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» Hatrack River Forum » Active Forums » Books, Films, Food and Culture » A thought about Torture's uses.

   
Author Topic: A thought about Torture's uses.
Dan_raven
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I've been reading The Gulag Archipelago, some nice light reading on the Soviet Slave Labor system.

In the chapter on Interrogations there appears a difference between interrogations--torture sessions-- that are performed to gather the truth, and those performed to get the person to lie.

Throughout history I know of four main reasons for torture, other than the sick fun of a demented mind.

1) Terror. From the Mongols to Vlad-The Impaler, from Nazi Terror squads to El Salvadoran Death Squads, one way to destroy the fighting ability of your opponent is to demonstrate inhumane brutality to all who oppose them.

2) Revenge. If they destroy what you hold sacred, what else can you do but make them suffer.

3) Lies. From the Spanish Inquisition to Vietnam, those in power have used pain to break the wills of their opponents, forcing them to say things that were not so were in fact so. From this property changed hands, innocent people were condemned, failed leaders were glorified. Look where starvation was used to influence elections in Africa.

4) Truth. Here we have the ticking bomb scenario. Tell us where the bomb is or we'll break your legs.

Of these four, which were we after in Iraq and Guantanamo?

1) Terror? Could we use terror on the terrorists? Could we actually try to become more dangerous than them--yes. Could we actually try to become more viscous than them? Not without becoming them.

I don't believe that anyone considered for long the use of random torture as a way of out terrorizing the terrorists. On the other hand, I do believe that some consideration of the effect our "aggressive interrogation techniques" might have in dissuading Al Queda recruits helped push those techniques to the forefront.

2) Revenge--I believe that some of the troops who lost friends or family to the enemy might have personal desire to see revenge done upon the bodies of the enemy. I also believe that there is a political advantage for those who are shown revenging the dead of 9/11. But I do not thing revenge was a major consideration for allowing "aggressive interrogation techniques"

4) The Truth. To discover military advantages, enemy hideouts, and other important facts, that is the main reason our people went to such violent lengths.

yet...

Several Intelligence experts say that torture and pain do not give near the quality and quantity of information as other types of questioning.

yet...
We have a prison filled with people culled from the battlegrounds of Iraq and Iran. We had great big prisons in Iraq full of prisoners.

It has been an embarrassment to the administration when it was discovered that many of these people are not as guilty as we were led to believe. Would it not have been convenient if we had a nice large stack of confessions to go with them?

yet..

If the truth about Abu-Graib had not come out would President Bush's numbers still be so low if he had documented proof that they were capturing and holding thousands of self admitted enemy combatants? Would Iran still be run by its religious zealots if we had confessions of their Nuclear plans, aid to insurgents, and planned war on the West?

yet...

Our troops were using the interrogation skills they had on hand. This was the handbook from our military's own anti-interrogation courses.

These handbooks used tortures that were based on the interrogation handbook of the North Koreans.

The North Koreans captured US Soldiers, but were not mainly after military secrets. They were after signed confessions of "The Western Capitalists evil designs and terrorist behavior". In other words, lies.

As I read the chapter on Interrogations in "The Gulag Arch.." all the interrogators wanted was those arrested to sign confessions for things they had never done.

So much was similar to what I read about in our own interrogations, including the quotes, "Its not torture, its aggressive interrogation" and "So they didn't let you sleep enough. You are in prison, not a resort." (We are talking weeks of no sleep in the Soviet system. It does sound very similar to what I've heard some administration apologists say about our techniques)

Now it would not take a Presidential plot to turn our "aggressive interrogation techniques" into a vehicle of propaganda as was used by the Koreans. It would just take a few believers in the Administration's ideology to create some forced confessions. Some one who believed, like some have stated, that Ideology trumps Reality.

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Trent Destian
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The Rag and Bone Shop, by: Robert Cormier

Good book to show that the truth is not worth so much as what is said to be truth.

And if you just like torture, read "A thousand deaths" by:OSC, if you haven't already. Russians know how it's done.

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kmbboots
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Another reason I can think of, to reinforce in ourselves the idea that the enemy is not human and not worthy of being treated a human.

Not a good reason, but, in war, a possibly useful one.

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Sterling
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Jane Mayer was recently on Fresh Air and one of the things she noted is that much of America's new "enhanced interrogation techniques" program arose out of military training programs that had been designed to resist such techniques as might be applied on captured soldiers and agents during the Cold War... That, in short, we were imitating techniques of the Soviet Union, and that those techniques had often been designed with the aim of eliciting false confessions, not acquiring accurate information.
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scholarette
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I watched a show on history or discovery and they interviewed one of the interregators. He was in the first groups called in. He talked about how they agonized over every decision- do we escalate this, where is the line, for this particular subject, can we bend the rules. And then the unit started getting transfered. The new guys would come in and they would learn the rules at the stretched level. And then they would decide to stretch the rules- which had already been stretched. It wasn't like they set out with this goal in mind. It progressed.
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Samprimary
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Given the overwhelmingly negative results of torture and the lack of any appreciable benefit to make the benefit worth the cost, the really interesting question is not whether torture works, but why so many people in our society want to believe that it works just so that we can keep torturing people.

but anyway. TORTURE!

General Jack Vessey:

quote:
"Any information that could be gained as a result of cruel, inhumane treatment or torture could never counterbalance the damage done to the United States of America when we do these things."
Some other dude:

quote:
But does torture work? ... I still cannot find a positive answer. I've heard it said that the Syrians and the Egyptians "really know how to get these things done." I've heard the Israelis mentioned, without proof. I've heard Algeria mentioned, too, but Darius Rejali, an academic who recently trolled through French archives, found no clear examples of how torture helped the French in Algeria — and they lost that war anyway. "Liberals," argued an article in the liberal online magazine Slate a few months ago, "have a tendency to accept, all too eagerly, the argument that torture is ineffective." But it's also true that "realists," whether liberal or conservative, have a tendency to accept, all too eagerly, fictitious accounts of effective torture carried out by someone else.

By contrast, it is easy to find experienced U.S. officers who argue precisely the opposite. Meet, for example, retired Air Force Col. John Rothrock, who, as a young captain, headed a combat interrogation team in Vietnam. More than once he was faced with a ticking time-bomb scenario: a captured Vietcong guerrilla who knew of plans to kill Americans. What was done in such cases was "not nice," he says. "But we did not physically abuse them." Rothrock used psychology, the shock of capture and of the unexpected. Once, he let a prisoner see a wounded comrade die. Yet — as he remembers saying to the "desperate and honorable officers" who wanted him to move faster — "if I take a Bunsen burner to the guy's genitals, he's going to tell you just about anything," which would be pointless. Rothrock, who is a more credible authority on these matter than any member of the armchair strategists who commonly vouch for torture, says that he doesn't know "any professional intelligence officers of my generation who would think this is a good idea."

Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 — long before Abu Ghraib, long before this was even a known issue — to assess interrogations in Iraq. Herrington, an experienced specialist, reported that besides its amorality and its illegality (!), torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk without stress methodology and that 'cruel and unusual' means are not going to be beneficial on a strategic level. Asked whether there would be similar resistance in religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the "batting average" might be lower: "perhaps six out of ten." And if you beat up the remaining four "they'll just tell you anything to get you to stop." — meaning, the use of mental or physical anguish to motivate the acquisition of intelligence is not a great way to defog the field.


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Threads
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Christopher Hitchens on being waterboarded.

Wikileaks photo of a supposed U.S detainee. (disturbing)

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