another word on torture

Someone posted a comment to my blog that not torturing people puts our military at greater risk.

Wrong.

It does NOT put them at greater risk. They are at greater risk BECAUSE we torture. Whatever we do to another country, how can we condemn them if they do the same to OUR military? John McCain has said torture doesn't work. He should fucking know. Robert Baer said it doesn't work. CIA for 25 years, I think he's a better source of information that most of the idiots out there. The bottom line is that we need to improve intelligence at the outset instead of waiting to capture some one to find out what's going on (and, by torturing them, we are getting incorrect information, read the fucking studies).

Until congress forces the different agencies to work better together, and until our intell community returns to HUMINT instead of relying on technology to gather information, things won't get better. But, you can see how stupid we are about these things. We put people at the airport to screen for terrorists instead of spending that money trying to find them BEFORE they buy a plane ticket.

Back in I think it was 1995 Clinton signed a bill that said the intell community could no longer recruit people who had a criminal record. That has to be one of the STUPIDEST decisions ever made. Who do YOU want as a source of information? A little old lady who's never done anything, or a woman who has worked with criminals and knows what they are doing? The problem was confounded by agency directors who put more money into technology than boots on the ground. Would it have been easy to find out about the 911 plot? No, but could it have been done? YES. There are MANY books out there about the intell failure that led to 911, and they are based on what's been declassified. I'm sure there's even more stuff out there pointing to the intell communities' failure.

And here's another thing to think about...torture assumes the person captured is guilty without any due process to determine guilt. That is TOTALLY against the way america is supposed to work. How would YOU feel if a member of your family was captured by the Saudi government, for standing on a street corner in let's say Istanbul, on vacation. The Saudis' took that member of your family and you had no idea where they were. Your family member was gone for 5 years. The whole time the government was torturing him or her.

Would you be like "oh, that's okay, they were doing it for protection"?

And if you have a loved one in Iraq, how do you feel about the fact that they would be treated equally to how we've treated prisoners? Would you be okay with that, water boarding, beating to the point of organ failure, sensory deprivation? Or would you at that point want to invoke the geneva convention?

If we don't believe that every human being is equal, we have lost our humanity. The fact that someone is an insurgent in Iraq does not make them any less of a human being than we are. If we can't treat them with respect that should be accorded to anyone with a soul, we should not call ourselves religious, or believers in god.

We should call ourselves inhuman because that's how we are behaving. And the fact that we have imprisoned innocent people, and tortured them, is going to have blowback. If you don't believe that you know nothing about history or the middle east.