Cross-posted at EuroTrib.com.
By Patrick Lang (bio below)
People often ask me at public events if I think it is “all right” to torture prisoners if that is necessary in order to obtain information needed to prosecute the “Global War on Terror.” (GWOT)
I routinely tell them that it is NOT “all right” to torture people for any reason. The assembly expects that result from the question and they also expect that I will then give them the standard lecture which holds (correctly) that the tortured will tell you anything that they think you want to hear in order to get you to stop what you are doing. Therefore, information obtained through torture is logically suspect and worthless. Intelligence interrogators are supposed to be skilled at their trade. Their trade is about applied psychology, not about beating confessions out of people.
The audience is usually a little more surprised to have me tell them that “torture” is a dishonorable and immoral thing to do and that a decent person, especially a decent soldier, will have nothing to do with such things and will not allow it to happen around him or her. (At this point I can expect to hear from someone whose PTSD-induced fantasy life will have encouraged a great story.)
With the conversation having progressed to this point, a look of dramatic, and cynical world-weariness comes over some members of the audience and someone (often a woman) asks me what I would do if the “authorities” had captured “Fulaan Abu Shuismuh” (so and so, the father of what’s his name) and this creep has the secret information needed to prevent a terrorist outrage, and won’t talk. “Isn’t it right to do whatever it takes…..”
(Continued below)
That is the question that is always asked, often with a kind of dreamy, far off look in the eyes. I have gotten tired of this Sado-Masochistic day-dreaming, so, in response I ask them how far they would go in “whatever it takes?”
“All the way,” is what these usually liberal, often academic, middle class Americans normally say.
“OK,” says I. “Let’s say he is really obdurate and the clock is ticking on said ‘terrorist outrage,’ so we bring him in here and you and you will hold him down while I take his fingers and toes off one at a time with garden shears until he talks? Are you “in” for that?”
Shocked silence follows. “Ah, I get it,” says I. ” You mean that it would be ‘all right’ for people like me to do these things.” At that point it can be seen from the faces that this is the case.
“Ah,” says I as a “follow up,” “then how far are you willing to go in ‘immunizing’ the tormentors from prosecution once the GWOT is a memory?” This does not get an answer. So, this is all BS, a fantasy for everyman and everywoman (complete with guilty frisson of titillation).
There are such people in any society, among any people, anywhere, and at any time. By creating a climate of permissiveness toward abuse of prisoners “for interrogation” the Cheney/Rumsfeld crowd have enabled a release of the demonic forces that, to some extent, lurk in all of us.
The danger is that Cheney and all the other political obsessives on this subject in and out of government encourage those among who are quite capable of any bestiality that their furtive imaginations contrive. They hold out to the “dark ones” the possibility of accomplishing their dreams of power and domination.
Now the Congress is deliberating a proposal by Senator John McCain of Arizona (who knows something about torture) which would forbid the use of torture in interrogations by intelligence personnel/ Cheney opposes this.
McCain wants the “limit” in what can be done to prisoners to be the US Army Field Manual on the subject. I think that would be most appropriate.
Ref: Washington Post
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Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including PBS’s Newshour, and most recently on MSNBC’s Hardball and NPR’s “All Things Considered.”.
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib <a href="Posts
Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
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There is never a time where torture is OK. You gain nothing and lose everything.
How far we have come from the days when Americans were known and admired for their non torture stance, the America I grew up in is no longer recognizable.
“All the way,” is what these usually liberal, often academic, middle class Americans normally say.
Not to start a ruckus, but is it normal for attendees to set forth their political pursuasions prior to asking a question? Or am I just being naive?
I’d quibble with that too. In my experience, liberals find torture abhorrent … except for a few like Dershowitz.
In my experience, the ones who are attracted to torture are sadists and/or rednecks.
Add one more group susan-I’ve said this before but the real whacko fundamentalist ‘christians’ seem to be inordinately fond of torture/punishment…for even the slightest transgressions. (like Dobson beating his dog) Combine that with the thinking of so many of them that Islam is evil and torturing prisoners in Iraq/Afghanistan is more likely seen as can-do even godly Americanism.
!). Torture issue is bullshit. It disrracts from the war. Which is worse blowing up a family or cutting off someone’s toes? The emphasis should be on the war, because the torure issue implies, that the war isn’t so bad it’s the torture they should not be doing. If we didn’t go to war, we wouldn’t have to worry about torture.
