated air and smelling their flesh burning.

Some of you people need to ask yourself the question, "Do I dislike George Bush more than I can find fault with Islamnist Facist's who want to murder me, my wife, and my children?" Don't feed to me the crap that our intelligence corp and soldiers are out on a wholesale round-up of foreign citizens just to derive pleasure from torturing them.

How does all this play into torturing barbarians? I don't know, I don't care, and I don't want my children blown up in a pizza palor or out at their workplace.

Torture is torture. Some methods are more brutal than others. Some methods are more effective than others in several ways, such as not seriously impairing the prisoner's health, while having him experience a living death, and talking to avoid WB a second or third time.

Generally, I think extreme discretion and rarity in applying torture is called for. There must be the strong presumption that very worthwhile information is to be had, no other way is feasible at the moment, and the identified status of the person is indicative, surrounding circumstances are damning, and other factors, such as corollary intelligence, point to this person.

Wholesale or too frequent application of torture by any unit without reason would lead me to believe we were dealing with sadists in our ranks that must be stopped cold.

Oh, by the way, prisoners picked up on the battle field are usually held until the cessation of hostilities.

I have an idea, lets set up halfway houses for the Gitmo prisoners, you got a spare bedroom?

It does not take long to establish who is credible and can offer reliable sources of information.

Like about, wait - how long have we been holding prisoners in Guantanamo now, five years?

You write the dumbest comments I've seen in six months, at least - and this on a forum where Bithead sometimes posts.

Intelligence resources usually don't waste their time on gathering up punks who know little and therefore can yield little.

When you sweep areas bringing in all the neighbors of suspected terrorists you end up "gathering up punks who know little and therefore can yield little."
When you offer rewards to warlords to bring in terrorists and when they have little or no accountability you end up paying others to "gather(ing) up punks who know little and therefore can yield little."

When people can't muster up the guts or rely on their intelligence to respond to what they believe, they usually resort to your kind of antics.
My view on religion would probably surprise you. Not all people who believe that terrorists are barbarians use Jesus as a point of reference. Also, trying to paint the picture that many of the people picked up and interrogated are just standing on the corner, waiting on the bus, is absurd. Intelligence resources usually don't waste their time on gathering up punks who know little and therefore can yield little.

Thanks for the good information.

Anderson and others.

First you don’t torture just anyone. So the chance of torturing some innocent person is very slim. It is probably slimmer then our courts convicting an innocent person for murder.

Also into the TTB scenario the probability of someone resisting harsh interrogation techniques including torture before you use a terrorist child, who is highly unlikely to be there, is next to none.

A much more likely TTB scenario is that a terrorist house is taken down. The take down agency find terrorist destroying material of a plot. The material that hasn’t been destroyed gives enough information to know that a massive attack is about to take place. There is a good chance that the captives know much of the information that they destroyed. Do you torture them?

Would I torture a suspected but not known terrorist just pulled off the street? No.

As I said before, there are scenarios where you torture but many in which you don’t. Giving more scenarios where you wouldn’t torture doesn’t show that you should never torture.

All of which except Boyde comments is off the original subject of if water-boarding is torture.

Here's one more bit, for you ticking-bomb fans:

Moran's whole approach ... was built on the assumption that few if any prisoners are likely to possess decisive information about imminent plans. (And as one former Marine interrogator says, even if a prisoner does have information of the "ticking bomb" variety - where the nuke is going to go off an hour from now, in the classic if overworked example - under duress or torture he is most likely to try to run out the clock by making something up rather than reveal the truth.)

The example contradicts itself, in other words. The terrorist can say "the bomb's at so-and-so," knowing it will take time to check this out, & by the time the infidels learn otherwise ... BOOM!

This article from the Atlantic is pretty well known around the internets on this subject.

Moran was writing in 1943, and he was describing his own, already legendary methods of interrogating Japanese prisoners of war. More than a half century later his report remains something of a cult classic for military interrogators. The Marine Corps Interrogator Translator Teams Association (MCITTA), a group of active-duty and retired Marine intelligence personnel, calls Moran's report one of the "timeless documents" in the field and says it has long been "a standard read" for insiders.

