Bye Bye Guantanamo

[cochise]

Heck ... lets do both ... What did Bhagwan Krishna say to Arjun when he was not interested in fughting a battle that would result in deaths of near and dear ones ?

The correct action must not be shunned, though it may be painful to oneself.

[cochise]

Read the article that I posted in post # 18. also consider the nearly a thousand dead in just one year ... caused by subscribers to the exact same ideology as those whose HR you are championing.

I will not take a redirection. The question was asked to you by me...it is only befitting that you deliver me the answer, don't you think? A thousand dead...yes...so, you want to turn the dharmic action in the Bhagavad Gita into an advocate for torture instead of Dharma? Is this where you are leading by your bait? Arjuna did not revel in his destruction, it was as swift as can be. The motivation (mens rea) was love...not hate or fear...(this is a very important point that most western educated and oreinted Indians and non-Indians seem to overlook)....without this...the corrosion within begins...by degrading the other, you degrade yourself. You lower yourself to their level or lower...for you should know better. And then...you know what? Ignorant outiders who have no idea of anything...can equivocate about you and the perpetrator. This is where the stupidity of cruelty leads...cruelty comes from the basest part of the soul. Now, please do not get me wrong....I am no pacifist. There needs to be battle...bring it on and lets end these guys quick. But no, I will not torture anyone....not willingly anyway...in a fit of rage...who knows....beating someone up can be construed as torture right? Can killing him be construed as torture?

[THX_1138]

Study "The decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbons. Then use it as a reflection for the USA. The understanding will deepen.

i read excerpts from it... and while the book is quite well written, i feel extending the analogy to united states is too much of an exaggeration.

[kumble_rocks]

For more human right abuses take place routinely around the globe and it never gets highlighted like Gitmo. So , in my opinion Gitmo has been blown out of proportions and blaming US as if it is the sole culprit is ridiculous. Just read the news clip and one will get the drift. http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0123/p04s01-wosc.html Thailand accused of mistreating Muslim refugees Nearly 1,000 refugees were detained on a remote island in December before being towed out to sea and abandoned with little food or water, rights group says. By Simon Montlake | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor from the January 23, 2009 edition BANGKOK, THAILAND - Hundreds of Muslim refugees from Burma (Myanmar) are feared missing or dead after Thai troops forced them onto boats without engines and cut them adrift in international waters, according to human rights activists and authorities in India who rescued survivors. The revelations have shone a spotlight on the Thai military's expulsion policy toward Muslims it sees as a security threat. Nearly 1,000 refugees were detained on a remote island in December before being towed out to sea in two batches and abandoned with little food or water, according to a tally by a migrant-rights group based on survivors' accounts and media reports. The detainees, mostly members of Burma's oppressed Rohingya minority, then drifted for weeks. One group was later rescued by Indonesia's Navy, and two others made landfall in India's Andaman Islands. Photos of refugees on a Thai island show rows of bedraggled men stripped to the waist as soldiers stand guard. In a separate incident, foreign tourists snapped pictures of detainees trussed on a beach. Thailand's Andaman coastline, where the abuses took place, is a popular vacation spot. Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has launched an investigation. Military officials have denied any ill treatment of refugees, while offering conflicting accounts of how they ended up lost at sea. The military has accused the Rohingya, who often travel via Thailand to Malaysia to work or seek asylum, of assisting a Muslim-led insurgency in southern Thailand. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is pressing Thailand for access to 126 Rohingya that it says are in Thai custody. These include 46 boat people reportedly detained on Jan. 16 and handed over to military custody. It said a second group of 80 Rohingya, which reportedly had previously been pushed out to sea and drifted back, had been transferred to the tiny detention island.

[Brainfade]

Well...this is more what you should worry about if you live in the anglo-sphere: http://www.321gold.com/editorials/willie/willie012009.html

Wouldn't you agree that the economy is closely intertwined with the security situation? One more successful AlQaeda strike on US soil, and the economy may tank beyond redemption.

Have you considered the possibility that he is an intelligence operative. I am sure they have.

