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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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North Vietnamese, during the Vietnam war, also famously tortured American PoWs, yet they won their civil war.

You provide a link to an example of an American PoW who was tortured into doing propaganda broadcasts for the North Vietnamese (John McCain was another). This is a minor variation on torturing someone to give a false confession. You do not provide examples of American PoWs tortured into giving up actionable intelligence, because there is no evidence that it happened. This is unsurprising - NATO doctrine on intelligence investigations is that a sufficiently large percentage of PoWs will give up the goods for a hot meal and a cigarette that you have to assume anything a PoW knows is compromised and plan accordingly, so we would not expect to see evidence either way.

You attacked US torture programme, merely by the result of the war, without proving that the programme was ineffective. It thus seems fair to defend the North Vietnamese torture by only showing that they won, not proving that it helped.

In any case, in both cases whether actionable information was obtained, is probably classified.

Fine, a CIA operative was kidnapped, soon after undercover agents that he knew were killed.

Thanks. Someone who has been tortured to the point where

Buckley was close to a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent; he slobbered and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking.

is obviously limited in the value of the intel they can provide, but getting them to name names worked for Hezbollah. I genuinely don't know how Hezbollah avoided the problem of continuing to get useless names after the victim has run out of useful ones - this was a major problem for the US in Afghanistan, to the point where the CIA torturing Al Qaeda captives to name names appears to have ended up being a net negative.

In any case, in both cases whether actionable information was obtained, is probably classified.

Unusually, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence declassified a summary of their report into the CIA torture programme, coming to the conclusion that

The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.

and providing an unclassified overview of the detailed evidence present in the full, classified report. The CIA's internal report into the torture programme (the "Panetta Review") apparently comes to the same conclusion.

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