This doesn’t work, you know:
Another note on torture issues. This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say whatever you tell them to say. To get them to lie, to get them to scream (and doesn’t it sound lovely?) while you get off thinking you’re Jack freaking Bauer.
There’s been a tag on this journal for a while - sep_reality - and almost all of the tag instances are for situations where people were living in fantasyland, where they could make their own rules and create their own world where you are little people and they are the Big Bad Boss. Where they could trick themselves and others into believing that they knew their butt from a hole in the ground, and were running the show with endless ease. The best trick, of course, was getting you to not understand what they were doing, and think it was awesomely awesome.
Somehow, through mindless showings of 24, or Kyriakou’s ‘torture made them sing’ stuff, now proven to be false, people got the very wrong idea that brave torturers got the goods on the bad guys and made ‘em fess up, saving us all. And then the secret memos from the insiders started coming out of the Department of Justice and other areas, basically saying that people using the gold standard of persuasion got everything out of the Al Qaeda dudes, and then People With Orders came in and tortured the terrorists many dozens of times in a month’s time, demanding more information. Information they didn’t have.
My guess is that as more things come out, the specific questions they wanted answered will come out. And my strong bet is that the entire point of that torture was to get a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, something they could then present as a ‘Saddam did this, let’s get him’ excuse to invade Iraq.
I don’t know this, and I certainly have no love lost for Al Qaeda or Saddam. But I don’t like it when people lie to me to get me to support them in something they wanna do because I’d never support it otherwise. As an American, I would hope that we’re better than that.
And frankly, the people who gainsay ooh-go-torture forget the long history of this country towards the protection of the rights of the individual. Watch this clip from A MAN FROM ALL SEASONS, about the need for the law, and you see, perhaps, that once you allow the law to fall, you may be the next one up when you end up on the wrong side of people who have more power than you do. Manzanar can be rebuilt for new tenants anytime, and with less reason.