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December 29, 2005
Surely, Andrew Sullivan Fainted after Reading that Torture Works
UPDATE: after reading comments to this post, I agree that the column/article conjectures that warterboarding MIGHT be what broke KSM. I read it too quickly and I apologize.
I don't know if I would consider "waterboarding" outright torture. I typically think of things like the rack and the Iron Maiden when someone says "torture."
But here we have evidence that waterboarding works waterboarding might work.
Moral and legal aspects aside, conventional wisdom is that torture simply isn't practical: that someone who is being tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, and that information gleaned through torture is therefore not reliable.
Some former military and intelligence officers say, however, that physically aggressive interrogation techniques that some human rights groups consider torture can be effective in the short term. When asked for specifics, the technique they cite is "waterboarding," in which water is poured over a subject's face to create the sensation of drowning.
Consider Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 39-year-old former al-Qaida operative who was the Sept. 11 mastermind and bearer of many al-Qaida secrets.
...He ultimately had so much to say that more than 100 footnoted references to the CIA's interrogations of KSM are contained in the final report of the commission that investigated Sept. 11.
Posted by Aaron at December 29, 2005 03:53 PM
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Comments
You're biggest problem in life is that you can't imagine anything like this ever happening to you. Having almost drowned twice, I'd have to say, hell yes waterboarding is torture. And I don't care if some wingnut looney say it worked. It's against about 6 treaties that we are signatories to. But since we have a known felon in the Whitehouse I guess we don't have to worry about that. The end justifies the means, right? You should have been a marxist.
Posted by: IaintBacchus at December 29, 2005 06:36 PM
Hold the phone. I just read that Op-ed disguised as a news story. Everything Kalid is reported to have talked about happened months or years earlier. THEY GOT ZERO USABLE TACTICAL INTELLEGENCE OUT OF HIM. If you want a fountain of useless information, you don't have to resort to torturing arabs. Just read this blog regularly.
Posted by: IaintBacchus at December 29, 2005 06:45 PM