Tuesday, October 23, 2007
King George the Third Degree
Jesus... this is so fucked up. When word initially got out that the US was torturing people, the lunatic right justified it on the grounds that the victims were dangerous, highly-trained "Islamofascists" who were plotting night and day to destroy America.
Now, torture is so routine that the FBI squeezes confessions out of innocent people by threatening to torture their wives and children.
The word "torture" originally meant "to twist" and derived from a torture machine used by the Christian Church to torture heretics and force them to recant. There were five degrees of twisting. The third degree caused excruciating pain, the fourth caused death, and the fifth tore the body to pieces. This is where we get the term "third degree."
Historically, torture has most often been used not to gain information but to force people to say what the authorities want them to say; to confess to crimes they didn't commit, to accuse other people of crimes, or to renounce their beliefs. Every intelligence officer knows that torture is next to useless as a means of extracting information. Even if the victim talks, the intelligence is of the lowest grade and must be corroborated before being usable. So much for the "ticking time bomb" excuse! It's far more common to give the torture victim a script to read, as for example when the CIA tortured Sheikh al-Libi into making a false connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
It seems to me there is another and in a way even sicker motive for torture. When you look at filthy pigs like Cheney the Dick, Scooter Libby with his sado-porn novel, or the entire current slate of rethug presidential candidates, it's clear that they get their jollies from the idea of brown people being tortured and abused. They are sick, twisted, disgusting sacks of shit.
I shouldn't have to point out that torture is never acceptable for several reasons:
- It is evil and immoral in itself.
- It is ineffective, if your goal is to learn information.
- It endangers our troops. If we torture the enemy's troops, they will torture ours.
- It coarsens and brutalizes our entire society. Witness the cheering and applause when rethug candidates try to out-macho each other and ramp up the torture stakes.
Trackbacks
This article is now closed to trackback pings.Comments
RSS feed for comments | heather wrote 10/23 4:27pm in reply to Original article: It is almost unbelievable that actions that would have brought down any western government a decade ago have become routine and that torture has come to be accepted as just another mildly unpleasant thing that governments do. Despite this apparent acceptance of the unthinkable, there's still a mild linguistic cover up, of course, with phrases like "waterboarding" and "extraordinary rendition." The "third degree" explanation was illuminating as well, bringing in the history. It reinforces your unarguable point that information, confessions or claims to dis/belief in X or Y that are extracted under torture are utterly worthless anyway. The only explanation that I can think of for both the US use of torture and the barely half-assed attempt to cover it up is that the government assume that knowledge of its existence will frighten their enemies out of opposing them. Of course, this is itself self-evidently terrorist.... Your post was excellent. (Reply) |
 | Oz Atheist wrote 10/23 9:08pm in reply to Original article: Interesting to read this, I've nearly finished Sam Harris's book 'The End of Faith' in which he tries to reconcile torture as being acceptable in certain circumstances. Have you read it? One of Sam's arguments is that "collateral damage" (bombing the s#@t out of people) is merely inadvertent torture of innocent men, women and children [pg 194, emphasis is mine]. I haven't been able to reconcile that chapter in the book, or come up with good arguments against it; I know there should be some. Of note this book was written in 2004, I wonder if his position still stands with what America has done recently as your article states? (Reply) |
 | No More Mr. Nice Guy! wrote 10/24 1:31pm in reply to Oz Atheist: I haven't read the book, but from what I've heard there are many areas where Sam Harris and I would disagree. I don't think it's valid to say "collateral damage" and torture are equivalent, they are both terrible things, but when you intentionally target a particular person and cause them excruciating agony, that's a different level of evil in my book. (Reply) |
