Except for waterboarding, sounds fun.
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/12/09/list-of-approved-enhanced-interrogation-techniques/
Grabbing someone forcibly by the collar and slapping in the face with fingers slightly spread are enhanced interrogation techniques? Sounds like a typical day in Catholic school to me.
^I was thinking the same thing.
Missing one night of sleep isn’t torture. It’s having a newborn baby.
What about being force fed rectally?
I guess it sucks to be the guy who was waterboarded 183 times. But other than that, how is this supposed to get people to confess to masterminding terrorist attacks (Edit: especially if it might mean condemning yourself or your comrades to death or life imprisonment)? I mean, civilian people in the US voluntarily run Iron Man triathlons and then collapse from fatigue in the end. Leaning on the wall to induce fatigue seems not too hard in comparison.
Maybe I am oversimplifying things…
I was not subjected to any of these myself, as I was a good kid, but I witnessed each of them during my 8 years in Catholic school (9 actually, including kindergarden):
Open hand slap to the face
Ruler across knuckles
Ruler across back of head
Blackboard eraser thrown at student’s head (yes, it hit him)
Kneel in corner for 30 minutes on tile floor
Hem ripped out of girl’s skirt (skirt did not come within 2 inches of floor while kneeling)
Male student’s hair cut (touched shirt collar in back)
Student grabbed by collar and pants belt and thrown out classroom door (on one occassion the door was locked and did not open when he hit it)
I’m guessing you can’t do any of that anymore, not even in Catholic schools.
“Hem ripped out of girl’s skirt”
Tell me more…
I would probably eventually admit to being a terrorist mastermind if water boarded, so I don’t think it is particularly effective at getting actionable information out of prisoners. I’m not saying we should stop doing it, but we should be honest about the fact that it is a punishment, not an interogation technique.
Maybe. But then maybe you should also read The Gulag Archipelago.
"Cramped confinement “with an insect” - Developed for Abu Zubaydah, a militant commander allegedly allied with Osama bin Laden. CIA officers learned Mr. Zubaydah was afraid of insects, so they sought permission to place him in a box with a harmless bug such as a caterpillar…"
LMAO
^HEY THAT IS NOT FUNNY
You’d be disappointed, nothing lurid. Skirts were not allowed to be more than 2 inches from the floor while kneeling. In this particular case, the girl had been warned a couple of times that her skirt was too high and she needed to lower the hem. She didn’t, so one day the nun had her stand infront of the class while she grabbed the bottom of her skirt and ripped out the hem, making the skirt longer. She was pretty embarrassed and cried while the nun was doing it, but there was nothing interesting about it. Not to kill everyone’s fantasies, but the vast majority of Catholic Schoolgirls wear shorts under their skirts (at least they did 30 year ago).
Doesn’t sound like my kind of Catholic school…
Also, the report mentions that the American interrogators used ice baths to try to get information from captives.
I recall reading that a Nazi doctor at a concentration camp ran experiments on Soviet POWs in which the men were locked into an ice bath for long periods. The doctor wanted to see how low a man’s temperature could go and still survive.
waterboarding is allowed in SERE school - if you get caught, you get strapped to the table for some fun. 
Once you get to the point where you have to justify your actions by saying “well, it’s not as bad as the Nazis”, that might be a sign that it’s gone too far.
As a human, I am disgusted by the actions taken by the CIA as described in that article. Furthermore, I am ABSOLUTELY APPALLED by the killing of innocent civilians in US Drone/Missile/Air-attacks.
But, I know that the world isn’t black or white. Some people have to make hard choices for the greater good. It’s easy to look back to determine whether the end justified the means.
At the end of the day, its hard to keep your humanity and morals when you’re at war.
Did the CIA behead any 3rd party journalists on youtube? If not, then I think we are still on the moral high ground. Frankly, most of this stuff is nothing compared to what your average inmate would experience in the US penal system. All these reports really manage to do is send a message to terrorists that, if caught, we will treat them much better than they got treated in whatever shithole they came from. If we kill them in a drone strike, they will be dead before they even know it and with 72 virigns. So basically, these guys are seeing a lot of upside in being terrorists
All things considered, the sodomy article actually seems pretty reasonable. The prisoners seem to have been fed rectally in response to hunger strikes and not because the CIA likes to put things in peoples’ butts. If the prisoners had died from hunger, surely the PR fallout would have been worse. The other practices, like threatening the prisoners’ moms (?), don’t seem really torturous and is even done on AF by a certain poster who will remain nameless. If this is the worst atrocity committed today by the US government, then the US government actually sounds pretty good. Compared to the things mentioned in this article, deploying ground troops with orders to shoot terrorists sounds much less humane.
Of course, it would be preferable if no prisoners underwent any kind of poor treatment. However, in a world where people are kidnapped and beheaded on live TV for having the wrong nationality, certain measures could be considered appropriate. It’s not like the prisoners’ dicks got chopped off and sent to their dad and sister, or something like that.