A Few Words in Defense of Torture
Sometimes I get the idea that America’s mainstream media is nothing more than an offshoot of Al Jazeera, a well-oiled propaganda machine for all things Islamic.
For instance, we’ve been hearing for the longest time that torture is the worst possible way by which to extract information from the enemy. Who says so? When something that is so nonsensical is passed off as common knowledge, I, for one, get very suspicious.
I’m willing to believe that every so often there are those who are willing to absorb any amount of punishment and take their secrets to the grave with them. But, aside from those occasional saints and masochists, I’ll wager that most people – and that definitely includes Osama bin Laden if we were ever to get our hands on him – would cough up everything they knew.
I think a problem we have when discussing, say, waterboarding is one of semantics. The question isn’t whether waterboarding constitutes torture. (If it’s not, then it’s just a big waste of time and a small waste of water). Rather, the question is: What purpose does it serve? When Muslims cut off the head of an American such as Daniel Pearl, they do it in order to prove how barbaric they are, and to put the fear of Allah in our hearts. However, when a terrorist is waterboarded so that we can avoid experiencing another 9/11 or prevent some American soldiers from being ambushed, I’m all for it. I do wonder, though, why we don’t just cut to the chase and threaten to feed them pork intravenously or bury their miserable remains in pigskins.
When you get right down to it, torture takes many forms. For one man, it’s being dunked repeatedly in water, while for another it’s being forced to sit through a Sean Penn speech or a Dixie Chicks concert.
Lately, I’ve been wondering if the folks who spread the rumor about the failure of torture to garner results are the same ones now insisting that Iran is not trying to develop a nuclear weapon.
My understanding is that our so-called intelligence community came to this absurd conclusion based on having overheard a single telephone call, probably one between Ahmadinejad and the guy who supplies his windbreakers. I suspect that at least a few of these clowns on the CIA payroll were members of the O.J. jury.
The logical question is why would Iran, a nation under the thumb of fanatical ayatollahs, fronted by a dwarf who spends half his time denying the Holocaust and the other half promising to initiate one of his own, not spend a sizable portion of its oil revenue in developing a nuclear bomb?
Television writer Burt Prelutsky is the author of Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco (101 Reasons Why I’m Happy I Left the Left).
Burt, your article is woefully ignorant. Do you always do research for your articles by watching season DVDs of 24? Five minutes on Google would have prevented your appalling juvenile article. I have graciously provided you with a link to assist in your education on information retrieval. And if you must do your research by watching the boob tube, may I suggest a rental of Brazil?
http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10781910701665766
This is the sickest post i have ever read. The problems with torture, besides the moral questions, is that people will say anything to get the torture to stop. This includes saying whatever the questioner wants ansered, lies,and many other things. Torture is justplain sick, doesn’t work. we did not have to to torture the Nazis to win WWII, Let us hope and pray that we do not become them in order to “win this war.
If this is the sickest post you ever read, will you please tell us which is the third sickest post you ever read? After all, you’re keeping a tally, right? If you don’t believe bombing the German cities to smithereens wasn’t torture, then what was it? Bring on the intravenous bacon and the football shrouds!! Put the fear of Hell into the swine! Oh, and by the way, if we torture you, will you admit that the enemy is evil? After all, you know, …say anything?
If torture didn’t work, it wouldn’t have been used for thousands of years. Wasn’t it widely supported that one of the terrorist bosses cracked after 30 seconds of waterboarding and gave up vital intelligence? In the military we were told that virtually everyone gives up information at some point and we were expected to hold out as long as possible. Our interrogation techniques may induce great discomfort, confusion, exhaustion or instill extreme fear, if necessary. I have yet to hear of an example where our interrogators used real, over-the-top inhumanity (normal people know the difference). That torture doesn’t work is just another liberal assertion that tries to pass as fact these days.
A few comments…
1) Waterboarding works. Why bother to go further if it isn’t needed. We waterboard our own troops, and have been using that and other “torture” for decades in our training.
2)The pork ideas do not work. Naturally, Islamic clerics long ago determined that unclean practices inflicted by the enemy are not a problem. Otherwise, these tactics would be common. That being said, in areas of less education and more superstition, such as parts of Africa, religious taboos have been used. I once met a merc who coated all his bullets in pig fat.
3) Those who claim that “torture” doesn’t work are ignorant. As is taught to American troops who may experience torture (in my day, by former POWs), it does work. I suspect the “torture doesn’t work” mantra flows from a combination of ideology, the natural response of professional interrogators who aren’t allowed to use torture; Sort of like the psychologists who used to insist that psychiatric drugs didn’t work (and of course, those shrinks were not allowed to use them).
