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Torture, Interrogation, and Intelligence

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This doesn't work with interrogators who are members of a free society, and have very good to excellent intelligence sources to confirm and verify what a prisoner says.

 

Part of this fallacy was created as a result of what our American POWs told their North Vietnamese interrogators, when those POWs were held in and around Hanoi during the Vietnam War.

 

North Vietnam was a closed society. That society only heard and saw what their leaders wanted them to hear and see. Our prisoners' Code of Conduct was changed in response to the brutal torture that our POW's endured.

 

Our POWs held out under that torture as long as they could.  When they could hold out no longer, they made up something to stop the torture. Incredibly, and to show you how stupid and uninformed the North Vietnamese were, our POWs made up names of superior officers.  These names included General Mills (the cereal company), Major Domo, Captain Video, etc. The North Vietnamese interrogators dutifully wrote down this information, smiled smugly, and assumed that they had extracted critical information from their prisoners.

 

In this sense, yes, the prisoners did outwit the interrogators. In contrast, when our POWs were interrogated by Russians, Cubans, East Germans, and Bulgarians, when they tried to pull the same stunt as they did with the North Vietnamese, our guys were beaten, starved, and tortured unmercifully. Our guys said that you could fool North Vietnamese, but don't even think about trying it with those other guys.

 

Fallacy #3. Torture as a means of interrogation is generally not accepted throughout the world.

 

In point of fact, within the last three years, more than three-quarters of all countries in the world have practiced torture as a means of interrogation. This applies to their own citizens, as well as foreigners, whether combatants or not.

 

Bleeding hearts just don't get it. On the one hand, they kept telling us to allow the weapons inspectors in Iraq more and more and more time and more and more and more time to uncover weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, once the President declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, the bleeding hearts started screeching that the rebuilding and democratization of Iraq wasn't happening fast enough. On the third hand, they run their hands at how quickly we had placed prisoners into detention facilities. This herky-jerky, stop-and-go, inconsistency is nothing more than political opportunism.

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Kevin Gosztola is managing editor of Shadowproof Press. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, "Unauthorized Disclosure." He was an editor for OpEdNews.com
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