How low can torture apologizers go?

[elfs]

How low can torture apologizers go? This low:

We now know that Islamists believe their religion forbids them to cooperate with infidels – until they have reached the limit of their ability to endure the hardships the infidel is inflicting on them. Imagine an al-Qaeda member who would like to give his interrogators information, who does not want continue fighting, who would prefer not to see more innocent people slaughtered. He would need his interrogators to press him hard so he can feel that he has met his religious obligations – only then could he cooperate.

In other words, Cliff May, who says he's not "pro-torture," but "pro-facts," is telling us that in order to release a Muslim prisoner from his religious obligation to stay silent, we had to "press him... to the limit of [his] ability to endure the hardships inflicted."

Attention Cliff May: That is the very definition of torture. And this isn't "We had to do it and we're sorry." This isn't even "We had to do it and we're not sorry we did it." This is, "They wanted us to do it."

Cliff May disgusts me. All the torture apologizers disgust me now. I live in a country with sympathizers for a regime that is indistinguishable from Communist China or the Taliban in its disregard for basic human dignity.

Comments

[shunra.livejournal.com]

I heard that tripe for years in Israel. I thought leaving it for the US would free me of that particular line of thought, the "they're not quite human so different rules apply one" ("they're not quite human, they need to be beaten before they know it's ok to talk" is just as bad as "they're not quite human so they don't care if their children are killed" and "they're not quite human so they don't commit crimes personally, it's always a family group - so it makes sense to demolish the family home when one family member is suspected of a crime").

I hate, hate, HATE having to have this discussion going on in the US. I thought our Constitution and 200+ years of liberty had rendered us immune to that argumentation.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a "they're not quite human" thing they're trying to push in the US. I think it's more along the lines of "they're too extremist".

But really, that's crap too.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Nothing in the Constitution says that these rights are given only to nice, middle class people who mow their lawns on weekends and shave.

"They're too extremist" means either "they're not quite human" or "we don't mean it about *all men*".

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Then maybe it was *because* he knew that Canadians don't do that sort of thing, when a senior Taliban member in Afghanistan surrendered to the Canadian army, apparently of his own will, and then went on TV to denounce the terrorism that al Qaeda was participating in.

But that kind of thing never makes the American news (kind of like how the Canadian navy rescued that captain from the pirates last week). Even if it did though, Cliff May would ignore that little tidbit because that's not what he wants to believe.

Really?

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

I have no trouble distinguishing between China or the Taliban and an elected civilian government that is temporarily overreacting to a strategic threat. If you can't, you have a problem.

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Re: Really?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The problem is that they are no longer temporarily overreacting to a strategic threat. They are now defending the right to continue overreacting to a now non-existent strategic threat with techniques we now know produce no useful information.

Re: Really?

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know, you keep saying that torture produces no useful information. But that's because you've got an agenda to push, and you don't understand the situation. Real professionals merely say that torture produces unreliable information.

Like most people writing on this subject, you don't seem to understand that intelligence services have evolved ways to make use of unreliable information. In fact, that's pretty much the essence of the intelligence business: finding ways to make practical use of unreliable information.

For example, the reason intelligence organizations try to gather so much information is because EVERY piece of information, in isolation, is unreliable. It could just be wrong, or it could be disinformation. Cross-referencing each item against the others uncovers corroborating or contradicting information. This is why intelligence services have so many big computers.

And if you think the threat is non-existent, you have another problem. Radical Islam is a cultural threat if not a military threat. Look at what's happening in Great Britain, France, Denmark, and other Western nations-- never mind Pakistan and Turkey, where radical Islam threatens progressive Muslim nations.

I imagine you think there's no real threat in the United States, but you must understand that 40 years ago nobody expected trouble in Europe either, and the timeframe for these cultural changes can be arbitrarily long.

Personally I believe the current conflict is the last gasp of a radical Islam that would have disappeared long ago if not for the large oil reserves in the Middle East. As those reserves decline, so will funding for these terrorists. But Peak Oil hype aside, that's going to take a long time, and I think we can't just wait for this problem to solve itself.

I don't support torturing anyone, nor do I support aggressive interrogation of people who are merely suspected of terrorism. I think that before we use any kind of aggressive interrogation techniques, every suspect deserves a fair trial to establish what they've done, and what they must know. These findings should be used to set the parameters for the interrogation.

