Here's what I've never understood about "torture"

[theboss]

Why did the Bush administration announce it as a policy?

I am sure this will offend people, but...whatever.

I feel confident in saying that at some point during the Cold War, a Soviet agent had his fingernails ripped out by an American.

In the future, I can envision a scenario where some toxic chemical has been stolen and some Yemeni immigrant knows where it is hidden but won't tell.

If something like that happens once every five years in the basement of some CIA safe house, I don't think any American is going to lose too much sleep.

The issue is, why did this become national policy? Why did the Bush Administration fetishize waterboarding to the point that they made it sound like something they did on Saturday night for kicks? And why did it suddenly become - or at least seem to become - a go to tactic, as opposed to something done during rare, drastic moments (and then never discussed again).

Obama obviously can't say this, but the message needs to be "Torture as a policy is over (but if it happens during a moment of national emergency once in the next four years, just don't tell me about it)."

The more you think about this, the more it becomse clear that there was something deeply wrong on a psychological level with the Bush Administration. And the damage they have done to the national psyche is going to take a long time to clean up. They made the twisted underbelly of our way of life, the mainstream.

It's almost as if Granny Porn had suddenly shown up on prime-time television. There are some things that we know exist, but are best left in the brown paper wrapper at the back of the store.

[stillcool]

1. I think it has as much to do with..

other detainee's as the one's being tortured..like a 'terrorism' thing. I also think that after they were caught it was necessary to make it legal. That's kind of normal isn't it?

[lxlxlxl]

2. setting up a political game...advertising and pacification

i dont think there is anything offensive about what you said.

its as if gitmo is really not a prison, but an advertisement for american's ability to get away with whatever they want.

it's an advertisement that we will treat innocent people viciously, so imagine what we will do to guilty people. it's tcheka/stalinist tactics at their most inhuman, state terror, cynically deployed by people who are simultaneously privileged by god and threatened by everything.

what is a war on terror? its like a war on drugs. How do you defeat cartels? Get rid of leaders? no, you leave the leaders alive as long as you can track what it/they are doing. that's exactly what they are doing with OBL and AQ, they can't get rid of them, they need them to exist in order to keep on top of what they are doing, what new people are getting involved, who/what/where etc...etc...

what is sickening is not that there is a rational strategy to contain terrorism, but that bush/cheney/GOP use it as a political bludgeon in order to make them look like their flag is bigger than everyone elses, that there are people who don't want to fight terrorism, etc...etc...

[nomorenomore08]

3. "It's almost as if Granny Porn had suddenly shown up on prime-time television."

You have a gift for analogy, my friend. :rofl:

But on a more serious note, I agree with you that there may be extreme cases where a form of torture is necessary (if still not morally justified), but to use it as a "go-to" tactic does indeed speak to something very wrong in the psyche of our government, and really in the national psyche as a whole (considering how many people unquestioningly support such measures). You'd think people got all their information about counter-terrorist operations from "24," which is analogous to learning about police work from a Dirty Harry movie. I guess it's true what they say, that fantasy has largely replaced reality in the public mind...

[theboss]

4. It really is about living in some fantasy world

I'm sure at some point in our history, some police detective snapped and killed a suspected pedophile or murderer in cold blood and got away with it. You know, a nation can survive if something like that happens on occasion.

If it is happening every week in every police department across the country, we can't survive though.

[EFerrari]

7. Torture has been an ongoing issue in Chicago for years, fyi.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/03/chicops.html

[theboss]

9. Well, it was more or less written policy during the Daley years

The Chicago Police have always been part police force/part enforcers.

[EFerrari]

15. It wasn't only Chicago, either. I saw a story on Amy's show where

the Chicago PD were "interrogating" a group of guys, two of whom where from San Francisco. So, they flew in some of our cops to "help out". I wonder how many guys from how many departments were flown in the same way.

[nomorenomore08]

12. Right. As long as excessive tactics are the exception rather than the norm, then the social fabric

will likely remain intact. Not to say that it's right, necessarily, that a KGB agent would be tortured or a murder suspect killed, but I do think there's a certain threshold up to which such things are "acceptable," if only in the sense that they aren't treated as normal procedure. When they are, they become a major threat to an ostensibly civilized society.

[theboss]

27. It's sort of like the Ramparts scandal (or other big police scandals)

The public always seems tolerant that there is going to be some graft and corruption in a metropolitan police force. It's when it reaches a tipping point, that the social contract falls apart.

[EFerrari]

5. You answered your own question. Torture does work -- on the spectators.

It doesn't give you good information but it does intimidate the populace that knows it is in use. Extreme head games.

[theboss]

6. I don't think it intimidated the population though; it seemed to embolden them

Maybe the Administration wanted to play on our blood lust. But that seems like a pretty dangerous game to get involved in.

[EFerrari]

8. When you think about it, faced with the knowledge that your government

rounds up people without due process and tortures them, you have a choice. You can either identify with the victims or you can identify with the torturers. We (using the term loosely) did the latter.

