Very interesting article from Der Spiegel re: outsourcing torture.

[Peregrine Took]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,624432,00.html

[Mojorabbit]

1. Good article nt

[EFerrari]

2. We need demonstrators at Miitchell's place immediately.

James Mitchell's new life begins with the same ritual every morning: He goes jogging, wearing Adidas shorts and a black tank top, his iPod in his ear. Then he gets into his luxury SUV and drives back to luxury home on Lake Vienna Drive in Pasco County, Florida.

[malaise]

6. We need to get this to KO, Rachel and Bill Moyers n/t

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[L. Coyote]

4. "private security experts" NOT!

[ThomWV]

5. This article begs a question - please consider and comment

That is a very good article to read. It fills gaps, big gaps.

Here is what I've asked myself. Why would the CIA get the job of interrogating prisoners? Why not the military? The military, along with the Justice Department, are the only agencies that ever have a reason to interrogate anyone and as a consequence they are the agencies who have trained interrogators. The CIA has no need for interrogators, or at least the old CIA didn't. Interrogation is a tool of military intelligence where the purpose is to interpret the battlefield it is not a tool of international intelligence gathering for a host of reasons not the least of which is that holding prisoners is not a normal part of intelligence gathering - its done covertly. That is the whole point.

So the Military had the trained people and Bush/Cheney had Rumsfeld - so what was the problem? Why didn't they just use Rummy's people?

The only answers I can come up with are these. With the CIA everyone is bound to secrecy and everything is classified. With the military there will always be a lot more people around and some of them might have fits of conscious - in short that our Leaders didn't trust the Military to be able to keep its mouth shut and so they entrusted it to an agency with little to no experience in what they wanted done. I suspect the same thinking would apply to the Department of Justice. They may have had a few dozen high officials from Justice in their pockets but not the working stiffs. Another possibility is that they needed to contract the torture out to keep it quiet and no Agency who had interrogators could justify contracting for interrogators - as weak as the Federal Unions are they would have picked up on that one.

Just speculation of course.