So yeah, we’re talking about torture again. I’m sure some of my readers are bloody sick of the subject. Hell, on some level I’m even sick of the subject. But it’s too important to ignore, and I think I need to address a very important aspect of how our national conversation about torture has been framed. As an aside, it makes me a little disgusted that our nation is actually discussing it. . . but that’s another rant for another day.

I’ve been saying for a long time, both here on my website and to anyone that will listen, that torture doesn’t work as a tool for gathering information. And this is true, much in the same way that a hammer is a terrible tool for driving screws. That doesn’t mean that torture is ineffective – far from it. Torture is very effective at its intended purpose, which is and has always been the extraction of false confessions. If you hurt someone badly enough, over a long enough period of time, they will eventually say or do just about anything to make that pain stop. Some people might break in hours. Others might be able to hold out for months, even years.

From the Spanish Inquisition to the Third Reich to the Khmer Rouge and all points of totalitarian oppression in between, torture was, has been and always will be principally effective in eliciting false admissions – specifically, targeted admissions. In fact, when you get right down to it, torture is really only useful if you already know what you want to hear. It doesn’t provide useful information because unless you already know the answer to your question, you have no idea if the victim is telling the truth, or simply fabricating intelligence in order to end the torture.

The counter-argument I’ve heard consistently, in favor of the use of torture, is that we may (or may not) have received critical information from torturing prisoners that helped fight al Queda. The first problem I have with that assertion is that it’s being made by the same bunch of duplicitous pricks that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was an imminent threat, and that Hussein had direct ties to al Queda. They were wrong on all counts, and continue (to this day, in some cases) to assert these fictions to anyone who will listen.

So why in the hell are we willing to believe them about torture’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism? If we assume they are telling the truth, it treads against literally thousands of years of human experience. If we assume they are lying, it precisely follows the pattern of covering-their-asses lies that we heard from every other orifice of the Bush Administration.

And that pattern is not unique to Iraq. No one could have predicted that terrorists would slam planes into buildings – except for the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and any counter-terrorism expert with more than a week’s worth of experience. No one realized the levees in New Orleans would breach – except for FEMA, Homeland Security, the Army Corps of Engineers, and hell, the freaking Weather Channel. We absolutely do not spy on American citizens – except that we do. And of course we get easily acquirable warrants from the very security-conscience FISA court first – except that we don’t.  I could go on for days. Hit the archives of this site, and you’ll see that I have. Occam’s Razor demands, at the very least, that you acknowledge the likelihood of a cover-up concerning the use and usefulness of torture.

Which brings me back to the original point. Why would we torture prisoners? It’s not that I think that everyone in the Bush Administration has some sort of sadism fetish, or that I think they’re “evil”. Excuse me for not seeing the world in stark, absolute black and white. What I’ve long asserted, and what is quickly coming to light, is that our government tortured prisoners for the exact same reason that every other regime or government has tortured people. To force confessions, accuracy be damned.

It’s a pretty open secret that the neoconservative movement has had a hard-on for toppling Saddam Hussein – as far back as the mid 90s. It’s clear as day on the Project for the New American Century‘s website – specifically their 1997 Statement of Principles (signed by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Bennett, Scooter Libby and Jeb Bush, amongst others). At least four years before they took the White House, this group of people was advocating using overwhelming American military force to control the world’s energy supply.

In a 1999 letter to Bill Clinton they insisted that America’s top national security priority should be, “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power”. That letter, incidentally, was signed by Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfelt, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, William Bennett and Richard Armitage. The same men who were telling us just three years later that Saddam was going to hand off WMDs to al Queda. And the same men that to this day defend the torture of prisoners in American custody.

I know that’s a lot of names, but I have a few more to throw at you. The first is Paul O’Neill. He was Secretary of the Treasury, appointed by George W. Bush. He resigned after less than two years, and later admitted that he was asked (read: told) to leave. In 2004 he wrote a book called The Price of Loyalty where he talked frequently about the new administration’s obsession with Saddam Hussein from the moment they took power – long before 9/11 and during a time when they effectively ignored global terrorism in general and al Queda specifically.

All of these assertions are corroborated by many sources, from the several books Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame) wrote about the Bush White House to the statements of counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke. Clarke served under every President from Ronald Reagan on forward. In his book Against All Enemies, Clarke tells a very similar tale about the Day One efforts to remove Hussein and the complete devaluing of counter-terrorism efforts against bin Laden.

In order to sell the American people on a war in Iraq, though, the government needed a better rationale than the Reverse Domino Theory that PNAC so clearly outlines. What they needed was to link Hussein to al Queda, which of course they could not actually do because the two were enemies. On at least one occasion, bin Laden called for revolution in Iraq and the beheading of Saddam Hussein (on one of his Greatest Hits tapes, which we don’t really get many of anymore). So what the neoconservatives who found themselves in charge of the most powerful military on the planet really needed was some sort of evidence that could tie Hussein, even tangentally, to the men behind 9/11.

What they needed were false confessions from captured al Queda prisoners. And that’s exactly what they got. Because like I said before, any human being will break after the right amount of pressure is applied over the right span of time. And once that happens, they will say anything – anything – to make their own suffering stop. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz. . . that whole crew was well aware of that fact. It’s why they started torturing prisoners in early 2002, before the invasion of Iraq. And it’s why they stopped torturing prisoners in 2004, after we’d already sealed the deal. It was done specifically and meticulously to provide just another false justification for the invasion of Iraq.

And if that doesn’t piss you off, I honestly don’t know what will.

Update: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (the “mastermind” of 9/11) says that he lied to his interrogators in order to get the torture to stop. Like I said, torture is very effective. But not at gathering information.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 11:19 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.