No, it never crossed my mind, and I still have no reason to think that. But in the bizarro-world of espionage, anything is possible.

[Brainfade]

For more human right abuses take place routinely around the globe and it never gets highlighted like Gitmo. So , in my opinion Gitmo has been blown out of proportions and blaming US as if it is the sole culprit is ridiculous. Just read the news clip and one will get the drift. http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0123/p04s01-wosc.html Thailand accused of mistreating Muslim refugees Nearly 1,000 refugees were detained on a remote island in December before being towed out to sea and abandoned with little food or water, rights group says. By Simon Montlake | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor from the January 23, 2009 edition BANGKOK, THAILAND - Hundreds of Muslim refugees from Burma (Myanmar) are feared missing or dead after Thai troops forced them onto boats without engines and cut them adrift in international waters, according to human rights activists and authorities in India who rescued survivors. The revelations have shone a spotlight on the Thai military's expulsion policy toward Muslims it sees as a security threat. Nearly 1,000 refugees were detained on a remote island in December before being towed out to sea in two batches and abandoned with little food or water, according to a tally by a migrant-rights group based on survivors' accounts and media reports. The detainees, mostly members of Burma's oppressed Rohingya minority, then drifted for weeks. One group was later rescued by Indonesia's Navy, and two others made landfall in India's Andaman Islands. Photos of refugees on a Thai island show rows of bedraggled men stripped to the waist as soldiers stand guard. In a separate incident, foreign tourists snapped pictures of detainees trussed on a beach. Thailand's Andaman coastline, where the abuses took place, is a popular vacation spot. Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has launched an investigation. Military officials have denied any ill treatment of refugees, while offering conflicting accounts of how they ended up lost at sea. The military has accused the Rohingya, who often travel via Thailand to Malaysia to work or seek asylum, of assisting a Muslim-led insurgency in southern Thailand. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is pressing Thailand for access to 126 Rohingya that it says are in Thai custody. These include 46 boat people reportedly detained on Jan. 16 and handed over to military custody. It said a second group of 80 Rohingya, which reportedly had previously been pushed out to sea and drifted back, had been transferred to the tiny detention island.

The issue is not about where HR occurs. It is that the US has always claimed moral superiority in this regard. And many people feel that it has lost the moral high ground and Obama feels he can restore that with this move.

[kumble_rocks]

The issue is not about where HR occurs. It is that the US has always claimed moral superiority in this regard. And many people feel that it has lost the moral high ground and Obama feels he can restore that with this move.

US may claim anything . That doesn't make their claim right. The very fact that they staged a fake war clearly abrogate their moral high ground . It's like muslims around the world claiming that Sharia better than Secular democracy . And we know it is not . So , hold US's claim of moral superiority at your peril. After all, this is a government which funded Taliban in the 80's. So , going back to the OP , the only real issue I have is the fact that Bush Government did not charge anybody until the Supreme court intervened. And dreaded terrorists like 9-11 mastermind getting tortured will certainly not disturb my moral conscience , and it certainly should not disturb yours. And for posters who present a case that torture does not work , just google and you will get articles posted by experts which points to the contrary. Heck , MSNBC and Foxnews have routine fights on this topic with expert guests being for and against the usage of torture. That's why I was alluding to the point that the jury is still out whether torture works or not.

[Macj]

I find it hard to believe that they captured Khalid Sheikh within the first year of the conflict but yet couldnt catch Osama. Bush had enormous goodwill after 9/11 , classic case of squandering good fortune. Anyways no more attacks occurred in the US , dozens were thwarted and he got Congress to pass the Nuclear Bill. I just hope Obama is pro India, controls Pakistan. The Guantanamo concept is not unique to the US but in the past decisions were made immediately, not like this, keep someone for 6-7 years for no reason( out of the 240 odd 30% havent been charged yet).

