【Native Speaker每日综合训练—46系列】【46-02】文史哲 Torture

油桃F

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Part I: Speaker

How to stop torture

Source: TED Talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/karen_tse_how_to_stop_torture

[Rephrase 1, 12:39]

油桃F

Part II: Speed

With torture, America hurt itself for nothing
By Jay Parini | December 10, 2014

[Time 2]
London (CNN) -- The release of a massive report on torture Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee has been accompanied by a strong statement by President Obama, who notes that it describes in detail "a troubling program involving enhanced interrogation techniques in secret facilities outside the United States" by operatives working for the CIA.

This report -- we're talking about nearly 500 pages summarizing more than 6,000 pages of data and analysis -- will certainly refocus the world's attention on this sordid phase in recent American history.

Obama acknowledged that his predecessors in the White House faced "agonizing choices" after 9/11, and they acted in ways meant to protect against future attacks by al Qaeda. Still, this new accounting of that period has raised protests from politicians on both sides of the aisle, but especially Republicans, who don't want to drag up painful memories of the Bush administration -- not in this, their finest hour.

But it has also raised many questions demanding answers. I'm in London as I write this, and there is already a great deal of talk about this report in the press. Indeed, for many, troubling questions arise:

How could Americans have allowed their government to fly prisoners suspected of terrorist connections to "black sites" in Thailand, Morocco, and Poland, where, as the report describes, they were hideously tortured in the hopes of extracting information from them about future plots against the homeland? (And people did know that something like this could be going on, as reporters often described the existence of shadowy rendition programs without knowing the specific details.) Is this how tax dollars were best spent to protect Americans against future threats?

Other questions swirl, but one seems especially relevant as we continue our necessary efforts to combat terrorism: Is torture an effective technique for getting reliable information? The report reviews 20 prominent cases that had been brought forth -- by intelligence officials and even alluded to by former President George W. Bush -- as examples of torture that worked, It concludes that none of this brutality resulted in useful information.
[344 words]

[Time 3]
This corresponds to what experts have suggested all along: Torture simply doesn't work and may actually be counterproductive in the fight against terrorism. The problem isn't with those who actually possess relevant information, it's with those who don't. Men being tortured will saying anything to stop the interrogator from drowning him or abusing him -- and some of the methods detailed in this report are truly horrific.

Top intelligence and military officials clearly warned the governmentas early as 2002 that this brutality doesn't work. In fact, torture generates "unreliable information," as this report affirms; it produces information that requires fact-checking that soon produces more misinformation. As Lou Dimarco observed in 2006, in a useful book about the practice of torture during the Algerian War (1954-1962): "History offers no modern examples of the strategic effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques, but it is replete with examples of the negative strategic effects such techniques have on the counterinsurgency force."

There is the additional problem that American enemies can use the fact that we have tortured prisoners as an excuse to torture American captives. Indeed, one can't help but wonder if the fury unleashed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq has its origins at least partially in the dark history of American torture. As the poet W.H. Auden so memorably wrote: "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return."

A truly democratic society depends on the rule of law and respect for human rights; it is the most important baseline we have. When a nation gives in to illegality and brutality -- and torture is both -- it is degrading itself, opening doors and windows that will never be easily closed. Hitler and Stalin were famous for their methods. The United States must set a better example.

In one of his first acts as chief executive in 2009, President Obama outlawed secret renditions and torture.This bold declaration was widely seen as a move that helped to restore the moral authority of the United States, which had badly suffered under the presidency of George W. Bush.
[344 words]

[Time 4]
Unfortunately, the Senate report is not the sort of thing most Americans will ever read, and already there has been a backlash by those who regard its publication as a partisan political move. No doubt they would rather spend their time and money on investigating what happened in 2012 in Benghazi, Libya, and how it came to be that Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was given some erroneous "talking points" before she went on Sunday morning talk shows to discuss the attack, that killed four Americans.

