Evan Wallach writes in The Washington Post about the American government's history of prosecuting waterboarding as a war crime: "After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding." Meanwhile, during World War II our interrogators weren't torturing people. And yet we managed to win the war somehow, possibly because torture is not, in fact, a vital tool of effective statecraft nearly so much as it is an intimidation tactic beloved by sadists and authoritarians.
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Waterboarding Then And Now
04 Nov 2007 10:43 am
Comments (32)
"Meanwhile, during World War II our interrogators weren't torturing people. And yet we managed to win the war somehow, possibly because torture is not, in fact, a vital tool of effective statecraft nearly so much as it is an intimidation tactic beloved by sadists and authoritarians."
This sentence is so great, I'm going to respond to it twice.
Response #1:
Ah, World War II, the good war. Is that the one where we fire-bombed eighty thousand Germans in Dresden after Nazi Germany had essentially been defeated? The one where thousands of German POWs under our control somehow died of exposure and starvation after the war? The same war where we melted the flesh off of a couple-three hundred thousand Japanese with nukes after Japan had long since ceased to be a threat to us? At least we didn't waterboard them! Firebombing and nukes are far more "vital tool[s] of effective statecraft".
Response #2:
There was little need for enhanced interrogation of prisoners in WWII because we were eavesdropping on our enemies' communications. That is universally acknowledged to be a "vital tool". Too bad the same folks who oppose enhanced interrogation today tend to oppose eavesdropping on our current enemies' communications.
beat that strawman, Fred! beat it good!
The one where thousands of German POWs under our control somehow died of exposure and starvation after the war?.
You really want to check the provenance on that claim. I don't think it's true, the figure of "thousands" I've never seen before, normally this narrative has a more ghastly figure but I don't think "thousands" is any more accurate. I've only heard this story from holocaust denial people and the best I remember it's nearly completely made up.
And yet we managed to win the war somehow
Who ever said that waterboarding is essential for us to "win the war"? Obviously, whether or not we waterboarded those three people would not determine whether we win the war. The point is that it potentially saved the deaths of many innocent Americans (given the we apparently obtained important information from waterboarding KSM).
But apparently Matthew doesn't care about saving innocent American lives. (Hey, if vetoing SCHIP means Bush doesn't care about children, I would say that refusing to waterboard means that Matthew doesn't care about saving innocent American lives.)
The point is that it potentially saved the deaths of many innocent Americans...
I have to agree with you there, but unlike you, I would rather save the lives of innocent Americans.
Many on the right who defend torture are just living in fantasy land - A videogame reality - They have no idea what their talking about - Little Rich Lowry was on the NewsHour defending waterboarding torture came accross as ridiculous - But this is all part of this postmodern schtick of pretend 'grown-up' view.
But poseurs like Colin Powell are actually the most conspicuous users of false information obtained by torture -
We are reluctant to make a harsh comment about Powell because we always admired him - until that UN speech. No - you did not have to wait years to learn much of his UN speech (25 falsehoods) was wrong. It was clear from the beginning and Powell slipped up when he leaked and bragged about not using the propaganda supplied by Feith & Co. That implies he was familiar with the sources for information he did use - namely, Egyptian interrogators.
Powell was selling the same policy as the neocons, but allowing the world to arbitrage his good reputation against their bad repuations -
Ah, World War II, the good war. Is that the one where we fire-bombed eighty thousand Germans in Dresden after Nazi Germany had essentially been defeated?
I've seen this argument from the right a few times, and I've yet to understand it. Yes, we did some regrettable things in WWII. I don't think Matthew is under the illusion we didn't.
The point, of course, is that those actions weren't necessary to win WWII, and neither is it necessary that we waterboard folks. I don't care how often Cheney calls it a vital tool, because he's insane.
Man, the objectively pro-torture, objectively pro-straw man, objectively chickenhawk paid shills are out in force.