[triam]

US may claim anything . That doesn't make their claim right. The very fact that they staged a fake war clearly abrogate their moral high ground . It's like muslims around the world claiming that Sharia better than Secular democracy . And we know it is not . So , hold US's claim of moral superiority at your peril. After all, this is a government which funded Taliban in the 80's. So , going back to the OP , the only real issue I have is the fact that Bush Government did not charge anybody until the Supreme court intervened. And dreaded terrorists like 9-11 mastermind getting tortured will certainly not disturb my moral conscience , and it certainly should not disturb yours. And for posters who present a case that torture does not work , just google and you will get articles posted by experts which points to the contrary. Heck , MSNBC and Foxnews have routine fights on this topic with expert guests being for and against the usage of torture. That's why I was alluding to the point that the jury is still out whether torture works or not.

KR, experts argue with anecdotes, Im genuinely interested is there some kind of study that proves this that torture helps in interrogation?? For each dreaded terrorist that is tortured there are atleast 3 non terrorists tortured.

[Macj]

KR' date=' experts argue with anecdotes, Im genuinely interested is there some kind of study that proves this that torture helps in interrogation?? For each dreaded terrorist that is tortured there are atleast 3 non terrorists tortured.[/quote'] That is true only if you arrest every other Hussein, Mohd and Mudassar like the US did. You have to arrest people with some justification or connection to terrorism, then torture might work.

[triam]

That is true only if you arrest every other Hussein, Mohd and Mudassar like the US did. You have to arrest people with some justification or connection to terrorism, then torture might work.

Anybody who gets arrested will be viewed as guilty by the military. Please show some evidence (not anecdotal) that torture works.

[punjabi_khota]

And for posters who present a case that torture does not work , just google and you will get articles posted by experts which points to the contrary. Heck , MSNBC and Foxnews have routine fights on this topic with expert guests being for and against the usage of torture. That's why I was alluding to the point that the jury is still out whether torture works or not.

