Word: hards
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...just enough of it that both defenders and critics of the CIA's techniques can claim to have been vindicated. The three high-value detainees who endured the harshest interrogation did yield a trove of information, including details of some schemes to attack U.S. targets. But it's hard to gauge whether these were actually looming threats. (See portraits of Gitmo detainees...
What makes a definitive analysis difficult is the fact that the inspector general's report and both memos are, despite their declassification, still substantially redacted. One consequence is that it is hard to establish timelines: for instance, how much information did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provide before he was waterboarded, and how much afterward? (Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times, Zubaydah 83 times and Nashiri twice.) (Read "How Waterboarding Got Out of Control...
Another, more fundamental question hard to answer with certainty is whether the interrogators needed to use harsh techniques at all. The inspector general's report says that at least in some instances, they were used "without justification." Even interrogators in the field worried that their bosses' "assessments to the effect that detainees [were] withholding information [were] not always supported by an objective evaluation, but are too heavily based, instead, on presumptions of what the individual might or should know." But ultimately, the conclusion of the inspector general's report in this regard is not, well, particularly conclusive: "The effectiveness...
...hard to drive down a residential street in Miami Gardens, Fla., and not see two, three, four houses in foreclosure. Some have been on the auction block since last year; they are once handsome, pastel-colored ranch houses that are now surrounded by waist-high weeds or boarded-up windows. "The tarp on that busted roof is about to disintegrate, it's been there so long," says Andre Williams, a Harvard-educated real estate attorney and Miami Gardens city councilman, pointing at one of the houses and shaking his head at the state of the solid middle-class, African-American...
...khat production, the leaf may be one of the few things still holding Yemen together. Says Ashraf Al-Eryani, one of GTZ's local program officers, "Khat plays a big role in keeping people calm, and keeping them off the streets. But it's also delaying change. It's hard to convince people...