The Hollywood Liberal

Here is a story about how the US used Psychologists to help them come up with their torture policy. These same Psychologists were used by the US to help soldiers overcome soviet style interrogation tactics. The CIA used those same tactics and turned them around for American soldiers to use against Al Qaeda. Of course torturing victims to talk does not work, eventually they will just tell you whatever it is you want to hear just to get the torture to stop. If you treat a suspect with respect, you are much more likely to find out what you want to know. Just like if you treat a country with respect (as opposed to just killing them all) they are much less likely to want to kill us and our soldiers. Of course the Bush administration knows this but they don’t practice it because they want the war to go on forever.

Rorschach and Awe

Vanity Fair
Excerpt

Zubaydah was stabilized at the nearest hospital, and the F.B.I. continued its questioning using its typical rapport-building techniques. An agent showed him photographs of suspected al-Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that “Moktar,” or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then proceeded to lay out the details of the plot. America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely.

Al-Qaeda operative Khalid Shaikh Mohammed shortly after his capture, 2003. Corbis.
It was an extraordinary success story. But it was one that would evaporate with the arrival of the C.I.A’s interrogation team. At the direction of an accompanying psychologist, the team planned to conduct a psychic demolition in which they’d get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death.

This is the approach President Bush appeared to have in mind when, in a lengthy public address last year, he cited the “tough” but successful interrogation of Zubaydah to defend the C.I.A.’s secret prisons,

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 6:03 am and is filed under H.L. News, Main Blog (All Posts). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.