The thing about torture is that its main purpose, historically, has been to coerce confessions out of people. Why would the Bush administration want to do that? Well, maybe because they were looking for stuff like this: "Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons." Naturally, that information worked its way into Colin Powell's famous UN presentation. You remember, the one that only a traitor, a coward, or worse a Frenchman could fail to be convinced by. Equally naturally, it was false.
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We Have Ways of Making Your Support Our Predetermined Political Agenda
06 Nov 2007 08:52 pm
Comments (20)
Matt, I have an excuse for not previewing my post - I'm not the owner of this blog.
What's yours? Crappy blog software that doesn't allow you to edit your own post? What tech genius at "The Atlantic" made that decision? Christ, I can edit my own posts at Superiorpics.com which is just a babe picture posting site! "The Atlantic" can't do better than that?
"Making Your Support"?
I think Matt does it on purpose.
Try it - it's kind of fun. In every comment your make on this site, remove won word randomly or change a noun to a verb or something like that. MY could be the least literate site on the web.
The ABC item annoyed me by not explaining whether the "smoking gun" cables were still secret. I was expecting to get a link to them.
Without that, as Joe Buck says, this is indeed old (tho still insufficiently well-known) news.
Matt, it's intelligence we're after. Nobody is arguing for torture-coerced confessions, for Christ's sake.
You understand the difference, yes?
JA, yes but historically torture has been a very poor way of extracting intelligence. probably used successfully by the french in algeria for this purpose (and fat lot of good it did them), but nowhere else i can think of.
torture has however proven itself an exceptionally good way of inducing people to make false confessions (see e.g., pretty much all torture in history, from witch-hunts and the inquisition through to soviet show trials to date).
this is, obvs, the point MY is making.
Yeah, I'm with JA.
I'm sure Matt can't possibly be suggesting that the Bush administration would torture somebody just so they could use the guy's confession as a talking point.
I mean, that's the sort of behavior we expect from fifth rate dictators in banana republics, not from the world's greatest democracy.
Next he'll be telling us the legislature is actually help the torturers get away clean! Oh, wait ....
stunningly, JA, we have been after intelligence for a very long time without it becoming the policy of the country that torture is ok.
that's because torture isn't ok. it wouldn't be ok even if it were a good basis of information, but it isn't, which we've always known until the current crop of idiots took command.
Historically, Matt is off-base because torture originated as a system of physical punishments to enforce tribal or civilizational customs and norms. No one cared at all about legalistic crap like "confessions". Elders or rulers decided - and with no jails and no jails except for certain elect people before very recently - the choices were death, painful death, banishment, slavery, or physical punishment.
Jails as something the common person had as an alternative was very recent, once industrialized nations were able to feed idle mouths and afford othewise useless lawyers, jail guards.
As part of the physical punishment - also known as "torture!!!" - it help reinforce those societal norms if the person having fingers lopped off, being horsewhipped would agree to those assembled that they agreed the punishment was just. It was effective in promoting harmony.
Even today, we have advanced societies and countless families that find corporal punishment is just as effective in certain circumstances. Graffitti is rare in Singapore, as they say...
Some of these punishments that worked on rebellious, criminal, disobedient members of the Clan or nation of course were employed against enemy. Instead of for punishment - to gain life-saving info from the enemy. Internal or domestic. Far more important to learn who else wished to kill the ruler and his line, who wished to deliver the nation to it's destruction than get a "confession" - only later moralistic societies cared about that.
They worked. Most societies have employed coercive interrogators for military intelligence needs, since the dawn of time. All part of every war requiring spies, saboteurs and their counters...For the most part, having interrogators and prisons and guards means diverting some of your smartest and most able away from calvary, logistics, weapons technology - to a specialized task deemed just as crucial and reliable an element of war.
If it didn't work in the military, it would be dropped over the ages like charioteers, counting on an Army to forage it's sustinance in the field, and various magic talismans were.
