[Casca]

[quote=Allan from Fallbrook]Casca: Where to begin? First off, at 43, I’m a little young to be a “retiree”. I was invalided out of the Army in 1988 as a result of being involved in a helicopter crash. I spent five years in (three as a Ranger), and then sayonara. So, while I had planned being a lifer, it didn’t work out that way.

I have friends in Iraq, Colombia and Afghanistan. While no one divulges anything of a sensitive nature, I get enough information to have a good sense of what is going on. All of us came up during the Reagan years (military wise), so there are no illusions about politicos or why we are doing what we are doing.

As far as the comparison between a civil war/insurgency in Central America and WWII, well, there really isn’t one. Our goal was extremely simple: Win the hearts and minds of the people and thus eliminate support, aid and sustenance to the FMLN movement. Our first step was getting the government of El Sal and the right wing death squads (such as Mano Blanco) to stop killing and torturing their own people. I’m sure the SD and Gestapo had proven methods of torturing, but the Salvadoran government and military didn’t. At least I don’t think they did: Nailing a baby’s head to a wall seems extremely ineffective.

There is also a huge difference between torture and interrogation. The information and intel yielded under torture is not, generally speaking, of high value. The subject will tell you virtually anything to get the pain to stop and the nature of the questions will eventually led him to give you the information he believes you want. We got more solid intel by breaking someone down over several days with intensive questioning and using a variety of psyops then by tying them to a chair and going after them with a phone book and a 2 liter of Bubble Up.

When I brought up the question regarding Gitmo and prosecutions, it was solely because that was one of the stated intents of that facility’s existence. We are warehousing all of those supposed terrorists, but gaining little intel and putting almost none of them away, in terms of incarceration.

As far as the number of them that will “live to fight another day”: Why are so many now slated for release? Is it because the Administration is bowing to outside pressure from NGOs, or is it because only a miniscule number of them are even remotely tied to terrorist organizations? I’ll let you and your bulls**t detector go look that one up.

I thought Dershowitz wrote an excellent piece on torture using his potential nuke threat as a rationale for torturing to gain information. I still didn’t agree with him, though. The senior NCOs and officers I worked with down south were all former Vietnam hands who had faced the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong. They were very familiar with both torture and interrogation and, almost universally, chose interrogation as the best means to gain solid and usable intel. They were all products of the HARD school of experience and most of them were Special Forces. Not a gentle bunch and not squeamish, either. You use those means that are most effective. Our record in that war speaks for itself, and we were able to accomplish it without sacrificing our honor or humanity. Both of which were in very short supply amongst the Nazis, whose record speaks for itself as well.

At some point, with torture and rendition, you become what you behold. So what is the gain if we “win” the War on Terror and sacrifice all that we hold dear in the process?

There are only a handful of us left from the group I served with. We’ve lost people in Somalia, Iraq, South America and Afghanistan. All of us believe in this country in a way you probably don’t understand. I think of the quote: “For those that fight for it, Freedom has a flavor the sheltered never know”.

It is easy to pontificate about torture and whether waterboarding is or isn’t, along with whether or not rendition is acceptable, and do so from the comfort of your den. It is quite another to have seen these things firsthand. I’m sure it pains your towering intellect to have to deign to deal with us mere mortals and our decided lack of neuronal plasticity, but someone of us actually do know of what we speak and why some things are just WRONG. No need to reason or argue about it.[/quote]

I’m in the awkward position of arguing transubstantiation with an alter boy. You keep setting yourself up as having some level of expertise based on what amounts to one tour of duty in the very narrow universe of El Salvador. Be honest with yourself and face the fact that your connection with the Army was a long time ago, far, far away, and it didn’t last for very long.

Now I don’t wish to hit you too hard here, because I think you’re the right sort of fellow, just a bit limited by your limited experience. If you had been an officer, then you’d know something about the law of land warfare. And had you spent a full career, you might have a better idea of what you don’t know. You’re like the fellow who once took the bay ferry, and now wants to tell you of his life at sea.

