But the truth is that we in America have tortured to obtain information. We have tortured systematically in Afghanistan, Iraq and Quantanamo and it has been approved by the highest levels of government. As a nation, we are bitterly divided on whether torture is justified or not. Approximately half of all Americans believe that there are some situations that justify torture while half believe it is NEVER justified. (Interestingly enough, over 60% of Evangelical Christians believe it is justified…and the more often you attend church services the more likely you are to support torture. While the people least likely to support torture do not attend church at all.)
Conservatives will tell you that America's "enhanced interrogation techniques" are not REALLY torture. "It's not like there is any permanent damage and it's not as bad as what Muslims do to each other anyway." Conservatives tell you that ALL other countries torture. We're no different than they are. Conservatives will tell you that it's ok to torture because IT WORKS!
But the truth is that waterboarding has been called torture by Americans in the past. We have charged, tried, convicted and hung Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American troops. Japanese soldiers whose only crime was to "interrogate" Americans in order to extract information needed to save the lives of Japanese soldiers and civilians. Why is the crime different now than it was then?
And yes, other countries torture. But as my Grandmother used to say, "If everybody else jumped off a bridge, does it make it ok for you to?"
Liberals will tell you that torture lowers our moral standing in the world. It provides recruitment propoganda for terrorists. It endangers our troops in future combat by making it MORE LIKELY that they will be tortured if captured. But these are merely ideological arguments.
If your personal ideology says torture is wrong, none of the arguments from the Right will persuade you that it's ok. If your personal ideology says torture is OK you won't change your mind listening to me. Stop reading, plop down on your couch and put in the second season of "24" or a rerun of HBO's "Oz" or just log onto an internet gay bondage site. You can get your jollies without wasting time on justifying it.
Conservatives are right on only one point. Torture can work. It can get you information that is needed. So if we ignore the ideological reasons for torture, we must examine the pragmatic aspects of torture as a way of obtaining information.
Now I have admitted that torture can work. But just because it works does not mean that it is the BEST way to achieve your goals of obtaining information. There are a lot of problems that are associated with answers received from torture.
For one thing you get a lot of bad answers to go along with the truth. And that leaves you with the problem of which answers are true "threats" and which are made up stories told only to STOP the torture. Eventually you can sift through the lies, but the time and resources to track down all of these stories can be enormous. Remember all the security alerts that were issued almost weekly in 2004. Liberals thought Bush was making things up to keep people scared and voting Republican. Now it looks like the government was reacting to fake confessions from terrorists.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) has been a poster child for waterboarding. The Bush administration has claimed that huge amounts of information came from KSM's "interrogation sessions". But CIA analysts contend that most of it was lies resulting in massive wastes of resources to check out the lies. Said one former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M.,
“90 percent of it was total f^#king bullsh*t.”A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”
Only 10% of the information given by KSM was true and that 10% produced NO actionable intelligence. Does that justify torture? The military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (which oversees the SEAR program that our nation's torture policies were designed from) states, "the key deficiency of physical or psychological duress is the reliability and accuracy of the information gained...A subject in pain may provide an answer, any answer, or many answers in order to get the pain to stop,". In conclusion, the document said, "the application of extreme physical and/or psychological duress (torture) has some serious operational deficits, most notably the potential to result in unreliable information."
Torture also comes with the problem of what if the person you are torturing for information really doesn't know anything. What if he's innocent? The assumption has to be made that he is resisting interrogation which means he knows something which means you need to keep torturing to get the information that you think he's withholding and that he really doesn't know! It's pointless.
Take the case of Diliwar, a young Afghan who was arrested by the Afghan army for suspicion of being involved in a rocket attack against an American base. The US tortured him for information on his co-conspirators. He never gave them up. He continued to insist he was innocent. Eventually he died of injuries suffered during his interrogation. AFTER his death, it was discovered that he really was just a 120 pound, 22 year old kid who had driven his taxi into the wrong neighborhood. The Afghan military officer who turned him in was later arrested and charged with the actual rocket attack. Dilwar was a patsy! We killed him in an effort to obtain information that he never had.
The problem with torture is that it is never as clean as it is in the movies. The information you recieve is not necessarily good information. In the end, we have to ask ourselves as a nation, Is torture really an effective use of intelligence resources? Even if you have no moral objections, you need to be able to prove that the information that torture produces is worth the cost to our nation's ideals!
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