Torture is in the news again, big time. I just wrote a post about it on a local newspaper’s Web site, in response to someone’s comment about 
the effectiveness of waterboarding. The writer – whose anonymous user name suggests he/she is a veteran – makes the claim that waterboarding produced the intelligence that foiled the plot to fly a jetliner into the library tower in Los Angeles. Of course, the claim falls apart on the most superficial level. The Bush administration took credit for foiling the plot in February of 2002; the torture (“enhanced interrogation”) program went into effect in August of that year. I can understand the writer’s confusion, though. There has been so much garbled noise around this issue in the past few weeks, much of it stirred up by that bloated ex-Vice President of ours, whom Gore Vidal once likened to “300 pounds of condemned veal in a gray suit.” Yes, Dick Cheney, evident war criminal, wants more memos released – the ones that show how effective his war crimes truly were in producing actionable intelligence. I say, tell it to the jury.
Cheney’s not the only one blowing smoke, though he’s certainly among the most visible. (Christ, you can see him from space!) Other ex-minions of the Bush team are creeping their way through the media hive, popping up here or there to offer a spirited defense of the indefensible. Some, like Phillip Zelikow, Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and adviser to Condi Rice, have appeared mainly to distance themselves from the controversy. But a lot of the noise reflects the same type of argument Bush himself used throughout his presidency – this is not torture, and it is being used to keep your families safe. Doesn’t matter that it breaks both domestic laws and international law. Doesn’t matter that aside from being fundamentally wrong and immoral, it is ineffective and known to produce unreliable information. (In fact, torture of the kind implemented by the last administration was formulated specifically to elicit false confessions.) Doesn’t matter that the examples they provide of terror plots foiled through torture hold not an ounce of water. The big lie continues.
I heard Pat Buchanan on MSNBC this past Friday defending “enhanced interrogation techniques” partly on the basis that most Americans favor their use against terrorists. I don’t know that this is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. People have 
become so used to the idea, both through the actions of their government and via television shows like “24,” that they consider the “smoking gun” scenarios constantly referred to in the media as plausible. This is a bit like the phenomenon of judges – actual trial judges – deciding cases partly on the basis of science used in shows like “CSI”. It’s as if NASA started basing everything they do on the scientific principles embodied by “Lost in Space.” That’s kind of scary… almost as scary as the torture itself. If we’re getting that detached from reality when we set policy or even just consider its effects, we are in “deep doo-doo,” as Bush’s father used to say. Just the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded more than 180 times over the course of a single month should indicate that, as a “smoking gun” remedy, this does not work.
In any case, forget whether or not psychos on the talk shows say it works. If we resort to Cheney’s hammer, we’re sacrificing what’s left of our humanity.
luv u,
jp