You’ve bought the line that torture doesn’t work, which just isn’t true. I’ve also given you the gold standard of an example in the SD. Then you lurch all over the place into wonton brutality, which is not torture. It’s just brutality.

Then, you make the mistake of lumping all stress techniques together as torture. Torture is maiming and killing in the interrogation process. We don’t do that, at least not at Gitmo.

Now go to Netflix, and order up “Colonel Blimp”. Watch it all the way through, and see if you recognize any of the characters.

[Casca]

Good gawd Socrates, I didn’t know that you were a child. With any luck, you’ll gain some wisdom after forty. As for my education comments, I occasionally make a tongue-in-cheek comment. As for your worldview, well you weren’t sentient during the Carter administration, and you don’t know what an unmitigated disaster it was. With luck you won’t have to learn from the Obama years.

[Casca]

Good gawd Socrates, I didn’t know that you were a child. With any luck, you’ll gain some wisdom after forty. As for my education comments, I occasionally make a tongue-in-cheek comment. As for your worldview, well you weren’t sentient during the Carter administration, and you don’t know what an unmitigated disaster it was. With luck you won’t have to learn from the Obama years.

[Casca]

Good gawd Socrates, I didn’t know that you were a child. With any luck, you’ll gain some wisdom after forty. As for my education comments, I occasionally make a tongue-in-cheek comment. As for your worldview, well you weren’t sentient during the Carter administration, and you don’t know what an unmitigated disaster it was. With luck you won’t have to learn from the Obama years.

[Casca]

Good gawd Socrates, I didn’t know that you were a child. With any luck, you’ll gain some wisdom after forty. As for my education comments, I occasionally make a tongue-in-cheek comment. As for your worldview, well you weren’t sentient during the Carter administration, and you don’t know what an unmitigated disaster it was. With luck you won’t have to learn from the Obama years.

[Casca]

Good gawd Socrates, I didn’t know that you were a child. With any luck, you’ll gain some wisdom after forty. As for my education comments, I occasionally make a tongue-in-cheek comment. As for your worldview, well you weren’t sentient during the Carter administration, and you don’t know what an unmitigated disaster it was. With luck you won’t have to learn from the Obama years.

[Casca]

[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.

[Casca]

[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.

[Casca]

[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.

[Casca]

[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.

[Casca]

[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.

[Casca]

[quote=Allan from Fallbrook]
On a personal note, I find it revolting that the US maintains a prison (Gitmo) equally as repressive as those found in Cuba. I can’t wait to see that place shut down.[/quote]

AFF, I was with you until the last paragraph. Run out to Walmart and get a Brita pitcher. There’s something in the water in Fallbrook. Too much fluoride?

[Casca]

[quote=Allan from Fallbrook]
On a personal note, I find it revolting that the US maintains a prison (Gitmo) equally as repressive as those found in Cuba. I can’t wait to see that place shut down.[/quote]

AFF, I was with you until the last paragraph. Run out to Walmart and get a Brita pitcher. There’s something in the water in Fallbrook. Too much fluoride?

[Casca]

[quote=Allan from Fallbrook]
On a personal note, I find it revolting that the US maintains a prison (Gitmo) equally as repressive as those found in Cuba. I can’t wait to see that place shut down.[/quote]

AFF, I was with you until the last paragraph. Run out to Walmart and get a Brita pitcher. There’s something in the water in Fallbrook. Too much fluoride?

[Casca]

[quote=Allan from Fallbrook]
On a personal note, I find it revolting that the US maintains a prison (Gitmo) equally as repressive as those found in Cuba. I can’t wait to see that place shut down.[/quote]

AFF, I was with you until the last paragraph. Run out to Walmart and get a Brita pitcher. There’s something in the water in Fallbrook. Too much fluoride?

[Author]

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