Re: Tortured Logic

I wonder whether obl would have chosen waterboarding instead of a double tap to the head and burial at sea.  

Sent from my iPhone

On May 11, 2011, at 10:19 AM, "david white" <[email protected]> wrote:

> http://reason.com/archives/2011/05/09/tortured-logic
> 
> Tortured Logic
> Does the killing of Osama bin Laden vindicate the use of torture?
> Steve Chapman | May 9, 2011
> 
> An old joke: "Why do elephants paint their toenails red?" I don't know. "So 
> they can hide in the tomato patch." There are no elephants in the tomato 
> patch. "See? It works."
> 
> That's the sort of logic deployed by defenders of the Bush administration's 
> torture program. After being waterboarded, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh 
> Mohammed admitted knowing someone later found to be Osama bin Laden's 
> courier. The CIA eventually located the man and followed him to the house 
> where bin Laden was killed. Voila! The information from Mohammed vindicates 
> these methods.
> 
> But it turns out that Mohammed also lied about the courier, saying he was a 
> retired nobody. From this, CIA officials now claim, they knew the guy had to 
> be a big deal. It was a crucial clue.
> 
> That's right: When tortured detainees provide truthful information, they 
> prove torture works, and when they lie, they prove it works. If Mohammed had 
> broken into a chorus of "Y.M.C.A.," that would have proved the same.
> 
> This bizarre reasoning is one of the many oddities about the defense of 
> torture. Another is that the advocates never, ever refer to it as torture.
> 
> Mark Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, wrote a 
> column for The Washington Post defending what he called "enhanced 
> interrogation techniques." Former Justice Department official John Yoo 
> referred to them as "tough interrogations."
> 
> Let's be more specific. Mohammed underwent simulated drowning 183 times. 
> Methods used on him and others, reports The New York Times, include "slamming 
> prisoners into walls, shackling them in stress positions and keeping them 
> awake as long as 180 hours." The CIA admitted making detainees stand for up 
> to 40 hours and dousing naked captives with cold water in chilled cells.
> 
> If treatment like this were inflicted on captured American soldiers, no 
> American would dispute that it was torture. But when we resort to it, the 
> likes of Thiessen and Yoo can't bring themselves to use the honest term. 
> Calling it "enhanced interrogation" is like calling the Alabama 
> tornadoes "enhanced weather."
> 
> The evidence that vicious methods work is modest. Matthew Alexander, who 
> wrote about his experience as a military interrogator in Iraq in his book 
> Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious al 
> Qaeda Terrorist, says that far from being helpful, brutality usually makes it 
> harder to get information from a prisoner.
> 
> Alexander, an Air Force Reserve officer who conducted or supervised some 
> 1,300 interrogations using traditional techniques, told me, "I was surprised 
> that the people we thought would be the hardest were the easiest to 
> interrogate."
> 
> He cites the case of a Muslim scholar, a high-level al-Qaida operative who 
> was "as hard-core as you could find." Using a non-coercive approach, "in six 
> hours I convinced him to cooperate."
> 
> How can it be that a violent, determined enemy of the United States could be 
> persuaded to talk without extreme measures? "He's human, he's not a robot," 
> says Alexander. By establishing a personal connection, interrogators can 
> induce prisoners to open up. But if detainees are abused, he found, "they 
> quit talking."
> 
> Sometimes, no doubt, torture can loosen a tongue. But once a high-value 
> operative is brutalized, there is no way to know what he might have divulged 
> under more patient, humane interrogation. If he spills secrets after being 
> waterboarded, it "proves" that torture works. If he withholds information, 
> it "proves" that nothing else would have sufficed.
> 
> But what if torture does sometimes work? Mere effectiveness is not enough to 
> justify it. Yoo was once asked about the legality of "crushing the testicles 
> of a person's child," and he did not rule it out.
> 
> Why should he? If torturing a terrorist failed, wouldn't we be justified in 
> torturing his wife or his children to get the truth?
> 
> If waterboarding is OK, why not crushing testicles? Why not pulling out 
> fingernails? Why not the most agonizing methods an evil mind could devise? 
> The advocates of waterboarding are much more eager to declare what is allowed 
> than what is forbidden—if anything.
> 
> In the end, they don't really care about imposing limits, and they don't 
> really care if torture is effective or not. Torture, in the minds of its 
> apologists, is not a means to a good result. It's a good result all by itself
> 
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