On Dec 17, 2008, at 3:06 PM, Charles Bennett wrote: > > On Dec 17, 2008, at 6:11 AM, LuKreme wrote: > >> On 16-Dec-2008, at 08:43, Charles Bennett wrote: >>> (Yes. *really* tortured, >> >> Ah, you are implying that the US only 'sorta' tortures? > > I think water boarding was torture. I think a lot of what happened > at Abu Gab was degrading but didn't rise tothe level of torture. > (In any case it *was* illegal and simply immoral) > > No, what I mean is that Saddam approached it on a scale that boggles > the mind and with Hitlerian efficiency > > When you have a position in the Iraqi government as the "official > rapist" (for interrogation purposes) you have taken it to an entirely > new level.
What Saddam's people did was certainly evil but not. from their viewpoint, irrational. They used torture as a means to suppress dissent. Even when it had a veneer of intelligence gathering, 'give me the names of everyone who has ever criticized the regime', it was really aimed at making people afraid to confide in their close associates and thereby suppress dissent. The US torturers clearly didn't believe that they were collecting valid intelligence or suppressing dissent. If you see a documentary like Taxi to the Dark Side it is clear that the front line interrogators and their superiors for at least 2 levels up the chain of command knew that their subjects don't have any useful information and joked about how their victims weren't terrorists until after being abused. These people knew perfectly well what would happen in a tribal society if they offered the local sheik a $1,000 bounty for any 'terrorist' he would turn in. Anyone not of the sheik's clan passing through the area would be rounded up and turned over. In fact very few detainees were actually arrested by US troops. 91% were turned in by locals for the bounty. Some of the enlisted 'interrogators' are willing to explain that they tortured because they wanted to curry favor with or avoid punishment with their superiors or avoid being ostracized by their peers. I have never heard any officer or CIA agent give a credible explanation of what they thought they might accomplish. One wonders if they were simply sadists. There are weird instances in Taxi where the interrogators are asked to elicit very specific confessions. 'Make prisoner X confess that on day Y he fired a mortar round at base Z.' The interrogators confess that sometimes they didn't actually force such confessions, merely reporting that they had. It was never really explained why such interrogations were ordered. When the North Koreans and North Vietnamese tortured confessions out of our guys they used them for propaganda. The people who know why we did it aren't saying. -- Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity. -Frank William Leahy, football coach (1908-1973) _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
