Yesterday when I was running an errand, I caught talk of the nation on NPR. Neil Conan was interviewing Robert Baer and Ted Koppel about torture, and whether it should be legal. If you care at all about this issue, I recommend a listen: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104021713
I was horrified to hear most of the idiots who called into the show that said it was okay to torture people. Robert Baer, who worked for the CIA, said he has never, ever in his career encountered a situation where torture was necessary. He cited examples of countries that torture (us, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, yeah, we're in great company) and said that they consistently have bad intell, where as countries that don't torture (he cited Jordan as an example) get good intell.
Ted brought up the whole "bus is going to blow up, you have to get the location of the bomb immediately" situation, and Robert Baer said those types of situations rarely, rarely if ever happen, and should not be grounds for having a law that says torture is legal.
I won't go too much into a tirade on this, but I read a quote that I thought was very profound about torture. It's in this week's issue of the new yorker, in an article by Philip Gourevitch, where he says:
"Former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that we must torture because it is effective*. That is at best, a false argument: a crime is not absolved because it works. (After all, terrorism can be effective.)"
I also would like to point out to any conservatives reading this that the problem stems from the intell community. If they did a better job doing their jobs, we wouldn't need to torture people. 9/11 didn't happen because we failed to torture people. 9/11 happened because the disparate intell agencies weren't sharing and acting on intell. Why wait until a crime is about to be committed to have to hurry up and torture someone? Why not be fucking on top of the problem BEFORE it becomes a problem?
Bush set up the DNI but that has just created another level of bureaucracy and its only purpose was to give bush intell analyzed to support whatever bush was doing. And nothing has changed in the intell community since 9/11. There are still information stove pipes, people who won't work together, and idiots who would rather go home on time than do their fucking jobs. Because, I guess they figure we can torture people and find out by being a bully what they were too stupid to figure out using their brains.
Anyway, it's something that has been weighing on my mind. This concludes the tirade on torture.
*and the idea that torture is effective has been mis-proven so many times in so many studies I assume the only reason that assumption still exists is because the idiots on Fox news are reporting their usual incorrect information
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Yes, it is true that torture is ineffective. After all I was tortured for many years by having to look at Shelf Butt, Julianne, and,additionally, having to imagine the M. Hom and J. Bayless sex tape. And yet I never divulged anything . . .
ReplyDeleteYou could get almost anyone to confess to shooting JFK after after 30 minutes of water-boarding, unless they had gills of course. The fall out from this is it puts captured servicemen and women at far greater risk than ever before.
ReplyDeleteI was agreeing with you, you Nimrod! My point is that torture is ineffectual, because you can get anyone to confess to anything. I did not realize that my last comment was that ambiguous that it could be misconstrued as being pro-torture. I thought it was clear that the word "this" referred to the situation being discussed i.e., "US torture of detainees."
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