"yet we managed to win [WW2] somehow, possibly because torture is not, in fact, a vital tool of effective statecraft nearly so much as it is an intimidation tactic beloved by sadists and authoritarians."
And with the Bush-Cheney Administration, we get into another war (Iraq, or, (h/t Borat) "the war of terror," or both), which we're taking even longer to wage in a way that suggests we're more interesting in maintaining it than winning it, and we *do* have torture.
Boy, it's a good thing that our leaders, their supporters, and their enablers aren't a bunch of sadists and authoritarians...
America, fuck yeah, indeed.
What's important to remember, always, is that whatever the "bad guys" do is wrong, and whatever Bush Jr. & co. (the "good guys") do is right.
Things aren't right or wrong because they are right or wrong, they are only right or wrong based on who does them.
I think that there is information vital to the safety of the US that we won't obtain without torture, at least not in a timely manner.
For example, why the hell did we invade Iraq, and what objective did we have that was worth a trillion dollars?
Bush and Cheney don't seem to want to tell us - but we have ways of making them talk.
By the way, everyone please stop trying to "save" me and my loved ones' lives by ruining the country and enjoying your most brutal dreams.
You're not helping, for one, and two, I'd rather me and mine die than lose everything we once thought worth living for.
El Cid, you've stumbled (perhaps that's more pejorative than I mean it to sound) upon a central truth of the radical right-wing ideology reigning today: they *are* intent on ruining the country and enjoying their most brutal dreams.
They will *say* this is "for our own good" or that "we should support them because they're our American leaders and they mean well" but if you press them to define their ultimate/ulterior motives, they'll gladly admit they don't care about their alleged ideals (like securing America/protecting democracy/whatever), they just want to wreck shit for fun.
Just like they fell back from wanting to bring democracy to Iraq to being happy to "turn the whole Middle East into a sea of glass (or parking lot; I forget which imagery/idea is more horrifying, and thus attractive, to them)," in the words of more than one conservative wacko.
But hey, they're the good guys.
Because they keep telling us they are.
(Pete Stark had to apologize because he was right)
Torture was never designed to get the truth. Most of the techniques you here described were invented to achieve a specific result: To force people to confess crimes whether they had committed them or not. Heresy, witch craft, or being jewish were many such 'crimes'. Torture will only make people say what they think you want to hear so that you'll stop. This could be the truth, but you'll never really know if it's the truth or not. Annoying, and logically foolish, arguments about ticking time bombs be damned. Any suspect would simply send you on a wild goose chase long enough for the bomb to go off.
And yet we managed to win the war somehow, possibly because torture is not, in fact, a vital tool of effective statecraft nearly so much as it is an intimidation tactic beloved by sadists and authoritarians.
Bingo.
BTW, while Wallach's piece is appreciated, one wonder why it took so long for the Post, etc., to do some basic reporting on this issue. I mean, a bit of historical perspective on our "enhanced interrogation" techniques seems like it would be the first thing a good journalism outfit would look to provide. It should be automatic.
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
Not just waterboarding. One of the "war crimes" for which Japanese were convicted was making prisoners stand for several hours at a time. Of course, Americans would never do such a thing today.
El Cid hits it on the head.
If you're one of the "Good Guys" (read: I agree with you - or at least, I suck up to you because I'm afraid of you), then nothing you do is "wrong", whereas everything done by anyone else is.
If you're one of the "Bad Guys" (read: I'm afraid of you because you're different or, horrors, smarter than me), then nothing you do is "right", no matter how legal it is under the actual law.
Pure primate behavior.
When an alpha chimp beats down the former troop leader and assumes command, he goes around to all the babies sired by the former alpha and kills them.
Bush sending US troops to war is remarkably similar.
I believe it's also been demonstrated that when the alpha chimp gets in trouble, he foments trouble with another nearby troop to rally the troops - er, troop - behind him.
Iraq and now Iran would seem to follow that pattern, too.
