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| 2004/9/16-17 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq, Politics/Foreign/Asia/Others] UID:33562 Activity:very high |
9/16 http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no1/article06.html From cryptogram, ex-CIA on interrogation \_ Cool article, thanks for sharing. -John \_ Excellent, well written, makes some very good points. Thank you. \_ Jeez, I'm beaming like I wrote it myself. -op \_ good article. I think this article, as well as the September 1st school incident in Russia brought a bigger issue: What is a "terrorist?" Terrorist are defined by the tactic they use, not ideology they believe in. While this is relatively clear to most people in case of Vietnamese nationalist and Chechen rebel, I don't think USA has learn that our "terrorist enemy" are the result of our past 40 years of foreign policy in the middle east, from religious support of creation of Israel at the expense of Palestine, to overthrown of popular government in Iran. Without drastic change in our foreign policy, we will not able to end the reluntless attack from Islamic extremist. kngharv \_ Terrorists will attack us regardless of our foreign policy. They don't like the US for what it is -- a free and prosperous place not following Sharia law. If you want to make an argument for a change in US foreign policy, using islamic terrorists is not a good way to go. -- ilyas \_ You're saying they hate us because they hate our freedom? Utter nonsense. Our freedom and prosperity might get some two-bit mullah worked up, maybe he'll convince some young, impressionable losers to do a minor attack; but convincing a man to orphan his children, a normal young guy to give up his chance with that pretty girl at the market takes a lot more than "this old book says that freedom is bad". Even the WTC bombers were normal men once. You can't just call them crazy without wondering what got them there. \_ ob40Virgins \_ there was an interesting Kristof column recently which said that some modern scholars think this is a mis- translation, and that they really get white grapes, not virgins. \_ http://www.angelfire.com/folk/patriotscorner/72Virginians.html \_ They hate the products of our freedom. They are envious of our obvious prosperity, they are made insecure by the inroads our "culture" makes into theirs (viz. blue jeans and rock & roll helping bring down the Soviet Union), they (in the case of the islamists) have issues with our lack of restrictions on women, music, clothing, whatever, and to some degree they feel left behind by economic development. Consider that the "Arab world" has never undergone a sweeping renaissance or an enlightenment or an industrial revolution, combined with the fact that many countries spawning "terror" have a tremendous percentage of unemployed youth, susceptible to demagoguery. So yes, they hate our freedom. -John \_ If it wasn't for GWB, they would love our blue jeans and music and McDonald's and our freedom for women! GWB has ruined American credibility around the world for generations! \_ Well, they don't say 'freedom is bad.' To them following Sharia is freedom, while our kind of freedom is demonic depravity and corruption. We call this 'extremism,' but this was a normal train of thought a couple of hundred years ago in Europe. They are not exactly crazy in a sense of being mentally ill, they are just experiencing an 'outside context problem' (Ian Banks term), and are living in a world we can't understand very well. I am not excusing what they do -- they are of course wrong, and are doing evil. -- ilyas \_ (Responding to John and ilyas) Who are "they"? If "blue jeans and rock & roll" brought down the Soviet Union, why don't we send these instead of an invasion force? And if it's Islamic fundamentalism we are fighting, why did we invade Iraq, one of the more secular middle eastern states. And why are we sending billions of dollars to some of the most fundamentalist countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait? Perhaps nationalism and belief in self determination have more to do with the resistance we faced in Vietnam and are facing in Iraq than you would like to believe? Did the Vietnamese conduct any terrorist act on us after kicking us out? \_ Because Soviet Union wasn't stuck in a feudal mentality. You can't expect 'blue jeans' to work if it's unclear to someone that jeans are a good thing. A typical russian wasn't fooled by the propaganda. -- ilyas propaganda. As for the Vietnamese, they have no fundamental ideological problem with the West, whereas the muslims do. -- ilyas \_ Nice try to transition to Vietnam=Iraq but no dice. Please provide a URL for us *sending billions of dollars* to Suadi Arabia and Kuwait. We won militarily in Vietnam, despite being the most stupidly fought war in history. We lost Vietnam at home with people like Jane Fonda and John Kerry telling the American soldiers and people lies about our troops and the war. If self determination is the cause of resistence in Iraq then why are there foreign fighters there? Why didn't these self- determined people do anything at all for themselves during Hussein's reign of death? \_ Lies? Are you denying that soldiers didn't kill civilians and didn't commit atrocities? \_ They tried after the '91 war after Bush I promised support but then basically helped Saddam crush the insurgents. Have you ever led a military revolt? I'm sure if they had you around Saddam would have been toast. Moron. \_ The Vietnamese had been fighting against foreign colonizers for over 100 years, 400 if you count periodic Chinese incursions. We would never have "won" Vietnam, though we could still have troops fighting and dying there, if we really had the will. It might even be down