Well, it looks like a day of protesting has actually had a positive effect.
Earlier today, GoDaddy.com, the most popular domain name registrar (and the registrar of many sites you may have heard of, such as dailykos.com) had the following words on its front page:
Close Gitmo? No way!! Think our interrogation methods are tough? Prisoners in the Middle East talk quick. Here's why.
It linked to this blog entry by the founder and president of GoDaddy, which has such choice quotes as, "Key prisoners at Gitmo still have not talked -- because our interrogation methods are so weak."
A whole ton of people protested, and various threads online (
Daily Kos,
MetaFilter) were filled with people vowing to leave GoDaddy and transfer their services elsewhere. Now, at the end of the day, we see that his blog entry has changed to become
this entry - similar format, but fairly different words throughout. Note that he actually replaced the old entry with this entry, even though the old entry is still accessible via the above url.
At the end of his more recent entry, he has these words:
Since this blog article was posted I have been accused repeatedly of supporting the use of torture to get information from prisoners. This is simply not true. I do not, under any circumstance, support the use of torture. I do not consider the use of interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation or the playing of rap music to be torture. That said, I now believe that even these mild methods are not necessary.
I have heard from a number of individuals who claimed to be professional interrogators. These readers have pointed out that the use of annoying or unpleasent techniques during interrogation simply do not work very well. After looking at the references they provided, and giving the matter some thought, I tend to agree and think that the there's a good argument for changing the way in which prisoners at Gitmo are interrogated. Thus things like sleep deprivation, playing loud rap music and other techniques that involve making the detainee physically uncomfortable would be completely done away with and replaced with psychological techniques that are more humane and as such yield better results. I have since modified the article that was originally posted here to reflect what I just learned.
I don't think his first paragraph really squares with his original contention that Gitmo's interrogation methods were not strong enough... but we do have a great example of someone publicly backing down in reaction to a strong public outcry. Way to go!
Also, major kudos to Bradford in Jax, whose first every diary on this subject got the ball rolling.