Enhanced Interrogation Techniques Quotes

It's convenient how everyone who supports waterboarding and torture, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" as they like to call it, have never experienced it themselves. Yet everyone who has, myself included, are firmly against it.

It’s not torture. It’s ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.

Mitchell and Jessen’s great achievement was to bend the accepted narrative of how SERE affects the mind and body. They made two important and related claims—that SERE could force prisoners to tell the truth, and that SERE did not constitute torture. The CIA, based in part on the notion that SERE was safe, told the Justice Department that the enhanced interrogation techniques were safe. Based on those assurances, in turn, the Justice Department provided the intelligence community with secret legal opinions stating that the techniques did not constitute torture and were legal.

Vice President Gore, Richard Clarke, and Madeleine Albright were “strong support[ers]” of the program, joining in President Clinton’s “intense” interest in it.5 Egypt’s most famous terrorist, Talaat Fouad Qassem, was “seized in Croatia, flown to the USS Adriatic, a navy warship, interrogated, then flown to Egypt for [torture and] execution.”6 Egypt’s secret police, the Gihaz al-Mukhabarat al-Amma, is widely known for its brutal torture regime, “real Macho interrogation . . . enhanced interrogation techniques on steroids” and was used by both Presidents Bush and Clinton.7 Congress attempted to end this program in 1998. The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act slipped in a passage making it the policy of the United States not to “expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.”8 Clinton vetoed the bill in late October,

Sensory deprivation has a devastating psychological impact and can lead to the complete dissolution of the personality accompanied by hallucinations, delusional thinking and general incoherence. It is presently acknowledged as a form of torture; in fact, it is one of a group of “enhanced techniques” that are entirely psychological in nature and unique in that they do not conform to the general public understanding of what torture is.

Thinking for a moment he might be able to do a George W. Bush and call it an ‘enhanced interrogation technique’,

Do you know the biggest obstacle with enhanced interrogation techniques, Ali?” he asked, his voice hard, laced with menace. “It’s that while applying pain can make a detainee talk, it cannot make him tell the truth. It increases the amount of information, but does not guarantee the accuracy. You and I aren’t gonna have that problem, though, are we? Because I’m willing to use whatever means necessary to make you crack, and just so you know, several of my tactics are unpleasant at best, counterproductive and illegal at worst, but effective none the less.” Wow. She actually tingled. “You obviously have no idea how hot it is when you go all bad ass soldier boy. It makes me want to use my mouth in ways that don’t involve talking.

Early on, Elster cited one of the meanings of rendering — a coat of plaster applied to a masonry surface. From this he asked the reader to consider a walled enclosure in an unnamed country and a method of questioning, using what he called enhanced interrogation techniques, that was meant to induce a surrender (one of the meanings of rendition-a giving up or giving back) in the person being interrogated. I didn't read the piece at the time, knew nothing about it. If I had known, before I knew Elster, what would I have thought? Word origins and covert prisons. Old French, Obsolete French and torture by proxy. The essay concentrated on the word itself, earliest known use, changes in form and meaning, zero-grade forms, reduplicated forms, suffixed forms. There were footnotes like nested snakes. But no specific mention of black sites, third-party states or international treaties and conventions. He compared the evolution of a word to that of organic matter. He pointed out that words were not necessary to one's experience of the true life.