It is a dangerous game, for sure, but on par with all the other dangerous games that Cheney/Rumsfeld went for and managed to sell to Bush. The blow back from rounding up and torturing is going to be with us for many, many years.

[theboss]

11. Well said

I can see its popularity after 9/11. What I find disturbing is that there is still this debate 7 years after 9/11 and in the face of Bush's plummeting approval?

It's like Americans said, We hate you....but we still love the torture.

[EFerrari]

14. Solly Mack and I have talked about this "forgetting" many times.

I've watched hearing after hearing where Congress seems so "surprised" that we are torturing people -- as if they'd not sat through hearing after hearing on the very same topic. It's just uncanny. The debate restarts every time. :shrug:

It is disturbing that we can't hang on to what we know from one week to another. And it's more than our short attention span. It's something about this particular issue that makes people go stupid and suppress what they know already.

[underpants]

10. Political reasons-W is "THE MAN" he is protecting you

and anyone who questions him is rooting against America. This was the strategy for getting the second term and the first mid-term

That being said. Your post reminds of my wandering why Condi and others would publicly say "We are using a carrot and stick strategy on them". Who comes out and TELLS people what their method is? Does a wishbone offense walk up and say "We are running right"??? No of course not. Yeah you know they are either going right or left but you don't know which.

I really think it goes back to sports. Aside from W and Rummy none of those guys ever played sports that I can find. They don't understand the basics of competition. They are just mealy little worms (not that you can play sports and not be a worm) tiny little backstabbers and grandstanders.

[nomorenomore08]

13. And the "rules" are rigged in their favor of course. Not very sportsmanlike, is it?

:P

[EFerrari]

17. These guys never wanted anything to do with free markets and fair competition

did they?

[nomorenomore08]

21. Does a grizzly bear use the forest as a latrine?

nt

[EFerrari]

16. Remember that dear Ray McGovern said Cheney and Rumsfeld

used to be called "the crazies"?

[JackRiddler]

18. Exactly what you say, plus another reason...

A great deal of what they did was done to establish the right of the unitary executive at permanent war to violate any law and to do so in public. (I honestly think this is one reason there were no major pardons in the end - no apologies.) It was a variant of shock and awe.

But they also wanted to bring a great many previously covert illegal practices into the open, not for the purpose of exposure, but so that these could be expanded and put on budget. The interesting thing is that this may now create the opportunity to truly abolish such activities, since no one can deny them any more.

A rabid crew they were, and their works still prevail and they can still easily come back to power if justice is not served. Investigate, expose, prosecute, abolish!

[Vincardog]

19. BUT "torture" DOES NOT WORK. Your toxic chemical just like the ticking time bomb

story is Bull $$$hit.
IT assumes that you would get useful information by using torture.
That assumption is BULL$hit.

If it happens it needs to be brought to light and stopped.

[theboss]

25. It might work once in a while

Any approach might work on occasion. Anyway, the point is not to justify it. Just to point out that aside from being immoral, it's a stupid approach.

[Belial]

28. I dunno.. I was watching Burn Notice last night..

they got what they wanted out of those guys with Torture.. }(

[Still Sensible]

20. Double Whammy answer that plays into

the politics we have had to live with since 9-11... and it has all been based on their "keep-Americans-scared" doctrine...

Whammy 1 -- We are taking every step necessary to protect you from the evildoers...

Whammy 2 -- The democrats that are arguing against this are pussies that are unwilling to make this hard decision and do what it takes to keep you safe...

And such bullshit.

[TWiley]

22. The problem is that you are searching for a pre-determined outcome.

Instead of looking for the truth; you are proving a pre-determined position.

I know you are guilty, so I will drill holes in your flesh and stuff lit cigarettes into them until you tell me just how guilty you really are.

Don't worry though, I never do this to innocent people. I only enjoy doing it to the guilty ones.

Factoid:

Loving Christians would tie women and dunk them in the water. If they drowned, then they were innocent. If they survived, then it was evidence of supernatural power, and they were burned at the stake. YOUR Christian heritage hard at work for justice!

[noise]

23. A couple of reasons

1. Politics. Showed they were "tough on terror." The authoritarian GOP base loves this sort of bullshit.

2. Tipping point towards a closed society. As Naomi Wolf wrote about in The End of America.

Sadly, there are plenty of journalists (for example Evan Thomas at Newsweek) who are still trying to justify the use of torture. Their evidence appears to be Bush's word.

[treestar]

24. Assumption is that the Yemeni will tell you

In response to physical pain. Maybe said Yemeni won't tell you. Now you've created a martyr.

There's always another, better way to get accurate information.

I even wonder why not offer the Yemeni a million bucks or something like that - if it's really that important to know, why is it to be presumed that the punishment is more likely to give a result than reward.

[theboss]

26. You're too hung up on the example

I'm not justifying it or saying it is right or whatever. My point is that as an exception, a nation can survive with such acts. As a policy, we are doomed.

[treestar]

29. OK, without the example

the tortured person doesn't always give up the truth. Then there's always the consideration the tortured person doesn't know the information, either.