They don't call Bush "Chimpie" for nothing.
MY doesn't know much about WWII history. During battle, very aggressive interrogations were conducted by Allies in the European theater to gain battlefield intelligence - out guys lives depended on learning where, say, the 7th Panzer Div was and while our conduct was generally good and in compliance with Geneva, certain Wehrmacht had the hell beaten out of them because Our Guys lives rested on knowing the enemy strength.
WWII in the European theater also saw us execute without trial German soldiers caught in civilian attire. Or who infiltrated our lines in American uniforms. We also had units that had Nazi soldiers screaming they were American Citizens who emigrated to Germany during the Depression - hoping for extra consideration from their fellow Americans. They didn't get it.
The Soviets did encounter a few Fallujah situations where surrendered German towns had "freedom fighter insurgents" and "innocent civilians" fight back. Their solution was tanks and massed 200+ artillery formations then pounded the civilians to dust, then sending in shock troops to kill off the survivors except for a few dozen that were sent to adjacent towns to alert them of the price of insurrection.
In the Pacific theater, in many battles, we reciprocated the Jap tactic of not letting prisoners live, for long. No Quarter given - based on how Japs had conducted themselves with our POWs in other battles.
And of course, we were happy with the tactic of burning down Nazi and Jap cities along with their "innocent civilians" because we knew from what it did in Nanking and Coventry, it terrorized and demoralized the other side - sometimes - other times it led to a Stalingrad. But you don't know 'till you try.
We also killed a pile of Japanese Americans fighting for Japan, and our subs torpedoed and drowned tens of thousands of troops and civilians trying to make it back to the Main Islands with no attempt by us to rescue them from shark-infested waters.
War sucks. WWII was not fought and won with Boy Scout rules. Nor will the long war with radical Islamists be won by liberal Jewish NGO lawyers and apologetic Lefties.
Nor will the long war with radical Islamists be won by liberal Jewish NGO lawyers and apologetic Lefties.
No, instead Humanity will be saved by Robert E. Lee impersonators doubling as waterboarders, because without their brutally pointless courage any minute now the giant Islamojihadic fleet will land their millions of amphibious Qur'aanic landing craft to take over our coastal cities.
So, Chris Ford, you admit something I've long suspected, that the war crimes trials carried out so self-righteously by the US and others after WWII were little more than victors' justice. You further admit that the US and allies were just as brutal as the Japanese and Germans. And since you evidently think that more brutality gives you a better chance of winning, I take it you believe the US should become more brutal than the current enemy? Good luck with that.
Chris Ford believes in "no quarter given".
I agree - for guys like him, no quarter should be given. Don't waste time on torture, put a bullet in his head and move on to something more important. In fact, it's not clear that wasting a 50-cent bullet on a clown like him is even warranted. Better to expend it on somebody who actually has some authority to order armed violence against civilians.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with the question of using torture on either SUSPECTS or POWs or otherwise committing war crimes on civilians who have nothing to do with the conflict in question.
But, no, Chris believes that all Muslims are "the enemy" and must be exterminated to the last man, woman and child. But he doesn't have the actual balls to say so, because he knows that, despite the fact that everyone here thinks he's a complete idiot already, he really would be dismissed if he called for pure Muslim genocide.
SLC has already done that, at least as far as the Palestinians are concerned, and of course nobody takes him seriously because of it.
As for US, Japanese, German and Russian behavior in WWII, well, yes, it was "all war crimes all the time". Not exactly an excuse for doing more.
The notion that, since "war is hell" and fought by morons, we should make it worse as a deliberate policy, is clearly a psychotic attitude.
So at long last, after all the garbage over the last 5 years or so about the left hating the troops and supporting "Islamofascism," after all the righteous indignation about Bush = Hitler, we see to day in Chris Ford and Fred the truth--the right thinks FDR and Churchill differed from Hitler only in being winners, and would behave exactly like bin Laden if they thought it expedient. How they can stomach themselves is a mystery.
