There are some who wish to hold hands and sing Kumbaya with those who are NOT American citizens AND hold information on impending death and destruction to American citizens.

Holding hands and singing Kumbaya with Khalid Sheik Mohammed would have yielded tremendous amounts of information, right?

 

While you've chosen a single example Patton, in the big picture, it depends on your personal opinion about the use of torture to attempt to obtain information from individuals
claimed to have been captured on the battlefield.  The articles, now two published in this series make it more than clear, many of those tortured had  nothing to do with the plots carried out on 9-11 nor were they even engaged in any activities related to the warfare taking place in Afghanistan shortly after the invasion and continuing today.

"In the small picture, it seems you think we lie." Quote by Patton.  We disagree and that is not an unusual factor Patton given your occupation and being subjected to the UCMJ as a
result.  This current after the fact investigation echoes others also the result of the policies and practices of the years since the attack on Afghanistan took place to include the many
other results of the use of torture, abu Ghraib being only one. 

Yes, there is ample proof, "we lie."  But in the end it comes down to cold and hard facts that the use of torture accomplishes very little. Not my words, but those of others. Just to add an interesting article exactly about what under Bush and maybe even more loosed by Cheney, an unfortunate, IMHO, use of torture, that in the end as U.S. citizens we may all be very ashamed of allowed to be used, not just on the plotters and killers of U.S. citizens, but also established evidence the circumstances have hardly been as claimed.

Personal recommendation, before knee jerk defense of the use of torture by those in the government and military, the Supremes have ruled once again against the denial of Habeaus Corpus by Bush et al, at GITMO. This period may well come back to bite even the previously tortured in Nam: McCain.

CIA Largely in the Dark on Interrogation Tactics
Bush Tasked Agency To Build a Robust System, Despite Its Limited History

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin
By SPENCER ACKERMAN 01/28/2008 | 30 COMMENTS
In a bucolic field two miles north of Mount Vernon, beside a baseball diamond in Fort Hunt Park, Va., about 20 veterans of a secret World War II intelligence unit gathered together last year for the first time since 1946. The National Park Service was holding a ceremony to commemorate their service. The men, mostly in their eighties, had never before told their stories. During the war, Fort Hunt was a secret interrogation center, where some 4,000 German and Italian military officers, high-ranking government officials and scientists were debriefed. A few years ago, Park Rangers responsible for the area learned of Fort Hunt's critical intelligence role in recently declassified documents, and they decided to create a memorial and reunite the unit's veterans. The dedication ceremony was held over two balmy, peaceful days last October.
 
Col. Steve Kleinman, a U.S. Air Force Reserve interrogator, 50, who had served in Panama and both Iraq wars, was one of the speakers that fall day. In a conversation earlier this month, Kleinman said he was horrified by America's turn to what Dick Cheney has called "the dark side" in the war on terrorism: indefinite detention in the name of national security, torture in the name of intelligence collection. And so he fought against it. Kleinman joined an effort, sponsored by the Intelligence Science Board -- an interagency intelligence-advisory panel -- to get the intelligence community to finally renounce torture. His speech at Fort Hunt was a subtle rebuke of the use of torture, comparing the war on terrorism to an earlier era, when interrogators shunned brutality.
 
Suddenly, at Fort Hunt that October day, a veteran approached Kleinman. "I never laid a hand on one of my prisoners," the older man said. "That allowed me to do my job and retain my humanity." Kleinman was moved. "I thought, when's the last time I heard an interrogator concerned about that?" he recalled.
 
Many interrogators today are, in fact, concerned about that. But the program that developed within the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11 has left the intelligence community playing a fateful role. Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy.

http://washingtonindependent.com/view/cia-largely-in-the3

Surely, Patton you can do better than that as the issue isn't just interrogation, it's the use of torture in the process. And not just torture, but torture of those claimed to have been captured on the battlefield when in reality some were simply rounded up and
sold to the Pakistanis who were paid by the U.S. and weren't terrorists or even fighters. 

Maybe if you actually read the article from the McClatchy investigation you might actually learn a bit of truth rather than responding in a knee jerk manner about saving lives of Americans.  Torture is against U.S. law. While these articles are related to specific circumstances in Afghanistan and GITMO, the reason for the practice of rendition was created to send some, no more guilty of terrorism than many of the ones interviewed, for the purpose of torture by others where torture isn't against the law.



 

Thus the difficulty when dealing with illegal combatants.  I keep seeing stuff like, "nobody had ever heard of him......he wasn't a high-value target".  The problem I have with this is that most suicide bombers and attackers are not high-value targets to begin with.  They are the grunts and it is likely that the first time they ever resort to violence is when they kill 25 people in one of their suicide operations.  The planners and high-value targets aren't on the battlefield - they're usually hiding somewhere giving orders.  So my first problem with the article is the premise that because nobody ever heard of one of these guys that he is thus innocent.  I don't buy it and I have little reason to take the detainee's word for it.  Indeed, I'm beginning to think the military is getting it right for the most part.  Prisoners that they release are going on to fight again (and become suicide bombers):

Ex-Guantánamo detainee became suicide bomber in Iraq, U.S. says
http://www.iht.com:80/articles/2008/05/08/africa/gitmo.php

If these are the guys the military deems non-threatening and releasable, I'd rather they stop releasing people!  The point is that just because the detainees don't appear on anyone's high-value target list - it doesn't mean they are innocent.  The idea that the detainees word is somehow proof of American wrongdoing is to me no longer valid (see above article).  Deception is at the top of the list of perfected tactics by our enemies.  Unfortunately, this makes believing anyone in a detention facility very difficult.


All of this being said however, I do NOT agree with torture of any detainee.  Harsh interogation procedures I can live with (like sleep deprivation and endless hours of awful music).  This is not torture.  There is a lot of anecdotal evidence (and some tangible evidence) that the best technique for acquiring information is to be kind and build trust between the detainee and interogators.  I am not an expert on this, and indeed there are some people that know information that will not be made to talk just because we are nice to them.  But even for these people, there has to be a limit.  I would imagine that any time-critical information that most of these guys know is long expired by the time we're able to "break" them with any torture.  

It is important that we have a clear line separating legal methods from illegal methods.  We also have to remember that counter-terrorism in the 21st century is a new and incredibly complex issue.  We don't have manuals for how to extract information from people who are very happy to die.  We also have just recently learned that one person can kill hundreds or thousands of people without much trouble.  This is not a simple "let them stand trial and treat them like Americans" sort of game we're playing.  This is new territory and the rules are at best guidelines at this point.  To top things off, our enemy is notorious for not following rules and this gives them some advantages, especially when they learn to use our own rules and reluctance for brutality against us.

Nevertheless, we will win against terrorism, that is an absolute certainty.  How we do it is now the question.  I would like to see that my grandchildren's textbooks hold the US in high regard when it comes to dealing with terrorism in the 21st century.  It should not be a blemish on America's record, but rather an example of why this is the greatest nation on Earth.  It will be very fulfilling to look back and say we had every reason to be vicious and brutal to our enemies but instead we stuck to our core beliefs as Americans and Christians and were able to face absolute evil and disregard for life with honor and respect for the rule of law.  When we win, that is how we should be remembered as doing it.

Depends on the context I suppose.  If the 7-year old has a Grenade, shoot that little bastard.

Tragedy..........but accidents happen.

Same can be said about the cop that shoots the suspect in a dark ally who was reaching for his wallet..........I imagine we are pretty much on the same side here.  I certainly understand the grey area in which we can find ourselves.