Boo Radley
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Let's suppose the sources that convinced you of this were reliable and absolutely no useful information was ever obtained from waterboarding these POWs, then why were so many subjected to it, so many times and for so many years?
Were the military and intelligence people who performed these waterboardings too stupid to realize this technic failed to serve it's purpose or were they cruel sadistic sociopaths who simply enjoyed to make others suffer or possibly some reason I have overlooked?
Just some support:
Ali Soufan, an FBI special agent from 1997 to 2005, told members of a key Senate Judiciary subcommittee that such "techniques, from an operational perspective, are ineffective, slow and unreliable and harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda."
'Enhanced interrogations' don't work, ex-FBI agent tells panel - CNN
Republican Sen. John McCain is ripping presidential candidates in his party who insist waterboarding is an effective technique for interrogating suspected terrorists.
The Arizona lawmaker—who was tortured himself while a prisoner of war in Vietnam — said the controversial practice was both illegal and ineffective on Monday evening.
“Very disappointed by statements at SC GOP debate supporting waterboarding,” he tweeted. “Waterboarding is torture.”
Read more: John McCain rips GOP presidential candidates* Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann on waterboarding* - NY Daily News
A report released Monday by an Irish neuroscience researcher pointed out that methods used by CIA officials to torture terrorist suspects in hopes of gleaning useful information were as problematic as domestic critics said they were.
The report, published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, takes several shots at the Bush administration’s insistence that interrogation methods such as waterboarding, were productive in retrieving information, and that they were harmless to recipients.
Professor Shane O’Mara of Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience said the backing by CIA officials and former Vice President Dick Cheney was based on “folk psychology” and not science. The report laid out a lengthy argument that techniques CIA officials used to torture suspects affected brain function, making memories inaccurate and in some cases causing permanent brain damage.
Editorial: Study shows torture ineffective - Aurora Sentinel: Editorials
The CIA later provided the Washington Post a letter from CIA Director Penetta to Senator McCain that confirms that enhanced interrogation techniques did not help and may have hindered the search for Bin Laden by producing false information during interrogations. In the letter CIA Director Panetta wrote Senator McCain that
we first learned about the facilitator/courier’s nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier. These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier’s role were alerting. In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means.[97]
Enhanced interrogation techniques - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Now there are books on this at librarys that offer much more. The interent is less able to pull those up, or at least I am. But there is much written on torture and waterboarding concerning the unreliablity of it.