Torture isn't just morally sick -- it's also ineffective and counterproductive
By David Neiwert Monday Dec 01, 2008 10:02am
Download | play 
Download | play (Warning-Disturbing images. NSFW)
Video courtesy Amnesty International.
A man using the pseudonym Matthew Alexander has written a truly remarkable op-ed for the Washington Post discussing effective interrogation of enemy combatants -- which most decidedly does not include torture:
I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.
Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.
Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.
Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.
If the moral argument cannot persuade the defenders of torture, then perhaps the practical one will. "Alexander" has written a book on the subject that I'm ordering today.
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Oh...I dunno...I always really liked the Berlin song, "Torture."
I get so angry when my friends give me that "the ends justify the means" bullshit.
they're not my friends any more.
You'd be amazed how many decent, hard working people still believe what they see and hear on television and the radio.
The problem is the Media filters everything we read or hear, including those of us on this site. The trick is to find one reasonably balanced like the BBC, and expand our perameters.
But I suspect your talking about Jack Bauer et al. That's why I've never bothered with 24, and loathed the new Batman movie, The Darknight. He was going as far as kidnapping a Chinese (?) citizen from his own country, because he was wanted in Gotham City.
Don't forget that in The Dark Knight, torturing the Joker was spectacularly ineffective; he lied.
The entire theater went dark after the Joker's escape from jail; that's twenty or so screens all at once. We were given rain checks to return to see any movie we wished, and I haven't done so yet. The Dark Knight has been at the dollar theatre for two weeks now, and I still haven't bothered. I so disliked the movie up to that point.
And Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon still reminds me of:
http://hotbeans.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/m...
And here's one for you ladies and certain...(ahem)...career bachelors:
http://www.simpsoncrazy.com/gallery/images/Ne...
They're hardly decent.
My brother, against all of his upbringing, believes shite like this. People who can justify this in any way, may be hard working, but they're not decent in the least. The patch of this kind of reasoning stains their whole character; this is basic human rights and an overt violation of "do unto others..."
The Bush administration was impotent in the face of 9/11, Katrina and now this economic tsunami. They ignored the warnings of Richard Clark and the CIA, they ignored the scientists predicting the hurrican, and they ignored the economic warnings. Instead they react to every crisis with a baseball bat (or a water board) They are thugs and morons and have nothing to offer this country. That is why they lost in Nov. Let's hope we return to competence in government and honor in our military.
The brainless Bush bastards should be sent to the Hague!!!
to argue that ends do NOT justify means is laughable.
That is the 'ethical' structure of the entire enterprise of "bidness."
It is not accidental that, as I've noted before, many econ profs and poli-sci profs teach from "the Godfather" for apt metaphors for bidness situations.
"Nuttin poisonal, Mahty. Just bidness..." BLAM BLAM "Nuttin poisonal..."
It is one of the profound--if not particularly puzzling--blindnesses of this consumerist culture which cannot recognize that contradiction between the proclaimed ethic of honesty, and fair-play, and the practical realities of cut-throat, murderous, predatory competitiveness in the essential structures of the economy.
dumbya and his disgusting war criminal buddies need to be brought to trial. Letting him go without so much as a slap on the wrist after all the horror, death and destruction he's unleashed across the planet is wrong.
Some examples of speaking out:
http://freewayblogger.blogspot.com/2006/09/to...
And I thought we learned this back in WWII. But then I guess the chickenhawks could never have learned anything from prior wars because they never experience them first hand.
This is the same approach we took with Nazi POWs brought to the US during WWII. Some of the "interrogators" from those days are still living and were honored about a year ago in Washington. One of them, however - an old gentleman now in his 90s - refused to accept any honor bestowed by George W. Bush.
Good cop, good cop works everytime.
Here in Dallas even Dominatrixes are turning in their whips for electrodes.
I have never heard a single professional interrogator say that torture works, so why would the administration use a system that has been proven not to work? Did they enjoy the idea of doing something so awful? Did they do it because they knew they could force people to tell them things that weren't true but that fit into the administration's plans?
Yes.
It worked so well in the Inquisition.
Has anyone heard a religious conservative raise their voice in oppostion to torture? Those hypocrites are the "base" that Palin supposedly energized. Maybe she'd rather hunt suspects from a helicopter.
she sees 'perps,' and when she guns down a running wolf, she's killing 'vermin.'
I hope her legs rot off.
if what you want is 'confessions.'
That's how it was initially used by the medieval Xian Church: extracting confessions of sacrilege, witchcraft, blasphemy, all manner of heterodoxies.
You'll confess to anything to keep some hooded freak from inserting a cherry-hot poker up your rectum...
