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Eric Fair served as an interrogator in Iraq working as a military contractor for the private security firm CACI. [...] Fair writes about feeling haunted by what he did, what he saw and what he heard in Iraq, from the beating of prisoners to witnessing the use of sleep deprivation, stress positions and isolation to break prisoners.
[...] Raad Hussein is bound to the Palestinian chair. His hands are tied to his ankles. The chair forces him to lean forward in a crouch, forcing all of his weight onto his thighs. It's as if he's been trapped in the act of kneeling down to pray, his knees frozen just above the floor, his arms pinned below his legs. He is blindfolded. His head has collapsed into his chest. He wheezes and gasps for air. There is a pool of urine at his feet. He moans: too tired to cry, but in too much pain to remain silent.
[...] Sleep deprivation, as I've said before, can be accomplished in a matter of hours. You can let someone go to sleep in a dark room with no windows, and you can wake them up in 15 or 20 minutes. They have no idea how long they've been asleep. And with no windows, they have no idea what time of day it is. You can let them go back to sleep, and you can wake them up in 20 minutes. They still have no idea. And they've since—within 45 minutes, they've lost all sense of time. Two or three hours later, you can convince this person that he's been living for four or five days, when it's really only been an hour.
[...] [The purpose of sleep deprivation:] The complete lack of hope. It is to strip away someone's hope and to insert a different way of thinking into their mind, which would be my mind into theirs, so that they're going to cooperate with me.
Part 1: http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/7/a_torturer_s_confession_former_abu
Part 2: http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/7/ex_abu_ghraib_interrogator_israelis_trained
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2016, @10:22PM
The article really has nothing to do with that other than those issues being a backdrop to the experience of the author.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2016, @10:42PM
But the underlying cause of the situation has everything to do with those issues.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @12:00AM
Not so much. That shit wrecks the peons who do the oppressing anywhere there is serious amounts of oppression.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday April 17 2016, @03:15AM
You can't ignore that, if they'd address the underlying problem, then they wouldn't need to deal with the terrorists as terrorists rather than as POWs.
The type of terrorism that we're dealing with in the 21st century is largely a byproduct of incompetent foreign relations. There are always going to be people who are willing to martyr themselves for their cause, but getting somebody to martyr themselves for somebody elses cause is a different matter and in most of the terrorist cases they aren't people who actually believe, they're people who are either coerced, bribed or feel they have no other options than to engage in terrorist activities.
The more typical western style terrorist was somebody who wanted to get away and there was usually a way of dealing with the problem with little or no life lost. For example the IRA would usually report the bomb with plenty of time to defuse it knowing that having a bomb placed in the financial district would cause disruption just because of the time needed to disarm it.
Torturing enemy combatants just provides evidence that we're less than human and deserving of these sorts of radical attacks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @05:27AM
It is becoming more and more clear that you haven't read the article and are just keying off any old mention of the occupation to use as a platform to talk about whatever you want to talk about. That's pretty selfish of you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @11:28PM
In other words, you're not smart enough to see the connection and would rather accuse me of being selfish than either address the point or ignore it.