Vice President Dick Cheney and Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts would like to give CIA operatives an exemption from a law that would prohibit cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment of prisoners.
But a Knight Ridder article last week showed that, moral objections aside, many CIA field agents and interrogation experts oppose torture for a practical reason — it doesn’t work. Tortured and mistreated prisoners simply give false information, and they become even more committed enemies. More useful information is usually gained by giving prisoners positive rewards.
That view is backed by another former CIA operative, Larry Johnson, who wrote last week in the Los Angeles Times that:
“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. And that’s the point. We should never use our fear of being attacked as justification for dehumanizing ourselves or others.”
Posted by Randy Scholfield
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23 Comments
Forward-thinking nations have known the truth sbout torture all along; The Cheneys and the Roberts wouldn’t know the truth of it bit them.
All they have to do is ask McCain. Opps, he might tell them something they wouldn’t to hear.
Why is it necessary to have this discussion anyway.
We don’t torture.
I heard our president say it, so it must be true.
Without human rights there will never be national security.I believe human rights is what motivated our own home grown terrorists to do the terrible deed at Oklahoma City.
We don’t torture people. But we also don’t want the enemy to know that either.
Now since this is publically known and Congress made a big stink about it, the captured terrorist will know that we are bounded by law not to do anything, so they won’t talk and give up any information now.
Way to go people!
That is the reason why Chaney and Roberts were against it. They don’t want terrorist to know anything as to psycologically try to extract information from them.
Oh no! Now I just might have spilled another can of worms. Next we will want all terrorist to have expert team lawyers to defend them costing taxpayers millions. *sigh*
It would be better to find the terrorist’s close family members and torture them.
They would be willing to sacrifice themselves and probably their female family members but their first born son getting castrated in front of them would make them talk.
Then, if they still didn’t talk, castrate them and turn them loose.
No information at all is far better than acting on obvious disinformation.
It’s true, treating people with respect will get you much farther than humiliating and intimidating them.If information and cooperation is what we want, go with what works. If we just want to act out our anger and hatred and make our enemies hate us even more, then by all means condone the use of torture.
CF
Sources say the Iraqi prime minister and US forces had been told about ‘torture cells’ months ago.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1116/dailyUpdate.html
As great as assumedly grown men (women?) engaging in a school-yard fight blog style is, I am still interested in this torture question.Is race a valid issue? Would we have tortured Germans in WWII for information? If esod’s defense is that they are “subhuman,” does that give us the right to act bestially as well? We can’t torture our pets, can we?So, the other question is- Is torture useful? Joe and Esod think torture is useful as a deterrent. You have to be able to threaten it. But that is like threatening war. Eventually, you are forced to do it if your threat is going to be credible.
Jed, Jesus said to love your enemies, not me. I don’t love mine, I’m WAY too human for that!
Did any of you read Leonard Pitts’ editoral on torture the other day? It was right on!!!
We had a general once upon a time who had a Muslim problem. Blackjack something. His solution was to capture a bunch of them, make them dig a large hole and crawl in it, douse them with hog blood, dip bullets in it and kill all but one of them. The survivor was released and discussed the situation with the rest of the “insurgents”. Torture? Wasn’t necessary.
Man’s inhumanity to man, will it ever end?
Dear Allie,
This whole torture business is just a liberal scam to hammer Bush. There is no evidence that suggests we are using torture against terorists or anyone else. There is no evidence that there is a secret administration policy that allows torture in extreme cases.
Radical Islamic terrorists are not protected by any set of known laws. They do not respect any country’s laws or any international laws. They are not armed combatants of any country. Liberals would give them constitutional rights and treat them like criminals. If we had treated the first World Trade Center bombers as terrorists which were part of a world wide terrorist network under the leadership of OBL, the second attack on the World Trade Center probably wouldn’t have happened.
Race has nothing to do with it. Culture does. German prisoners of war in this country were treated good. They were treated with respect and dignity. Many of them lived with and worked with farm families and came back to a 50 year ‘family reunion’ in 1995.
Americans in Japanese POW camps were treated very bad. It was a cultural thing. The Japanese didn’t think it honorable to surrender. I personnaly don’t think that torture in the way people that have been watching movies and such think of torture is useful for anything. We do, however, have to have the will to do what ever it takes to win the war on terror. That means pursuing and killing terrorists where ever we find them.
When VP Cheney lobbies to prevent Congress from outlawing the use of torture by the CIA he does it so that we wont end up fighting stupid legal battles over unfounded charges. We don’t torture. We have no policy that allows torture. We have all of the laws we need to handle cases of suspected torture on the books already. Any politician that brings up this phoney torture issue does it for short term politcal gain only.
Dear Damoon,
Yes,I read Leonard Pitts’column. He is an idiot. His little editorial was based on insipid inuendo, half truths, and out and out lies.
So how far do we go with torture? Of course there’s the ticking bomb scenario that the administration loves to use. De we torture to, say, save an American city where we know there’s a bomb? Unquestionably! No jury in the land would convict. But how often has that happened? Do we torture to gain info of an impending attack? Well, if we know it’s impending, why do we need to resort to torture?
It’s easy to condone torture when it’s used against brown foriegners of a different religion. We could even get used to that. But what other henious crimes might we use torture for? How about people we suspect of terrorist activity here in the states? And maybe we could torture a few child molesters. Nobody likes child molesters. And then maybe we could torture murder suspects. When is enough enough?
esod,
The intellectual bankruptcy of your arguments is only matched by your willingness to defend the indefensible.
