I’m a long time lurker, but I feel that I need to comment here.

I don’t agree with the stance that it’s beyond the pale to threaten in an interrogation. It seems from most of the comments that many believe that an interrogation is all flat out coercion and imprecations. Psy ops are about getting inside the mind of the person being questioned, and that involves contradictory behavior. It’s using ups and downs to disorient and confuse the person into slipping up and revealing what he doesn’t want to give.

I would wait to see what the context of the threats are, and how they were used if they truly were. This type of leak reeks of shock value for the news cycle, and that makes me mistrust it.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. —George Orwell”

Our enemies know our ways, our morals, our legal basis and make no mistake, they use that information against us. The irony of this debate is that they consider even questioning the value of violence against an enemy to be a sign of weakness, while we consider the debate of great value and substance.

Faced with such a disconnect between value systems, how can we, in good conscience, attack those few of us who’ve had to bear the burden of being the “bad ones” while in the pursuit of the intelligence to protect the rest of us? They deserve a respectful oversight and investigation, not a drawing and quartering by the media and the beltway to serve their political agenda.