How about we take a collection to buy a subscription to the Washington Post for the Washington Post editorial board.
Uhm Al another consequence of torture (in Egypt at the time) is that Ibn al Sheik al Libbi confessed that Iraq agents had trained al Qaeda terrorists in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Without mentioning the source or the method used to make him talk, this claim was a regular feature of Bush administration arguments for invading Iraq. It was also false -- all other prisoners contradicted al Libbi, he retracted and there was no evidence in Iraq or Afghanistan of any such activity.
If I believed that evidence had anything to do with the invasion of Iraq, I might argue that we are in that quagmire because of torture. Since, in fact, the invasion had nothing to do with the intelligence good or bad whether or not it was obtained with torture, I can't argue that.
Also remember the orange alerts. Were they totally political or did they too have something to do with bad intelligence obtained by torturing Abu Zubaida who was apparently insane to begin with ?
Finally, we know KSM talked. We don't know if anything he said was true. His very extensive confession was believed to be an attempt to claim blame for things other people did, so as confuse us.
These are, I believe, the three people known to have been water boarded. I'd say the evidence is overwhelming that the evidence so obtained has an immense value which is, however, negative.
Fred: Opposing warrantless interception of communications of people in the USA does not imply opposing interception. You will notice, I think, that the interception of German and Japanese communications during WWII would have been allowed if FISA had been passed in the 30s not the 70s.
"we see to day in Chris Ford and Fred the truth--the right thinks FDR and Churchill differed from Hitler only in being winners, and would behave exactly like bin Laden if they thought it expedient."
I never said anything like that. My point was simply that Matt's tired technique of comparing our current war conduct invidiously to our conduct in World War II is specious. It has a surface appeal because when readers think of the War on Terror they think of Chimpy McHitler, Abu Ghraib, American troops running over dogs in their Bradleys and mocking deformed women, etc.; while World War II evokes Big Band music, pressed khakis, Robert Mitchum in The Longest Day, etc. This is of course a false analogy: we see World War II largely through the prism of the patriotic media of its day, and we see the War on Terror largely through the oppositional media of today. The very debate we are having over waterboarding today demonstrates how much more brutal we were during World War II.
Not that being brutal was necessarily a bad thing in the context of WWII. It's possible that the occupations of Japan and Germany would have been more like the occupation of Iraq had we not bombed the crap out of both countries toward the end of the war; it's possible that this brutality ultimately saved a lot more lives. It certainly seems to have drained the zeal for war out of two peoples that were known for it.
"Fred: Opposing warrantless interception of communications of people in the USA does not imply opposing interception."
The issue is knowing which calls to intercept. The NSA's current technique, AFAIK, relies on data-mining of millions of calls looking for key words. If you require warrants for every call that is data-mined, you are effectively killing the program.
Fred bullshits more when he's called on his bullshit.
Now he's claiming that he never supported firebombing civilians in WWII, it's just that the US public thinks everybody was a hero in WWII.
Bullshit.
Christ, what a gutless punk. Can't even stand up for his own psychotic ravings.
Not to mention that none of that has anything to do with a) whether the US tortured anybody as a matter of policy in WWII, and b) whether that has anything to do with what the policy today should be.
"Brutality saves lives". Right. Another right wing motto...
Why don't you guys just hoist the Nazi flag, put on the SS uniforms and the daggers I know you have in your collection, and just start marching?
You're not even remotely connected to any kind of US "patriotism", let alone the sort of common sense, decency and integrity the Founders had. You're simply "American Fascists". Neo-Nazis too gutless or too sneaky to put on the uniforms.
Two slogans, one made up, one well known -- and part of the reason New Hampshire has turned an angry shade of purple:
"torture: it's not just for confessions anymore"
"Live Free Or Die"
And a question:
Doesn't a waterboard somewhat subvert the fifth amendment against self-incrimination?
