Seems to belong here - a long article on the US interrogation system this past Sunday.
Perm link http://tinyurl.com/7rmhr http://www.bugmenot.com "Only after a new commanding officer had arrived and official inquiries had issued their reports did we learn that 40 percent of those penned up at Guantanamo never belonged there in the first place. At Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the record was even worse: two-thirds of the detainees were eventually said to have been innocent of terrorist links. At least when they were picked up. Who knows what leanings they developed or links they forged during and after their interrogations?" "...uncomfortable with both absolutist positions -- the trusting ''do what you have to do in secret'' carte blanche versus the pure ''no coercive force ever'' position held by those who are strict constructionists when it comes to laws against torture lite as well as torture -- and equally dubious about the feasibility of a decent middle ground, I set out with notebook in hand several months ago to speak to politicians on Capitol Hill, spymasters, interrogators and legal experts. My hopes were that their experience and conclusions would shed light on the ingredients of a successful interrogation, whether these included coercion and, if so, how much, and whether there was anything that ordinary citizens could safely be told about what goes on in the shadows. My itinerary wasn't arduous. It involved traveling to Washington for conversations on Capitol Hill; then to Cambridge, Mass., to talk to law professors with a range of strong views on my subject; and finally to Israel, a country whose Supreme Court had asserted its jurisdiction and declared in 1999 that not only torture but all forms of ''cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment'' -- the term for torture lite used in the Convention Against Torture -- were illegal under Israeli law. At least there, it seemed, the security services that conduct interrogations had adapted themselves over many years to the idea that some legal standards might actually apply on the dark side. That was more or less the American view until just after 9/11." "Even when clear evidence of the effectiveness of torture lite is hard to come by, democracies threatened by terrorism shrink from laying down the weapon. Should the threat ever pass, we can be expected to repress any memory of its use as we now try to do in daily life while it persists. Then we'll discover how much gratitude or resentment has accrued to us in the places where we've operated, among the descendants of those we've detained." -- Gary Denton Easter Lemming Blogs http://elemming.blogspot.com http://elemming2.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
