Originally Posted by Uncle Mxy
Zubaydah provided good info to the FBI long before the "bug in a box" tactic. It's unclear if the "bug in a box" added anything that he hadn't already told them long before. A lot of the things classified as "revelations" weren't.
How do you know when to stop torturing someone? KSM was waterboarded 180 times in a month or some shit like that. If the first 179 times didn't work, why should the 180th time? If he confesses to some crime under extreme duress, how do you know that it's not bullshit just to get the torture to stop (as was reported the case with KSM, who confessed to all kinds of things where his real connection was tenuous at best)?
Define "worked". Torture worked very effectively to make us look like shit with a lot of our allies, but is that the kind of effectiveness we want? Do we have any idea of how much information we lost because we tortured people into shutting down where other mechanisms might have opened them up? Judging effectiveness turns out to be hard in most cases.
Rendition started under Bill Clinton. That's not "reportedly" or rumored, that's simply factual. But under Clinton, rendition wasn't conducted for interrogation purposes, and didn't involve U.S. soil. It was all about removing bad guys on foreign soil without outright killing them, and our agents didn't directly acquire the targets. We matched wanted foreign baddies we cared about as dangers to the U.S. with the foreign countries who wanted them, then supported the locals/third parties who did the kidnappings. Dubya's rendition is occasionally referred to as "extraordinary rendition", to distinguish it from rendition as an extradition thingy the way Clinton implemented it.
