re: #59 Killgore Trout

Yeah, I think I can still stand behind that sentiment….

Although I haven’t been thrilled with much of Obama’s second term foreign policy I prefer the drone strikes. The few captured terrorists that Obama has imported seem to have a clear legal path unlike the Gitmo guys who are in permanent legal limbo.

Waterboarding is torture. Horrible torture that makes people feel like they’re going to die.

This little known writer, Christopher Hitchens, underwent it and reported on it very compellingly.

vanityfair.com

This is the document he had to sign to undergo it:

“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.

And this is some of what he had to say:

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered.

A great concluding paragraph:

Which returns us to my starting point, about the distinction between training for something and training to resist it. One used to be told—and surely with truth—that the lethal fanatics of al-Qaeda were schooled to lie, and instructed to claim that they had been tortured and maltreated whether they had been tortured and maltreated or not. Did we notice what a frontier we had crossed when we admitted and even proclaimed that their stories might in fact be true? I had only a very slight encounter on that frontier, but I still wish that my experience were the only way in which the words “waterboard” and “American” could be mentioned in the same (gasping and sobbing) breath.

All the people who have volunteered to undergo it have come away convinced it was torture, for the simple reason that it is torture. That’s why our special forces soldiers are taught to resist it: because it’s a torture technique.

Now, torture is also a shitty, shitty way to get information. WHy? because if you capture Abdul Hamad, but it’s actually Achmed who knows where the bomb is, Abdul will happily tell you where the bomb is to get you to stop torturing him. He’ll tell you first, of course, that he doesn’t know, but if you keep torturing him, he’ll tell you where the bomb/Taliban camp is. You go and search and find no bomb. Torture Abdul some more. Another location—along with, of course, pleas that he doesn’t actually know. More torture. Yay.

Or say you actually got Achmed. How can you tell when he’s actually broken, when he’s telling you the truth, and when he’s just telling you something to get you to stop? Unless you already know what Achmed knows—at which point it’s pointless to torture him—the information you’ll get from him can’t be divided into the true and the false. It’s all just “What Achmed said to make the torture stop.” Is it a lie, a truth, a deception? Who knows. To find out, you have to do real intelligence work.

This point has been made to you many times and you just blithely ignore it and go on pretending that torture is some sort of cheat mode that unlocks all the terrorists secrets, when in fact it not only is a despicable violation of American ideals, but also fundamentally flawed as an interrogation tactic.