The Pointless Scuffle Over Torture

[Flabbergasted]

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1668971,00.html?xid=rss-topstories

The Pointless Scuffle Over Torture
Friday, Oct. 05, 2007 By ROBERT BAER

The CIA is still torturing, according to the New York Times, and the Administration is still denying it. "The government does not torture," Bush said Friday.

So what do you call simulated drownings — waterboarding — and slapping and freezing, techniques that were approved in a 2005 secret Department of Justice legal opinion? If the Eighth Amendment prohibits American police from waterboarding suspects, common sense tells me it's illegal.

But legal or not, the important thing to remember is that torture doesn't work. When I was in the CIA I never came across a country that systematically tortures its citizens and at the same time produces useful intelligence. The objective of torture, invariably, is intimidation.

When Stalin asked the KGB to find out how to make an atomic bomb, the KGB didn't kidnap and torture American and British scientists. It recruited spies. And Stalin got his bomb.

The Israelis figured all of this out a long time ago. For the last three years I have been in and out of Israeli jails interviewing members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Many of them had been in suicide bomber cells — just the kind of people the Israelis would want to extract every last detail out of. None of them, however, claimed to have been tortured. The Israelis found out what they needed to know using traditional, legal police methods. It simply isn't worth it for them to risk damaging their already shaky international reputation by torturing suspects on the slim hope they just may get a lead.

[PDJane]

1. He is correct, as far as it goes.

However, the main use of torture, IMHO, is to produce the "intelligence" that will allow the administration to go on with the "war on terror." That means that the people being tortured and admitting to crimes are mostly innocents confessing to heinous acts so that they can get out of the US hellholes and back into their own lands.

It's not a pointless exercise. The whole damn "war" was bogus, and the torture is just a means to an end.

[babylonsister]

2. Baer is right, as are the Israelis. We have a major relationship with them;

why isn't anyone listening?:-(

[nightrider767]

3. I think water boarding is torture

Being a Navy pilot, I went through the Navy's Survival, Escape and Evasion training. Basically, if you get shot down, what to do and what to expect if you're captured. One of the forms of torture that we were trained to expect was the "water-board". Water boarding simulates drowning. It may not seem like much to the layman, but it's as barbaric electrocution. Remember, drowning is one of the most painful deaths you can experience.

Water-boarding, electrocution, sexual humiliation, beatings. All the domain of cowards.

Is water boarding torture? Just check the Navy's manual. They sort of know about that after Vietnam.

[PDJane]

4. Of course it's torture...........

But how else do you get the propaganda if the situation is not as you have portrayed? If you don't care about truth, it's a fine tool.

[nightrider767]

5. It's DIsgusting

And it's approved Chicken Hawks....

Scumbags.....