Torture memos

[Undertoad]

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/...050100328.html



There were gasps in the audience at a press conference by female North Korean defectors in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday when Bang Mi-sun rolled up her black skirt and showed the deep ugly scars in her thighs. The event was part of North Korea Freedom Week.

As soon as she was asked to recount her life in a North Korean concentration camp, Bang (55) stepped on a chair and roll up her skirt. Various parts of her thighs were sunken as if the flesh had been gouged out. She also walks with a limp.

Bang had formerly been an actress with the propaganda squad of the Musan Mine. She fled the North with her children when her husband starved to death in 2002, but soon fell victim to human traffickers. She was arrested by Chinese police and was sent back to the North, where she was tortured. In 2004, she escaped again.

Bang testified that one 21-year-old pregnant woman who had fled to China and been forcibly repatriated was killed when she refused to have an abortion. Forced abortions of half-Chinese children apparently aim to prevent the proliferation of "unclean" stock due to the North's archaic obsession with the national bloodline.

She called on U.S. President Barack Obama to make sure no more North Korean women are "sold like livestock in China. Please raise your voice in the international community so that North Koreans no longer receive this subhuman treatment in prison."

[classicman]

Wow - thats awful.

[classicman]

Pelosi received a briefing on interrogation by CIA officials when she served as ranking Democrat on the Intelligence panel in 2002, but she has asserted that she was never told that waterboarding and other harsh practices were used, only that intelligence officials thought them legal.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, however, has since released information calling Pelosi’s assertion into question. A DNI chart released earlier this month asserted that Pelosi received a briefing in September of 2002 during which she was given a description of interrogation methods used on a suspected terrorist.

Pelosi has claimed a different recollection of the briefing.

“Trying to understand what she was told is almost impossible; her story changes almost every day,” said Graham.

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by classicman

Quote:
Pelosi received a briefing on interrogation by CIA officials when she served as ranking Democrat on the Intelligence panel in 2002, but she has asserted that she was never told that waterboarding and other harsh practices were used, only that intelligence officials thought them legal.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, however, has since released information calling Pelosi’s assertion into question. A DNI chart released earlier this month asserted that Pelosi received a briefing in September of 2002 during which she was given a description of interrogation methods used on a suspected terrorist.

Pelosi has claimed a different recollection of the briefing.

“Trying to understand what she was told is almost impossible; her story changes almost every day,” said Graham.

classic, there is now evidence that they were torturing people to try and make a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussien. Which they never got btw.

[classicman]

Originally Posted by sugarpop

there is now evidence that they were torturing people to try and make a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussien.

That was old news a month ago, but thanks for the update. It also has nothing to do with what I was talking about.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Chicago radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller decided he'd get himself waterboarded to prove the technique wasn't torture.

It didn't turn out that way. "Mancow," in fact, lasted just six or seven seconds before crying foul. Apparently, the experience went pretty badly -- "Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop," according to NBC Chicago.

"The average person can take this for 14 seconds," Marine Sergeant Clay South told his audience before he was waterboarded on air. "He's going to wiggle, he's going to scream, he's going to wish he never did this."

Seems Sergeant South was correct.

[TheMercenary]

That is frigging hairlarrious. Mancow was in the idiot category of, "wish I would have just gone to breakfast."

[Undertoad]

Wheeeeee the wheel goes around again

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...T2009082804015

[DanaC]

Would that be a catherine wheel?

[dar512]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Would that be a catherine wheel?

I was wondering why you were bringing up fireworks in this thread, but wiki provided the answer.

I wouldn't have had any reference for Catherine wheel at all if it weren't for the Moody Blues Eternity Road.

[classicman]

Excellent article UT- very interesting read. I need to digest it a bit more...

[DanaC]

*grins* what can I say. I have a bleak sense of humour.

[Undertoad]

Oh good god damn.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...rding?page=0,0

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."
...
Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.

"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."

But never mind, he says now.

"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

[lookout123]

RebuttalFor each genius who says no another says yes.

[classicman]

I have spoken to the people who — unlike Kirakou — were in the room for the interrogations of Zubaydah, KSM and other terrorists held by the CIA. And in Courting Disaster, I meticulousluy document the evidence for the efficacy of the CIA interrogation program — based not on Kirakou's claims, but on the testimony of the actual interrogators, interivews with top CIA and other intelligence officials, the evidence presented in the CIA inspector general's report, and other top-secret documents declassified by the Obama administration. I urge you to read it and judge for yourself. The evidence is overwhelming.

Before these documents were released, there was room for debate on the efficacy of CIA interrogations — because the facts had not been declassified. No longer. Yet the critics will continue to attempt to muddy the waters and use Kirakopu as "proof" of their claim the interrogations did not work. They will do so because if they admit that the interrogations worked, that means that the consequence of their position would have been another 9/11. They have to argue that a) enhanced interrogation is wrong and b) it did not work, because if the latter is not true then the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women, and children would have been the price of their approach.

The last part from LO123's link