I want to say something about torture, because it's going to be coming back soon
I guarantee this will come up again soon, so I want to get this out now:
During the George W. Bush administration, the US used "enhanced" interrogation techniques, commonly described as "torture", on detainees.
Forget whatever you've seen in "24" or "Homeland" or "Quantico". Because none of that is how any of this works. We have the documents from Gitmo, and it's much grimier than the dialog makes it.
The public dialog is something like this:
"There's a nuclear bomb hidden somewhere in Times Square. We've caught a terrorist; should we hit him with a lead pipe until he tells us where the bomb is?"
This is an interesting philosophical question, but it has no actual practical application. Because we will never be in that situation.
The US tortured detainees while asking them questions we already knew the answer to.
I want to repeat that, to make it sink in.
The US tortured detainees while asking them questions we already knew the answer to.
When the detainee's answer matched what we already knew was true, the torture was stopped, and the detainee was marked as compliant. And marked in a way that his cellmates could see.
This is what we did.
Torture is not a way of extracting information. An idiot could tell you that. If you beat a man enough, he will tell you whatever you want to hear. But "whatever you want to hear" is often not the truth.
Torture is not a way of obtaining information; it's a way of obtaining compliance. And it's coming back, bigly.
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