| The Bush Administration Lawyers Were Torture Pushers: But not for torture's sake |
 The Bush Administration Lawyers Were Torture Pushers: But not for torture's sake
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Jun. 6th, 2007 @ 05:57 pm 
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A study was recently released by the Intelligence Science Committee, mostly about the "interrogation" techniques (i.e. torture) advocated by the Bush Administration. . It was commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity, and is posted at the Federation of American Scientists' Web site, at http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/educing.pdf .
Scott Shane and Markj Mazzetti reported on the study for the New York Times. In an interview podcast at the New York Times Scot Shane notices that it was the lawyers in the Bush Administration that dominated the process of advocacy of torture. It was not the people that knew from experience what interrogation techniques were best in obtaining information. I quote the significant passage.
GREG WINTER. Some of the advisers argue that the government has spent more energy on trying to provide a legal justification for harsh techniques than on actually perfecting interrogation strategies. Why is that?
SCOTT SHANE. Yeah. Not only these Intelligence Science Board advisers, but a former State Department official named Phil Zelikow, who's now at the University of Virginia — they made the same point coming from different directions. Zelikow said that the lawyers in the administration sort of took over the process and dominated the process. And the question that was being asked was: What's the most we can get away with under the law? By coming up with creative readings of the law, what's the toughest, harshest techniques we can use? As opposed to, Zelikow says, they didn't ask the question — they're asking the question, What can we do? And not, ... should we do? He said it should have really been more of a moral discussion rather than a legal discussion.
The science advisers say the same point. But they're talking not about the morality but the effectiveness of interrogation techniques. They say that, again, the debate was dominated by the lawyers and: What can we do? As opposed to: What's the most effective thing we can do?
June 2, 2007 - World View Podcast - Interview By GREG WINTER [transcript] Podcast here
The legal ideologists of torture, who were completely divorced from the reality of information gathering, advocated torture because they wanted a stronger, more authoritarian government.
The fact is that few U.S. officers have direct hands-on experience in how to torture "suspects". So where did our methods of torture come from? The Pentagon based U.S. torture techniques on Soviet torture techniques that they had studied in order to prepare captured pilots in resistance. We called these techniques when the Soviets were performing these so-called "enhanced-pressure" techniques of interrogation, but stopped calling these "techniques" torture when the we started using them. The CIA on the other hand mainly based its torture methods on "interrogation techniques" used by Middle Eastern torture regimes, such as our sometime friends in Syria and our best friends in Saudi Arabia.
As the Washington Post reported, on the study by the "Intelligence Science Board"
"In it, experts find that popular culture and ad hoc experimentation have fueled the use of aggressive and sometimes physical interrogation techniques to get those captured on the battlefields to talk..."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/15/AR2007011501204.html
U.S. torture is driven more by popular culture (television and movies) than a desire to obtain useful information should not surprise anyone, but why do so few people draw the obvious conclusion. Popular culture, torture, and political ideology are all serving the same purpose, and has nothing to do with "interrogation," or winning the war on terror, and everything to do with fighting a war against the public by inducing fear in U.S. citizens and inducing terrors in all of those who think they may become the object of torture.
The men (mostly) at the Pentagon and CIA knew with some degree of certainty that torture techniques did not work, if "working" means obtaining useful information. That is why the middle level managers at the Pentagon and the CIA are, for the most part, opposed to torture for the purposes of obtaining information. (A side note is necessary here: The CIA has always been in favor of torture for other purposes besides obtaining information, i.e. as a means of terror used by our clients in Third Word countries. But that is another story.) But the middle level managers at our intelligence agencies miss the point. The advocacy of torture has nothing to do with obtaining useful information and everything to do with increasing the power of the state over human bodies. It has always been so, throughout history. Torture is an extension of terror and has never been an interrogation technique.
And here again is the significance of the fact that the Bush legal ideologists, such as John Yoo, were the most rabid advocates of torture. The main reason they advocated their policies was to stretch the power of the Imperial Presidency to the point that the Great Presidential Leader could become a law unto himself. That is precisely the tendency of the Imperial Presidency, and torture and the so-called "war on terror" were a pretext as far as these people were concerned, for their main job of making sure that the empire has a presidential institution it deserves, i.e. an elected dictatorship as far as foreign policy is concerned, with continuous electronic Nuremberg rallies for the home population. That has always been the program of the Bush administration. The introduction of torture, for these people had nothing to do with destroying peoples lives. They could not care one way or another whose lives they destroy, as long as it furthers their end of increasing executive power.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
6 June 2007
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
music: Scott Shane On Torture NYT 01worldview |
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