News Reporter: Fact Checker: Is it training, or is it torture?

Friday, 23 March 2018

Fact Checker: Is it training, or is it torture?

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

Is it training, or is it torture?

Torture is back in the news because President Trump's nominee to lead the CIA is Gina Haspel, a veteran intelligence official who once ran a black site prison in Thailand and was involved in the decision to destroy videotapes showing the waterboarding of al-Qaeda members during the George W. Bush administration.

Talking about the "enhanced interrogation techniques" of the Bush years — and whether they achieved results — is a lot like talking about religion. Either you believe it or you don't, and there is little bridging the chasm.

Rep. Liz Cheney is a believer. She says these techniques did work, and she argues they are not unlike what you would see in Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, a program that helps train U.S. military personnel in survival techniques in case they are captured by an enemy. But these two programs do not have the same purpose: one aimed to extract information from detainees, the other to build endurance for U.S. military personnel in worst-case scenarios.

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Houston, we have a problem with this claim from Trump

Trump has racked up his fair share of Pinocchios for all kinds of statements involving Planet Earth. But one of his recent claims was out of this world. Trump said that Americans would not be going to Mars, and that people wouldn't even be thinking about it, had Hillary Clinton won the presidency.

Well, Clinton has been talking about getting humans to Mars since at least 1999. In the 2016 race, she specifically supported plans to get humans on the Red Planet one day. She visited a factory making parts for the NASA rocket being built for the interplanetary trip. And it's not like Trump started NASA's efforts to go to Mars. The space agency has been planning a "Journey to Mars" for years, with continuity throughout different administrations. Clinton in all likelihood would have continued those efforts, just as Trump has. Like an asteroid hit by a comet, Trump's claim quickly disintegrated under scrutiny, and we gave him Four Pinocchios.

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