Link to NYT article describing how psychlogical tactics worked against Khalid Sheikh Mohammad WASHINGTON — In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland, Al Qaeda’s engineer of mass murder faced off against his Central Intelligence Agency interrogator. It was 18 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq was giving Muslim extremists new motives for havoc. If anyone knew about the next plot, it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a C.I.A. offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called “knuckledraggers.†Mr. Martinez came in after the rough stuff, the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English. He achieved a rapport with Mr. Mohammed that astonished his fellow C.I.A. officers. A canny opponent, Mr. Mohammed mixed disinformation and braggadocio with details of plots, past and planned. Eventually, he grew loquacious. “They’d have long talks about religion,†comparing notes on Islam and Mr. Martinez’s Catholicism, one C.I.A. officer recalled. And, the officer added, there was one other detail no one could have predicted: “He wrote poems to Deuce’s wife.†Mr. Martinez, who by then had interrogated at least three other high-level prisoners, would bring Mr. Mohammed snacks, usually dates. He would listen to Mr. Mohammed’s despair over the likelihood that he would never see his children again and to his catalog of complaints about his accommodations. “He wanted a view,†the C.I.A. officer recalled. The story of Mr. Martinez’s role in the C.I.A.’s interrogation program, including his contribution to the first capture of a major figure in Al Qaeda, provides the closest look to date beneath the blanket of secrecy that hides the program from terrorists and from critics who accuse the agency of torture. Beyond the interrogator’s successes, this account includes new details on the campaign against Al Qaeda, including the text message that led to Mr. Mohammed’s capture, the reason the C.I.A. believed his claim that he was the murderer of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the separate teams at the C.I.A.’s secret prisons of those who meted out the agony and those who asked the questions. In the Hollywood cliché of Fox’s “24,†a torturer shouts questions at a bound terrorist while inflicting excruciating pain. The C.I.A. program worked differently. A paramilitary team put on the pressure, using cold temperatures, sleeplessness, pain and fear to force a prisoner to talk. When the prisoner signaled assent, the tormenters stepped aside. After a break that could be a day or even longer, Mr. Martinez or another interrogator took up the questioning. Mr. Martinez’s success at building a rapport with the most ruthless of terrorists goes to the heart of the interrogation debate. Did it suggest that traditional methods alone might have obtained the same information or more? Or did Mr. Mohammed talk so expansively because he feared more of the brutal treatment he had already endured? A definitive answer is unlikely under the Bush administration, which has insisted in court that not a single page of 7,000 documents on the program can be made public. The C.I.A. declined to provide information for this article, in part, a spokesman said, because the agency did not want to interfere with the military trials planned for Mr. Mohammed and four other Qaeda suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The two dozen current and former American and foreign intelligence officials interviewed for this article offered a tantalizing but incomplete description of the C.I.A. detention program. Most would speak of the highly classified program only on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Martinez declined to be interviewed; his role was described by colleagues. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A., and a lawyer representing Mr. Martinez asked that he not be named in this article, saying that the former interrogator believed that the use of his name would invade his privacy and might jeopardize his safety. The New York Times, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked undercover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news articles and books, declined the request. (An editors’ note on this issue has been posted on The Times’s Web site.) The very fact that Mr. Martinez, a career narcotics analyst who did not speak the terrorists’ native languages and had no interrogation experience, would end up as a crucial player captures the ad-hoc nature of the program. Officials acknowledge that it was cobbled together under enormous pressure in 2002 by an agency nearly devoid of expertise in detention and interrogation. “I asked, ‘What are we going to do with these guys when we get them?’ †recalled A. B. Krongard, the No. 3 official at the C.I.A. from March 2001 until 2004. “I said, ‘We’ve never run a prison. We don’t have the languages. We don’t have the interrogators.’ †In its scramble, the agency made the momentous decision to use harsh methods the United States had long condemned. With little research or reflection, it borrowed its techniques from an American military training program modeled on the torture repertories of the Soviet Union and other cold-war adversaries, a lineage that would come to haunt the agency. It located its overseas jails based largely on which foreign intelligence officials were most accommodating and rushed to move the prisoners when word of locations leaked. Seeking a longer-term solution, the C.I.A. spent millions to build a high-security prison in a remote desert location, according to two former intelligence officials. The prison, whose existence has never been disclosed, was completed — and then apparently abandoned unused — when President Bush decided in 2006 to move all the prisoners to Guantánamo. By then, whether it was a result of a fear of waterboarding, the patient trust-building mastered by Mr. Martinez or the demoralizing effects of isolation, Mr. Mohammed and some other prisoners had become quite compliant. In fact, according to several officials, they had become a sort of terrorist focus group, advising their captors on their fellow extremists’ goals, ideology and tradecraft. Asked, for example, how he would smuggle explosives into the United States, Mr. Mohammed told C.I.A officers that he might send a shipping container from Japan loaded with personal computers, half of them packed with bomb materials, according to a foreign official briefed on the episode. “It was to understand the mind of a terrorist — how a terrorist would do certain things,†the foreign official said of the discussions of hypothetical attacks. Thus did the architect of 9/11 become, in effect, a counterterrorism adviser to the American government he professed to despise. A Break in Pakistan When Mr. Martinez flew to Pakistan early in 2002, he was joining an increasingly desperate campaign to catch and question anyone who might know the plans for the next terrorist attack. Months had passed since Sept. 11, 2001, without a single senior Qaeda figure being taken alive. Intelligence agencies were alarmed by the eavesdropping “chatter†about threats. But without a high-level terrorist in custody, the government had few sources to warn of plots in progress. Then, in February 2002, the C.I.A. station in Islamabad, Pakistan, learned that Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaeda’s logistics specialist, was in Lahore or Faisalabad, Pakistani cities 80 miles apart with a combined population of more than 10 million. The hunt for the terrorist’s electronic trail grew intensive. Armed with Abu Zubaydah’s cellphone number, eavesdropping specialists deployed what some called the “magic box,†an electronic scanner that could track any switched-on mobile phone and give its approximate location. But Abu Zubaydah was careful about security: he turned his phone on only briefly to collect messages, not long enough for his trackers to get a fix on his whereabouts. That was when Mr. Martinez arrived, beginning what would be an unlikely engagement with the world’s worst terrorists. The son of a C.I.A. technician who worked on the agency’s secret communications and eventually became a senior executive, Mr. Martinez grew up in Virginia, majored in political science at James Madison University and went directly into the C.I.A. training program not long before his father retired. He wound up in the agency’s Counternarcotics Center, learning to sift masses of phone numbers, travel records, credit card transactions and more to search for people. “Deuce had a reputation as one of those eggheads who could sit down with a lot of data and make sense out of it,†said one former C.I.A. officer who knew him well. In the agency’s great cultural divide, he was a stay-at-home analyst, not an “operator,†one of the glamorous spies who recruited foreign agents overseas. His tool was the computer, and until the earthquake of 9/11 his expertise was drug cartels, not terrorist networks. After the attacks, officials recognized that tracking drug lords was not so different from searching for terrorist masterminds, and Mr. Martinez was among a half dozen or so narcotics analysts moved to the Counterterrorist Center to become “targeting officers†in the hunt for Al Qaeda. Colleagues say Mr. Martinez, then 36, threw himself into the new work with a passion. On a wall at the American Embassy in Islamabad, he posted a large, blank piece of paper. He wrote Abu Zubaydah’s phone number at the center. Then, over a week or so, he and others added more and more linked phone numbers from the eavesdropping files of the National Security Agency and Pakistani intelligence. They excluded known institutions like mosques and shops and gradually built a map of the network of contacts around Abu Zubaydah. “It was a spider’s web,†said one person who saw the telephone chart. “Aesthetically it was quite pretty.†Using the numbers, and premises linked to them, Mr. Martinez and his colleagues sought to identify Abu Zubaydah’s most likely hide-outs. They could not reduce the list to fewer than 14 addresses in Lahore and Faisalabad, which they put under surveillance. At 2 a.m. on March 28, 2002, teams led by Pakistan’s Punjab Elite Force, with Americans waiting outside, hit the locations all at once. One of the SWAT teams found Abu Zubaydah, protected by Syrian and Egyptian bodyguards, at a handsome house on Canal Road in Faisalabad. It held bomb-making equipment and a safe loaded with $100,000 in cash, according to a terrorism consultant briefed on the event. Photographs of the raid reviewed by The Times last month showed Abu Zubaydah, a cleanshaven 30-year-old Palestinian, shot three times during the raid, lying face down in the back of a Toyota pickup before he was taken to a hospital. At first, Abu Zubaydah fell in and out of consciousness, emerging occasionally to speak incoherently — once, evidently imagining himself in a restaurant, ordering a glass of red wine, a C.I.A. official said. The agency, desperate to keep him alive, flew in a Johns Hopkins Hospital surgeon to consult. Within a few days, Abu Zubaydah was flown to Thailand, to the first of the “black sites,†the agency’s interrogation facilities for major Qaeda figures. Thailand, which had long faced Muslim insurgents in its south, became the first choice because C.I.A. officers had a very close relationship with their counterparts in Bangkok, according to one American intelligence official. At first, the official said, “they didn’t even tell the prime minister.