Heard a very interesting piece today on the ineffectiveness of torture today on NPR's Morning Edition. Quotes and analysis in main body.
The part that I found most interesting in the article was:
Alexander and his team arrived in Iraq in March 2006 — well after the abuses at Abu Ghraib forced the military to reform its interrogation process. By the time Alexander's team was on the ground, a military task force had been searching for Zarqawi for three years. But it took Alexander's team just two months of questioning detainees to get one of them to reveal the location of Zarqawi's safe house. Based on that information, the al-Qaida leader was killed in a military operation in June 2006.
Further Alexander stated:
"When you use coercion, a detainee might tell you the location of a house, but if you use cooperation they will tell you if the house is booby-trapped, and that's a very important difference"
This seems to fly in the face of what former Vice President, and agent of evil, Dick Cheney stated:
"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.
"I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."
I find it interesting that Christians, who form a large proportion of the base have come down theologicaly against the use of torture. Specifically stating in the evangelical magazine, "Christianity Today that, "Torture violates the dignity of the human being." Please note that this would be considered a mainstream Christian publication as Pastor, and best-selling author, Rick Warren has contributed writings to this publication.
What makes this even more disturbing is that CNN has released a statement that churchgoers are more likely to support torture.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified.
Further the notion that torture is ever justified is wrong headed. I was just reviewing literature from my Neo-Con I'm a gung-ho idiot literature ,and saw that I still had Tom Clancy's book, "The Sum of All Fears." This book is interesting because in it a CIA agent (Mr. Clark) uses enhanced interrogation techniques to extract information from a terrorist after terrorist activities. I bring this up because Tom Clancy's logic seemed to be a preclude to exactly the logic the GW used in justifying torture.
I do realize that 9/11 was a tragedy, but a greater tragedy would be forsaking all of the ideas and philosophy that produced the Enlightenment and consequently the United States just because "lives were on the line." Yes people died but reverting to tyranny should never be an option. Many more lives have been lost, some by my ancestors, in the fight to overthrow tyrannies.