Torture Works AMAZINGLY Well New
Mon, 12/01/2008 - 11:04 — woody
if what you want is 'confessions.'
That's how it was initially used by the medieval Xian Church: extracting confessions of sacrilege, witchcraft, blasphemy, all manner of heterodoxies.
Sounds like some fun parties I've gone to.
Is homosexuality a heterodoxy?
is doxies and such.
A dox on you!!!
Or better yet me...
I do not know whether the medieval church vigorously pursued 'sodomites' and 'catamites.' I think they tended to extinguish 'em where they found 'em, unless there were other interests at "stake."
But they had 'bad' names for 'em, so you'd hafta guess it was regarded as at least a bit 'unorthodox.'
That was back before Kissinger killed irony.
Americans watched as Bush/Cheney Mafia tortured/rape/killed innocent people. We allow this people to be transported all over the World to be tortured and brought them back to Gitmo as we did nothing. We will learn of the horror as the United Nations brings the 7 years of US terror to the front pages of newspapers around the World. We had no problem bombing Iraq as innocent people slept not knowing the real enemy was the United States. Millions of Iraq people were kill/injured/displaced which has out done anything Saddam had done while he was the Iraq Dictator. We showed the World what American Demoracy really means with our action at Abu Ghraib Prison. Yes we saw some horror pictures but not anything like to others which are worse. Right now 7 men will be freed after 7 years of torture/rape while held in Gitmo. These men were innocent and the US knew it for 7 years. All 7 men were professionals who were set up by a person who didn't like them. We found out be couldn't let them go. Now all 7 men are declared insane by the torture done to them at Gitmo.
The Emeny will use the Bush Policy on Americans in the future and then and only then will Americans realize the Evil of the Bush Mafia. Don't look for the United Nations to say anything as the USA lead the way to allowing torture/rape/murder under the Bush Administration from 2000 to 2008.
Oh, torture works. It just depends what your objectives are.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUdMBciScd0
Only
TRAITORS
Torture
Treason is listed as a reason for removal for a reason.
Let this slide and reap the blowback.
Why this red bitch clinging to one thing singularity of topic but ONE method of many highly effective torture routines, including murder touted as THE question. OF COURSE IT'S WITHOUT A DOUBT TORTURE. We KNOW it's torture, we always HAVE KNOWN waterboarding is torture. Why is this hammering still going on? Where are the myriad other methods of torture mentioned like electroshock humiliation rape murder deprivation of food and sleep filth breaking of bones and hanging dungeon-style like in the days of Theodoric of Yorik?
Is this singularity of torture topic somehow meant to have us believe there is a question? Is it's lack of resolution somehow meant to distract us from the Scores of other creative methods of torture in use? Hey, waterboarding's not so bad! What's everybody bitching about? Just more manipulative dialogue to distract from the hideous Other things going on...then they can keep doing them because nobody's really sure waterboarding actually hurts. Kee-rist!
Does anyone else have a problem with NSFW? Like is the job the ultimate decider of what you can see? It is ok for granny and the kids but better not let the master man see you looking at this. Can't there be a better warning like "CAUTION graphic images".
NSFW makes me feel like a slave, screw that.
On topic I suggest the movie Rendition. I just watched it and I think that it was a strong statement about the crap we are doing to people and how the idea and the execution of torture is flawed to the core. I think it is being done because the people torturing likes it, plain and simple.
BTW, rendition is NSFW
This Washington Post article should be sent to BillO the Clown O'Reilly. BillO calls waterboarding "coerced interrogation," or something like that....not "torture."
I think BillO should be waterboarded and made to say that he is a Republican, not an independent or a "traditionalist," as he likes to say.
King George is a "wahr prezident." He knows what's best for our country, because God speaks to him.
Everyone knows that torture doesn't work yet that fact has been absent from most debates on the topic. There just seem to be a bunch of sick f*cks who get their rocks off over it.
The men sitting at the top of the chain of command were all chickenhawks who believe you project power through fear. They couldn't have cared less that the information gathered was false. They cared that the word got out that when captured, expect to be tortured. The end goal was clear. FEAR US. Fear what we can do to you.
They did the same thing here after 9/11. Create fear of the terrorist threat. Fear of high energy prices. Fear of hurricanes. Fear of gays. Fear of travel.
Keep everyone scared while they loot the treasury.
How much easier would it have been to stop the looting. Restore power and water. Protect schools and hospitals. Supply food and medicine. But who fears that? How do you spend billions on military equipment doing that? Each failure was calculated to inflict the exact response they got. Don't think for a second it wasn't.
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