†Inside a ‘Black Site’ It was at the Thai jail, not far from Bangkok, that Mr. Martinez first tried his hand at interrogation on Abu Zubaydah, who refused to speak Arabic with his captors but spoke passable English. It was also there, as previously reported, that the C.I.A. would first try physical pressure to get information, including the near-drowning of waterboarding. The methods came from the military’s SERE training program, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, which many of the C.I.A.’s paramilitary officers had themselves completed. A small version of SERE had long operated at the C.I.A.’s Virginia training site, known as The Farm. Senior Federal Bureau of Investigation officials thought such methods unnecessary and unwise. Their agents got Abu Zubaydah talking without the use of force, and he revealed the central role of Mr. Mohammed in the 9/11 plot. They correctly predicted that harsh methods would darken the reputation of the United States and complicate future prosecutions. Many C.I.A. officials, too, had their doubts, and the agency used contract employees with military experience for much of the work. Some C.I.A. officers were torn, believing the harsh treatment could be effective. Some said that only later did they understand the political cost of embracing methods the country had long shunned. John C. Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer who was the first to question Abu Zubaydah, expressed such conflicted views when he spoke publicly to ABC News and other news organizations late last year. In a December interview with The Times, before being cautioned by the C.I.A. not to discuss classified matters, Mr. Kiriakou, who was not present for the waterboarding but read the resulting intelligence reports, said he had been told that Abu Zubaydah became compliant after 35 seconds of the water treatment. “It was like flipping a switch,†Mr. Kiriakou said of the shift from resistance to cooperation. He said he thought such “desperate measures†were justified in the “desperate time†in 2002 when another attack seemed imminent. But on reflection, he said, he had concluded that waterboarding was torture and should not be permitted. “We Americans are better than that,†he said. With Abu Zubaydah’s case, the pattern was set. With a new prisoner, the interrogators, like Mr. Martinez, would open the questioning. In about two-thirds of cases, C.I.A. officials have said, no coercion was used. If officers believed the prisoner was holding out, paramilitary officers who had undergone a crash course in the new techniques, but who generally knew little about Al Qaeda, would move in to manhandle the prisoner. Aware that they were on tenuous legal ground, agency officials at headquarters insisted on approving each new step — a night without sleep, a session of waterboarding, even a “belly slap†— in an exchange of encrypted messages. A doctor or medic was always on hand. The tough treatment would halt as soon as the prisoner expressed a desire to talk. Then the interrogator would be brought in. Interrogation became Mr. Martinez’s new forte, first with Abu Zubaydah; then with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the Yemeni who was said to have been an intermediary between the 9/11 hijackers and Qaeda leaders, caught in September 2002; and then with Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Saudi accused of planning the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in 2000, who was caught in November 2002. Mr. bin al-Shibh quickly cooperated; Mr. Nashiri resisted and was subjected to waterboarding, intelligence officials have said. C.I.A superiors offered Mr. Martinez and some other analysts the chance to be “certified†in what the C.I.A. euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation methods.†Mr. Martinez declined, as did several other C.I.A. officers. He did not condemn the tough methods, colleagues said, but he was learning that his talents lay elsewhere. Another Suspect Is Seized The hunt for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed involved the entire American intelligence establishment, with its billion-dollar arrays of spy satellites and global eavesdropping net. But his capture came down to a simple text message sent from an informant who had slipped into the bathroom of a house in Rawalpindi, near the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. “I am with K.S.M.,†the message said, according to an intelligence officer briefed on the episode. The capture team waited a few hours before going in on the night of March 1, 2003, to blur the connection to the informant, a walk-in attracted by the offer of a $25 million reward. The informant, described by one American who met him as “a little guy who looked like a farmer,†would later get a face-to-face thank you from George J. Tenet, then the C.I.A. director, at the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi, intelligence officials say, and he was resettled with his reward money under a new identity in the United States. Within days, Mr. Mohammed was flown to Afghanistan and then on to Poland, where the most important of the C.I.A.’s black sites had been established. The secret base near Szymany Airport, about 100 miles north of Warsaw, would become a second home to Mr. Martinez during the dozens of hours he spent with Mr. Mohammed. Poland was picked because there were no local cultural and religious ties to Al Qaeda, making infiltration or attack by sympathizers unlikely, one C.I.A. officer said. Most important, Polish intelligence officials were eager to cooperate. “Poland is the 51st state,†one former C.I.A. official recalls James L. Pavitt, then director of the agency’s clandestine service, declaring. “Americans have no idea.