Torture.... The real story

Here's an excellent and lengthy article on torture technique's the U.S. has been using.

The other day on Hannity, a liberal was going on and on about how we couldn't use torture. The caller said that if we needed information from a prisoner, we should tell him that he should give up the info because we are a good nation, and his cause would never win.

Right......

But the Kandahar prisoners were not playing by the army rule book. They divulged nothing. Prisoners overcame the [traditional] model almost effortlessly, writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, his gripping account of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. The prisoners confounded their captors not with clever cover stories but with simple refusal to cooperate. They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember even the most basic of details, and then waited for consequences that never really came.

Some of the al-Qaida fighters had received resistance training, which taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question prisoners. Failure to cooperate, the al-Qaida manuals revealed, carried no penalties and certainly no risk of torture a sign, gloated the manuals, of American weakness.

Even if a prisoner had not previously studied American detention policies before arriving at Kandahar, he soon figured them out. It became very clear very early on to the detainees that the Americans were just going to have them sit there, recalls interrogator Joe Martin (a pseudonym). They realized: The Americans will give us our Holy Book, they'll draw lines on the floor showing us where to
pray, we'll get three meals a day with fresh fruit, do Jazzercise with the guards, . . . we can wait them out.

Even more challenging was that these detainees bore little resemblance to traditional prisoners of war. The army's interrogation manual presumed adversaries who were essentially the mirror image
of their captors, motivated by emotions that all soldiers share.

It is hard to understand just how different the war on terror is compared to any other conflict we have been involved in fighting. I am very sympathetic to the idea of outlawing all torture. However, a rational discussion should be held. Frankly, While torture is distasteful, I think psychological "torture" is just fine.

I don't think we should be like the torturers we are trying to rid the world of (like Saddam Hussein). But at the same time, we need to fight this war. There is a lot of room between torture and simple questioning with out any pressing.