The argument that the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden shows that George W. Bush’s torture policies were justified got another rehearsal in Newsweek fromYale professorStephen Carter (5/5/11):
In the end, we were able to track bin Laden because he communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers. And what was the source of this vital clue? The intelligence apparently came from detainees imprisoned in secret facilities overseas and subjected to what has been euphemistically called “enhanced” interrogation….
So the information from the detainees was crucial, and we face an uncomfortable irony, both political and ethical. The finest moment of Barack Obama’s presidency to this point came about precisely because of the detention system against which he railed during his campaign. Indeed, the only slip in what was otherwise an exemplary performance on May 1 was the president’s failure to credit his predecessor, who established the controversial mechanism that likely led us to bin Laden’s door. If we are cheering bin Laden’s death, then we are also cheering, whether we like it or not, the methods that brought it about.
Three cheers for torture–because the “vital clue” that “led us to bin Laden’s door” was that he “communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers”? So without this “crucial” information, the U.S. government wouldn’t have been looking for bin Laden’s couriers? Or if it had found them, it wouldn’t have realized they were important? Maybe it would have wasted time looking for couriers who were only children. “Bin Laden’s door” it isn’t.
Newsweek‘s rationale for cheering terrorism is no more convincing than the one advanced by Time (FAIR Blog, 5/6/11), which argued that the fact that detainees didn’t give up any information about the courier under torture was key evidence that the courier was important.
One gets the sense that people who participated in torture, or helped to justify it–as Carter did in his book The Violence of Peace–recognize on some level that this was a horrible thing to do, and are desperate to assert that their moral collapse was not in vain.
Warning to all Americanskies.
The people of USA must express belief in this propaganda for the good of their own nation.
Look what happened to the Soviet Union when its people stopped believing in that state’s version of the truth.
So it’s okay to torture as long as it helps you find the person you want to murder. Or perhaps as long as it MIGHT help you find the person you want to murder (not, of course, bring to justice–as in a fair trial before the world). Torture, assassination–it all goes together, doesn’t it. The New Amerika.
Note that Newsweek under it’s new editor, has pretty much gotten rid of all hard news and substituted analysis, celebrity news, and big pictures.
They got the “news’ out, but they didn’t get the ‘weak’ out.
Paul Street wrote that ‘high intelligence can be (and often is) marshaled to destructive and regressive causes.’ Carter’s endorsement of Obama’s endorsement of torture is a sad example of this. We have got to be more vigilant against Obama who campaigned against torture, yet have let the Senate Democrats change his position, and have allowed the torture of Bradley Manning with all that we now know about Guantanamo. No amount of intelligence can trump something Oprah said today: “those who know better, do better.”
Maybe we just have to admit the sociopaths are in charge. They just seem to have more persistence and energy, and their arguments are easier to understand in sound bites.
Personally, I’m sure that torture is not effective, and does not lead to reliable intelligence. But that’s beside the point. The point is the torture is IMMORAL and ILLEGAL. That should be the end of the argument.
The United States of America is supposed to be better than this.
Actually, torture is highly effective. Just not effective at obtaining reliable, accurate, actionable intelligence.
Torture is, however, a highly effective tool for terrorizing populations (toe the line or this could happen to you!) and at extracting such items as false confessions or any other “intelligence” that government agents want to hear or report as true, whether they are true or not (yes, yes, I’m a witch/subversive/whatever, and so is my neighbor down the street).
And that’s why governments want to keep using it.
It kind of looks like all the powers- that- be want to justify this barbaric behavior with the exception of one (McCain) who actually was tortured. You would think that would be food for thought for our great leaders, but of course you would think wrong. Should they ever have to endure what they re-released on the world, it will be laced with the knowledge of their own complicity. I really no longer believe we evolve as a species. This return to vicious cruelty is proof to me we are actually going backward.
Well, I think people are still evolving, Carol. But governments, naturally, will be much slower. Governments do what’s expedient and then defend as much as they have to. Of course when they own the media, defending is very easy. They just make it up as the go along. Oudiva is right, I think, that useful information is not generally attained by way of torture, and I think even Dick Cheney knows that. But I think Jim is right too, that torture is “working” as a terror technique. A reputation for ruthlessness is very useful when your goal is to run the world. But we, the American people, can’t be told that. We’d have to admit that we are terrorists. That would never do.
Well, given that Newsweek–like TIME–is an Establishment propaganda rag, it’s no surprise that it endorses torture.
Several intelligence officials, INCLUDING DONALD RUMSFELD, has corrected this idea that detainees under torture supplied the crucial information to hunt down bin Laden. Despite the torture policy, there were other professionally trained interrogators that used the LEGAL methods (which works somewhat like the Stockholm syndrome), to gain trustworthy information. KSM was quite a braggart, taking credit for all kinds of crimes and terrorist attacks, including 9/11, BEFORE he was waterboarded. After the first waterboarding, he clammed up.
If torture works, KSM should have given us libraries of information from being waterboarded 183 times! Instead, he gave his torturers whatever he THOUGHT they wanted, which was useless information. Why else would he have been waterboarded 183 times? Because we didn’t get the information we ‘wanted’ at least 182 times! At 183, we may have just given up. Torture is used to elicit DESIRED information, particularly testimony that provides the captors with the RATIONALE for their actions. The Bush administration knew there were no WMD’s in Iraq, but they needed “testimony” that there were. There is a good reason why this kind of “testimony” is not allowed in courts.