†Mr. Mohammed met his captors at first with cocky defiance, telling one veteran C.I.A. officer, a former Pakistan station chief, that he would talk only when he got to New York and was assigned a lawyer — the experience of his nephew and partner in terrorism, Ramzi Yousef, after Mr. Yousef’s arrest in 1995. But the rules had changed, and the tough treatment began shortly after Mr. Mohammed was delivered to Poland. By several accounts, he proved especially resistant, chanting from the Koran, doling out innocuous information or offering obvious fabrications. The Times reported last year that the intensity of his treatment — various harsh techniques, including waterboarding, used about 100 times over a period of two weeks — prompted worries that officers might have crossed the boundary into illegal torture. His cooperation came in fits and starts, and interrogators said they believed at times that he gave them disinformation. But he talked most freely to Mr. Martinez. An obvious chasm separated these enemies — the interrogator and the prisoner. But Mr. Martinez shared a few attributes with his adversary that he could exploit as he sought his secrets. They were close in age, approaching 40; they had attended public universities in the American South (Mr. Mohammed had studied engineering at North Carolina A&T); they were both religious; and they were both fathers. Mr. Mohammed, according to one former C.I.A. officer briefed on the sessions, “would go through these emotional cycles.†“He’d be chatty, almost friendly,†the officer added. “He liked to debate. He got to the stage where he’d draw parallels between Christianity and Islam and say, ‘Can’t we get along?’ †By this account, Mr. Martinez would reply to the man who had overseen the killing of nearly 3,000 people: “Isn’t it a little late for that?†At other times, the C.I.A. officer said, Mr. Mohammed would grow depressed, complaining about being separated from his family and ranting about his cell or his food — a common theme for other prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah, who protested when the flavor of his Ensure nutrition drink was changed. Sometimes Mr. Mohammed wrote letters to the Red Cross or to President Bush with his demands; the letters went to C.I.A. psychologists for analysis. And there were the poetic tributes to Mr. Martinez’s wife, scribbled in Mr. Mohammed’s ungrammatical English and intended as a show of respect for his interrogator, according to a colleague who heard Mr. Martinez’s account. But as time passed, Mr. Mohammed provided more and more detail on Al Qaeda’s structure, its past plots and its aspirations. When he sometimes sought to mislead, interrogators often took his claims immediately to other Qaeda prisoners at the Polish compound to verify the information. The intelligence riches ultimately gleaned from Mr. Mohammed were reflected in the report of the national 9/11 commission, whose footnotes credit his interrogations 60 times for facts about Al Qaeda and its plotting — while also occasionally noting assertions by him that were “not credible.†The interrogations the commission cited began just 11 days after Mr. Mohammed’s capture and ended just days before the commission’s report was published in mid-2004. Together they amount to a detailed history of Mr. Mohammed’s initiation into terrorism along with his nephew, Mr. Yousef; his plotting of mayhem from Bosnia to the Philippines; and his alliance with Osama bin Laden, to whom the egotistical Mr. Mohammed was reluctant to defer. Mr. Mohammed also claimed a role in a long list of completed and thwarted attacks. Human rights advocates have questioned some of Mr. Mohammed’s claims, including the beheading of Mr. Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, suggesting that they may have been false statements made to stop torture. But Mr. Martinez told colleagues that Mr. Mohammed volunteered out of the blue that he was the man who killed Mr. Pearl. The C.I.A. at first was skeptical, according to two former agency officials. Intelligence analysts eventually were convinced, however, in part because Mr. Mohammed pointed out to Mr. Martinez details of the hand and arm of the masked killer in a videotape of the murder that appeared to show it was him. “He was a leader,†said a foreign counterterrorism official briefed on the episode. “He wanted to demonstrate to his people how ruthless he could be.†Divergent Paths On June 5, Mr. Mohammed made a theatrical return to the public eye at his Guantánamo Bay arraignment, with a long, graying beard and a defiant insistence that the American military commission could do no more to him than give him his wish: execution and martyrdom. His interrogator has moved on, too. Like many other C.I.A. officers in the post-9/11 security boom, Mr. Martinez left the agency for more lucrative work with government contractors. His life today is quiet by comparison with the secret interrogations of 2002 and 2003. But Mr. Martinez has not turned away entirely from his old world. He now works for Mitchell & Jessen Associates, a consulting company run by former military psychologists who advised the C.I.A. on the use of harsh tactics in the secret program. And his new employer sent Mr. Martinez right back to the agency. For now, the unlikely interrogator of the man perhaps most responsible for the horrors of 9/11 teaches other C.I.A. analysts the arcane art of tracking terrorists.

