I understand. Do you understand that M.I. has ways to check information, or do you really think they have the resources to check every little scrap of information they hear? It's no stretch to say they decide who to set aside and who to focus on based on their limited resources
Can you get down off your high horse now? Please?
What, you think they just snatch and torture just anyone?
What's more likely, that M.I. has ways of determining who's a high value prisoner, or that they just flail about hoping they don't just have another Johnny Jihad?
Don't you think they check? Organize the information? Cross-reference names they've heard before?
Or do you think it's coincidence that the elite structure of AQ has been decimated and they're stuck focusing their bombing efforts on overseas targets?
All due respect, but I doubt you know what Military Intelligence investigators want.
This is as far as I've gotten in the thread so far, and I have the germs of a longer post in the back of my mind, but I thought I needed to jump in here on what might appear to be an irrelevant nitpick, but it is not.
The use of "MI" or "M.I." or "Military Intelligence" as your catch-all is a demonstration of the dangers of armchair philosophy in this instance. As background, I served all 9+ years of my active duty military time and the first several years of my Reserve duty time as a part of Military Intelligence. After that, I served briefly in Psychological Operations before switching to Civil Affairs. I held the designator of 35E (Counterintelligence), though in practice I worked primarily in Signals Intelligence at the higher levels and as a tactical intelligence staff officer at the lower levels.
ETA: All of the below. I can't fix the formatting above; for some reason the software keeps inserting quote breaks that should not be there, and it cut off all the following:
In this discussion of torture as it regards finding strategic intelligence against terrorists, MI is the small fry. From a logistical point of view, the military may be the big player – providing the support for and security of camps on foreign soil, for instance – but that’s not MI, and the interrogations MI conducted were not focused on national level, existential-threat, type detainees; that was for the other players.
See this link for some of the legal background at Guantanamo and specifically for this bit which lists those organizations involved in interrogations there:
The agencies or bureaus that interrogated at Guantánamo include: the Central Intelligence Agency and its Counterterrorism Center; the Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF); the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) of the FBI; Defense Intelligence Analysis (DIA); Defense Human Intelligence (HUMINT); Army Criminal Investigative Division (ACID); the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI); and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Private contractors also interrogated detainees.
Note that last one, “private contractors.” I presume they were there under the auspices of some other organization, but even if so, the idea that they “have other means to verify information” presumes both honorable intent un-muddied by the emotional vicissitudes caused by on-the-ground frustration, but also an historically non-present degree of cooperation between agencies.
Regardless, MI is not and was not the prime player in the search for strategic terroristic intelligence, though they are and were a large player. Wiki has
an excellent entry on MI here, though it doesn’t discuss MI personnel assigned to directly to non-MI units to oversee tactical and operational intelligence operations directly in support of the maneuver commander.
Note that most of MI is organized on a mostly standardized wartime setting, and only the 902nd MI Brigade in INSCOM has functions similar to those being discussed.
Now let’s look at the specific implication that MI has other means to validate information gained through torturous interrogation. They do, to an extent, but not to the extent or efficiency implied or to the extent that Hollywood implies with their omniscient and infinitely fast databases and computer networks and key players upon whom the hero prevails to repay a favor. MI itself is siloed, with a still lingering Green Door syndrome (the tendency for MI personnel to develop great and valuable intelligence and then disseminate it only within closed and limited circles because of an atmosphere of elitism revolving around clearances and access). Granted, the Green Door syndrome improved mightily even during my career, but it is still there, and it is greatest when working cross-agency. Which leads to the key point: the inability to efficiently share and validate information and intelligence across agencies and even within agencies was a key part of why 9/11 was not prevented, and despite efforts to improve, the institutional inertia remains.
Now, you might be tempted to dismiss me by saying that the misapplication of labels to whoever is doing the interrogating is irrelevant to the point about torture being practically effective, but you would be wrong to do so because you have brought that label into the argument specifically to buttress your point. And if you can’t get the labels correct when discussing something that you are implying is objectively true, then it detracts immensely from your credibility and therefore your point.
I’m writing this post while multi-tasking real life projects, so it is likely jumbled and rambling, but I thought it important enough to post anyway. I am proud of my time in MI, and I think MI and the rest of the intelligence community with whom I frequently crossed paths is populated primarily with conscientious people attempting to do good things. However, the failings are large, and the support of torture demonstrated in this thread is indicative less of any objective knowledge regarding its efficacy than it is of an emotional reaction to the bastards who did this once and might do it again.
It’s a bad road to take the first step on, and we ran screaming down it for a mile. Thank goodness we’re trying to get off it.
