Torture
polaris_x
Posts: 13,559
1. torture does not work ... ask any person who has studied it ...
2. you can't be the greatest country on earth when you do shit like this ...
********************************
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/artic ... california
The plot goes like this: A CIA agent is given the task of interrogating a prisoner who is believed to be a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda and could lead the U.S. to Osama bin Laden. The prisoner has been kidnapped off the street in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.
The only problem? Over the course of the interrogation, the agent concludes the CIA has the wrong man. He advises his masters of his conclusions.
But the CIA doesn’t listen. It instructs the agent to press harder. The spy agency believes the prisoner’s refusal to answer certain questions is proof of his guilt.
When he still fails to reveal anything, the CIA sends both the prisoner, known as Captus, and his interrogator to Hotel California — the CIA’s most secret detention centre — where the prisoner is tortured.
A page-turner, right? Well, this tale is not the creation of a master of spy thrillers. Glenn Carle, a former CIA officer with 23 years in the service, lived it.
He is the CIA agent who had to tell his spy masters their analysis was wrong. Captus was most certainly a bad guy who had done evil things, hung out with bad guys, perhaps even engaged in a deal or two with low-ranking Al Qaeda members.
But, says Carle, he simply wasn’t a member of Al Qaeda, high-ranking or otherwise. Nor would he be able to lead the CIA or the United States to Osama bin Laden.
Carle was the deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats when he retired from the CIA in 2007. He was one of the U.S. government’s three most senior officers for intelligence assessments on threats to America.
But after his experiences at Hotel California — believed to be somewhere in Afghanistan — he was haunted by his experiences as an interrogator and angered by the U.S.’s policies on rendition and torture.
He decided to write a book about it and has spent the past year and a half trying to get his story out. This summer, after much wrangling with the CIA, The Interrogator: An Education has been published.
Carle wrote the book not for fame or glory or to tell a sexy spy story, he says, but because he is incensed at what happened to Captus and believes the detention, without charge, and torturing of the prisoner was well beyond the laws of the U.S. Constitution.
The 55-year-old also believes the War on Terror and the U.S. laws that allow torture and rendition of detainees were immoral.
And he’s not afraid to place blame at the feet of former Vice President Dick Cheney and in turn former U.S. President George Bush for the laws that allowed the U.S. to render and use torture to obtain information.
“This is the gravest crisis to our institutions and our society since the internment of the Japanese in World War II,” he says in an interview with the Star. “I wrote the book because Americans need to know.
“I’m one of the few people who was directly involved in the Bush Administration’s War on Terror policy of rendition and interrogation. I know what this policy has done to us . . . we became what we were opposing. We were supposed to be a government of laws. And we’re not. We were undermining what we believe we were protecting.”
The battle he fought with the CIA to relate his story is telling. His book had to be vetted by the Publications Review Board. The mission of the PRB, as it’s known in CIA circles, is to vet or censor publications to protect sources and methods. Carle and members of the PRB tangled off and on for about 18 months. It only took Carle six months to write the book.
Many parts of the book are redacted, he says. “I wrote the book to be about 100,000 words. The CIA redacted 40,000 words. Entire chapters are missing.”
At one point the arguing got so petty, Carle says, that he and a team of CIA agents were fighting over the use of the phrase “football-size stones.” The CIA argued that use of those words might reveal the location of the black-ops prison.
Carle’s response: “The whole world is made of rocks,” he recounted to the Star. “When I sue you, the judge will throw you out of court.” The CIA eventually backed down and Carle was allowed to use the phrase.
The CIA team, he says, also unsuccessfully tried to take out a whole section of the narrative about urinals. Carle mentions that the urinals in the men’s room at the prisons were too high for men to actually use — five feet off the ground.
For him the urinals were a metaphor for the craziness of the CIA and the War on Terror and its insistence that the prisoner was a member of Al Qaeda. “I was the only one who realized it was senseless or was concerned about it,” he says.
The CIA’s reaction to the book has been less than enthusiastic. After two requests for comment by the Star, a CIA public affairs spokesman sent this written response: “Some allegations in books on the CIA deserve a response, and some just don’t.”
When Carle first was assigned the case, he was matter-of-fact about it. A go-getter, who was keen on making gains in his career, he was happy to get the gig.
A Harvard grad with a B.A. in government, Carle got interested in working with the CIA while he was doing his masters in European Studies and International Economics at John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
He started with the agency after his class work was done, working on terrorism issues since the mid-1980s.
In his briefing when he was assigned the case, he was told that the CIA had a letter — by John Yoo in the U.S. Justice Department — that gave the CIA carte blanche to do whatever the President said was legal.
“The American people don’t understand we sanctioned the breaking of our laws,” Carle explains. “We received orders in a memo to our superiors that said whatever the President said is legal is legal.
