Against Torture

[randwolf]

Have I missed the day? It seems I have. We've been dealing with a domestic drama involving my lover's daughter, and I have had other things on my mind. And at first I thought I didn't have anything to say on the subject. I mean, what is there to say other than, "torture bad?" Which has been said over and over again over the centuries, believed for

Comments

[sajia]

A fine essay. Most of the essays I've read focus on the "torture gives false information" aspect, but this one goes beyond in talking of why governments persist in doing it, and how they might be persuaded to change their mind.
I never doubted for a moment that Americans would be torturing people as soon as they invaded Iraq. I can kind of understand why American civilians might not have thought so, because there's no publicized documentation of American soldiers torturing Germans during WWII and of course the Japanese, the Koreans, and the Vietnamese are not human as far as middle America are concerned.

[randwolf]

Thank you. We didn't expect it, you know--the Bush II administration exceeded the worst fears of all but the most radical of its domestic critics. Torture had not been US military policy since the 19th century--it is after all illegal. What we have now is is a horrifying relapse, made the more horrifying by the relentless propaganda defense of the practice. Brrr.

[sajia]

But hadn't people heard of the School of the Americas? It might have been illegal, but that doesn't mean American soldiers and spies weren't torturing.

[randwolf]

People thought that wasn't "normal", and as far as I can tell they were correct; the torture trainers were a very small faction of army intelligence and the CIA, which strictly speaking isn't the military at all. When Rumsfeld, probably acting on Cheney's orders, wanted to torture at Abu Ghraib, he actually had to install his own hand-picked people, trained at Guantanamo Bay, and at that some of them were CIA or mercenaries. (Look up Janis Karpinski's book for details.) As far as I can tell, Terry Karney, over at Making Light, is much more representative of the former Army position than Rummy's bastards. Now, of course, the rot has spread. Any army stretched thin will become brutal, and the army in Iraq is stretched very thin.

What I think most of us underestimated, even people like me who could see these people were imperial wannabes, was just how corrupt and corrupting the Bush administration would turn out to be. It is enough to make one believe in demons.

[catsittingstill]

You come at this from a really different perspective than I do. I don't mean that as any kind of disagreement--I had just never thought to approach the matter from this direction.

Thank you.

[kylakae]

Wow, very nicely thought out essay. Lots of food for thought, there.

[randwolf]

Thanks! (I'm just glad that people actually read it.)