to 1000/yr by now. Why would we possibly want to do that??? \_ ob40Virgins \_ there was an interesting Kristof column recently which said that some modern scholars think this is a mis- translation, and that they really get white grapes, not virgins. \_ http://www.angelfire.com/folk/patriotscorner/72Virginians.html \_ Terrorists kill civilians (on purpose). \_ But I thought that's why we went to iraq. So they could kill our soldiers instead of our civilians... \_ Yeah, Iraq is a big honeypot. People complain about the dead soldiers but if we hadn't gone there we'd have HUNDREDS of thousands of civilian deaths! If the stream of terrorists starts to trickle out, we should bomb some villages in Syria and other likely places to flush out more terrorists, like fleas from beating a rug. Eventually the terrorists will run out and we can go home! \_ You forgot to capitalize "thousands" Please tell me you're continuing the sarcasm and don't actually believe this... \_ So the Commander of The Allied bombing campaign in Europe during WWII was a terrorist? Dresden was known to be full of civilians. of civilians and had no legitimate military value. The firebombing was undertaken to break the "will" of the Germans to fight. Is that terrorism in your book? \_ If you kill civilians on purpose as a military leader and with a strategic purpose in mind, people start saying you are a war criminal. But it sticks less if you're on the winning side and the winning side is a democracy. Terrorists do it from a position of little power. War criminals do it from a position of great power. It's similar to "why is it racist when white people make fun of black people, but not so in reverse?" \_ Terrorism performed by national militaries isn't called terrorism. It is terrorism in fact though, and so was Hiroshima. There's no getting around it. (the key is deliberate vs. accidental civilian killing). \_ The U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, killing 80,000 civilians outright, to end the war early. This is a war crime under the current accepted definition. Because it ended the war early, and may have saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and because Japan had attacked first -- many would argue it wasn't a war crime, or at least the definition should be refined so it excludes the 80,000 dead innocents in Hiroshima being a war crime. \_ Victor writes the history. Duh! |
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| www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no1/article06.html Merle L Pribbenow The war on terror is frustrating and confusing. It is a war of shifting targets and uncertain methods, a war that is unconventional in every sense of the word. One of the most difficult parts of the war for the average American to understand is the trouble we have had in obtaining information from some of the captured terrorists being held at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other locations around the world. A college classmate of mine, someone who knows I am a retired CIA operations officer, recently expressed to me his frustration with the pace of the war on terror. He said he believed that the terrorist threat to America was so grave that any methods, including torture, should be used to obtain the information we need, and he could not understand why my former colleagues had not been able to "crack" these prisoners. Our current war on terror is by no means the first such war our nation has fought, and our interrogation efforts against terrorist suspects in the United States, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay are (hopefully) based on lessons learned from the experiences of past decades. This article details one particularly instructive case from the Vietnam era. Nguyen Tai More than 30 years ago, South Vietnamese forces arrested a man who turned out to be the most senior North Vietnamese officer ever captured during the Vietnam War. This was a man who had run intelligence and terrorist operations in Saigon for more than five years, operations that had killed or wounded hundreds of South Vietnamese and Americans. US and South Vietnamese intelligence and security officers interrogated the man for more than two years, employing every interrogation technique in both countries' arsenals, in an effort to obtain his secrets. Frank Snepp, the CIA officer who conducted the final portion of the interrogation, devoted a chapter in his classic memoir of the last years of the CIA station in Saigon to the interrogation of this man, whom he called the "man in the snow white cell." Nguyen Tai Photo Nguyen Tai (Photo courtesy of author) Snepp was wrong. A few years ago, he published a slim memoir of his years of imprisonment and interrogation titled Face to Face with the American CIA. His book may provide some insights into the problems, both practical and moral, facing our interrogators today. Early Nationalist Like Osama bin Laden, Nguyen Tai was a sophisticated, intelligent, well-educated man from a prominent family. His father, Nguyen Cong Hoan, was one of Vietnam's most famous authors. Tai's uncle, Le Van Luong, was a member of the Communist Party Central Committee and the second-in-command of the communist Ministry of Public Security (Vietnam's espionage, counterespionage, and security organization, patterned after the Soviet KGB). By 1947, when he was only 21, he was Chief of Public Security for French-occupied Hanoi city. The woman kept the suitcase next to her until it exploded, thereby becoming perhaps the first female suicide bomber in history. Following the communist victory at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the communist takeover of North Vietnam that followed, Nguyen Tai rose quickly in the hierarchy of the communist