Juan Cole on "Why Torture?"

Informed Comment today has a great take on the Bush adminstration's motives for doing torture, especially in Iraq. Bottom line: torture is useful because it produces bad intelligence -- which is the goal!

Extended excerpts below the fold.

If you want to "fix the intelligence around the policy", in the words of the immortal Downing Street memo,  you need to boil someone alive who can be tagged as a "terrorist", until he tells you whatever big lie you want to hear.

Then you have your justification for a "war on terror" where there isn't one.

But the problem is that we now know that serious al-Qaeda is probably only a few hundred men now, and at most a few thousand. Look at who exactly did the London subway bombing. A few guys in a gym in Leeds. That magnitude of threat just would not keep a "War on Terror" in business. The embassy bombings, the Cole, and September 11 itself were done by tiny poorly funded cells that functioned as terror boutiques to accomplish a specific spectacular operation. They don't prove a worldwide, large organization. They prove tiny effective cells. Most of what the Pentagon does and can do is irrelevant to that kind of threat. You'd be better off with some good FBI agents.

So how do you prove to yourself and others a big terror threat that requires a National Security State and turn toward a praetorian society? You torture people into alleging it.

Cole cites Craig Murray on Uzbekistan as a country where there is no actual Islamic terrorist threat but the dictatorship there has used torture to invent one. It's a fascinating look at an oil-rich country in bed with the Bush administration, which bears out the thesis that to Cheney et. al., it's all about military control of the oilfields. But Cole goes farther -- he hypothesizes that Uzbekistan model of lies-drawn-from-torture is what the Bush administration is using on a global scale. Deliberately.

Global terrorism is being exaggerated and hyped by torture just as the witchcraft scare in Puritan American manufactured witches. It is even to the point where 5 African-American and Haitian Christian cultists in Miami can be identified by the FBI as an "al-Qaeda threat" interested in "jihad" after an FBI informant offered to hook them up with al-Qaeda.

Isn't it interesting how we keep falling back into The Crucible?

Bush needs torture for the same reason as Karimov does. He needs to generate false information that exaggerates the threat to his regime, so as to justify repression. He needs the ritual of confession and naming others, to have it down on paper so he can show it to Congress behind closed doors. But Bush/Cheney's ambitions are global, not just internal.

Go read the whole piece.

•  I think Cole

  has a terrific point, just as I think No Child Left Behind is a deliberate attempt to keep the masses vastly undereducated. They can be much more easily led that way.

  by RagingDem on Sun Oct 01, 2006 at 11:27:29 AM PDT

•  sorry, but I think this is giving them way too

  much credit for those things called "logic," "rationale," and "thinking."

  They torture for the same reason dogs lick themselves.

  by elmo on Sun Oct 01, 2006 at 11:30:47 AM PDT

  •  I disagree

    These people are not stupid. They wouldn't be in power if they were stupid. What seems irrational to normal people like you and I makes sense in their sick little world. That they torture to get the "intelligence" they want comes as no surprise to me.

    by metal prophet on Sun Oct 01, 2006 at 12:19:57 PM PDT

•  There is no other reason.

  This Administration has committed mass murder and lied to do it.  They will do anything to keep their power.  I found the definitions of, "terrorist" and "enemy combatant", in Bushes Torture Bill vague.  The Government is involved in criminal activity.  Hell yes, torture is a tool.

  by Friend of the court on Sun Oct 01, 2006 at 11:38:50 AM PDT

  •  Excellent diary

    As I've been trying to reduce Cole's article to a useful diary, I appreciate the great job you've done.  Here's a gem I wanted to include:

    Uzbeks have a Muslim heritage. They have Muslim names. But Uzbekistan is a country full of atheists and secularists. It is more secular than France. Everyone drinks vodka like fish. Almost no one could actually tell you how to pray the five daily prayers. There are a few. They are considered odd by the other Uzbeks. I know a sociologist brought up in the Soviet Union who has studied its "Muslims," who were deracinated over 60 years, and he said, "What you have to understand is that they were normal Soviet citizens." He is right....