* * *

Part of why Sherwood Moran became such a legendary figure among military interrogators was his cool disregard for what he termed the standard "hard-boiled" military attitude. The brutality of the fighting in the Pacific and the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese had created a general assumption that only the sternest measures would get Japanese prisoners to divulge anything. Moran countered that in his and others' experience, strong-arm tactics simply did not work. Stripping a prisoner of his dignity, treating him as a still-dangerous threat, forcing him to stand at attention and flanking him with guards throughout his interrogation—in other words, emphasizing that "we are his to-be-respected and august enemies and conquerors"—invariably backfired. It made the prisoner "so conscious of his present position and that he was a captured soldier vs. enemy intelligence" that it "played right into [the] hands" of those who were determined not to give away anything of military importance.

Every soldier, Moran observed, has a "story" he desperately wants to tell. The interrogator's job is to provide the atmosphere that allows the prisoner to tell it.

The whole article is required reading for anyone genuinely interested in the subject, and not precommitted to "torture, torture, rah rah rah!"

* He was a Cryptologic Technician (Interpretive) in the Navy. We operated radios, mostly on ships, submarines and airplanes. Our job was mostly tedium, so some of us like to turn it into an adrenaline-pumping action adventure in our sea stories.

* None my friends and colleagues who were in Beirut on October 23, 1983, can remember Malcolm's presence in the aftermath of the Marine barracks attack. If he was there, he maintained what was a startlingly low profile for Malcolm.

* Malcolm was an instructor at the Navy Technical Training Center Detachment at Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo, TX, which is where he earned his Master Training Specialist designation. It had nothing to do with his assignment at SERE School.

* Malcolm was assigned to SERE School as an instructor to get him out of the way of the mainstream of the Navy's Cryptologic community, due to some run-ins he'd had with influential people. CTs only get assigned duties outside of the community when they've lost their clearance or really pissed someone off. CTs have Top Secret SCI clearances; they don't get sent to mainstream Navy schools as instructors (thereby wasting their clearances) unless there's a problem somewhere. It certainly wasn't because Malcolm was some whiz-bang SEAL counter-terrorism expert.

* I went through SERE school at least a decade before Malcolm was a SERE instructor, but during my class, there wasn't anything approaching the severity of his description of waterboarding. Yes, there were many very unpleasant experiences there, but nothing that came anywhere close to being properly called "torture."

* Malcolm bases some of his claims on "classified" information. The last time I checked, revealing classified information is against the law (unless you're a politician, of course). Regardless of the legalities, I have a hard time understanding how a person of honor and integrity can reveal information that he has sworn to keep secret.

Malcolm has always been a superior writer. Likewise, he's had an uncanny ability to step into the proverbial pile of shit and come out smelling like a rose. Those of us who know him best don't trust anything he says or writes. Take his books and articles with a pillar of salt.

Waterboarding will get the result without resorting to eye-gouging.

Yes, I'm sure you know this with mathematical precision. People who are willing to blow themselves up in a suicide bombing aren't likely to respond to such things.

Hey, here's one for ya. Ticking time bomb, nuke about to go off in the middle of <insert your favorite, red state, highly populated, all American torture loving city here> Prisoner does not respond to water boarding. Has no finger nails left, all fingers broken. Already sliced up his 'nads.

We do have his beloved children, though. Guess you're going to volunteer to rape/torture/slowly kill/whatever these kids in order break the dude to save everyone in the city.

Yep, James. Quite the wonderful constituency y'all on the right have. Going to write up real well in the history books.

Waterboarding will get the result without resorting to eye-gouging.

It gives me pause that a significant percentage of the public sees waterboarding as torture.

Shouldn't if give you pause that a significant percentage of the public doesn't see waterboarding as torture?

Generally, those who accept waterboarding don't accept pulling out fingernails, maiming, etc. So, we aren't without a moral compass.

BTW, please explain how dropping a bomb on enemy "troops" is OK, but waterboarding them isn't.

What is the acceptable ratio of innocent people water-boarded to terrorists water-boarded? Can we water-board 10 innocent people for every actual terrorist?

In the ticking time bomb scenario, explain to me why water-boarding is fine but gouging-out eyes is not?