Guantanamo, marteling & behalen doelen

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Er is al veel gezegd en geschreven over de gebruikte verhoor methoden in
Guantanamo en soortgelijke (geheime) kampen.
Hieronder het commentaar van een Amerikaanse krijgsgevangene uit Vietnam,
die het zelf heeft ondergaan.

Saillante punten:
- geen gebruik van bestaande kennis
- betrokken hebben (meerdere) academische opleidingen gehad, maar keken
niet verder dan neus lang was, ondanks vermeende onderzoekskwaliteiten

Mijn observaties:
- veel groupthink
- de (typisch Amerikaanse?) patriottische druk
- doelbewuste misleiding om einddoel te bereiken, door juridisch sausje
over twijfelachtige standpunten (vnl. door Cheney en volgelingen)
- sommige (tot enkele maanden geleden) leidinggevenden denken nog steeds
dat het effectief was (dus blind voor uitkomsten)
- ik zal een aanzienlijk deel van Amerikaanse houding/politici nooit
begrijpen/bevatten (wél zien/onderkennen)

Groet / Cees

http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/04/22/us/politics/22detain.html
In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Look at Past Use - Readers comments:
There is a source of knowledge of torture and its effectiveness and
results that was not considered. I was a POW in North Vietnam for six
years. Torture and brutality far in excess of what is ever used in SERE
training were routinely used by the North Vietnamese. To the best of my
knowledge, no former POW has been queried about what works and what
doesn't work. I am a member of a communications net that includes almost
all former POWs and I have posed the question of whether any of us had
been consulted. No one responded. In addition, each of us were extensively
debriefed after the war. The debriefings were taken with the assurance
that they would be permanently classified so that former POWs would be
shielded from recrimination and embarrassment. They are all on file at the
Joint Personnel Recovery Agency at Fort Belvior, Va, only a few miles from
Washington.

SERE training is arduous and unpleasant, but it is only training. Each
trainee knows that those abusing him will be in big trouble if they injure
him and that the training will be over in a few days. It does not compare
to the real thing and anyone who bases their expertise and conclusions
about torture and its utility on mere observation of SERE training simply
does not know what he is talking about.

I can't help but conclude that all the people mentioned in this article
were way out of their league on this issue, and they didn't use the
resources available to them to educate themselves. Many of them have
several degrees from prestigious universities where they supposedly
learned the discipline of research and analysis, but in this case they did
neither.

Torture is effective in obtaining superficial compliance. You tell them
what they want to hear. The important stuff is always hidden behind lies
and evasions. You learn to hate them, and finally you learn to overcome
your hatred so as to be more effective in resisting them in every possible
way. In the end the torturers delude themselves by using torture as a
substitute for real intelligence work. Jails around the world are filled
with people who gave false confessions under duress while the real
criminals go free because the police were too lazy or inept to do the real
police work.

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