The American Way

Did you feel mildly insulted when Obama said "We tortured some folks, we did some things that were contrary to our values."

"It's important for us not to feel sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those folks had."

Usually it's Radical Islamic Fundamentalists and now it's 'folks' he excused these as 'mistakes' made by CIA operatives at Black sites around the world because they were under enormous pressure to prevent another attack after the 9/11 attack.

He said he still had confidence in the CIA Director John Brennan who will make sure that lessons are learned from those mistakes.

So these operatives at bases in Thailand, Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and North Africa were all under enormous pressure and just had to use excessive torture, I say excessive because the US used torture before 9/11 but afterwards the gloves came off. As former President George W Bush used to and probably still says, “they hate our freedoms, it was them or us."
 
Cofer Black, the former director of the CIA’s Counter terrorism Center told the Senate that "from the point of view of the national security state, anything goes."

So what has changed? The Obama administration tends to use the NSA more and the CIA has fucked up too many times, funding needs to be directed elsewhere. The CIA are forever getting culled and downsized every few decades.

So now those practices of waterboarding, sleep deprivation/adjustment , 20-hour interrogations, isolation, exposure to extreme temperatures, enclosure in tiny spaces, stress positions, loud music, and light control, religious and sexual humiliation, abdomen strikes, insult slaps, shaking and controlled fear (including use of dogs) are now-discontinued, they were seen as questionable in 2009 but they have decided that they are bad.
In 2005 the CIA burned tapes of interrogations knowing full well they would get into trouble for it but having those tapes seen would have been far worse. It only took 13 years to realise that Enhanced interrogation techniques might be morally wrong.


Will they stop these integrations? of course they will, now they'll just hand the prisoners over to brutal non-American interrogators..... under American supervision of course. Nothing scares the ragheads more than the thought of being sent to a prison in a country who really hate their guts.

Ach we've seen Jack Bauer break a hand to get info it's no big deal and really, would these guys torture us?
Treat people as you'd have them treat you or get in there first and break some bones just in case they are lying cunts.  

Israel gets it, you have to fight to destroy and brutalize because the enemy fights like that, good guys finish last. We want to conduct war like how we buy our food in washed, prepared packages that doesn't look anything like the animal.     

We want to log on, fire off a few strategical Hellcats while eating M&M's and sucking on a Slurpee. All clean and civilised then we go home.