4) Your approach has more than a slight taint of vengeance and brutality in it. While our use of “torture” in critical situations does not “bring us down to the level of the enemy,” the gratuitous use of excessive torture, as you propose, is immoral and demeans us. If we *must* torture, we must; but as a civilized society we should limit it to the minimum effective amount, used only when necessary.
Those who are ignorant about the “in the works” takeover of the US and the entire world by Islam, had better wake up. I am a medical professional, sworn to comfort and save lives and one of those methods of comforting and saving lives is to prevent the loss of life and limb! Therefore, torture is most definitely mandated to be used as prevention against being slaughtered by that stone-aged 7th century way of “thought”, Islam!
Torture does, in fact, work. I am quite familiar with many of the studies to the contrary, both military and academic, and most are tendentious nonsense. If you begin from the premise that torture is immoral and ineffective, you can easily find a “Peace Studies” department at any university to affirm your position. But aside from the boring moral rhetoric about utilizing torture, the techniques can be very effective in the right hands. And good news for all the enervated, egghead crybabies, modern torture techniques require virtually no blood, so you won’t have to faint at the sight of it!
Now let’s see; torture doesn’t work because the victim will say anything. I’m captured by al qaeda and they start to torture me. “Tell us where you get the propaganda that praises us or we’ll cut your left hand off.” I won’t rat out the NYT or Time magazine so I’ll make up a lie and say, “the Wall Street Journal”. They say, “OK Satan junior, we’ll check this out. If we find out you lied to us, we’ll cut off both hands.” Oops. “Can I make a slight correction?”
Torture is nasty business, a last resort, and I suspect we all agree that evidence derived as a result of torture should never be admissible in a court of law.
Actionable intelligence however is not the same thing as evidence. When we are not “looking to bring someone to justice” but disrupt the terrorist plot, find the prisoner, locate the radioactive material, there is no rational reason not to countenance the use of extraordinary techniques. When the fate of your child, your city, your entire way of life is at stake, only a blithering ideological idiot will continue to shout “Don’t go there.”
All this babble on the use of torture being wrong. I have noticed that the majority of those against torture are relativists. You say torture, I say appropriate intelligence gathering method. The fact that the “terrorists” are in fact irregular combatants obviously is lost by some. Irregular combatants are not guaranteed the same protection as lawful combatants, in other words soldiers wearing a nations uniform in obvious site. But then these same “terrorists” don’t recognize any part of the Geneva Convention in regards to warfare, except when it might benefit them. I myself am more offended at the idea that the military guards handle the prisoners’ korans with gloves, less their infidel hands sully the *coughing* religion of peace’s manifesto. They are getting off far lighter than any non-muslim in their nation.
Well, having actually been in the military, I can tell you that torture does get results.
But are the results accurate, or what the torturers want to hear?
There’s no bigger fan of 24 than me. 24 is the official show of New West Notes.
But it doesn’t actually work quite so well in the real world, and in fact top military officers went to the producers of 24 to urge them not to present it as a panacea.
Cowardly conservatives
You want to torture because you are filled with fear. You want to hurt others simply because it makes you feel good. The more pain the better, it helps you go to your dark place.
Enjoy tongue-kissing Satan when you get to Hell.
When I began reading the string, I find myself worrying that the “Bush is Hitler”/”No blood for oil” crowd had overtaken us. But then, thank God, Bill, Kevin, Paul, Fred, Annie, John, Lon, Broadsword and Ubu Roi, rushed in to restore order and common sense, before Bobobill reminded us once again that a brain is a terrible thing to waste.
Regards, Burt Prelutsky
Torture is a tool – used INTELLIGENTLY, it can and does save lives.
German, Japanese and even Allied (!) civilians and soldiers were tortured on a significant scale by Allied military intelligence during WW 2. The difference is that allegations of abuse were usually hushed up at the source, and certainly not spread over the Internet.
Khaled Sheik Mohammed appears to have spilled the beans remarkably quickly once he was caught (probably without serious torture). It has been reported that billionaire Osama Bin Laden has an executioner in his entourage precisely to avoid being taken alive and destroying his carefully crafted image.
It is true that torture can and is used as a substitute for intelligent investigation, and that this can lead to incrimination of innocents etc.
If we train our own troops by water boarding them, are we torturing our own or training them in aggressive interrogation techniques that may be used against them? Not many have been privy to the video of or wish to refer to the beheading of the contractor Eugene Armstrong by the vermin in Iraq. That was torture.
