[quote=Allan from Fallbrook]Casca: I’m a little curious about your background. I spent three years in a place where torture was commonplace, as was the attitude that the end always justified the means. Having seen firsthand the effects of torture and knowing that it doesn’t work (it yields information of extremely poor value), I don’t advocate it.
What has Gitmo gotten us, in terms of usable intel? Very little, actually. I have friends in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and there has been little in terms of intel yield coming out of Gitmo. How many prosecutions have resulted? Again, very few. So what purpose does it serve? Meanwhile, we are taken to task for it’s existence, and for what it says about how we do business.
My views on the subject are the product of hard won experience. Yours?[/quote]
They say experience is a dear school, and a fool will learn in no other. If you’re speaking from the hard school of experience, then you know that NOBODY here knows anything about what intel has come from Gitmo, and you also know that none involved in the trade would be in a position to share anything with anyone about sources and methods, least of all retirees in Fallbrook. So drop the facade of “inside scoop”.
As for Gitmo being our face to the world. I think you’re right. We lock up the bad guys, feed them full of ice cream, let them pray to Allah five times a day, and hold them in our zoo for the world to see. What barbarians we are. The rest of the human race would have their heads on pikes, and rightly so.
Now I have a supposition based on a rather good understanding of the intel world, and how it should work. The bad guys graduate to Gitmo when they’re exhausted as sources in other more secure locations. It is our human archive of the war. Occasionally we go back and pull one off the shelf, but in all real terms, their information has a very short shelf life, and is spent by the time they get there. We keep them locked up so that they might not live to fight another day. The track record in this department hasn’t been perfect.
As for your position that torture isn’t productive, I’d like to direct you to Anthony Cave Brown’s most excellent work The Secret War Report of the OSS, and the fate of the Jedricks under the questioning of the Sicherheitsdienst. When the SD was finished with you, you were finished. If torture didn’t work in El Salvador, it wasn’t being done right.
Finally, calling waterboarding torture is like calling golf a sport. If you don’t bleed, and you can’t die in the process, it isn’t.
I was going to end this with the previous paragraph, but during review noticed your “How many prosecutions have resulted?” That line alone pegs my bullshit detector. I can’t imagine that a career military officer with a combat arms MOS would say such a thing. Of course there are always a few knuckleheads running around.