But once we've done all that, I really don't see any problem, moral or Constitutional, with most of the techniques we've used. Certainly not the techniques that fall short of the kind of treatment we used to call "hazing" when we applied it to college freshmen and plebes at military academies.

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Yes. Really.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Those who have relevant military and policing experience don't just "keep saying" that torture provides less useful information, they know that it doesn't, by direct experience.

I have a friend who is an interrogator for an intelligence agency that has operated across the globe. He is quick to point out that an interrogator is a highly trained person who could be likened to a "field psychiatrist". He believes that if he even has to threaten a subject, it means he's doing a poor job and is unlikely to be able to obtain reliable information. There is a reason why advice to military personnel is to not engage in any dialogue with an interrogator, because most soldiers are not smart enough to be able to say anything to, or even look at, a good interrogator without revealing too much about what that interrogator wants to know.

He stresses that interrogation is not torture, and is not as flashy as you see on TV. While we do have ways of determining useful information from unreliable information, torture actually makes it harder to do that, and in some cases makes it completely impossible. By default, if a piece of information has been obtained under any form of coercion, it is considered less reliable than that obtained without coercion. Information obtained by coercion requires far more corroboration from other sources for it to be considered useful. He points out that the most reliable means of interrogating someone is doing it when they don't know they're being interrogated, such as while sitting beside them on a public bus. It's a skill, true, but more, and more reliable, information is obtained by "chance" encounters with trained interrogators on buses, trains, in markets, mosques, or other public places than is ever obtained in an interrogation cell. Not so easy to arrange during a shooting war of course, but still possible.

Finally, even disregarding that torture is morally wrong, as well as being against international law, making anyone who has ordered, approved, or taken part in it, liable to being arrested any time they leave the USA, it was also a stupid mistake strategically. Here's another actual person with relevant qualifications and experience, one Major Matthew Alexander, a former US interrogator who served in Iraq, who is saying that he believes the US torture program has likely killed more Americans than 9/11 by recruiting people to the resistance:

Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype.

In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.

Did you notice that you aren't actually disagreeing with me?

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Nor are you agreeing with Elf. You changed his "no useful information" to "less useful information", which is synonymous with what I said.

I don't think the statements of Major Alexander in that Cockburn article are even persuasive, never mind conclusive. I especially don't believe that _anyone_ joined Al Qaeda because the US was torturing people in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Al Qaeda isn't exactly Amnesty International; they've blown up more people than we've kept up all night.

For that matter, I think the Cockburn family has probably killed more people than 9/11.

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Re: Really?

[tagryn]

...a now non-existent strategic threat...

Considering what's going on in the Pakistani tribal areas currently, or more to the point what we don't know about what al-Qaeda's been working on in their camps there, this is an extremely premature "mission accomplished"-type statement to make.

I'm also waiting to see what the memos that Cheney wants released show before concluding that the techniques were completely worthless. We certainly don't know the complete story yet.

I think May has a point, albeit not as well made as it could have been. In Milton Shulman's book Defeat of the West there's an account of a German commander in WWII who's orders were to resist until "it was no longer feasible," so when the Americans arrived and asked for his surrender, he explained that his honor wouldn't allow him to do so but that since his men had no anti-tank weapons, he would be unable to continue if he faced tanks. A couple of Shermans were called forward, and when the German major saw them he promptly surrendered, after having his conscience satisfied that he had adhered to his orders. May's posed scenario is similar; there's a continuum between the extreme dead-enders who'll die before breaking, and the ones who'll cooperate easily and be willing to be bought off. There'll be a lot of people in the middle who'll give in, but only after having satisfied to themselves that they've done all they can, and I expect this to be even more important for those from tribal- and honor-based societies where obligations to the group are emphasized much more than in the West.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

God, Elf! I don't know which is worse: that the architects of Torture, American-Style are sinking to such lows, or that so many people in the U.S. have bought The Big Lie.

BTW: One of my grandfathers was stationed in Hawaii during World War II. He worked for OSS, or what would become the OSS, looking for spies amongst the Japanese immigrant community on the islands. (His views on what happened to Japanese immigrants was hardly one-sided, as he was the son of Italian immigrants and faced much bigotry himself. I disagreed with him that the federal policy during the war was regrettable but necessary.)

Had he lived to see the coming to light of all of the torture that the US committed, he'd be horrified. Moreso by the comments to you post, and other apologists, and all that they imply.