I've stumbled across an excellent (and rather long, for the Internet) piece on US military interrogation methods and how woefully... weak, they are. That is, our interrogators have to be nicer to the terrorists that they interrogate than NCO's (non-commissioned officers; i.e. sergeants) have to be to their own soldiers. Which is, of course, completely and utterly assinine.
Ahmed the Afghani Goatherd who fought for the Taliban because they had been winning for the last 5 years might break if you stare at him sternly and tell him he was a bad boy, but a hard core Al Qaeda "professional" will not. They are trained and conditioned to resist interrogation, even torture, by oppressive Arab security and intelligence services at those nifty little camps they go to. A direct testimony of this truth is related in the book "The Interrogators," which the article's author quotes a few times. The squeaky clean by the book methods used by the initial groups of interrogators in Afghanistan in 2001-02 accomplished exactly nothing. No information of any value. Some detainees, including Arabs (who were obviously Al Qaeda transplants, and a few of whom were later revealed as key ["high value" in MI jargon] targets) were set free with a wave. It was only after the interrogators got more aggressive and creative that prisoners started to break. And then, only the flunkies (more or less) would break. The leaders would just clam up, confident that they could outlast their questioners. So off to Cuba they would go, for a tropical vacation and more of the same.
'Well,' you might ask, 'if these guys are supposed to be tough, what makes you think harsher treatment would break them?'
You should see what they do when we threaten to give them to the Israelis. Or the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Egyptians, Bahraini, or whatever other local power they've pissed off. (but especially the Israelis) A bunch of these guys have committed crimes from money laundering to drug trafficking to sedition to rape in some of these countries where rough treatment is more... routine. They would be treated worse in Yemen for peddling dope or raping a little boy (to use a case I'm familiar with) than they would in the United States for massacring dozens of Iraqis or beheading prisoners on television. And they know it. And many of them will do anything to avoid such a fate, including ratting out their friends. Some hold out though, thinking that they are tough enough to handle it or not really believing that we weak and puny Americans would do such a thing. Sometimes, after these criminals get sent to their respective offended countries (like some of them do), they suddenly start to sing to their new captors and lo! new information is gained. This is the root of the "Outsourcing of Torture" accusations in the press. This stupid flap over Secret International CIA Prisons is undoubtedly linked to this and similar tactics. That's the trouble with secrecy. Because it's secret, you can't just hold up pictures and placards disproving every stupid little accusation and theory that gets thrown at you. Hence why the CIA and Freemasons (both organizations are by and large made up of fine people) have sinister reputations.
Contrary to the not-necessarily-widely-held opinion that our interrogation techniques are somehow inhumane or cruel, they are in fact not tough enough. And after the Abu Ghraib incident (which is kind of stupid anyway... similar antics can probably be found on any large campus in the US... in a frat house during Rush Week. Naked pyramids, hooah!) Army interrogators there are saddled with so much red tape and bureaucratic mother-may-I? horse shit that they are completely ineffective. The military has had to train Air Force interrogators(?!) to go in there instead because of all the BS following the Army around. Shouldn't that ring some bells? The freaking AIR FORCE now has to interrogate terrorist prisoners captured by the Army because the Army is too scared to touch them because of possible political backlash. It's like the entire Johnson Administration's Vietnam strategy writ small. Fucking politicians. And that includes some military officers.
It's pushing 3am and I'm tired and kind of rambling. Summary:
"Is that all you've got? You Americans are pussies." - "Oh yeah? We'll send you to the Mossad!" - "Oh have mercy!" This does not mean that we are not, in fact, pussies.
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