I wish both Republican and Democrats could see that information like the Senate report is the lifeblood of American democracy. Transparency is all. This admission of torture will surely rile many in the Middle East and elsewhere. But isn't it ultimately a good thing for other countries to see that we hold ourselves to high standards of self-examination? We make mistakes, as all countries do. But we admit our mistakes.

One last thing to consider: The new report confirms that President Bush was not directly briefed about the harshest techniques of torture before 2006, although Vice President Dick Cheney apparently attended meetings where these were discussed. So the question remains about whether we should actually try to punish those in the U.S. government who authorized or committed these repulsive and unlawful acts of torture.

I would tend to agree with Anthony D. Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union, who wrote an article in The New York Times suggesting that however much the idea of torture turns his stomach, it's better for President Obama to pardon Bush and Cheney for these (my words) crimes against humanity. They will, of course, never be prosecuted anyway.

But by granting them pardons, Obama would -- symbolically -- show the world that we recognize that torture is illegal as well as reprehensible, and those who authorized it "were indeed criminals."
[316 words]

Source: CNN opinion
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/09/opinion/parini-torture-report

CIA lied about torture, Senate report suggests
BY  KEN DILANIAN | December 13, 2014

[Time 5]
WASHINGTON — When CIA interrogators were torturing accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at a secret prison in Poland in March 2003, a top CIA analyst asked them to show him a photograph of an alleged terrorist named Majid Khan.

The interrogators slapped Mohammed, denied him sleep, rehydrated him through his rectum, threatened to kill his children and waterboarded him 183 times. And he offered up details on Khan.

The analyst later told the CIA’s inspector general that Mohammed’s information helped lead to Khan’s arrest, CIA records show. The watchdog included that as a success story in a 2004 report that became public and for many years stood as the most detailed accounting of the program.
But the analyst, then deputy chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, knew Khan already had been captured in Pakistan at the time Mohammed was asked about him, according to the 520-page Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogations that was released this past week.

In other words, what she told the inspector general wasn’t true.

The Senate report has exposed years of such CIA misrepresentations that seem designed to boost the case for the effectiveness of brutal interrogations. The CIA acknowledges the misrepresentation about Khan’s arrest, while disputing most and playing down others.
But the Senate investigation relied on the CIA’s own records to document a pattern of an agency consistently understating the brutality of the techniques used on detainees and overstating the value of the information they produced.

“You’ve decided to do something and now you’ve got to justify it, and you may even believe your justifications,” said Cynthia Storer, a former CIA analyst whose work has been credited with helping locate bin Laden, and who opposed the torture.

“The CIA lied,” Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, one of the agency’s toughest critics, said in the Senate a few days ago.
[310 words]

[Time 6]
In its written response to the report, the CIA said it was “dismayed” that it had “failed to meet its own standards for precision of language, and we acknowledge that this was unacceptable.” But, the agency said, “Even in those cases, we found that the actual impact of the information acquired from interrogations was significant and still supported.”

CIA officials insist that the treatment of Mohammed and other detainees yielded valuable intelligence, something the Senate report disputes. The CIA stands by 18 of the 20 cases in which the Senate says the agency failed to obtain uniquely valuable intelligence from detainees through harsh interrogation.

The Senate report has exposed lies well beyond its pages.

Former top CIA manager Jose Rodriguez wrote in his 2011 memoir, “Hard Measures,” that during waterboarding, “our officers used far less water for far shorter periods of time than they were allowed.”

He suggested that the public’s view had been swayed by “a cartoon version” in which detainees are “practically being doused by a fire hose.”

CIA records cited in the report show that Rodriguez, who destroyed videotapes of some of the sessions, was not telling the truth.

The waterboarding was far more intense and gruesome than the Justice Department had authorized, according to the records, which the CIA has not disputed.

Waterboarding caused al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah to become “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth,” while the procedure used on Mohammad evolved into a “series of near drownings,” with interrogators cupping a pool of water over his nose and mouth. The first waterboarding session of Mohamed lasted 10 minutes longer than the Justice Department allowed, the Senate report says.

