At last the trial date for the planners of the 9/11 attacks is set
Source article at the NY Slimes:
Trial for Men Accused of Plotting 9/11 Attacks Is Set for 2021
The article states that the validity of their confessions is in doubt because they were "tortured," stating matter of factly that waterboarding and sleep deprivation are forms of torture. If sleep deprivation is torture, then raising an infant, sitting for college exams and being the subject of a tax audit all are violations of the Geneva Accords.
Everybody who goes through a US military SERE course (Survival, Escape, Resistance & Evasion) gets waterboarded. It was far from being the least pleasant thing that ever happened to me, but then I only got it once and it rarely has the desired impact in just one application.
Considering that our legal system recognizes the legitimacy of the Excited Utterance rule (in a nutshell, people who think they're at the brink of death don't lie), it is inconsistent to argue that torture doesn't work. Both imply that under certain conditions people are inclined to speak truthfully, even if it isn't in their best interest. As a rule, people don't lie by happenstance (lie = deliberately stating a falsehood for the purpose of deception). Factualness is in the very nature of communication. The purpose of stressing the subject is to reduce their mental state to one where the overwhelming preoccupation is securing their personal safety.
The interrogator expects the subject to reach a point when he will begin trying the scattergun approach. Saying anything to make it stop. But the subject knows the truth will work (or at least hopes it will, if the interrogator recognizes it), so the truth, in time, will tend to be offered more frequently. And more earnestly. The lies will change once it becomes evident they aren't working, but the subject will keep circling back to the truth.
Which is where having other interrogation subjects becomes important. Not indispensable, but important, especially from the standpoint of time. Using a name or buzzword offered up by one subject might give another subject to believe that his interrogators have more information that they're letting on. And that can loosen their tongue. Police investigators use the same technique all the time. Give Suspect B in a crime to believe that Suspect A (his partner) is about to rat him out and cop a plea in an effort to convince Suspect B to be the first to cooperate.
Whether it it violates basic human rights is an entirely different question but anyone who says torture doesn't work is either an idiot or knows they're lying. Want proof? The CIA's own website states that torture doesn't work, and they lie for a living.
Ask an expert poker player if he can tell when an opponent is bluffing. It's no more complicated than that. An interrogator is part lie detector and part poker player. Like a lie detector operator, he asks "controls," leading questions he already knows the answers to. And like a poker player, he studies the subject's responses as he tells what the interrogator knows in advance to be truths or falsehoods to look for patterns. "Tells."
But like the polygraph, the effectiveness of torture is very dependent on who's administering it. And it's trickiest when there's only one subject because if you have multiple subjects, it's a simple matter to stress them all and then cross-reference to see where their answers jive. A single subject makes it more time-consuming because confirmation is more difficult. But an organization as large as the US tends to have a surplus of subjects to interrogate.
It doesn't always work but sometimes it works when nothing else does. In the course of his enhanced interrogation sessions, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed gave up the codename of Usama bin Laden's personal courier. Surveilling the man behind the codename led the CIA to bin Laden's holiday hide-a-way in Abbottabad. Absent that information from KSM, UBL likely would have died from old age and received a hero's funeral in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, right next to that other Muslim warrior hero, Saladin.
Doesn't work my ass.
We didn't think so lowly of torture during the war in Iraq. Otherwise we wouldn't have been remanding 'special' detainees to the Jordanians and Syrians for interrogation. Whenever we saw the white unmarked CIA jet in Baghdad airport, one of those two likely was its next destination. Jordan if you wanted them thoroughly interrogated, or Syria if you just wanted them fucked up.
We've been torturing to gain access to information for thousands of years. If it didn't work you'd think the people doing the torturing would have figure that out by now and woldn't need the UN or the Communist News Network cluing them in.
