tv Frag den Lesch Deutsche Welle February 25, 2021 6:45am-7:01am CET
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brand training sessions for the interrogators and the stuff at abu ghraib prison where he transmitted the guantanamo and techniques to the abu ghraib stuff basically the restraints were removed and they were told to get results the thing that became so clear is that what the united states was doing was not a secret it was hidden in plain sight it wasn't really until the photographs from abu ghraib were released which were just you know the tip of the iceberg of what was actually happening that people in this country began actually talking about it. but we didn't know what it was exactly the right thing to do and if i had to recommend all over again and i think exactly the right signals that. we didn't
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so and and yes they were violating. military regulations in what they were doing but. they were operating within a system in which they they were conditioned they were structured in order to violate those laws. when you arrived at the brave where you aware of what had happened there. almost immediately after we arrived we were briefed that there was misconduct but we weren't given details and the interrogators that i knew who had been there during that time didn't they didn't talk about it so we we didn't know if i learned
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everything through the news. we understood the geneva conventions to mean that absolutely you know you knew you couldn't you couldn't harm anybody in your care that your primary responsibility was there will be. rather than putting you in distress but then we were confused and then of you know of course we got these memos from the justice department and from the pentagon. authorizing the use of much more harsh techniques. we started docking those techniques when i was stationed in mosul among them were stress positions sleep deprivation. inducing hypothermia. to stay and in any way we could put them in in distress using dogs this is this is the so-called slippery slope so that they take the gloves off policy allowed american interrogators from going from
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a certain list of techniques that were let's say allowed and even those were already torture to doing extreme things rape and sodomy and you know the most extreme forms of physical and psychological point tally. you can just torture somebody on a whim without knowing how to do it and the reality of course is that torture like any physical skill right requires training requires practice it requires an institutional setting a built environment really you need to have this institutionalized spates physical space in which you can perform torture we want you know we we wanted to be
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successful i was against the war you know liberal i didn't vote for george bush. but i wanted to do my job well you know i felt like you know if i can be successful and get intelligence from these people then we could end the war quickly and it would be better for iraq better for for us and the people. in recent days is going to focus a few. betrayed our values on some of the future. of our country. with 6 or 7 investigations underway. just a system that has felt. we know that those. who are they are brought to justice.
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was angry at our leadership because i knew that they were prosecuting interrogators and guards and leadership wasn't being held accountable i. i was disappointed in myself and. i remember there was terrible so that i was right i was very angry when the abu ghraib trial happened. i got a call from the lawyer for chip frederick. and he asked me to act as part of the defense team i said well the person that you should really talk to is zimbardo he ran this experiment and the 1970 s. and the situations of abu ghraib as far as i can tell are those conditions that are also reproduced in the. zimbardo experiments chip frederick he's. the man here he was the one who had the idea of putting electrodes on in the hood.
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his lawyer said the problem now is the military want to use him in a show trial in baghdad. in abu ghraib not only not a single scene office that went to trial not a single scene officer got a call letter of reprimand in fact in some cases they even got promoted to the office so it's it's the people at the top always take care of the people at the time. when we're still evaluating how we are going to approach the whole issue of interrogations detentions and so forth and i don't believe that anybody has but belong on the other hand i also have a belief that we need to look forward as lows as opposed to looking looking backwards.
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we'll look forward will look backward while forward is going to be like backward if you don't do something about what happened in the past nobody has been held accountable for the torture that happened in the past and for this among other people i fault president obama essentially he gave everybody dick cheney donald rumsfeld he gave them all a free pass. to it's w. bush they're all going to be rehabilitated they're all going to be treated as great statesmen one day i mean they gave president obama a nobel prize for not being george w. bush. the question of course the world cup dancing around. you know are avoiding is does it work as torture work doesn't work people that have information that are part of an underground up or run a terrorist organization a revolution urbanisation a commerce organization whatever organized form of collective elements it
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might be they won't. know. and the people that you pick up that are innocence yes you'll. turn them to pieces you store them you'll ruin them. i think that a few of the people that passed through my hands and interrogated did have intelligence but the vast majority of the people that i dealt with were just being picked up because they were males of military age and they were just get swept up and in these raids i don't think torture is always being used as a method to gain information or or confessions it's often just being used out of out of anger and fear. here in the united states we have this picture of torture as something that is done by the lonely person the
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lonely the man who does it more in sorrow than in anger because he is absolutely forced to because so many lives depend on it is willing to take the moral stain and the moral pain on him and in order to save all these people there was always this anxiety in american politics which is that the kinds of makes makes us weaker and less capable of taking the real things that real men should be able to do there's a very gendered masculinist sort of notion behind this real bad torture. and democracy makes us sissies. in the middle east we have people shopping their heads off christians we have things that we have never seen before i would bring back waterboarding and i bring back a hell of
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a lot worse than waterboarding. one of the things that we need to consider now it has become quite an issue is how many of these soldiers who used to participate in these kinds of american techniques are now policemen and immigration officers who manage mexicans and hispanics and other sorts of things in interrogations today there's already beginning to be evidence that these old techniques including freezing rooms. sleep deprivation all these things are now being used on on on immigrants and children so this is one of the terrible things about techniques is that they circulate between war and home and whatever you do in war comes home ready ready.
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if we keep torture clean 'd then we can feel that the thing that's being done to protect us isn't really so bad we have become used to the idea that it is a legitimate moral stance that we do anything we need to in order to feel safe to feel secure and in a bizarre way it's as if the government is trying to make a deal with us you let us do whatever we want over here on the dark side and in return i promise you will never die it's like this fake promise of immortality. but of course what. and history the american empire is for. and 50 years from now historians might have to say as french restaurants have said about france and algeria that that something was lost in the us soon brought supporter of moral authority that made america world leader sucker fazzt for this the shimmer of effective interrogation.
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germany. 30 minutes d.w. . she helps refugees however she can with clothes food and compassion fellow hard as i know who she ditched isn't even worth her in bosnia. she is supporting migrants perseverance here in the freezing cold like yasmina herself along with many fellow volunteers is coming under pressure. some good sponger. 90 minutes on d. w. and company push pull up thrown out of the mud right now climate change the 1st off the story. faces wife leslie way from just one week. how much work really do. we still have time to our ongoing.
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success. that subscribe and like the. plague. this is v.w. news live from concern over a comeback islamic state returns in northeast syria syrian kurds say they're being overwhelmed by the terrorist group we hear from those living in fear of the g. harvest and those who welcomed their return. also on the program divisions are growing among e.u. members over vaccines travel restrictions and
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