Sometimes I sit around, especially after reading a spate of dissenting blog comments, and think, “I’m too cynical of a person”. And then I read something like this (hat tip) and I realize that I’ve been in error all this time, because I wasn’t cynical enough.
See, for years now I’ve been one of those liberals who points out torture, on top of being a gross violation of basic human rights and a poison that corrupts your society, is also a really bad idea because it doesn’t work as promised. It’s supposed to be used to get people to dump valuable information that they’re otherwise inclined to keep secret, or at least that’s what I’ve been told. And the retort to that was that it doesn’t work, because people will lie under torture. Often they’ll lie because they don’t have any information, but they hope by providing something the torturer wants to hear, the torture will stop. We have ample historical evidence of this, especially in situations where people confessed to things that are impossible (witchcraft, mass murdering Christian children, etc.). We dwelt on this fact on the theory that it was a show-stopper of a point. And it is, if you really are attracted to the idea of torture as a way to get information from people.
But we weren’t cynical enough, because apparently the Bush administration authorized torture in hopes of getting false confessions.
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.
Of course they did, and I wasn’t sufficiently cynical enough about how evil they could be. In retrospect, it’s hard to see why it didn’t occur to me that they were hoping for this, since pinning all your hopes on one false piece of information is classic wingnuttery. Probably because I thought that once we were in Iraq, the Bushies largely dropped even pretending to give a shit about their lies regarding either WMDs or links between Hussein and al Qaida. The only value in continuing the ruse was to give supporters something to cling to, and I guess I didn’t think they really felt the need for that, because they don’t care about those nitwits (except as useful fools), and they knew that said nitwits didn’t need things like evidence to believe.
------
Registration is now required! We're still in the process of getting it all squared away, so for the moment don't forget to Login or Register using the links in the upper left menu before starting to write your comment.
Monsters were in charge of this country for 8 years. And there are more where they came from. I just had to listen to some mouthpiece on the Diane Rehm Show this morning going on and on about how the release of the torture memos was treason (giving aid to our enemies in a time of war, because now they know what we’re capable of doing and can train against it- as if they didn’t already have expectations of what the Great Satan was capable of doing) and that torture clearly worked because the (phony) Los Angeles Library plot was foiled and lots of Al Qaeda members were rounded up based on information we got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after we waterboarded him 183 times. It was that 183rd time that did the trick, don’t you know.