I haven’t been around much and I won’t be again until tomorrow night, but I wanted to quickly give my take on the “prisoner abuse scandal”. I don’t think people who support either Bush or Kerry or McCain or any of the other politicians behind this war have any right to complain, nor do I think that Congress has any right to object to the torture.
Congress has no right to object because they abdicated that right over a year ago when they allowed the Executive branch to launch a war without Congress approving it, as is Constitutionally required. Congress invalidated themselves with their cowardice and lack of patriotism. They had their chance to stop all of this, and they didn’t. Now it’s out of their hands.
Most of us believed at first that this torture crap was a bunch of reservists losing it in the absence of a command structure. However, now it’s looking like not only elite troops like Delta Force were involved, but that top generals were present and audited some of the torture. Both the Americans and the British are being forced to admit to torture at an increasing number of facilities. So to put it simply, “torture” was the command that came from the top, and an order that was followed fairly universally.
There are two lines of reasoning you can follow to try and figure out “why”. You can either assume that there’s an intelligent reason, or that it’s incompetence. I may not agree with the US military’s actions, but I don’t believe that the command structure is stupid. I believe there is a good reason for torture this wide spread, and I think I know what it is, and while I don’t think it justifies it, it might just explain why it’s necessary (if one accepts the premise that the war will have a good end result).
The Red Cross has said that 80%-90% of the people inside those prisons are falsely accused. The US has not denied those numbers, and in fact, when you look at the way civilians are rounded up, imprisoned, processed, and then largely released, I think it’s clear that those figures are generally accurate. Again, in simple terms, the US knows that most of the people they’re torturing are innocent.
Torture has never been shown to be capable of producing credible factual information. Many of the innocent people released from the prisons that have come forward describe admitting to everything — “I am Osama bin Laden in disguise! I buried Saddam’s weapons on my farm!” — but of course none of it was true. However, there is one thing about torture that is relevant: innocent people “break” differently than guilty people, and spew different kinds of information.
The goal of these torture sessions isn’t to get information out of the insurgents. The goal of these torture sessions is to figure out who the insurgents are and who the civilians are. Breaking them psychologically reveals that fact, and that fact alone. After they’ve figured out who’s who, they can release the ones that are innocent, and take the “real” insurgents to secondary processing facilities if they think they have information, or simply kill them on the spot if they don’t. Point is, this may be the only way to “win” this war, so as long as you support Kerry, Bush, McCain, or any of the other mainstream politicians that support staying in Iraq, this blood is on your hands as well.
It all reminds me a lot of witch tests. That is, since witches float, you can tie a woman up and throw her in a lake, and if she drowns, she was innocent and is in heaven. But if she floats, she’s a witch and can be burned at the stake. Sadly, the end result of universal witch testing is that everyone is dead.
