The Senate report on torture (a.k.a. war crimes) perpetrated by our government is out, and of course, the vast majority of media and political commentary misses the point by a mile. As is often the case with discussion of this issue, the question of efficacy is paramount. Did torture “work”? Did it yield the intelligence our government needed, for instance, to conduct its unauthorized raid on a sovereign country (Pakistan) and assassinate the prime suspect in the 9/11/2001 terror attacks (rather than bring him to trial)? Does it, more generally, extract reliable, “actionable” information, or just a bunch of blather that victims of torture usually pipe up just to make the agony stop?
This discussion is not limited to the full-on, proud of all we did crew, like the execrable Dick Cheney, snickering from his podium, confident that he will never pay for his crimes against humanity. This is the discussion being advanced by Senators who supposedly oppose these interrogation techniques. They didn’t work, they say. No useful intelligence was gained. What a strange conversation to be having at this moment in history, when we are confronted with detailed evidence of this latest foray (far from the first) into systematic abuse of those we seek to dominate and suppress.
These are crimes. They are explicit violations of both U.S. law and international law. Whether or not they “work” is immaterial, though I think it’s been fairly well demonstrated that you can’t torture the truth out of people. When someone robs a bank or shoots their neighbors in order to steal their car, we aren’t particularly interested in whether or not they successfully obtained the goods. When people break the law, they should be held accountable and have their day in court. That’s a conservative principle of long provenance.
Of course, what the torture program did produce was intelligence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. That was, of course, completely bogus, waterboarded out of Al Libbi. It’s not hard to imagine how this worked. The Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq. They were, at some level, aware that torture may not be an ideal tool for extracting the truth, but it DOES work at getting people to say what you want to hear. Why else waterboard someone 80 times or more? In the end, they got what they wanted – a rationale for invasion.
So … torture works, if your aim is to produce incendiary lies. That’s what Bush/Cheney wanted, and the torture program didn’t disappoint.
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