Rodriguez, who ran the CIA interrogation program, did not respond to requests for comment.
CIA officials said they could not speak for Rodriguez, but they say the analyst’s assertion about Khan’s arrest was a one-time mistake.

Senate investigators say the error was repeated many times to the inspector general and was used to bolster the case for Justice Department approval of brutal techniques. The misinformation was also sent to a CIA panel reviewing the interrogation program.
[354 words]

[The Rest]
The same analyst, who now holds a senior job in the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center, exaggerated other aspects of intelligence gained under torture to the inspector general, the report says. She played a pivotal role in the wrongful CIA kidnapping of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, who says he was tortured at the CIA’s Salt Pit in Afghanistan.

Another CIA misrepresentation, the Senate report says, was the assertion to the White House, the Justice Department, Congress, and later the public that Zubaydah, the first detainee to be waterboarded, told the CIA he believed the U.S. was weak and lacked resilience, and that he stopped cooperating under traditional interrogation techniques.

In August 2006, a CIA al-Qaida expert wrote: “We have no records that `he declared that America was weak, and lacking in resilience’ …” Another al-Qaida expert wrote, “I can find no reference to AZ being deifant (sic) and declaring America weak… in fact everything I have read indicated he used a non deifiant (sic) resistance strategy.”

Two others speculated how the exaggeration took hold. They refer to the senior analyst who gave the misinformation to the inspector general.

“Yes, believe so,” an officer wrote. “And agree, we shall pass over in silence.”

Years of such misinformation bubbled to the surface during the first briefing about interrogations to the full Senate Intelligence Committee, in 2007, by then-CIA Director Michael Hayden. He made so many factual misstatements about the program, the techniques, the number of detainees and the intelligence, that the Senate study devotes a 37-page appendix to fact-checking his testimony.

“I was describing the mature program that I was suggesting should go forward,” Hayden said in an email this past week. “I think a lot of the incidents they pointed out came from really early in the interrogation process.”
[297 words]

Source: PBS
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/cia-lied-torture-senate-report-suggests/

油桃F

Part III: Obstacle

Torture and the Truth
BY JANE MAYER | December 12, 2014

[Paraphrase 7]
It’s hard to describe it as a positive development when a branch of the federal government releases a four-hundred-and-ninety-nine-page report that explains, in meticulous detail, how unthinkable cruelty became official U.S. policy. But last Tuesday, in releasing the long-awaited Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the C.I.A.’s interrogation-and-detention program, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee chairman, proved that Congress can still perform its most basic Madisonian function of providing a check on executive-branch abuse, and that is reason for gratitude.

It is clear now that from the start many of those involved in the program, which began in 2002, recognized its potential criminality. Before subjecting a detainee to interrogation, a 2002 cable notes, C.I.A. officers sought assurances that he would “remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” Permanent, extrajudicial disappearance was apparently preferable to letting the prisoner ever tell what had been done to him. That logic may explain why no “high value detainee” subjected to the most extreme tactics and still in U.S. custody in Guantánamo has yet been given an open trial.

The report also demonstrates that the agency misrepresented nearly every aspect of its program to the Bush Administration, which authorized it, to the members of Congress charged with overseeing it, and to the public, which was led to believe that whatever the C.I.A. was doing was vital for national security and did not involve torture. Instead, the report shows, in all twenty cases most widely cited by the C.I.A. as evidence that abusive interrogation methods were necessary, the same information could have been obtained, and frequently was obtained, through non-coercive methods. Further, the interrogations often produced false information, ensnaring innocent people, sometimes with tragic results.

Other documents illustrate how the agency misled. In June of 2003, the Vice-President’s counsel asked the C.I.A’.s general counsel if the agency was videotaping its waterboarding sessions. His answer was no. That was technically true, since it was not videotaping them at the time. But it had done so previously, and it had the tapes. The C.I.A. used the same evasion on Senate overseers. A day after a senator proposed a commission to look into detainee matters, the tapes were destroyed. Similar deceptions on many levels are so rife in the report that a reader can’t help but wonder if agency officials didn’t simply regard their cloak of state secrecy as a license to circumvent accountability.