Ministry of Public Security. One aspect of his rise was said to have been his assistance in the prosecution of his own father for anti-regime statements. The operation sought out allegedly pro-Soviet and pro-Vo Nguyen Giap elements--including members of the party's central committee and the cabinet, and several army generals--opposed to the policies of then-Communist Party First Secretary, Le Duan. However, Tai carried in his head some of North Vietnam's deepest, darkest secrets--including the fact that all the US and South Vietnamese "spies" in North Vietnam were now working for the North Vietnamese; the identities of communist spies in South Vietnam's leadership; specific points of friction in North Vietnam's relations with the Soviet Union and Communist China; and internal splits and factionalism within the North Vietnamese leadership. Therefore, sending him to operate covertly behind enemy lines was a tremendous risk for the Hanoi regime. One of his mission orders, contained in a 17 May 1965 memorandum from the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) Security office, directed him to "exploit every opportunity to kill enemy leaders and vicious thugs, to intensify our political attacks aimed at spreading fear and confusion among the enemy's ranks, and to properly carry out the task of recruiting supporters among the lower ranks of the police." According to a Vietnamese Public Security press release in 2002, "Making great efforts, Public Security forces under Tai's command recruited agents, transported weapons into the city, and conducted many well-known attacks that terrified enemy personnel. While traveling to a political meeting in December 1970, he was arrested by South Vietnamese forces. The cover story and the identity documents carried by Tai and his traveling companions were quickly discovered to be false. After an initial interrogation and physical beating by South Vietnamese security personnel, Tai shifted to his fallback position to avoid being forced to reveal the location and identities of his personnel in the area. He "admitted" to being a newly infiltrated captain from North Vietnam. When the interrogation became more intense, he "confessed" that he was really a covert military intelligence agent sent to South Vietnam to establish a legal identity and cover legend before being sent on to France for his ultimate espionage assignment (which he claimed to have not yet been fully briefed on). He did this to play on the interrogator's ego by making him think that he had "cracked" his subject's story and to divert attention from the things that Tai wanted to protect--such as the location of his headquarters, the identity of his communist contacts, and his own identity and position. Tai's effort succeeded in buying time for his colleagues and contacts to escape to new hiding places and in diverting his "enemy's" attention onto a false track. But his claim to be a covert military intelligence agent ensured that he would receive high-level attention. Instead of being detained and interrogated by low-level (and less well-trained) personnel in the Mekong Delta, Tai was sent to Saigon for detailed questioning by South Vietnamese and American professionals at the South Vietnamese Central Intelligence Organization's (CIO) National Interrogation Center (NIC). The problem facing the interrogators at the NIC when Tai first arrived was that no one had any idea who he really was. Tai devised a cover story, complete with fake name, family and biographic data, and information on his work assignments. He pretended to be cooperative, but provided only information that was either already known or that could not be checked. To claim ignorance about the local communist organization and local contacts, he said he had just arrived from the North on an infiltration boat (one whose arrival was already known because the South Vietnamese had attacked and destroyed the boat when they discovered it at a dock in the Mekong Delta in November 1970). He stated he had been selected for the assignment in France because of his excellent French language skills and had been told that for reasons of security he would be informed of the precise nature of his mission in France only after he established a cover identity and received legal papers in Saigon for his onward travel. The information Tai provided about his military intelligence training and instructors in North Vietnam was information he knew had already been compromised by communist agents captured previously. He was thus able to give his interrogators what seemed to be "sensitive" information they could confirm, thereby enhancing their belief in his story while at the same time revealing nothing that might cause further damage to his cause. The fact that he had initially "concealed" this information and only "confessed" after being beaten by South Vietnamese officers would, he knew, enhance the story's believability. Tai claims that his story began to fal... |
| www.angelfire.com/folk/patriotscorner/72Virginians.html The 72 Virginians After getting nailed by a Daisy Cutter, Osama made his way to the pearly gates. "You wanted to end the Americans' liberty, so they gave you death!" James Madison comes up next, and says "This is why I allowed the Federal government to provide for the common defense!" Osama is subject to similar beatings from John Randolph of Roanoke, James Monroe, and 65 other people who have the same love for liberty and America. As he writhes on the ground, Thomas Jefferson picks him up to hurl him back toward the gate where he is to be judged. As Osama awaits his journey to his final very hot destination, he screams "This is not what I was promised!" An angel replies "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you, idiot. |