“That was the doctrine. I thought, what are you talking about? The president isn’t above the law. He’s subject of the law, just like we are. That’s the triumph of our society.”
After Carle began to interrogate Captus, he realized something was seriously wrong. The facts just didn’t add up. He told Washington.
At first his assessments were ignored, and then he was told that the fact the prisoner was not answering questions proved his guilt.
In fact, that was the formal position of the director general of the CIA. “He said a lack of answer is taken as proof of guilt and you must pressure him harder to answer,” Carle explained.
Carle says he began to feel he was in “the world of Kafka, where up was down, in was out, night was day, and yes was no.”
Despite Carle’s protests, the prisoner was rendered to Hotel California. Eventually Captus was passed on to a new interrogator. Carle returned home to the States and to his wife and kids. But before he left the secret black-op detention centre, he tries once more to get headquarters to right what he considers a horrible wrong, sending lengthy cables detailing his analysis of Captus, the rendition and torture.
But the cables he had written were never sent.
Looking back, Carle doesn’t believe the cables were stopped out of malice, but rather the senior officers did a double take when they realized he was challenging one of the cases of the War on Terror, criticizing rendition and interrogation techniques. “I think they decided not to send it so there wouldn’t be a problem.”
“A few men were ordering us to bypass our laws. If I say this, people will think I’m crazy. America doesn’t do that to itself. But we did.”
His prisoner — Captus — remained in jail for eight years. He was never charged. He was eventually freed in 2010 with a muted apology from the U.S. government, says Carle.
“I found a small number of men at a time of crisis, with the acceptance of a large portion of our population, undermined our laws. We mustn’t let this be accepted as expedient and necessary. It’s neither. It’s not the America I took the oath to preserve.
“Maybe I am the last of the naifs,” he says. “I took my oath very seriously.”
2. you can't be the greatest country on earth when you do shit like this ...
********************************
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/artic ... california
The plot goes like this: A CIA agent is given the task of interrogating a prisoner who is believed to be a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda and could lead the U.S. to Osama bin Laden. The prisoner has been kidnapped off the street in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.
The only problem? Over the course of the interrogation, the agent concludes the CIA has the wrong man. He advises his masters of his conclusions.
But the CIA doesn’t listen. It instructs the agent to press harder. The spy agency believes the prisoner’s refusal to answer certain questions is proof of his guilt.
When he still fails to reveal anything, the CIA sends both the prisoner, known as Captus, and his interrogator to Hotel California — the CIA’s most secret detention centre — where the prisoner is tortured.
A page-turner, right? Well, this tale is not the creation of a master of spy thrillers. Glenn Carle, a former CIA officer with 23 years in the service, lived it.
He is the CIA agent who had to tell his spy masters their analysis was wrong. Captus was most certainly a bad guy who had done evil things, hung out with bad guys, perhaps even engaged in a deal or two with low-ranking Al Qaeda members.
But, says Carle, he simply wasn’t a member of Al Qaeda, high-ranking or otherwise. Nor would he be able to lead the CIA or the United States to Osama bin Laden.
Carle was the deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats when he retired from the CIA in 2007. He was one of the U.S. government’s three most senior officers for intelligence assessments on threats to America.
But after his experiences at Hotel California — believed to be somewhere in Afghanistan — he was haunted by his experiences as an interrogator and angered by the U.S.’s policies on rendition and torture.
He decided to write a book about it and has spent the past year and a half trying to get his story out. This summer, after much wrangling with the CIA, The Interrogator: An Education has been published.
Carle wrote the book not for fame or glory or to tell a sexy spy story, he says, but because he is incensed at what happened to Captus and believes the detention, without charge, and torturing of the prisoner was well beyond the laws of the U.S. Constitution.
The 55-year-old also believes the War on Terror and the U.S. laws that allow torture and rendition of detainees were immoral.
And he’s not afraid to place blame at the feet of former Vice President Dick Cheney and in turn former U.S. President George Bush for the laws that allowed the U.S. to render and use torture to obtain information.
“This is the gravest crisis to our institutions and our society since the internment of the Japanese in World War II,” he says in an interview with the Star. “I wrote the book because Americans need to know.
“I’m one of the few people who was directly involved in the Bush Administration’s War on Terror policy of rendition and interrogation. I know what this policy has done to us . . . we became what we were opposing. We were supposed to be a government of laws. And we’re not. We were undermining what we believe we were protecting.”
The battle he fought with the CIA to relate his story is telling. His book had to be vetted by the Publications Review Board. The mission of the PRB, as it’s known in CIA circles, is to vet or censor publications to protect sources and methods. Carle and members of the PRB tangled off and on for about 18 months. It only took Carle six months to write the book.
