TORTURE: BLACK EYE FOR THE RED WHITE AND BLUE
May 14, 2009 posted by Gordon Duff · 4 Comments
NECESSARY EVIL OR WAR CRIME?
WHY ARE WE NOW TALKING ABOUT TORTURE?
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER
Interrogation used to be an art taught to the "best and brightest." The CIA even has an interrogation manual called KUBARK, long on the internet (google it) showing how to classify "subjects" and get them to spill their guts. Most of the methods are psychological and those with the most to tell, respond to psychological ploys much better than being beaten.
Really tough people will lie to you for years. If nobody has noticed, we are fighting really tough people. Intelligence is only "timely" for 48 hours or as soon as your enemy knows you have someone who can put them in danger. They move, they hide, they cover their tracks. This game is 4000 years old and will never end.
We changed the rules. We didn’t torture to get intelligence. We had liars working for us. The truth was never the goal. We wanted an excuse to go to war, an excuse to arrest lots of people, guilty and innocent. We wanted lies to back up our mistakes, not "secret intelligence" to find "sleeper cells" or track down "evil Osama."
Questions changed. No longer did we ask: "Where is you leader hiding?" We now asked: "Sign this confession saying all these people did these things, true or not, had these weapons or not, and we will stop what we are doing to you." "If you don’t agree to lie, we will torture you."
We stopped being America and we became North Korea.
The real issues are not about torture. We tortured German POWs, or as phonies and "spin doctors" want to call it, used "harsh interrogation techniques." We did everything we do now. We started "waterboarding" during the Philippine rebellion over a hundred years ago. We called it the "water cure."
The debate in Washington is never an honest one. Everything is driven to give newspapers the stories they need, raise money from special interest or supply fodder for talk shows. We have become a nation of liars led, too often by fools. Nobody needs to be told this. We live with it every day.
Torture, done publicly, bragged about by total idiots is insane. The Geneva Convention makes torture a crime. President Roosevelt never bragged on his "fireside chats" that we tortured German sabateurs or POWs for vital information. If he did, he would have faced war crime trials right there with Hermann Goering.
How could we execute German soldiers for the Malmedy Massacre if we openly admitted murdering their POWs? How could we prosecute Japanese for murdering our POWs or using them for experiments if we did the same? (Actually, we brought the scientists who experimented on Americans back to the US to help us with our germ warfare program. These brutal criminals lived their lives in comfort as American citizens.)
What were the reasons some of the worst lawyers in the country and the stupidest people on Earth turned out bushels of "memos" supporting war crimes as legal when everyone knows better? Giving power to the stupid, the arrogant and the spineless is how so many other countries turned to hellish prisons.
Torture may be necessary for a few situations, done secretly, done in a timely way, when America’s survival is really at stake. Legalizing torture as a normal part of the criminal justice system, as has been done now, has simply announced to the world that our respect for our own laws, our respect for international treaties and our common sense is at an end.
Dozens of countries that once respected us now look on us as akin to brutal dictatorships they despise. We tortured to get lies. We tortured as a show of force, using brutality on the helpless. We tortured to brag about it to get votes. Worst of all, we showed ourselves to be amateurs and fools, brutal and incompetent, to the real enemies we need to fear us.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.
Great article but I have a slightly different take on why we tortured. We tortured, essentially, because the people who were in charge were operating under the typical American delusion of Manifest Destiny. We tortured because God said we could…because we are Americans.
Since long before we were a Nation, since the times of the Pilgrims and the Jamestown Colony, we have had a peculiarly American view that this is the Promised Land, the Bright and Shining Light on the Hill. This twisted view of our relationship with a Deity has fueled more pain and warfare and cruelty throughout our history than is possible to relate in this short note.
We went to war with Mexico in 1848 because we wanted their land in what is now the American Southwest. We literally started out to provoke that war. And we did that. The Southern States felt every right to defend themselves against Northern aggression based on their view of their special place in the scheme of international nationhood. Slavery was acceptable to them based on the New Testament scripture verse found in Ephesians 6:59 which reads in part "…Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear.." We waged a war that killed 618,000 American soldiers on both sides and perhaps another 80,000 civilians and unaccounted for troops. We did it because we had a right to do it. At least we thought so at the time.
The Spanish American war saw us absorb 4,108 casualties on the American side. We have never been able to figure out the Spanish casualties. And on and on with all of our wars….
Most of our wars were fought for market share on the world exchange. We simply wanted the markets and/or the territory so we took it. The same mindset more or less, was apparent for our invasion of Iraq. They are an oil rich country, we wanted either access to their oil or we wanted to be in a better position to protect Middle East oil fields, so we simply concocted a reason to go to war and then we executed it.
We tortured people under G.W. Bush for one simple reason. We could.
We knew that no one would seriously condemn us for torture after the 9/11 incidents so we took advantage and decided to become North Korea. Now here is the price we have paid; we are now without a doubt seen as a third rate dictatorship with a first army and navy who is truly the bully on the block. People just wait bullies out, they do not engage with them. Because we have no vocal critics of any stature around the world relative to our torture history does not mean that people agree with us, it means they are waiting for us to weaken economically and socially before they pull their money out of our markets and turn to China and India as economic powerhouses. That will probably happen within the next thirty years.
This is the ultimate price of torture. Your friends simply pick up and leave.
Good Morning Duff,
I happen to agree with both you and Barnes on this. If torture worked bin Laden would be history, al Qaeda would no longer exist and the U.S. would be in a another quagmire in Afghanistan.
Looking into history and currently at countries who use torture an an institutional method of interrogation are not the most successfully or economically and that include Israel.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
Yet another article by the far-left contingent here on VT that automatically labels as "torture" the non-lethal, non-injurious interrogation methods that the CIA used on a few terrorists. Some responses for those who want facts and reason instead of propaganda and polemic:
Fact vs. Myth: The CIA Waterboarding Interrogations ( April 27, 2009 )
The Memos Prove We Did NOT Torture ( April 27, 2009 )
Didn’t Need to Waterboard? Obama Should Know Better ( April 30, 2009 )
"Almost All" Guantanamo Detainees "Innocent"? Not Hardly ( April 25, 2009 )
European Court of Human Rights Vindicated Harsh Interrogation Method that Rumsfeld *Rejected* ( April 24, 2009 )
No matter how many times you point out that the CIA’s interrogation methods caused no physical damage, and of course were not lethal, some folks on the left are never going to stop calling those methods "torture." It seems to be a matter of emotional, religious faith on the left that waterboarding, walling, and sleep deprivation are "torture." Nothing anyone says to them is going to get them to stop peddling this myth.
perfect