Torture not just wrong – but ineffective, says US Army interrogator

In a great article I found in a link from Crooks and Liars, a US interrogator working in Iraq found that using the US Army field guide, not torturing people, and treating them respect works a lot better than beating on them:

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology — one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

It’s still amazing to me that anyone thinks that torture or “just smack them around a bit” ever works. In WWII, playing chess with captured Germans gave up more information than beatings ever did. Americans were tortured in Vietnam, and yet it did nothing to change their attitudes in the end (see John McCain).

Yet people still think that violating another human being’s civil rights will this time get the results you want. And every time, they are still wrong.

All of those torture fans might get off scott free

Suppose you think torture is awesome. But there is this pesky thing called the Constitution that says “torture bad”, and if you do it, you can go to jail for a looooong time. And on top of that, if you’re a President who says “Yeah, torture, rock on,” you could be fired from your job.

It’s just so unfair!

The solution is easy, though. All you have to do is get outgoing President Bush to issue you a pardon saying all those time you beat up prisoners or forced them to feel like they were drowning is all forgiven. That way, you can ignore that whole “rule of law” thing and get down to business!

(sigh)

Cheney: Still shredding evidence on torture. Glorious bastard.

Dick Cheney. Can anything keep him down? Morals? Ethics? Perhaps the law which says you shouldn’t go shredding evidence of crimes like torture?

Nah. I didn’t think so.

New torture rules! All right!

Rejoice, folks – the Pentagon has issued new interrogation rules.

I wonder if it’ll include belly slaps. Probably not, because the Pentagon has actually got some great people with ethics, compared to some people that God keeps screwing with their heart to tell them they’re evil, evil people.

White House endorses CIA torture porn.

It’s like something out of a bad movie. We go from the Bush administration claiming “we don’t torture” to “OK- we harshley interrogate” to “Well, maybe we water boarded some people – but we didn’t know about it.”

Except, the White House evidently authorized torture as requested by the CIA.

We don’t know who authorized it – the President? The Vice-President? Who in the Bush administration signed off that the ban against “cruel and unusual punishment” was finally cool because, you know, the Constitution is just a piece of paper, after all.

Learn to abuse prisoners like a pro

If you read through the book The Shock Doctrine (and if you haven’t what’s wrong with you?), you’ll read about how many really cool torture techniques were learned, then exported around the world.

Most people would see that as a mark of shame, and something that a nation should repent in sackcloth and ashes for. Other asshats would decide no – let’s make a manual of the ways we can abuse prisoners! Screw due process – if we arrested them, they must be guilty of something, right?

Which is why now you, too, can learn the tips from the pros and read the official Guantanamo prisoner operating procedures – or check out the original PDF document of the same.

Now you, too, can learn how to belly slap, use stress positions like “Worship-the-Gods”, and even the proper way to “manhandle”! Wow – who knew prisoner abuse could sound so homoerotic?