Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.Because that sort of talk hasn't jumped the shark. Trying to scare us into doing whatever the Rovians want us to do by raising the specter of September 11th is so 2002. Gotta like this bit as well:
[T]errorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly and thus diminish the effectiveness of these techniques as they have the ones in the Army Field Manual.Doesn't matter, as those techniques aren't in use. We're just using the Army Field Manual now. Irrelevant. And here's the big defense:
Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known.So, their understanding is that someone who tells you the truth on one answer will keep on telling the truth permanently? They're not going to change their minds?
Such a claim often conflates interrogation with the sadism engaged in by some soldiers at Abu Ghraib, an incident that had nothing whatever to do with intelligence gathering.True, but also irrelevant. Once brutalism enters the culture it metastasizes. Here are dumb and dumber on how Obama is handicapping intelligence professionals:
Even with a seemingly binding opinion in hand, which future CIA operations personnel would take the risk? There would be no wink, no nod, no handshake that would convince them that legal guidance is durable. Any president who wants to apply such techniques without such a binding and durable legal opinion had better be prepared to apply them himself.Yes, God forbid they follow the damn law. You know, the one that worked for us during WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War, all of which were rather more formidable than al-Qaeda.
Those Bushies stay true to their colors, don't they? They only offer one (discredited) piece of evidence in favor of torture, that of Abu Zubaidah, who talked before he was tortured and afterward gave a bunch of false leads that wasted a lot of the government's time. This is a document that is political and consequentalist, unrigorous and silly. I'm not linking to it--you can find it on your own.
The reason why torture is wrong, and why it has no place in a liberal democracy, is simple to my mind. Torture is the process of breaking a person's spirit, of smashing someone's will in order to obtain something from them. It is a violation on a scale so immense it is inconceivable that one human would do it to another, unless the perpetrator felt that the victim was less than human. Indeed, the most prolific torture regimes in the 20th century felt that way--the Nazis, of course, codified it in law. Same with the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge, etc. In the latter cases the victims weren't humans but bourgeouis parasites who had to be purged for the greater good. Ah, you might say, but America didn't kill people on the magnitude of those evil regimes. Yes, though some terror suspects died in interrogation, America didn't participate in mass purges. I do believe, though, that while the terrorists are clearly doing something worse than the Bush Administration did, that there is a parallel there. The ultimate purpose of torture is to break someone, in effect to destroy that person in order to get what you want from them. Having read The Dark Side and all manner of journalism about the hollow husks of humanity that are torturees after release, it seems like the express purpose of "interrogation" is frequently accomplished. Despite only one little piece of evidence they can give that it has any worth at all, and lots and lots of arguments that it can't.
So it's depraved, but the defenders are even more disgusting. I find it baffling that right-wingers would save their cries of fascism for Barack Obama's stated desire to raise upper-class tax rates a few points while they support torture, and it just goes to show how the rudderless, twisted, and rotting remains of the right have abrogated any concept of morality or justice in favor of esoteric and ancient hatreds and prejudices. These are people who have no problem with the notion of a government that can kill them or torture them without having to give reason, and yet they complain about the creeping role of government and the erosion of "traditional American values", though presumably not the part about how all men are created equal and entitled to certain inalienable human rights.
