![\"real](\"https:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7563\/15844038938_aa359b631a.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Never mind there should\u00a0be no\u00a0debate over torture, any more than there should be a debate over rape or\u00a0child molestation. There is<\/em> a debate and it’s heading downhill fast, witness this statement by one of the most powerful men in the land:<\/p>\n \u201cI think it is very facile for people to say \u2018Oh, torture is terrible,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cYou posit the situation where a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people.<\/p>\n \u201cYou think it\u2019s an easy question? You think it\u2019s clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yes, that’s Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia<\/a>, who knows torture works because he saw it work on\u00a0TV,<\/i>\u00a0even referencing the specific episode of 24<\/em> he saw it on. He said this on Friday, days after the release of the Senate report on torture.<\/p>\n Jesus. I can’t. Even.<\/p>\n Yes, I’m still writing about\u00a0an issue everyone clearly wants to ignore; everyone, that is, save for a friend or two who want me to go from talking about things I know about (SERE\u00a0training, the experiences of Vietnam POWs I’ve flown and worked with) to speculating on\u00a0things I know nothing about.<\/p>\n As in: why? Why did we torture captives\u00a0when we knew torture didn’t work? Why did military and CIA interrogators agree to do it? Why did members of the medical profession go along with it? Why are the program’s\u00a0architects, in the face of the shameful details\u00a0revealed in the Senate report on torture, defending it so proudly and vigorously?<\/p>\n Why did we torture when we knew it doesn’t work?<\/em>\u00a0Historically, the US military (a century or more ago), and the\u00a0CIA (as recently as the 1960s) had ample experience with torture. Both learned long ago that\u00a0torture is counter-productive:\u00a0victims will tell you what you want to hear,\u00a0say whatever they think might stop the torment.<\/p>\n Making captives say what you want to hear can\u00a0be useful if your purpose is to obtain\u00a0false confessions, as in the forced chemical warfare confessions the North Koreans beat out of\u00a0American POWs in the early 1950s, but it’s not useful at all if you’re looking for actionable\u00a0information about upcoming attacks or the current location of terrorist leaders. Not once did our\u00a0military or intelligence agencies\u00a0learn anything truly actionable\u00a0from tortured prisoners, either in earlier days or during our\u00a0more recent experiments with torture, and they’re on record as saying so<\/a>.<\/p>\n The CIA and US military renounced torture decades ago and rewrote regulations and procedures to ban its use. Then, within hours of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, even\u00a0before there were captives to question, these agencies and their shadowy contractors began dusting off old torture plans, even hiring psychologists from the USAF’s SERE School to reverse engineer simulated training torture into the real thing, to be used on captives as soon as they\u00a0had some. And pretty soon they\u00a0did, and we were back in the torture business.<\/p>\n Why did military and CIA interrogators agree to torture captives? <\/em>Well, why do cops so often falsify evidence or suppress exculpatory evidence? Why are they so anxious to close cases, even when multiple witnesses say they have the wrong man? Because their political masters want results. Because they have a quota system. Because career success depends on closing cases.<\/p>\n I’ve read many insider accounts\u00a0from former administration, CIA, FBI, and military officials. Their accounts share a theme: top-down pressure for results from the highest\u00a0levels of the\u00a0George W. Bush administration. Dick Cheney wanted results and wanted them now. Rumsfeld & Tenet (and their successors), the men who briefed Cheney and Bush daily,\u00a0wanted the same (and in Rummy’s case, metrics). The administration wanted to be able to demonstrate to the American public it was doing something to stop future terror attacks.<\/p>\n Never mind that false confessions made under duress had\u00a0DHS and FBI agents running\u00a0screaming from one imaginary threat to another (my god, the Sears Tower is next;\u00a0oh no, they’re planning to hit a casino in Las Vegas); what was important was that interrogators send intelligence reports uphill, the more the better. Asses were covered, careers made.<\/p>\n And then there’s the torture\u00a0bureaucracy, starting with the SERE psychologists and their multi-million dollar program, leading to the whole apparatus of contractors, black sites, military prisons,\u00a0secret flight plans, and\u00a0an army of interrogators and interpreters. Not to mention\u00a0huge infusions of cash\u00a0to agencies like the CIA and DHS. This is exactly the kind of banal corruption\u00a0that drives innumerable other programs we know don’t work, like new C-130s for an air force that stopped wanting them decades ago, or the wasteful production of ethanol fuel), but never mind that, think of the jobs (I think of billionaire\u00a0contractors setting up tax shelters in the Caribbean, but that’s just me).<\/p>\n Why did medical personnel agree to go along with it?<\/em>\u00a0Who the fuck knows? When I was a kid I believed the police were looking out for me, that I could turn to them if I was in trouble. I grew out of that pretty quickly, but I carried a belief in medical ethics well into adulthood.\u00a0I guess I should have known better.<\/p>\n Does anyone like torturing captives? Does anyone get off on it? I mentioned the\u00a0possibility in comments to earlier torture posts, but didn’t really believe it, at least at higher levels. Certainly the young US Army troops\u00a0who tortured Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib appeared to be enjoying themselves in those infamous photographs, but I can’t bring myself to believe the professional\u00a0interrogators\u00a0who waterboarded prisoners were doing it for fun. I hope my belief\u00a0in some remaining vestige of human decency isn’t\u00a0as misguided as the trust\u00a0I once had\u00a0in the medical profession.<\/p>\n Why are torture’s\u00a0architects, even in the face of the shameful details\u00a0revealed in the Senate report on torture, defending\u00a0so proudly and vigorously what they did?<\/em> Wow, what a question. Does anyone think we’ll ever get an honest answer?<\/p>\n