..from @emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler)
The Debate about Torture We’re Not Having: Exploitation
Published December 8, 2014
As the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on torture (released over 5 years ago, in far less redacted form than tomorrow’s summary will be) makes clear, the Bush regime embraced torture not for “intelligence” but for “exploitation.” In December 2001, when DOD first started searching for what would become torture, it was explicitly looking for “exploitation.”
As Administration lawyers began to reconsider U.S. adherence to the Geneva Conventions, the DoD Office of the General Counsel also began seeking information on detention and interrogation. In December 2001, the DoD General Counsel’s office contacted the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, for information about detainee “exploitation.
And as a footnote explaining that reference makes clear, “interrogation is only one part of the exploitation process.”
Some other things exploitation is used for — indeed the very things the torture we reverse-engineered for our own torture program was used for — are to help recruit double agents and to produce propaganda.
And we have every reason to believe those were among the things all incarnations of our torture were used for. We tortured in Abu Ghraib because we had no sources in the Iraqi resistance and for some reason we believed sexually humiliating men would shame them into turning narcs for the US.
read more: https://www.emptywheel.net/2014/12/08/the-debate-about-torture-were-not-having-exploitation/
related:
Some torture facts.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2014/12/08/some-torture-facts/
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