A couple of things to keep in mind about torture:
First, sophisticated torture is quite complex and requires a fairly artistic psychological profile of the subject being tortured. Each person has their own unique set of fears and reservations that can be exploited for valuable information.
Second, in the instances where kindness and a sense of noblesse oblige has been effective (as with both the Germans and the Soviets), the success was largely, I would argue, as a result of prisoners expecting the most barbaric and inhumane treatment imaginable (which both regimes were well equipped and willing to deliver). The tremendous fear of suffering and death that a prisoner expected worked on his mind in the background and, when treated with uncommon civility in place of the anticipated brutality, the prisoner broke out of sheer panic. Here he was expecting the devil and he encounters a saint! The more thoughtful Japanese used similar techniques with equal effectiveness; but in all cases, the actual fear of a terrible death (a very real and well-documented fear in each instance) underwrites the effectiveness of the light touch. If the terrible reputation for cruelty were exposed to be nothing but a chimera, I doubt anyone would tremble when being captured by such adversaries. Simulated torture, like waterboarding, is buttressed by a very real possibility that we might actually drown a couple here and there; the mope has to believe, at some level, that we might actually waste him, either from vindictiveness or from accident, and at that point the the instinctive fear of death overwhelms the rational mind and he coughs up the goods. But once our enemies know for sure that we are faking, the gig is up–or made significantly more difficult.
Bobobill, I doubt you know this, but I heard it directly from Dick Cheney that Satan is a great kisser, and knows how to throw a terrific party. Sorry you weren’t invited.
Waterboarding is torture? No, if you want to know what torture really is, go back a couple of weeks and read about the torture chambers found in Iraq being used by the terrorists. Now that is torture!!
We are sending our troops to prison for placing undergarments on some sensitive Muslim’s head when they cut the head off an innocent victim and our wonderful liberal element stands by with their collective heads shoved up the southern region of the anatomy.
Inhuman treatment you say!! Ask the rape victims of villages taken over by terrorists.
Hell, why bother. After the Democrats win in November, it will be a mute issue. Anything resembling a national defense will disappear and be replaced by a group singing folk songs of the Middle East to appease and apologize for the Crusades. A grand world wide ass kissing crusade will be undertaken and we will regain our “lofty position” again.
Can we at least agree on a definition of “torture” before arguing whether it should be allowed?
I suggest “Torture is the deliberate infliction of pain or suffering on a prisoner”.
This excludes the bombing of cities, for instance, and also suffering caused by negligence or incompetence.
The worst part about blogging now days is that everyone thinks they are good at it. This article wouldn’t receive better than a D- in a free write at your local community college. Not at any point does the author make a thought provoking or supported claim. Pajamas Media needs to do better than this if they don’t wish to be an after thought in the future of political blogging.
So you Americans have reached this low, as to try to justify torture. Your grandparents would be ashamed of you.
And then you wonder “Why do they hate us”… LOL
Actually Bjorn, having saved Europeans from themselves several times since 1917, very few Americans outside the liberal chattering classes, suffer from angst. We and our grandparents are well accustomed to ingratitude in all its manifestations.
Are you kidding me? The author and several commentors are actually advocating torture? The ends do not justify the means. This is easily the most offensive thing I have read ever!
“This is easily the most offensive thing I have read ever!”
Jake, you obviously haven’t been reading the Daily Kos lately. Waterboarding is frightening people and frightening people (deceiving them into fright) isn’t torture. Many people pay good money to be frightened. Witness amusement park rides, the passengers on which are sometimes injured or killed.
Right now, OBL is sitting in a cafe in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. He is joking, with his fellow conspirators, about murdering your kid. Fully intending to carry out his conspiracy, he and his buddies spend their full time planning mass murder here in the US.
The government of Pakistan, supported by the people of that nation, take no effective action against Osama. Thus, they are complicit in planning these murders.
What measures are we justified in taking now? What measures will we be justified in taking after the next mass murder is committed?
Remember what happened in WWII when there was a mass existential threat to the children of Americans. The fire bombing of Tokyo, which was largely constructed of paper products. The fire bombing of Dresden, which was a major industrial center. The rounding up of possible persons posing a domestic threat, based only upon possible threat status. The total destruction of German infrastructure. Have you ever seen a photograph of the center of Berlin taken in June of 1945?
It seems likely that a nuclear attack on NYC would precipitate a reaction on that scale. It wouldn’t necessarily be nuclear, but the gloves would come all of the way off. Nobody would care about civilian casualties anymore. Those protecting the conspirators, even by silent assent, would have earned their new status as target.
If waterboarding an identified conspirator would prevent such an event, would it be justified?
How about torture, if it might save a million lives?