Another Reminder: Clint Van Zant Ponders "Does Torture Really Work?"

[DistressedAmerican]

JUST A REMINDER THAT THE TORTURE OF THE AMERICAN MILITARY's DETAINEES CONTINUES!!!
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7516880/

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Does torture really work?
Former Vietnam MI agent and FBI hostage negotiator Clint Van Zandt ponders the value of interrogation with extreme prejudice

COMMENTARY
By Clint Van Zandt
MSNBC analyst & former FBI Profiler
Updated: 3:20 p.m. ET April 15, 2005


This undated still photo made available by The WashingtonPost shows a U.S. soldier holding a dog in front an Iraqi detainee at Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Interrogation— from Vietnam to Guantanamo Bay
My experience suggests it largely doesn’t. I was a Military Intelligence (MI) agent in Vietnam in 1966. I watched as we worked to dehumanize the enemy, some calling them “gooks,” “slopes,” and other terms designed to differentiate between them and us, the good guys and the bad guys.

The U.S. Army and other military services taught and practiced “IPW” or interrogation of prisoners of war techniques. A designation in your military service record verified that you had been taught to conduct “interviews” of enemy combatants. MI agents and other battlefield interrogators did what they believed they had to do to get information from a detainee, information that could save the lives of other GIs. After all, how could you compare the life of a Vietcong or a member of the North Vietnamese Army with that of an American, especially when our troops were being killed at such an alarming rate? And so it went, just as it had probably gone since combatants first squared off against each other with rocks and spears on the fields of battle around the world. We had to defeat “the enemy,” and if we needed to “take the gloves off,” we justified it in the name of war in order to bring our troops home alive.

Now fast forward with me to 2003-2005 and the detainee holding facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. We know that General Ricardo Sanchez, former U.S. military commander in Iraq, signed a memo in September 2003 that authorized interrogation techniques against Iraqi and other detainees that may have been in violation of both the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Army’s own standards for the conduct of such interrogations. Gen. Sanchez’s memo allowed for tactics such as the use of dogs (the Iraqi detainees were said to be terrified of attack dogs); subjecting prisoners to body positions that would induce physical and mental stress; the implementation of isolation techniques; manipulation of the prisoner’s environment, including disruption of his sleep cycle to confuse his body’s circadian rhythm; drastically changing the temperature in the prisoner’s cell, and even injecting “unpleasant smells” into the prisoner’s environment.
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The abuse of prisoners has all but been written off as a one time aberration by the American public. Those of who are paying attention know that the torture of prisoners is a routine and systematic practice.

We must stand up to this corrupt regime and demand an end to this insane war.

We must push for the fair and humane treatment of those we detain in anti-terror efforts.

We must demand that those being held have legal recourse and access to lawyers and their families.

Failure to do so makes EACH OF US culpable for these war crimes!

[DistressedAmerican]

1. Lynndie Kicker!

[DistressedAmerican]

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[DistressedAmerican]

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