More on Torture (posted by DT)

I guess I'm now considered out of the mainstream when it comes to interrogation and torture. I find this fact depressing, given that it wasn't too long ago that there was a pretty clear consensus in the US that we were the "good guys" who would win the Cold War because we were seen by common people everywhere as the bastion of Freedom and Democracy, bringers of prosperity. The USSR, on the other hand, were the authoritarians who arrested people for no reason or with little evidence, and sent severed limbs back to whoever pissed them off to make sure that they knew who they were messing with.

Now, in the Age of "24", we're so post-modern that we don't believe in that claptrap any more I guess. But there are lots of problems with torture outside of the moral element:

• How are we supposed to know if the guys we're torturing are really terrorists? As I noted in my earlier post, we've been picking up lots of "alleged terrorists" in sweeps all over Afghanistan and Iraq, and lots of them have turned out to be innocent. (Remember even the Bush administration released lots of people from Gitmo because they weren't terrorists). Without any legal system or rules of evidence, we could be torturing the wrong people. Before you sneer that I'm protecting Bad Guys, note that we ALREADY HAVE tortured innocent people: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/world/americas/25arar.html or http://www.truthout.org/1210093
• Torture doesn't work as a method of gaining information. Professional interrogators from the FBI and the military have been appalled by these tactics. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802242_pf.html Torture is really good for extracting false confessions- that's what authoritarian regimes use it for, not to get good intelligence. When you're getting tortured, you'll say anything to get the torture to stop, and that certainly includes lying.
• The "Ticking Time Bomb" scenario popularized in the TV series 24 just never happens. It's great drama, but it's not real life. How many people do we torture looking for the one guy in 100 who might know something?
• Torture is a runaway train- it can't be used in a limited way only in extreme cases- it always migrates to everything. Look at Abu Ghraib- people on the ground take it and run with it. Besides, the logic extends to increased use: if torture is OK to find terrorists, then shouldn't we use it to find common murderers? What about rapists? Why only foreign citizens?

Finally, it's important to note that the Orwellian use of terms like "enhanced interrogation" are a smokescreen. We should call it what it is. The difference between waterboarding or sleep deprivation or hanging in stress positions on one hand (all used by the US in recent years), and cutting off fingers on the other is a difference only in severity. There have been dozens of DEATHS of detainees in US custody that occurred because the "enhanced interrogation" went a little too far- how can that not be torture?