After Feinstein introduced the report on the Senate floor, John McCain rose to speak. He praised the document as “a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose—to secure actionable intelligence to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies—but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.” His endorsement was important not only because, as a former prisoner of war who survived torture, he has particular authority on the issue but also because he is a Republican. He lent the report credibility against torture apologists hoping to discredit it as a political stunt. The tableau of the two elder senators putting aside their differences to stand together was a relic of bipartisan statesmanship.

It remains to be seen, though, whether the report will spur lasting reform. Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and an expert on torture regimes, doubts that it will. For one thing, despite McCain’s testimony, torture is becoming just another partisan issue. This wasn’t always the case—it was Ronald Reagan who signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture, in 1988. But polls show both a growing acceptance of the practice and a widening divide along party lines. “It’s becoming a lot like the death penalty,” Rejali said.

The 1975 Church Committee report, which was conducted following revelations of, among other things, covert operations to assassinate foreign leaders, was, until now, the best-known public airing of C.I.A. practices. According to Loch K. Johnson, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, who was a special assistant to Senator Frank Church, its findings were broadly accepted across the political spectrum. “No one challenged it,” he said. By contrast, the new report, even before it was released, came under attack from Republicans, including Dick Cheney, who, although he hadn’t read it, called it “full of crap.” Senator Mitch McConnell, the incoming majority leader, castigated it as “ideologically motivated and distorted.” John Cornyn, the second-highest-ranking Republican in the Senate, argued that C.I.A. officers should not be criticized but, rather, “thanked.”

There was a way to address the matter that might have avoided much of the partisan trivialization. In a White House meeting in early 2009, Greg Craig, President Obama’s White House Counsel, recommended the formation of an independent commission. Nearly every adviser in the room endorsed the idea, including such national-security hawks as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and the President’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Leon Panetta, the C.I.A. director at the time, also supported it. Obama, however, said that he didn’t want to seem to be taking punitive measures against his predecessor, apparently because he still hoped to reach bipartisan agreement on issues such as closing Guantánamo.

Obama has made plain in his public statements and in his executive orders that torture, which is how he forthrightly labelled the program, was unacceptable. But, in leaving matters to the Senate, he left the truth open to debate. He further complicated things by appointing John Brennan to run the C.I.A., even though Brennan, as a top officer in the agency, had worked closely with George Tenet, the director during the worst excesses of the program. Last Thursday, in a rare press conference, Brennan called the C.I.A.’s past practices “abhorrent” but declined to say that they amounted to torture, undercutting Obama. Democrats called for Brennan and other C.I.A. personnel to be “purged.” Senator Mark Udall, who sits on the Intelligence Committee, said, “If there is no moral leadership from the White House, what’s to stop the next White House and C.I.A. director from supporting torture?”

Rejali, who has studied the tension between torture and democracy around the world, says that “there’s a five- or six-year window for any kind of accountability. We’re now past that window. The two sides are entrenched.” Without a mutual acknowledgment of the mistakes made, and some form of accountability, he warned, another reversion to torture may be difficult to prevent: “Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.”
[1082 words]

Source: The New Yoker
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/torture-truth

cyndichiang

Speaker
The speaker met a 12 year-old boy who was tortured in political prison
Torture,a low-cost way, was legitimized  in 93 countries
She tried to find justification against torture.
She thinks that lawyers can get together to provide justice.

Obstacle 5'49''
A report was released,which revealed the cruelty of federal offical policy and raised debates.
The program aims to maintain security but may hurt the image of doing good for the world
Some thought the program has involved into a partisan issue.
Even though Obama admit this torture program,but he left the truth to be debated and his statment was unacceptable.