    [The former UK ambassador] pointed out that if you had a referendum in Uzbekistan on whether Islamic canon law should be the law of the land, and explained that it would result in a ban on vodka, less that 1 percent of the population would vote for it. That is certainly true.

    by ybruti on Sun Oct 01, 2006 at 11:53:32 AM PDT

    •  Yes, that's really the key contribution

      What I love about Cole is that he always reads things with cultural and historical knowledge I don't have, and then points out something stunningly obvious -- like that bit about how Uzbeks are so secular -- that renders the whole set of facts utterly different.

      Without Cole, I feel well-informed but increasingly ignorant -- confused by my lack of context in which to interpret anything about the Middle East accurately.

      Like Friedman, who sounds so wise until you actually know anything in detail about the subject, and then his stuff just sort of collapses into nonsense, most of the time. It's so easy to do that sort of high-flown and uninformed commentary and get away with it, even at the paper of record.

      by samizdat on Thu Oct 12, 2006 at 05:50:34 PM PDT

•  Totally agree with Cole's take on torture!

  I also came to that conclusion in a comment on a diary about a Paul Krugman opinion a week ago:

  This is key:

  I'd like to say great minds think alike, but comparing myself to Juan Cole would be like comparing an 8-track to an iPod!

  by deafmetal on Sun Oct 01, 2006 at 11:58:38 AM PDT

  •  Excellent comment.

    This article makes me want to drink a whole fifth of vodka, and move to a place where there are no oil, gas, metal deposits, and everyone lives in huts made from Pandanus leaves and eats bananas, breadfruit and pineapple, and is enough above sea level not to drown from global warming.

    What in heck are we doing on this blog thinking GOTV is going to change anything? Only the US military can save us and the rest of the planet. Only they have what it takes to put a stop to it.

    by Halcyon on Sun Oct 01, 2006 at 01:53:11 PM PDT

  •  I should have recalled that Krugman

    ...which I read, too. Your blog post on it was right-on. Wish I had time to actually read all the diaries, I would have cited you.

    It's getting so I'm afraid to post here because I can't  read everything and so I never know if I'm covering the bases I should. It's a firehose, who can drink from it.

    by samizdat on Thu Oct 12, 2006 at 05:43:37 PM PDT

•  I wonder--is Cole still defending barbarism?

  I used to regularly read Juan Cole.

  Then he posted an article defending Iraqi clerics who said that homosexuals should be executed.

  Rather than just condemn their barbaric opinions, he went on and on about how they didn't really mean it, the statement had to be taken in its cultural context, blah blah blah.

  I want to get my information on the Middle East from sources that I can trust, not from some Neville Chamberlain for Islamist fundamentalist views.

  Sorry. But it was like getting a bad case of food poisoning. I just didn't want to go back to that source again.

  by mel55555 on Sun Oct 01, 2006 at 01:00:58 PM PDT

  •  I hope you give Juan Cole another chance

    I don't think he was defending the opinion, he was trying to create understanding of the cultural context in which such opinions are regularly expressed.

    If we don't understand the source of even what we totally disagree with, we are often at a loss. Cole's point was that these ideas do not emanate from some total 'axis of evil' that's beyond comprehension. They are cultural norms in certain contexts -- not something you, I or Cole are happy about, but not something we can't analyze.

    I see Cole getting a lot of criticism, especially from some supporters of Israel who see him as a political enemy. But I don't think he is, even of Israel. I think he's a voice of reason speaking with vast experience to those of us who are woefully ignorant of the point of view of most people living in the Middle East, the history, and the meaning of current events and pronouncements that other sources report without a shred of understanding.

    Cole's depth of experience and detail in analysis wins me over time and again. I really don't see him as a partisan but as a scholar, in an age when honest scholarship can get you trounced.

    That said, I am sensitive to the concerns you raised. Cole should be very careful to distinguish the opinions he reports from his own. Trying to get inside the heads of people is different from arguing for their beliefs, and he should make it crystal clear which he's doing -- because, of course, at different times and on different points, he contantly does both in his blog.

    by samizdat on Thu Oct 12, 2006 at 05:41:01 PM PDT