So, the internment of the Japanese was a matter of ‘culture’ and not one of ‘race’? Because the Germans were so well-behaved and civilized (’Kultur,’ as you may or may not know, was an elitist concept of Germanic origin deployed to vindicate the superiority of aristocratic virtue), unlike those fanatical Japanese? Seriously, esod, how stupid are you? It’s interesting how the racist, dehumanzing image of the ‘Hun’ from W.W.I. drops almost completely out during W.W.II. to be replaced by the language of the ‘yellow peril’. But no sir, no racism there–it’s all an issue of ‘culture.’
The Right deserves credit for its willingness to make indefensible arguments, in the face of the available evidence, for its ideological commitments. Just think how far Wingnuts could get if they were actually right about something, too!
Which brings me to torture. Of torture, esod wrote, “There is no evidence that suggests we are using torture against terorists or anyone else. There is no evidence that there is a secret administration policy that allows torture in extreme cases.”
Well, esod, it’s hard to know where to start or what to say. So let’s start with the pictures from Abu Gharib. No one was tortured, eh?
Then there’s the memo written by John Yoo and others, which raised the threshold for what counts as torture to ‘the pain equivalent to major organ failure and death.’
I now expect that you’ll play the parsing game and define torture out of existence. Be my guest. But your simultaneous affirmation of the legitimacy of torture and denial that the U.S. has practiced it reminds me, more than a little bit, of a Nazi denying he’s anti-semitic but affirming that it would be a great thing for someone to just get rid of all those Jews. Can’t have it both ways, esod.
For you to deny that the U.S. has used torture or that the Administration has approved it is just, flat, wrong. Factually wrong. Period. All your arguments are just variations on ‘who are you gonna believe–me or your lyin’ eyes?’
Well esod, it’s getting old hat, but if you don’t want to be called a liar, or at least disingenuous, then stop lying and being disingenuous.
Esod–
You’re exactly right. Torture is an art form perfected over the centuries.
The Romans couldn’t imagine anything worse than cruxificion, and with good reason. First there was the scourging with the lead tipped cat o’ nine tails. Next came the large iron nails through wrists and feet. Third was the victim’s growing realization that he couldn’t breath when he took his weight off his legs. However when he put his weight on his legs, he got the worst kind of shooting pain.
So this long cycle of asphyxiation followed by intense pain followed by asphyxiation under the hot sun until finally a slow, miserable death.
You notice how well that stopped Christianity . . .
BTW, when have the Bush administration ever listened to the pros?
Condi Rice was scheduled to give a major speech on national security the day after 9-11. Her planned speech was full of justification for why we needed the “star wars” defense system. It didn’t have a single reference to Al Qaeda or Mideast terrorism.
Tenet and the Clark and Sandy Berger (i.e., THE PROS) were going nuts about terrorist chatter, and BushCo could care less.
It was “Operation Ignore.”
Did anyone find out what type of ‘torture’ was being done in WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War? Nah. Didn’t think so. It’s easier to bash.
Already bashing the next President of the U.S., Galahad? I suppose Condi isn’t black or a woman? I’m looking forward to the Rice/Clinton race.
Condi has on two occasions on “Meet the Presstitutes” that she will not run for President, doesn’t WANT to run for President, has no aspiration to run etc. etc.
Of course, saying one thing and doing the exact opposite is a long Republican tradition, so who really knows.
I agree wholeheartedly with esod. Let’s torture and exterminate all those muslims. And when we’re done, we can concentrate on those idol-worshipping hindus, moving on to the buddhists, wiccans, jews, those papists, and so on.
Oh wait! what happen when we’re running out of those “sub-humans” to burn? Will esod be willing to be the next sacrifice to the ever burning altar of Moloch?
So you see, esod, you ARE one sick mind. You shamelessly are promoting genocide on even larger scale than even Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined can imagine. Speaking of race, Timothy McVeigh was white and former member of the US armed forces, and he blew up the pre-school. Are you for castrating everyone who share the same characteristics?
esod-You say there are no indications we torture. Yet, Gonzales et al. seem certainly to be trying to make it acceptable by limiting its definition. Do you have an in at the CIA and in Iraq, Gitmo, etc. that proves we don’t torture? Do you think there is going to be a transparent paper trail? It is far better to do it orally and then pin Abu Ghraib on a couple of low level officers. Then we have to jump on the CIA secret facilities leak because it endangers national security; endangers republican hegemony is more like it. Finally, the WH and CIA are hardly known for transparency. You trust them, but that isn’t good enough for the rest of us.I understand the administrative difficulties of torture laws. Clearly, anyone could claim that they were tortured and definitive proof is hard to come by. By that logic, we should not have rape laws either. But, we are not going to “win the hearts and minds” of people by holding indefinitely or torturing their brothers in prisons without proven cause and accountable to no one except GWB and the hawks. Anyway, “They’re worse” is not a defense against basic human rights.Your claim about the first bombing is simply fictive. Would we have caught OBL or simply further fanned the flames of radicalism, who knows? Could we have stopped 9/11 if Bush I had beaten Clinton? Who the hell knows, but I doubt it.Your culture claim doesn’t hold water because your examples are still cross racial. We didn’t torture white guys, Asians did torture white guys. We wouldn’t have dropped the bomb on Germany, but we would on Japan. Face it, there is a racial (and not just cultural) difference that we Americans use in deciding how to fight one enemy as opposed to another.You can paint anything as “short term political gain” –they are politicians. That doesn’t make it wrong for it to be examined.