Chris Ford exposes a sophomore's background in military history.
"MY doesn't know much about WWII history. During battle, very aggressive interrogations were conducted by Allies in the European theater to gain battlefield intelligence - out guys lives depended on learning where, say, the 7th Panzer Div was and while our conduct was generally good and in compliance with Geneva, certain Wehrmacht had the hell beaten out of them because Our Guys lives rested on knowing the enemy strength."
A) he seems to have missed interviews with WWII vets from the intelligence services -- they were scornful and ashamed by our 'modern' methods of interrogations.
B) We knew where the 2nd Panzer was because the French told us. We didn't know where it was (in December, 1944) because we the Germans didn't.
C) The Germans 'modern' interrogation techniques failed to prevent successful Soviet 'maskirovka' (say in November, 1942), or to give Rommel sufficient information to redeploy reserves away from Calais and towards Normandy.
D) Speaking of Rommel, it might be noted that the German and Soviet purges were so brutal and excessive for two reasons: 1) because their security services knew full well that they couldn't get accurate information about conspirators, and 2) because they operated within a culture of impunity.
E) Finally, it is worth noting that the agents of the real Western 'intelligence successes' were not equipped with truncheons and waterboards, but slide rules, index cards, and pocket protectors -- the OSS and the Bletchley Park operatives got their information by buying German newspapers and trade publications from neutral countries, and by cracking German (and Japanese) radio codes.
But otherwise, Ford sounded quite authoritative.
About that last point of Carrington Ward's: if the "Rule of law, my ass!" Right, and especially their mouth-breathing base, were to acknowledge that "intelligence successes" came about as a result of *actual* hard work instead of presidential petulance *about* "hard work", then there'd be nothing for them to do. No boring number-crunching because number-crunching is for pussies; no patient and methodical assembling of information and recognition of patterns, because that doesn't involve "looking tough."
If they were interested in doing boring-but-effective stuff, they'd have stayed awake in math class, or learned any other languages, or history, instead of jerking off to fantasies about torturing people because, well, fuck, being mean and violent is something they *can* do.
You almost can't blame them; they want to do *something*, but nothing they know how to do is particularly useful -- except supporting authoritarian violence. To tell them there are other, better methods of promoting national security is like telling them that they're stupid, violent, and useless... and if there's one thing you can learn from American history, if not history generally, it's that people *really* don't like to be told that. Especially when it's something they're already afraid they think and know about themselves...
Chris got that right - except I CAN blame them both for being mouth-breathers, and for being stupid, violent and useless.
The only reason these people don't put on SS uniforms is they're too busy congratulating their grandfathers for having defeated the Germans in WWII. So it would look bad in that respect.
Besides, they want to support Israel and despite Israelis basically supporting Nazi policies these days, that really would look bad.
So that means they want NEW uniforms with an American flag on both the uniforms and the daggers and the standards when they go marching.
Actually, they're too stupid to even want uniforms. Most of them would probably try to march in shit-kickers and bib overalls.
That is, if they had the discipline to be able to march in a straight line.
No, basically all they want to do is cheer someone else on in doing the marching - and preferably the dying overseas.
That's why they're big on "support the troops". Until some troops oppose the war - then those troops become "fake troops."
It's called "vicariousness".
Which is just another big word for stupid.
Man. Chris may have just written that rarest of items -- a nearly perfect comment.
My favorite may be this:
You almost can't blame [if the "Rule of law, my ass!" Right]; they want to do *something*, but nothing they know how to do is particularly useful -- except supporting authoritarian violence.
It simultaneously acknowledges a sliver of humanity in today's crazy right wing, while clearly identifying their utter, utter inability to act upon any but the basest aspects of that humanity.
Bravo.
Comments closed November 18, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
what we have here is an ex-Republic.
Posted by cleek | November 4, 2007 11:06 AM