A few questions about torture

[struggle4progress]

Congress should get answers from the policy-makers

Karen J. Greenberg, Joshua L. Dratel
Sunday, January 23, 2005

<snip> -- Does torture work? Given the detailed attention shown in the White House memos to describing three levels of interrogation (from questioning to physical abuse) to be applied in the war on terror, is there an underlying assumption that torture in fact really works? That it is more effective than ordinary means of questioning prisoners? And, if so, what does it work to produce?

Have you considered whether it is a means of venting frustration or a means of obtaining reliable information? Is there clinical, verifiable evidence that torture produces better information more quickly and more accurately than other methods of interrogation?

Did your discussions of torture involve consulting experts in Israel, Britain, Egypt and elsewhere? If so, what did those sources have to say in recommending torture? Or was the administration convinced of the efficacy of torture before it began drawing up its legal documents?

-- Assuming, for a moment, that torture is effective, what is the difference between this conflict and these detainees, and previous conflicts and prisoners? <snip>

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/23/ING4IASU9U1.DTL

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. what I have read

in articles in regards to torture at Abu Ghraib, experts from the FBI said that torture does not get any reliable information.

[judy]

2. In a new documentary "The Power of Nightmares"

(soon to come to the SF International Film Festival), it is very clear that there is a very close link between torture and the birth of a terrorist.
They show how Sayed Qutb, mentor to Ayman Al Zahawiri became a fanatic after being tortured by Nasser's CIA trained police in Egypt.

"Qutb survived, but the torture had a powerful radicalizing effect on his ideas. Up to this point, he had believed that the Western secular ideas simply created the selfishness and the isolation he had seen in the United States. But the torture, he believed, showed that this culture also unleashed the most brutal and barbarous aspects of human beings. Qutb began to have an apocalyptic vision of a disease that was spreading from the West throughout the world."

I think torture is very effective, not in gathering information (I would say anything not to be tortured), but in creating determined fanatics.

Good Job, Smirky!!