Larry Johnson has a piece in the LAT:
"If you inflict enough pain on someone, they will give you information, but what they tell you may not be true. You will have to corroborate it, which will take time. And, unless you kill every suspect you brutalize, you will make enemies of them, their families, maybe their entire villages. What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust — even with a terrorist, even if it's time-consuming — than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets, who believed that national security always trumped human rights."I hope we have a better argument than this - can you spot the flaw in the argument?
"the Nazis and the Soviets believed that national security always trumped human rights" - and therefore it was ok for them to torture...
if torture 'doesn't work', and it creates blowback, then we need to stop it for those reasons. if torture 'does work', then we need to throw the 'torture doesn't work' thing in the trash, and only argue on 'human' grounds, and we need to find another way to argue that we aren't terrorist lovers who don't care about national security.
perhaps we can argue that torture 'works' to the extent that it 'extracts quick confessions' - but those confessions are usually just self-incriminating lies to make the torture stop (if that is indeed the case). a while back, digby wrote a post or two about the fact that nazi/soviet torture methods were in fact designed to extract false confessions, and that 'we' have adopted the same techniques - perhaps we can take that line (again, if it is true).
the reality is that many countries torture, and many have tortured in the past - presumably because (they believe) it 'works' at some level, (or because the perpetrators are psychopaths).
we need to get the story straight, because we are going to officially be 'at war' for decades if the neocons have any say in the matter, and while we are at war, national security trumps paper, rock and scissors - ergo, the neocons will always argue that they should be be torturing more people.
(btw - the latest Darby pix release was a two day story, which makes me feel like i've been tortured)
3 comments:
What about the argument of your own soldiers being tortured if captured? McCain had all the gravitas in the world to make that case and still Bush had the nerve to attach a signing statement.
Instead of resorting to Nazi tactics, why don't we try getting a QUALIFIED President. Why are we bending the rules of human dignity so a lowlife like Bush can play the role of war leader? It's so sick...ie...Bush won't read intelligence reports but torture is fine with him.
I think the politicians who support the Bush administration and won't do oversight on torture should be willing to watch videotaped torture sessions. There is way too much detachment from reality in D.C. to state the obvious.
"What about the argument of your own soldiers being tortured if captured?"
thats a good argument, but then the wingnuts scream THEY BEHEADED A PERSON
mccain is a hack
actually, some congresscritters watched some of the darby videos and they could barely speak - so i think you are correct - they should ALL be strapped down and forced to watch it
gday olschool - good to hear you venting :-)
yeah - i like johnson normally - but this piece was quite disconcerting
i'd like to see some Sense In Congress too. Or perhaps they should all have to pass a Sense Test
that zogby thing is incredible
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