Should civilized nations use "Enhanced Interrogation" techni

[Occhidiangela]

Being willing to "break eggs" and "do the deed" and "get the win" might be fantastic macho posturing, but it doesn't seem to actually give particularly good results.

It is hardly macho posturing to play to win. Your attempt at a dismissive ad hom is reconized for what it is. As to results, the win is the prime result. Style in not unimportant, but its importance is secondary to the win. (This relates somewhat to "should the A bomb have been used in pursuit of the win" arguments, which was a matter of style. )

I do. Much of the rest of the world certainly seems to. You can disregard those opinions as you please,

And I tend to, since
1. all opinions are not equal, nor equally valid, and
2. Discussion about political issues are discussions about power, since politics (at the action level) is about power, and who wields it
3. Power is that is at stake here.

My nation is a Power. Capital P. Your nation is allied to Power, via NATO and other treaties, and as such is part of a Power bloc. The rising to status as a Power of China, and India, is changing the balance of power weekly, monthyl, and annually.

The Islamists want to be Powers, or a Power bloc, depends on who is doing the talking.

Whatever it takes to forestall that is in the interest of modern civilization, which you (and I) are a part of and advocate for ... but to you, based on your rhetoric, style is more important than substance in the struggle.

I'll go a step further, and suggest to you that a significant portion of the Islamic world is not Islamist, and are also interested in Islamists not becoming Powers, since there is a yearning to participate in the modern world -- I'll wager the current government in Pakistsan and many of its people feel that way.

There is such a thing as a Phyrric victory. We may very well be in the process of winning one.

I'll take the win, even if it's winning ugly. The alternative is uglier than what you are griping about, in terms of means.

Back to the topic at hand: should the Bush administration gone as far as they did in establishing a new MO, openly supported from the top how we go about battling the new warrior class that does not owe allegiance to a nation, but to a cause whose ends are used to justify means you and I agree are unpacceptable? I am certain we both agree that walking into a Baghdad market with a bomb under your burka or coat, and blowing up yourself and a few dozen others, is something neither of us considers good in any way, shape, or form.

Was the risk of political damage, in the world of images and symbols, worth taking?

Don't know.

Was any attack forestalled with those methods as key factors?

Don't know. Based on what I have read over the past five years, and in the past three weeks as more of the veila has been removed, there is sharp disagreement among the people actually involved.

We may never know. The insiders have argued both sides: both from the interrogator level and from the policy level. This judgment runs into the same problem with measuring the effectiveness of a safety program: how do you measure non-events? How do you attribute causal relationship between a non-event and a predicted event? You can sometimes show correlation, and that may be as far as you can go. (For example, most driving accidents are not drunk driving accidents.) How do you know how many accidents you avoid, in aviation, when you change a rule or policy? I've seen a lot of careless analysis that attributes to cause a policy, when said policy isn't the driving factor. One then has to try again when the accidents spike, a few more die, and back goes the policy formation, accounting for more factors. Attempting to isloate the "torture" factor strikes me as potentially self deluding, as potentially self deluding as the firm belief, held by senior members of the Bush administration, that coercive means was just what was needed to get what they needed and wanted. I am of the opinion that to at least some extent, they talked themselves into that, the CIA director Mister Tenet among them.

To relate this to the matter of taking members of guerilla cells and fifth column cells, as these terrorist cells operate, and pretend that they are like in kind to regulars of a national and dispiplined force, is to go out of one's way to fight the wrong war the wrong way. One of the few good justifications for the coercive methods is that actionable intel is often perishable, in time. There is a time constraint to the value of information some sources have. Do I need to restate for you the Al Zarqawi problem? The patient method took over two years to find him. In those two years, the blood of well over a thousand Iraqis can be attributed to his efforts, probably more. Are those thousand worth losing for your principle?

Probably so, given the interrogators (go back a couple of years, Atlantic Magazine, for a fantastic article on that case) don't think they'd have gotten the info they did any other way. So, put yourself in a similar position for a moment. You'll hold your principle sacred, and let your own people bleed, by the thousand, until you maybe or maybe don't get what you need to act.

Your conscience up to that, Jester? Your inaction leading to your own people dying? Maybe it is, but if you put yourself in the position of a polician, who has to be seen to be acting to correct this bleeding, your choices may change.

As you and Pete have gone over, and as any interrogator will likely know experiantially, there is the risk that use of coercive means yields something other than what you are looking for. There is the risk that you drive the subject mad, or unhinged and incoherent. There is the risk that he doesn't know what you think he knows, and that you may lose other useful intel in the process of trying to find a particular body of information. (Talk about a waste of time, and effort)

All of those are risks. Should they have been taken? I have mixed feelings, since this policy ideation contaminated my profession, in terms of what was allowed in the command climate in OIF. In time, the decisions on coercive interrogation came before the Iraq war began. While the core problem at Abu Ghraib was one of failed leadership and under resourcing, combined with both contractors and other agencies being involved in a military detention facility/prison, it is my opinion that the command climate was infected by the attitudes in Washington that amounted to rounding up at least all of the usual suspects, and leaning on them until someone talks.

That attitude may not have been the intent. The intent may have been that selected high value targets, in the intel sense, could be squeezed. The outcome, thanks to a gross failure in leadership at that prison, from General Sanchez on down to the officers and seionr NCO's in charge there, led to a lax enough environment that the soldiers on task not only got sloppy, they got both unprofessional and criminal in the process.

I will remind you that the prison abuse there was first discovered, investigated, and prosecuted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and his defense department. Whatever the policy was, a strand of the chain recognized something very wrong and charges were filed. This was in the fall of 2003. You and I didn't find out about it until those so charged released the photographs of what they'd been doing, spring of 2004.

That's right, the criminals in this case, those charged with maltreatment, were the source of the information used to attempt to discredit the US. Pyrrhic victory, is it?

I suppose, in that the Department of Defense found and punished some (in my opinion not enough at the right ranks higher than sergeant) members who were out of line. That is a fine victory for the rule of law, one of the cornerstones of modern civilized society, which by the way is referred to in the title of this thread.

That victory led to a local political disaster, and a defeat in the informational element of that war. That it didn't lead to defeat in November of 2004 is, IMO, of more than trivial interest.

Look at the timeline again, Jester. Rummy, the much revlied (and for a lot of good reasons) was "doing the right thing" in prosecuting that case. He won. The courts martial returned convictions.

And he lost. Maybe that is due to being late to the game, or to eggs not being unbreakable.

You enjoin the Americans to "do the right thing" as you see it.

Is that standard worth suffering a loss for?

How big a loss are you willing to suffer before you'll change your mind. See my comment above on "too late" when the three billion are coming. How much of your own blood, my moral and upright, pacifist friend, are you willing to shed for your principle? (IIRC, you are from previous discussion a pacifist, but if I have that wrong, I am sorry, memory foggy)

Occhi