Word: harsh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...certainly looked that way in the harsh light of Chappaquiddick, a scant year after Robert's assassination, when the weight of expectations seemed to have broken him. Or during the worst of his bouts with the bottle. Or when changing mores turned the family tradition of skirt-chasing from a mark of virility to the sign of a cad. While the Senator grew fat and seemed to fall apart, his brothers remained ageless and timeless, slim, breeze-kissed. If he was reality, then we wanted no part of it. (See Ted Kennedy's top 10 legislative battles...
...tactics, Cheney demanded that it also release two CIA memos that, he said, would "show the success of the effort." Those memos, taken together with the unclassified inspector general's report into the CIA's interrogation program, would be the smoking gun that proved, once and for all, that harsh interrogation paid...
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...
Whether or not the harsh techniques loosened their tongues, the three men did give up a great deal of information. One of the CIA memos, dated July 13, 2004, described Mohammed as "a key intelligence source for the U.S. government on al-Qaeda plots and personalities." It says he provided "information on al-Qaeda strategic doctrine, probable targets, the impact of striking each target, and likely methods of attacks inside...
...capture, elaborated on his plan to [attack Heathrow]." This could suggest he gave up the information before he was put on the waterboard. But as with much of the eagerly anticipated documents, its meaning is anything but clear. Which means that far from ending the debate on whether harsh interrogation worked, the inspector general's report and CIA memos have simply provided more grist to both sides of the argument...