Despite McCains protestations now that "Rorture Never Works", earlier McCain inteviews and books said torture was highly effective in breaking American POWs and getting them to reveal classified info, cooperate with their captors in issuing statements.
We may be coming up on an age of new technology where we can use more modern detection techniques to see if a person is lying. We see minute changes in eye and voice with computerized scanners indicative of truth or lies. The brain can be scanned with radioactive metabolites scanned to see if a person is truthful (requires less energy, less metabolites) or lying.
Might greatly reduce the costs and lawyers required to staff a criminal justice or counterterror system as well as cut down on interrogators.
But no 5th exists for unlawful enemy combatants, so techniques that many activist Lefties, ACLU types consider torture like long interogations, cold cells, alck of sleep, and being slapped around will still have to be employed, even with new technology. If the detained person refuses to talk, they must be forced to. With a set of discomfortable punishments and penalties meted out when the detainee is caught lying.....
If it didn't work in the military, it would be dropped over the ages like charioteers, counting on an Army to forage it's sustinance in the field, and various magic talismans were.
yeah, if it didn't work, torture would have long since been abandoned.
incidentally, until the bush administration reintroduced it, torture had long been abandoned, in every conceivable international forum and by the law of every industrialised country. but whatevs, leftists, the ACLU, graffiti in singapore etc etc.
Chris Ford, thank you for confirming that you are a sick human being.
There's no evidence that prayer works either. Guess that explains why no one in any army in the world prays anymore.
Howard, I appreciate you outing yourself as a traitor.
Thank you.
It takes the hard work out of finding enemies within.
In most of human history, confessions did not exist. Corporal punishment abounded. Jails did not exist for the masses until the 19th Century.
Physical punishment has been a constant part of society since societies were 1st created, in all corners of the world. They persist because they work. In every military since the dawn of time, interrogators exist, because they save lives.
Well, Chris, armies between about 1700 and 1920 managed to get by without torturing, and amazingly, some generals managed to win wars. Torture has only really come back in a big way since the age of Hitler and Stalin.
Now you mention it, when I was in the occupation army in Namibia in 1980, we were issued with hand-cranked field-telephone generators, and yet our bases didn't have field-telephones. Funny old world, isn't it?
And, by the way, we lost that war, just as surely as you are losing yours, because we deserved to.
Ford is a joke troll.
He writes like he personally has knowledge of every single torture technique and the history of torture in every society since time began. Obviously he read that book, I forget who the author is, who went over that history in some detail.
This shows you the sort of person Ford is. He reads about the history of torture for light reading.
A psychotic wingnut.
And a joke.
Chris Ford barks thusly:
"Howard, I appreciate you outing yourself as a traitor."
So in Chris' solipsistic world, his personal views define patriotism.
Ford is indeed a joke troll, and wrong as well.
The Romans used torture to extract confessions. Questio, the origin of our "putting to the question."
I think a 2000-year-old precedent is more important than some anthropological-sounding theory of "origins."
Ford's comment is exactly the kind of nonsense that led Renoir to say, "Everyone has his reasons."
Why the frick are Democrats not shouting this argument from the hills of the capital and the campaign trails????
"While Republicans claim that torture is necessary for intelligence, in the real world we know that torture has produced false intelligence about WMDs that Bush used to lead us into the Iraq War."
THAT is a good argument AND a compelling narrative. Which is I guess why Democrats will never use it. They prefer ritual humiliation like having Republicans vote to bring up Cheney's impeachment and forcing the Democrats to shoot it down. Disgusting.
Well, some of them might be pro torture, being a Dem doesn't necessarily make you a good person. But yeah, basically they are spineless fools who like power too much to take a stand that might make them appear "soft on terror".
Comments closed November 20, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
This is being reported as news, because of the ABC story, but the whole sordid tale, plus other details, are in Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine". Google "Suskind al Libi" and you can find lots of discussion from about 18 months back.
Posted by Joe Buck | November 6, 2007 9:34 PM