Follow-up Brains

[elfs]

NYT: The American use of torture is inexcusable.

By now, we know the truth: In the aftermath of 9/11, panicked administration officials authorized the use of torture as a means of getting information. Cheney, especially, authorized the use of torture to extract information about the assumed link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein because existing interrogation techniques had not revealed the link. He was informed by his own people that such techniques might be illegal, and even while the CIA was going at it he was ordering a legal team to create justification.

The claim that Khalid Sheik Mohammed broke after one waterboarding session, and provided useful information, is now revealed as a lie: the United States waterboarded Mohammed 183 times over a 30 day period.

Intelligence officials entrusted with vetting the torture program, a derivative of the military's SERE program (which trains soldiers how to resist torture), were unaware of its history or efficacy. They did not know that they were reverse-engineering Communist techniques used to elicit false confessions from prisoners of war. They gave the task of doing that research to John Yoo, who as far as we know, never did any research at all.

About that other al-Qaeda plot

One of the myths going around is that toturing KSM got us information abouta plot to destroy towers on the West Coast as a kind of coda to the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. The problem with this is that, looking at the memos closely, we captured KSM in 2003, but the FBI had already asserted that the plot had been foiled and was dead as of 2002. So he gave us useless, out of date information, that the defenders of the torture regime are touting as their greatest success.

Louisiana seeks to one-up Texas and ban all medical research

A bill has been introduced into the Louisiana State Legislature banning all "mixing of human and animal cells" in a petri dish. Apparently, the Catholic Church of Louisiana is behind this bill, but equally apparently nobody there understands that mouse cultures are frequently used to support other cells for research. All non-agricultural research is at risk from this bill.

This is of a piece with modern fundamentalist religious thinking: it does not matter how much suffering or hellishness we create on this Earth, as long as our souls are oriented toward the next life properly. It would seem the Catholic Church of Louisiana takes Jesus's statement "The wretched will be with you always" as an instruction. (via Pharyngula)

To be a conservative, you must approve of torture

John Hindraker, from the loony right website Powerline, describes the current wave of anger about torture as "mere policy differences" between administrations, and characterizes Barack Obama's attempt to regain "our moral bearings" as "criminalizing conservatism."

If that's what conservatism means, then we should be glad it's doomed.

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