Torture

About

Torture, while often billed as (and believed strongly by much of the public to be) a tool for obtaining vital information from captured enemies, is in fact primarily a tool for inspiring fear in the enemy and sometimes for obtaining false confessions for use as propaganda.

Despite repeated claims of those who use torture, there is no evidence that it actually works to obtain accurate information; its victims will say whatever they think the torturers want to hear.

More importantly, though, those who use it are lowering themselves to the moral level of the terrorists they claim to be fighting.

Reference

• Wikipedia
• Conservapedia
• dKosopedia no article as of 2008-01-30
  • Torture Memos
• SourceWatch no article as of 2008-01-30

Related Pages

• United States:
  • Use of torture by the Bush-Cheney administration
    • Abu Ghraib abuses
  • Senate report on CIA use of torture

Links

• 2005-12-18 Torture's Long Shadow by Vladimir Bukovsky (Washington Post)

News

• 2026-02-03 [L..T] There Are Four Lights: Star Trek’s Unwitting Allegory for Domestic Abuse «The abuser who frames every escalation as the target’s fault. The partner who says, “You know how I get when you do that.” The harm becomes the target’s responsibility; the torturer becomes the reluctant administrator of consequences the target has chosen.» .. «The shame that survivors carry about their own breaking – why didn’t I resist longer, why did I start to believe them – is shame misplaced onto the target rather than the perpetrator. [..] The symptoms of assault become proof that the target was unstable all along.»
• 2014-05-23 [L..T] Absolution By Punctuation "The administration to which Ms. Rice was unswervingly loyal -- and for which she fudged her testimony in front of the 9/11 commission, and for which she helped lie this country into a war that was the most fundamentally immoral act of foreign policy (perhaps) in its history -- did, in fact, torture people to those ends."
• 2014-03-30 [L..T] [[2014/03/30/Students Walk out on Dick Cheney|]]
• 2008-07-02 [[ L]..T] Believe Me, It's Torture «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.»
• 2007-12-18 [L..T] FBI, CIA Debate Significance of Terror Suspect «Al-Qaeda captive Abu Zubaida, whose interrogation videotapes were destroyed by the CIA, remains the subject of a dispute between FBI and CIA officials over his significance as a terrorism suspect and whether his most important revelations came from traditional interrogations or from torture.»
• 2007-11-07 [L..T] Ex-Navy Instructor Promises to Hit Back If Attacked on Torture «Nance remarks, "Two centuries of knowledge were thrown out the window" when the administration decided after 9/11 that, to use Cofer Black's famous phrase, "the gloves come off." What administration officials mistakenly thought, Nance says, is that "these were actually gloves, not empirical data. Dude, it's not a glove. It's a fact. But they thought it was one more tool in the tool box."»