it's time to stop pretending that evil keeps us safe

[dilletante]

apparently the most pernicious pervasive myth propagated by action movies and tv is not that cars explode when they crash or that shootouts are glamorous and bloodless; it's the myth that torture works to extract informationthis shows up all over the place. it's taken for granted; it's always assumed that the debate around torture is about whether

Comments

[aroraborealis]

Well said; thank you.

[fanw]

I agree with all of this. And I'm still horrified that we have folks in Guatanamo 13 years later that have not been charged with a formal crime. I thought the oubliette was from centuries past, but I guess not.

[veek]

Thank you for writing this. Yes.

[metaphortunate]

I hate this myth. It's the only thing I hate about the Steerswoman books: she totally buys into it. It sucks.

The whole point of A Few Good Men was that the guy bellowing "You can't handle the truth!" was wrong and corrupt.

[kcatalyst]

I've always figured that it's the shittiness of the feeling that brought us here and is keeping us here. It's feels better to just keep believing the stuff that doesn't make you feel shitty. You can't stop torturing people because if you do, that means either it was wrong or ineffective or both and holy fuck that would suck.

[dilletante]

i assume that's why the people who did it dig in.

what gets me about the torture thing was that, institutionally, we, our government knew already that it didn't work. it wasn't like we needed to do that experiment again. so why do it?

i assume somebody wanted to feel macho-- the story that seemed to be coming out when it first started to become public was that the cia didn't want to do it but the white house insisted. which was consistent with bush's overcompensatingly-macho public image, and even more with cheney's. but it's also the sort of thing the cia would totally lie about to cover their own asses. so who knows?

[kcatalyst]

It strikes me that many of the comments from people at the prisons where these people were tortured is the emphasis on communicating and demonstrating control of the prisoners bodies. Quite a bit of this may have been from those people, all the way up the chain of command, feeling a need to demonstrate to themselves that no terrorist scum could sass them.