HaiqingYU

Thanks for sharing!
[Time 2]02:11
The reports that reveal American torture cases intrigue troubling questions: is torture an effective way to get useful information?
[Time 3]02:34
pl in torture would make up the false information;
Torture should be abandoned to restore the country's morality.
[Time 4]01:56
This case shows that America hold self-examination and admitted its mistakes;
Obama should pardon B's mistakes.
[Time 5]02:10
The torture of M in order to catch K who has already been caught: CIA lied about their behaviours.
[Time 6]01:58
CIA refutes the charges,but it doesn't comment on critics of its hard measures.
[Obstacle]06:30
The release of recent documents: CIA misrepresents and misled its torture report;
Even with testimony, it's difficult to predict a change in torture of CIA.
The torture is more regarded as a party division.

Alpha4Dream

虽然成绩还是不理想，但感觉自己文史类阅读的速度小有提高，坚持！
Time 2                         00:05:25.42
Time 3                        00:03:17.88
Time 4                         00:04:16.54
Time 5                         00:03:03.42
The rest                00:04:40.74
Time 6                        00:03:08.29
Paraphrase 7                00:14:07.86

KaterinaTse

Speaker
Speaker talked about a 12-year-old boy prisoner who was tortured in the prison.
She said in Cambodia people who was prison without lawyer had been torture,so 24 lawyers oganized assistance.
She also told us that a baby born in prison was the only one free in and out of the prison, and when the baby grew up he always took new victions to thousands of prisoners for sharing.

Time 2
2'47'79 Obama's decision has raised protests from politician but has also raised many questions demanding answers.People don't think it will protect Aamericans Against future threats.

Time 3  
2'58'48 Torture simply doesn't work.History offers the examples of the negative strategic effects.Many doubts appeared when tortured was pointed out that the messages were not helpful.Obama's bold declartion was hoped that it could help to restore the moral authority of US which was suffered under the presidency of Bush.

Time 4
2'25'03 The author thought we should admit our mistakes about admission of torture.And the author agree with AD.R that Obama should symboically show the world that we recongnize the torture is illegal as well as reprehensible.

Time 5
2'25'51 CIA lied to the inspector.And the Senate relied on the fake CIA'S owen records about the captive of Khan and overstate the value of the information they produced.The toughest critics condemned CIA's behavior about lies.

Time 6
3'04'75 The CIA justified for thier behavior and said that actually their degree of torture was not so brutal. But the Senate report has exposed that their torture was far more brutal than the allowance.CIA officials said that the analyst's assertion about Khan's arrest was a one-time mistake.

The Rest
2'13'15 The first detainee to be waterboarded believed that U.S. was weak and lacked resilience.But CIA export wrote that they had no records about that he declared such things.The CIA director Michael Hayden made their facual misstatemtns so that the Senate study devotes a 37-page appendix to fact-checking his tesitmony.

Paraphrase 7
7'20'54 The report demonstrates that C.I.A was vital for national security and did not involve tortue.But Obama left matters to the Senate,he left the truth open to debate.Senator Mark Udall insisted that torture should be stoped by moral leadership from the White House.

Hendy

拜读，有点不顺利读的

zisemujin

掌管 7        00:07:43.89        00:22:35.02
掌管 6        00:01:35.32        00:14:51.13
掌管 5        00:02:48.63        00:13:15.80
掌管 4        00:02:22.02        00:10:27.17
掌管 3        00:01:55.13        00:08:05.14
掌管 2        00:03:18.41        00:06:10.01
掌管 1        00:02:51.60        00:02:51.60
。。。。政治新闻给跪了，我前半小时还在津津有味地刷知乎，欣赏各种torture漫画。。。结果被这篇虐了

猫小雯雯

T1:2.32
the torture was ...by US and US fly prison to Thailand ,Poland and other countries as "black site"
Bush was an example to identify the action will be effective
T2:2.55s
T does not work actually,and they will get relevent information or mis information
the prisoners will say anything to avoid the brutality
Obama has relieved sth which was horrible in the time of Bush
T3:2.23
the ambassador talked about the attack
we can read senate report to find the transpatrent things
Obama should ask Bush for criminals against humanity
T4:6
reversinon to tortures will happen
other passages explained the agency misled
a passage was attacted by the repulications
this passage i do not understand much...oh no