"I don't suppose even the 'Gee, I'm not sure waterboarding is really torture' crowd will be able to claim that whipping someone with an electrical cable isn't torture," writes Mark Kleiman. The preferred tactic in these cases, of course, is to completely ignore the issue. The issue, in this case, being that the defense department won't let mid-level officers testify in a closed session of a congressional panel about the training of Iraqi soldiers, seemingly because they don't want anyone to ehar about this business.
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Training to Torture
22 Apr 2007 04:24 pm
Comments (13)
I puzzled by the notion that Iraqis need Americans to teach them how to torture.
I think they fear that someone will point out how absurd it is to believe that the Iraqi military will someday be as good as the U.S. military.
U.S. military annual budget - around $600 billion a year.
Iraqi military budget - around $5 billion a year.
Yet the Iraqis will be able to accomplish something the Americans can't?
It should be noted that at every point in the Iraqi chain of command they report to and our subordiante to the American military. The idea that after a multi-year process of training and building, that the Iraqi military would being to spontaneously, systematically use torture, without any complicity or enabaling by the United States military is laughable. That's the reason they don't want the officers testifing. Because it is common knowledge how the Iraqi military works in Iraq, and it does this with some combination of look-the-other way, and do it, but pretend were not telling you to do it, from the US military.
I don't know what happened to my last bit, which showed up in preview, but my first comment should've had:
</conservative jerk-off>
If you have to stop to contemplate whether or not it's torture, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
It appears that the NYT story you link to challenges your assertion that "torture" never works. Care to comment?
That depends on what you mean by "works". If you mean "did we get some bad guys and get some intel", then yes, it sometimes works. If you mean "did we get some bad guys and get some intel without making 20 or 30 more people from these guys families and neighborhoods sign up to lob bombs at us", then no, it doesn't work.
Did I miss it, or does Kleiman have any actual evidence for the claim that the NYT article, or its substance, was the reason the Pentagon canceled, seemingly at the very last moment, the appearance of those mid-level officers before the congressional committee?
more complete crap from the tub O'lard.
Once again yglesias takes two seperate events and simply asserts there is a relationship between them without offering either argument or evidence. It's bullshit of the lowest order
Yglesias also doesnt note the iraqi captain in the NY times article who criticises the US forces for being soft with detaineea. A criticism which seems to undermine his oft repeated suggestion of widespread abuse of prisioners by US forces and his intimation that US forces are somehow involved in the iraqi's prisoner abuse.
puzzled by the notion that Iraqis need Americans to teach them how to torture.
Of course they don't. They need Americans to teach them how to interrogate prisoners properly -- the way our interrogators found the way to Zarqawi, as recounted by Mark Bowden at Matt's new home.
But we're not teaching them that ... my most plausible guess is that it's because we are just marking time & looking to get the hell out. "Democracy-building" would presumably include Interrogation 101.
Of course, when the leaders of our own democracy are actually big fans of torture, that doesn't help either.
(JustinB, I didn't see the connection either -- it appears to be Kleiman's inference, which may falter upon the mistaken belief that Congress and the Pentagon spend as much time worrying about torture as Kleiman, Yglesias, & I do.)
Comments closed May 06, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Have you ever been to one of those adult superstores? Such people actually choose to be whipped -- that's what freedom is all about. And yet you free love moonbats think it's torture! Make up your mind, morans!
Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra | April 22, 2007 4:37 PM