Many parts of the book are redacted, he says. “I wrote the book to be about 100,000 words. The CIA redacted 40,000 words. Entire chapters are missing.”
At one point the arguing got so petty, Carle says, that he and a team of CIA agents were fighting over the use of the phrase “football-size stones.” The CIA argued that use of those words might reveal the location of the black-ops prison.
Carle’s response: “The whole world is made of rocks,” he recounted to the Star. “When I sue you, the judge will throw you out of court.” The CIA eventually backed down and Carle was allowed to use the phrase.
The CIA team, he says, also unsuccessfully tried to take out a whole section of the narrative about urinals. Carle mentions that the urinals in the men’s room at the prisons were too high for men to actually use — five feet off the ground.
For him the urinals were a metaphor for the craziness of the CIA and the War on Terror and its insistence that the prisoner was a member of Al Qaeda. “I was the only one who realized it was senseless or was concerned about it,” he says.
The CIA’s reaction to the book has been less than enthusiastic. After two requests for comment by the Star, a CIA public affairs spokesman sent this written response: “Some allegations in books on the CIA deserve a response, and some just don’t.”
When Carle first was assigned the case, he was matter-of-fact about it. A go-getter, who was keen on making gains in his career, he was happy to get the gig.
A Harvard grad with a B.A. in government, Carle got interested in working with the CIA while he was doing his masters in European Studies and International Economics at John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
He started with the agency after his class work was done, working on terrorism issues since the mid-1980s.
In his briefing when he was assigned the case, he was told that the CIA had a letter — by John Yoo in the U.S. Justice Department — that gave the CIA carte blanche to do whatever the President said was legal.
“The American people don’t understand we sanctioned the breaking of our laws,” Carle explains. “We received orders in a memo to our superiors that said whatever the President said is legal is legal.
“That was the doctrine. I thought, what are you talking about? The president isn’t above the law. He’s subject of the law, just like we are. That’s the triumph of our society.”
After Carle began to interrogate Captus, he realized something was seriously wrong. The facts just didn’t add up. He told Washington.
At first his assessments were ignored, and then he was told that the fact the prisoner was not answering questions proved his guilt.
In fact, that was the formal position of the director general of the CIA. “He said a lack of answer is taken as proof of guilt and you must pressure him harder to answer,” Carle explained.
Carle says he began to feel he was in “the world of Kafka, where up was down, in was out, night was day, and yes was no.”
Despite Carle’s protests, the prisoner was rendered to Hotel California. Eventually Captus was passed on to a new interrogator. Carle returned home to the States and to his wife and kids. But before he left the secret black-op detention centre, he tries once more to get headquarters to right what he considers a horrible wrong, sending lengthy cables detailing his analysis of Captus, the rendition and torture.
But the cables he had written were never sent.
Looking back, Carle doesn’t believe the cables were stopped out of malice, but rather the senior officers did a double take when they realized he was challenging one of the cases of the War on Terror, criticizing rendition and interrogation techniques. “I think they decided not to send it so there wouldn’t be a problem.”
“A few men were ordering us to bypass our laws. If I say this, people will think I’m crazy. America doesn’t do that to itself. But we did.”
His prisoner — Captus — remained in jail for eight years. He was never charged. He was eventually freed in 2010 with a muted apology from the U.S. government, says Carle.
“I found a small number of men at a time of crisis, with the acceptance of a large portion of our population, undermined our laws. We mustn’t let this be accepted as expedient and necessary. It’s neither. It’s not the America I took the oath to preserve.
“Maybe I am the last of the naifs,” he says. “I took my oath very seriously.”
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Comments
Russian Interregator #2: Every minute you don't tell us why you are here, I cut off a finger.
Emmett Fitz-Hume: Mine or yours?
Russian Interregator #2: Yours.
Emmett Fitz-Hume: Damn!
Emmett Fitz-Hume: [trying to buy time by making something up] All right! All right, I'm an American agent!
Russian Interregator #2: And...?
Emmett Fitz-Hume: And? And... uhh... they... they sent me here t-to assassinate your Premier!
Russian Interregator #2: [to the other interregator] I knew it! Pay up, comrade!
Russian Interregator #1: [unimpressed] Let's cut his fingers off anyway.
Godfather.
The guy is an Evil Fuck IMO.
it doesn't work ... even the people who do the torturing say so ... they said torture actually hindered their efforts to find BL ... and that they would have captured him much quicker ...
Then, you must also have to think that the torture of our soldiers is necessary for our enemies to use in order to get strategic and/or tactical information from them... right? And that it was a necessary means for the North Vietnamese to torture captured U.S. pilots and flight crew to get information about priority targets... right?
Hail, Hail!!!