Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

Cookies, not Torture, convinced Al-Qaeda Suspect to Talk

From Time:

The most successful interrogation of an Al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or “walling” and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.

From Raw Story:

Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard opened up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered — sugar free cookies.

Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn’t eat sugar cookies he’d been offered.

“Soufan noticed that he didn’t touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: ‘He was a diabetic and couldn’t eat anything with sugar in it,’ Time’s Bobby Ghosh wrote. “At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal’s angry demeanor.

“We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him,” Soufan told Ghosh. “So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures.”

The seemingly absurd report calls into question the efficacy of the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” A 2005 memo by a Bush administration official revealed that CIA interrogators had waterboarded alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month.

Waterboarding — or partial drowning — also drew fire late last week when a conservative radio host voluntarily underwent the procedure and lasted just six seconds before calling off the procedure. He later said that he would have said anything to have gotten his handlers to stop.

Ghosh also paints Abu Jandal as having transformed almost miraculously after his interrogators showed him humanity.

Prior to the cookies incident, “Abu Jandal’s guards were so intimidated by him, they wore masks to hide their identities and begged visitors not to refer to them by name in his presence,” Ghosh writes. “He had no intention of cooperating with the Americans; at their first meetings, he refused even to look at them and ranted about the evils of the West. Far from confirming al-Qaeda’s involvement in 9/11, he insisted the attacks had been orchestrated by Israel’s Mossad.”

Afterward, the al Qaeda operative who grew up in Saudi Arabia and had been held in a Yemeni prison, offered myriad details about the terror network and its membership.

“It took more questioning, and some interrogators’ sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda — including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers — but the cookies were the turning point,” Ghosh writes.

“After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans,” Soufan said. “Now he was thinking of us as human beings.”

Soufan’s comments come on the heels of statements by a former military interrogator who said that he believed that the Bush administration’s torture policies actually cost “hundreds — if not thousands” of American lives.

“Torture does not save lives,” the interrogator, who spoke under a pseudonym, said. “And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool…These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse….literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.”

-John Byrne

Torture and Active Denial Technology

A recently unclassified report from the Pentagon from 1998 has revealed an investigation into using laser beams for a few intriguing potential methods of non-lethal torture. Some of the applications the report investigated include putting voices in people’s heads, using lasers to trigger uncontrolled neuron firing, and slowly heating the human body to a point of feverish confusion – all from hundreds of meters away. (SOURCE)

Full Report: Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons (PDF Download, 20 pages)

 
Also:

Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System (V-MADS)
Active Denial Technology is a breakthrough non-lethal technology that uses millimeter-wave electromagnetic energy to stop, deter and turn back an advancing adversary from relatively long range. It is expected to save countless lives by providing a way to stop individuals without causing injury, before a deadly confrontation develops. (SOURCE)

“Constitution” by Chris Jordan: 83,000 Abu Ghraib Prisoner Photos

Constitution, 2008. 8 x 25 feet in five panels

Depicts 83,000 Abu Ghraib prisoner photographs, equal to the number of people who have been arrested and held at US-run detention facilities with no trial or other due process of law, during the Bush Administration’s war on terror.

From Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait

“Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

“This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.”

~ chris jordan, Seattle, 2008