Word: harshness
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...special agent who came in from the cold - and waded straight into the debate over the use of harsh interrogation techniques. Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent and perhaps the most successful U.S. interrogator of al-Qaeda operatives, says the use of those techniques was unnecessary and often counterproductive. Detainees, he says, provided vital intelligence under non-violent questioning, before they were put through "walling" and waterboarding...
...piece in the New York Times, Soufan says Abu Zubaydah gave up the information between March and June 2002, when he was being interrogated by Soufan, another FBI agent and some CIA officers. But that was not the result of harsh techniques, including waterboarding, which were not introduced until August. "We were getting a lot of useful material from [Abu Zubaydah], and we would have continued to get material from him," Soufan told TIME. "The rough tactics were not necessary...
Obama apparently spent weeks debating the merits of releasing the documents and was lobbied by CIA Director Leon Panetta to keep them classified. In the end, the case for transparency was too great. The harsh tactics--isolation, sleep deprivation, humiliation, waterboarding--not only had been widely reported, but much of it was also acknowledged to have originated in "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War," a 1957 article written for the Air Force about abusive Chinese interrogations of U.S. troops during the Korean War. Anyone who wanted to could find it via Google for years...
...Furthermore, Obama should take the radical but logical step of lifting the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. The harsh economic sanctions are a historical relic from past efforts to dislodge Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom several presidential administrations—beginning in the 1960s—have tried unsuccessfully to shake from power. The sanctions may have actually had the opposite of their intended effect politically, allowing Castro to blame the U.S. for Cuba’s sluggish economic development. As disagreeable as Castro’s actions toward America may have been, an embargo rooted in personal enmity against...
...FlyBy doesn't give two shits about that little blueprint you cooked up. There are 99 things on the internet you must see, apparently (FlyBy recommends 14, 26, 32!, 37, 73, 86...you know you wanna do this...90, and 95). Ok, that was actually kind of harsh...don't click that...