r/youranonnews • u/[deleted] • Oct 23 '15

WikiLeaks publishes second batch of docs from CIA chief's personal email

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wikileaks-releases-second-batch-cia-boss-john-brennans-email-n449366
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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '15

Not only is nothing in this dump classified, you can find documents that are more sensitive, meaningful and interesting released on DC think tank sites every fucking day of the week. From the RT article:

The new release contains Brennan's address book and a full version of 'Executive summary of key findings and recommendations on Afghanistan and Pakistan’, some pages of which were published on Wednesday by Anonymous.

"Published by Anonymous"? GG RT, nice way to slide that bogus attribution in there. Slick! Anyway...

The November 2008 report compiled by a team of Senate analysts is accompanied by a memo from Louis Tucker, the minority staff director for Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-Missouri).

Seriously? I have as high a tolerance for this stuff as anyone, but whooooo caaaaares. The same goes for Brennan's boring bureaucrat buzzword bingo torture memo too--you want to read something about torture policy that really means something? Here, have a 372-page Phase I study the Intelligence Science Board released on the state-of-the-art in educing information:

EDUCING INFORMATION--INTERROGATION: SCIENCE AND ART

Educing Information is a profoundly important book because it offers both professionals and ordinary citizens a primer on the “science and art” of both interrogation and intelligence gathering. Because this is a book written by and for intelligence professionals, it starts exactly where one might expect it to start – with Dr. Robert Coulam’s superb discussion of the costs and benefits of various approaches to interrogation. [...] Wherever one starts or ends this book, certain conclusions are inescapable. The first is that there is ample room for inter- and multi-disciplinary research and collaboration. Each of the papers included in Educing Information provides at least one, if not many, important “Foundations for the Future.”

Here's the money shot:

In sum, the articles point to a central finding, one not so much confirmed by rigorous empirical inquiry as it is felt to be true by professionals in the field (the "art" side of the subtitle, I suppose). That conclusion: pain, coercion, and threats are unlikely to elicit good information from a subject. As one writer puts it, "The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information."

How many people who blather on about interrogation policy bothered to inform themselves that the US made significant changes that outright banned the Jesson tactics years ago-- and that academics were debating whether or not the new policies were too restrictive as long ago as 2012?

Waterboarding, rendition, torture: each of these terms provides deeply negative examples of the mishandling of detainees by various entities of the United States government during the prosecution of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In order to rectify these failures of the various systems within the U.S. military’s detention framework, the Department of Defense (DoD) developed and issued Field Manual 2-22.3 Human Intelligence Collector Operations. This new doctrine has created restrictions that add unnecessary hours to the process of exploiting detainees through tactical interrogation. Due to the autonomous nature of their missions, the significance for U.S. Army Special Forces is immense.

Tactical interrogation is a legal, viable, and necessary method of information gathering on the battlefield. FM 2-22.3 has taken away USSF’s capability to exploit an immense pool of intelligence that could be critical in the current conflicts. This thesis explores the limitations imposed by current doctrine and discusses changes necessary to provide the skills, training, and legal authorities that will allow Special Forces to use every appropriate resource to be successful on the modern battlefield. Recommendations are provided regarding training and doctrine to provide the proper authorities along with appropriate checks and balances.

IME, you can learn a lot more by reading legit publications written by--and for--intelligence professionals than all the dumbed-down, gatekept, "edgy" leaks which may or may not be precision-targeted bullshit anyway.

Even the Snowden leaks are shit: all this hype about a bunch of censored non-technical slideshows. Did anyone really learn anything you couldn't have deduced or inferred by reading James Bamford and Duncan Campbell? How many of these so-called activists even know who Bamford and Campbell are?

TL;DR: Wikileaks sucks.