[Macj]

Anybody who gets arrested will be viewed as guilty by the military. Please show some evidence (not anecdotal) that torture works.

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Ridolfi-plot Duke of Norfolk spilled the beans on the plot to kill and overthrow Elizabeth I.

[sandtest]

pakis certainly have become homeless :haha:

[cochise]

i read excerpts from it... and while the book is quite well written, i feel extending the analogy to united states is too much of an exaggeration.

Not really as what is being asked is not to make a 1 - 1 mapping but to identify the dynamics of empire that lead to it's downfall...like over-extension, debasing of the currency, resentment in the provinces and the colonies at the corruption and debasement at the center, multiple centres of power emerging at the periphery... Those dynaimcs inform the picture today...they do not necessarily paint the picture...but you can learn a lot from it about the consequences of such imperial policies and overstretch.

[cochise]

Not exactly .... He says do not worry about killing as you cannot kill the soul only the body can be killed (nashwar) and as a kshatriya its your duty to take up shastra (weapons) to preserve dharma and for the greater good without being concerned or attached about the results. In that situation him (arjuna) not fighting would actually be a sin.

I agree. Non-action in the face of aggression and killing is to be complicit in it. My statement was minimal, but it conveyed the same idea.

Ohh no no no ... I would simply go by common sense ... i dont need Bhagwad Gita to tell me what I need to do. What you are proposing is something on the lines of "Gadhe ko halwa khilana". You wanted to put this situation through a dharmic test and Iam merely indulging you on that.

Common sense can sometimes lead one astray. I cannot see an argument for the base act of torture that justifies it's use. I think you would agree that it is not a policy to be used for punishment or deterence...but you may argue that it could be used to gain critical information from the enemy. If this is your argument, then it has been shown time and time again that the information obtained from torture is unreliable and there are better ways to extract information. However, that is not a line of argument I would advance. Torture is odious because of the motivation for it. To fight and kill in defence is one thing...to cause unbearable pain, suffering and humiliation to advance ones own agenda (particularly when other, more effective and reliable means are available) is immoral and rather heinous. It has the added degenerative effect of decaying the ethical and moral fibre of the state employing it and all it's agency...so much so that it may end up looking like the enemy it is fighting. If you do not maintain your values despite the cost they may entail, then your values are meaningless and thus, you are reduced down to your enemies level...i.e. he has degraded you down to his level. This is hardly winning the war...this is losing yourself.

[THX_1138]

Not really as what is being asked is not to make a 1 - 1 mapping but to identify the dynamics of empire that lead to it's downfall...like over-extension, debasing of the currency, resentment in the provinces and the colonies at the corruption and debasement at the center, multiple centres of power emerging at the periphery... Those dynaimcs inform the picture today...they do not necessarily paint the picture...but you can learn a lot from it about the consequences of such imperial policies and overstretch.

yeah i do concur with some of those observations, but the thing is, the united states government has numerous checks and balances which rome lacked. unfortunately, a number of these checks and balances were either circumvented, or simply ignored when the republicans controlled all three: house, senate and presidency. i guess the system of checks and balances fails when you have a rubber stamp congress or senate. thankfully, there are still quite a few democrats who have conflicting view points than barack obama.

[Guest dada_rocks]

Gunatanamo had outlived its utility anyway.. Real balls wud be needed elsewhere.. how about bringing back the army from iraq tomorrow..

[triam]

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Ridolfi-plot Duke of Norfolk spilled the beans on the plot to kill and overthrow Elizabeth I.

hahaha, 1568?? wow, I earlier said not anecdotal,this precedes anecdotal,this incident is mythical.

[THX_1138]

Gunatanamo had outlived its utility anyway.. Real balls wud be needed elsewhere.. how about bringing back the army from iraq tomorrow..

overturned two more legislatures on environmental policy imposed by the bushies... ghosh you must be so at unease these days! the messiah is actually delievering... tsk tsk.