Permission to torture is really an obligation to torture

[gratuitous]

I've posted this before, both here at DU and at the Bartcop site (which I don't visit anymore, precisely because of this issue). But once we have decided that torturing people to extract important information is allowable (the "ticking time bomb" scenario so favored by Hollywood), we pass very quickly down the line from "torture is allowable under circumstance X" to "torture is imperative, because this might be circumstance X and we just don't know it yet."

Today's New York Times has a story where this happened exactly:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10detain.html

At a Secret Interrogation, Dispute Flared Over Tactics

By DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: September 10, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — Abu Zubaydah, the first Osama bin Laden henchman captured by the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was bloodied and feverish when a C.I.A. security team delivered him to a secret safe house in Thailand for interrogation in the early spring of 2002. Bullet fragments had ripped through his abdomen and groin during a firefight in Pakistan several days earlier when he had been captured.

* * *

By all accounts, Mr. Zubaydah’s condition was rapidly deteriorating when he arrived in Thailand. Soon after his capture, Mr. Zubaydah nearly died of his infected wounds. At one point, he was covertly rushed to a hospital after C.I.A. medical officers warned that he might not survive if he did not receive more extensive medical treatment.

According to accounts from five former and current government officials who were briefed on the case, F.B.I. agents — accompanied by intelligence officers — initially questioned him using standard interview techniques. They bathed Mr. Zubaydah, changed his bandages, gave him water, urged improved medical care, and spoke with him in Arabic and English, languages in which he is fluent.

* * *

In Thailand, the new C.I.A. team concluded that under standard questioning Mr. Zubaydah was revealing only a small fraction of what he knew, and decided that more aggressive techniques were warranted.

_______________________

Please note the sequence of events: Zubaydah, badly injured, is nursed back to health, and using standard interrogation procedures, reveals what he knows. Later the CIA shows up, and based on nothing, decides that he knows more and that "more aggressive techniques" will get the vital information out of him. Unfortunately for Zubaydah, he didn't have any more information, and was subjected to torture just for the hell of it because he might have known something, and the CIA interrogators had to be sure.

Read the article and decide for yourself whether Zubaydah was tortured just for funsies. But it certainly was torture, and as The Rude Pundit says today, "Whether or not you think Zubaydah 'deserved' his treatment (and if you do, you're a vicious pig fucker), at a bare minimum we could agree on the label of 'torture.'"

And that's why I don't go to Bartcop anymore.

[EFerrari]

1. Torture isn't used to get good information. It's used to intimidate

your oppoenents.

And in the case of this Cabal, that would be us.