Two problems with torture: It's wrong and it doesn't work, according to interrogation expert STUART

[babylonsister]

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07294/826876-35.stm

Two problems with torture
It's wrong and it doesn't work, according to interrogation expert STUART HERRINGTON
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Stacy Innerst/Post-Gazette


Recently revealed White House memos have raised the ugly question yet again: Is torturing prisoners captured in the Global War on Terrorism an effective and permissible use of our nation's might?

I served 30 years in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer, which included extensive experience as an interrogator in Vietnam, in Panama and during the 1991 Gulf War. In the course of these sensitive missions, my teams and I collected mountains of excellent, verified information, despite the fact that we never laid a hostile hand on a prisoner. Had one of my interrogators done so, he would have been disciplined and most likely relieved of his duties.

snip//

Three men in custody

Question: What do these three men have in common?

A wounded North Vietnamese Army sergeant, captured only after he exhausted his ammunition, brags that his Army is "liberating" the South and refuses to cooperate under harsh treatment by South Vietnamese interrogators. He then provides Americans with information about his unit, its missions, its infiltration route. He even assists in interrogating other prisoners. Granted amnesty, he serves in the South Vietnamese Army for the duration of the war.

A captured Panamanian staff officer, morose and angry, initially lies and stonewalls his American interrogator but ultimately reveals his role in his leader's shadowy contacts with North Korea, Cuba, Libya and the Palestine Liberation Organization. He provides information about covert arms purchases and a desperate attempt to procure SAM missiles to shoot down American helicopters in the event of an American invasion.

An Iraqi general, captured and humiliated during Operation Desert Storm, is initially frightened and defiant but eventually cooperates, knowing that Saddam Hussein's penalty for treason was certain death. Before repatriation, the general hands his captor his prayer beads and a scrap of paper bearing an address, saying with emotion, "Our Islamic custom requires that we show gratitude to those who bestow kindness and mercy. These beads comforted me through your Air Force's fierce bombings for 39 days, but they are all I have. When Saddam is gone, please come to my home. You will be an honored guest and we will slaughter a lamb to welcome you."

Answer: All three were treated by their American captors with dignity and respect. No torture; no mistreatment.

-- Stuart Herrington

[L. Coyote]

1. Torture is "not constitutional" by recent accounts. Whatever that means.

I guess it means it is legal if Bush said to do it, but the Constitution didn't expressly say he was supposed to do so. He gets to decide for himself what he can and cannot do, and that part IS constitutional. Oh wait, I'm channeling someone, yes, I'm seeing who it is, yes Bush's latest lackey, the new AG nominee, Mukasey.

TORTURE is criminal, punishable by death! I'm myself again, thank whoever, and I have to say, "wrong" may be as weak as Mukasey's answer. It is a CRIME!

[Kagemusha]

2. It's an argument that laws are unconstitutional.

That's why I resent that argument.

[CJCRANE]

3. It can work

to force people to admit to things that aren't true. That's exactly the kind of "intelligence" the neocons prefer.

[Cronopio]

6. Correctamundo! They don't care if it's a lie, as long as it's a *useful* lie.

Truth is just another commodity to these people, just like themselves and everything else in the universe. They've abstracted everything and everyone, which is why reality pisses them off so much when it reasserts itself.

[Warpy]

4. I keep wondering what country I'm in

because when I was growing up, the feeling was out there that the US didn't torture because we are superior to all those primitive folks out there who run on pure emotion with revenge as their main goal.

Suddenly, all the savages are in control and we who still feel that way are seen as weak.

When did this happen? How do we defeat the savages?

[Jade Fox]

5. Hideous, isn't it?

Torture doesn't work, it just gives monsters a chance to let their Id out to play.

After 9/11 I was sure we would respond as a country by wanting to look superior to those who perpetrated that atrocity. Man, was I naive. Instead, the monsters were unleashed.

The monsters have proven to be a useful tool for those in power. Of course, monsters are hard to control, and sane people recoil at their actions. Eventually this will stop them, but how long will it take, and at what price?

[Cronopio]

8. "... it just gives monsters a chance to let their Id out to play."

Well said.

And those who've seen Forbidden Planet know that the Id Monsters have a tendency to come back home to their makers.

[Cronopio]

7. You're in a country of people who would rather adapt to whatever system is presented to them ...

... than fight for a better system. As long as some sort of payoff is there to help make the adaptation not feel like a total sellout.

Just like Germany in 1935.


"Suddenly, all the savages are in control and we who still feel that way are seen as weak."

My take: savages can't understand individual strength. That's what makes them savages.


"How do we defeat the savages?"

Bonhoeffer, Sophie Muller, etc. had a lot of ideas on this.

If all else fails, the True Germans like Einstein (as opposed to the Good Germans) knew what to do - leave the system and renounce their citizenship with the Evil Empire.

I'm convinced that's the fallback position for Americans also. If the majority continues to be convinced that the only choice they're given is to continue to adapt to a toxic social and political system (which is essentially an act of slow suicide), the individual non-savages must do what they can and relinquish their American citizenship. It's the only effective way an individual can deprive the system of the tax dollars it needs to function. It wouldn't stop the Evil Empire in and of itself, but it would be an effective act of integrity and conscience.