as if either of these ought to be news

[winterbadger]

Waterboarding is torture

"Two problems with torture: It's wrong and it doesn't work..."

Sadly, they are.

Thanks to tacnukesoul, from whose LJ I ganked the links.

Comments

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Waterboarding is torture. And, in other news, the sky is blue.

Still, having a SERE instructor speaking out against this shit...that's pretty powerful.

[winterbadger]

What's depressing is reading the LONG conversation of comments, in which relatively intelligent people, clearly believing that they are morally in the right, ignore or seek to explain away everything he says. I'd try to find it funny, but I think I've just seen so many earnest, righteous, sincere, but deeply morally corrupt people speaking about "right" in the last four years that I can't manage it any more.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

They're trying to avoid the cognitive dissonance by papering it over instead of admitting they were wrong and changing opinions.

[winterbadger]

Would that I thought that were true. What bothers me is that I really do not think that they do not believe they are wrong--they truly believe that our society is morally superior to its enemies, despite using the same methods they do, because we use those methods to what we believe to be a moral end. Very literally "the end justifies the means".

What leaves me confused and baffled is the stubborn unwillingness to believe pretty much every professional interrogator when they say "Torture does not produce reliable information."

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

American exceptionalism, in other words? The whole "We are the Good Guys by definition, so we can do no wrong" business that they try to instill in the schools? That could be.

I think they resist the fact that torture doesn't work because it seems like it should, y'know? I mean, on the surface, the idea of forcing someone through pain to tell you what you want to know sounds like it makes sense. You have to think about it (for a few moments) to realize why it wouldn't work. I think thinking is something some people try to avoid at all costs.

[winterbadger]

I think they resist the fact that torture doesn't work because it seems like it should, y'know? I mean, on the surface, the idea of forcing someone through pain to tell you what you want to know sounds like it makes sense.

Agreed. They think about what they would not want to tell someone, and how horrifying torture would be, and think "I would break and tell." Which of course they would. So would you. So would I. What doesn't occur to them is that they would tell that, and about 50000000 other things, all at once, because they would want to tell the torturers whatever they want to hear.

And what leads to more of that sort of thinking is the constant harping on the "where is the bomb" scenario. But what the SERE trainer, and all the other people who have talked about interrogation in the press have pointed out, is that rarely if ever do such situations arise. You're not asking, "Which of these three identical doors is the tiger behind?" You're asking "Who are the guys you talk to to find out where to leave the stuff? And where you do meet them? And who do they know?" It's not one one simple nugget of information you are trying to hide. It's a mass of data. And no interrogator is going to stop when he gets one piece of data--he wants everything he can get out of you. And the longer you are telling him stuff, the longer you are *not* being tortured.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

I've a friend in the Army, who was in Iraq, whose MOS is interrogation. One of the things she told me is that, once you have someone in an interrogation room, they can't be assumed to know anything about what's going to happen in the field. They can tell you about what has happened, and what they heard might happen, but their information is no longer current when they're out of circulation.

So "ticking bomb" really can't happen, unless you catch the person WITH the bomb ON them. And then they just blow themselves (and you) up.