They point out that they never used any sort of pain or stress when interrogating prisoners, and did their best to befriend prisoners. And it worked. They got a lot more information out of captured Nazi generals and such by playing chess with them than the guys at Gitmo are getting with their torture. As far as I know, not a single major al Qaeda figure has been captured based on info from Gitmo. We'd know about it if they were, because the Bush Administration simply can't keep their mouth shut about how great torturing them darkies down at Gitmo is.
But then again, that assumes that we're torturing prisoners down at Gitmo in order to get sound and usable information. That is of course not the case at all. We are torturing prisoners down at Gitmo in order to get confessions. Whether they actually did the crime to which they confess or not is irrelevant. What is important is that we have confessions of heinous crimes to wave in front of the American people in order to terrify them into giving yet more power to the Busheviks. It's the same trick that the Bolsheviks used in Soviet Russia to convince people that the mean evil Capitalists were coming to render every good Soviet citizen into his body fat for use as motor oil. Busheviks, Bolsheviks, different rhetoric but same general philosophies of government...
-- Badtux the Confessional Penguin
the best intelligence we ever received in vietnam came from a program called "chu hoi" (open arms, welcome home). the process worked like this, an nva or vc would be either captured or would come in with the purpose of defection (which happened all the time, often over stuff like "i was hungry dude, fish heads and rice balls get old after six months"), and at some point the interrogator (who would take up to six weeks preparing the subject for this moment) would say "you know, i like you, if you can give me some information about positions and strength that we can prove, i'll get my bosses to put in the paperwork to send you to america, the big PX, and we'll make sure that you have enough money to get started on your way. how does a liquor store in orange county or a pho shop in fresno sound?" from that moment on, there were no communists in the room, only good solid americans doing business.
ReplyDeletethat shit worked.
There are lots of reasons to oppose torture. For one thing, virtually no one working in a military or a terrorist organization has any information with much of a shelf life. Local cities have a hard time keeping to a time frame to build a bridge on schedule--I'm sure that fluid terrorist cells are not somehow more organized in their planning. But more importantly, we don't want to let the government assume that they have the right to pick people up, detain them without trial, and then torture them. We always need to keep close track of what our government is doing. When these people get screwy ideas, millions die, not just a few thousand.
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