More Is Less

As I watched this TYT clip with Cenk Uygur discussing the disgusting and despicable Liz Cheney who appeared on FauxNooz I remembered a part of the Soufan testimony from earlier today.




Now one of the contentions she made on FoxNews was that by limiting interrogators to following the Army Field Manual somehow President Obama was making us less safe by allowing terrorist to know what was coming should we capture them. But check out what Soufan had to say about this issue.

The harsh technique method doesn't use the knowledge we have of the detainee's history, mindset, vulnerabilities, or culture, and instead tries to subjugate the detainee into submission through humiliation and cruelty. The approach applies a force continuum, each time using harsher and harsher techniques until the detainee submits.

The idea behind the technique is to force the detainee to see the interrogator as the master who controls his pain. It is an exercise in trying to gain compliance rather than eliciting cooperation. A theoretical application of this technique is a situation where the detainee is stripped naked and told: "Tell us what you know."

If the detainee doesn't immediately respond by giving information, for example he asks: "what do you want to know?" the interviewer will reply: "you know," and walk out of the interrogation room. Then the next step on the force continuum is introduced, for example sleep deprivation, and the process will continue until the detainee's will is broken and he automatically gives up all information he is presumed to know.

There are many problems with this technique.

A major problem is that it is ineffective. Al Qaeda terrorists are trained to resist torture. As shocking as these techniques are to us, the al Qaeda training prepares them for much worse – the torture they would expect to receive if caught by dictatorships for example.

This is why, as we see from the recently released Department of Justice memos on interrogation, the contractors had to keep getting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods, until they reached waterboarding and then there was nothing they could do but use that technique again and again. Abu Zubaydah had to be waterboarded 83 times and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times. In a democracy there is a glass ceiling of harsh techniques the interrogator cannot breach, and a detainee can eventually call the interrogator's bluff.

The truth is as Soufan pointed out that the terrorists train for shit that would never under any circumstances be legal even in Dick Cheney's world for us to do to them. And because they know this then when we torture them we actually give them the upper hand. So unless the pro torture crowd is prepared to go the full Syrian and break out the thumbscrews and pull out fingernails doing "harsh interrogation" probably does more harm than good in terms of trying to keep us safe. It would help if somebody in the media would point this out.