2). Interrogation is applied psychology and applied psychology is an art not a science. And no one seems to understand what human beings are, least of all human beings. The interogators are just more disturbed, perverse people masquerading as patriots who simply like to hurt people. That’s basically what the CIA and other “secret” organizations are made up of…people who want to hurt other people, because they are so paranoid about being hurt themselves, they want to hurt first.
3). The people you encounter at your meetings are typical Americans. The Dumbest, most obnoxious, ignorant, vile, insensitive, bland, clueless, provincial, hapless humans on this planet.
American isn’t the land of the free, it’s the land of the dumb. It is the suburb of planet Earth. It is the cities that voted for Gore and the countryside that voted for Bush. Still the cities are no longer made up of urbane people but rather people looking to become urbane who are from the suburbs.
The CIA and the Bush government are largely made up of people from the suburbs, the country side or who were raised in a protected academic background.
We need to clip the ‘torturer”‘s wings. Everything Cheney says he believes is acceptable should be done to him first and then ask him what he thinks about it.
Mr Lang:
My father would interrogate German prisoners during WWII. When I was 9 years old, I wuld go to him and ask him to tell me some war stories. I once asked him what would he do when they would not answer. “I would spank them” he told me. I looked at him, and told him: “that’s mean”, I replied him.
He was so ashamed, he never told me one of his stories again.
The Nazis developed the gas chambers at the extermination camps because Himmler couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Literally – he witnessed some mass executions carried out by gunfire, and was so sickened by them that he determined that something else needed to be done. So they developed the fake shower rooms into which poison gas was dispersed. He watched a batch of prisoners executed in this fashion, and declared himself satisfied.
The “you have only two hours left to get the information that will save thousands of lives” argument is essentially dishonest anyway. The reality of torture is too often some pitiful individual (with no knowledge of anything picked up for no good reason) brutalized until he tells lies that he thinks will bring an end to his ordeal. We’ve been torturing people for 4 years now, since we invaded Afghanistan. If there was a single instance in which torture produced information that thwarted a major terror incident, they’d be crowing about it.
Thanks for the approach to a topic on which discussion has become a bit predictable and stale. The exchanges I’ve encountered are almost scripted and this will offer a slightly different approach to a critical issue. By making the questioner the torturer you eliminate the distance that makes them feel safe.
should cheney do some torture on condi because she might know about another imminent terrorist threat to the usa? The last one she knew about, binLaden determined to strike america, kind of slipped through the cracks.
question:
Are you someone else posting for Pat Lang?
It was I. I do the mechanics of posting for Pat, and sometimes — because I’m so absent-minded — I forget to log out and log back in as susanhu.
There’s now a large team devoted to helping me remember 🙂 (I’m so embarrassed.) Hits self on side of head.
So does that mean that the comments posted by Pat Lang are really you?
Ray McGovern was on NPR this afternoon debating some wingnut (didn’t catch his name, sorry!) about torture. And the wingnut kept on saying that we (Americans) don’t torture, but there should be no limits placed on how we question. You do have to wonder how their brains and tongues manage to utter such incoherent illogicality.
Anyway, McGovern gave five reasons for not engaging in torture in order of importance:
The last point was also made by Milt Bearden in a recent NYT op-ed.
Great report by you. And that list is a keeper.
I see that McGovern has a new story … it’s linked at http://www.buzzflash.com … about torture.
Next time you are asked about what to do with the ticking bomb, give the lady the hostage to evil comeback. She is stopped by terrorists, who show her a working nuke in NYC and then put a wire on her. She is then instructed to go to the nearest hospital and lob a grenade into the nursery or else they will detonate the nuke.
Will she kill a room full of babies to save millions? Or will she call you a sick ** for even thinking of the idea?
Utilitarianism is a yukky moral philosophy, ain’t it.
But I’ve gotten even more enraged twords the neo-con bastards. And I had just read about the video an Italian news network is airing tomorrow of napalm-like chemical weapons being used on the civilians of falujja only fifteen minutes ago.
Cheney’s middle initial is B. I wonder if it might stand for BEELZEBUB!
“There are such people in any society, among any people, anywhere, and at any time. By creating a climate of permissiveness toward abuse of prisoners “for interrogation” the Cheney/Rumsfeld crowd have enabled a release of the demonic forces that, to some extent, lurk in all of us.”
I think a real danger is that people who see themselves as “liberal” on the one hand or “moral” on the other hand (buzzwords, to be sure) do not understand that ANY human is capable of these actions under the right circumstances.
That is why it is SO important to make it clear that abuse/torture is NEVER permissable, and to make it part of a Code or Law that people are obligated to obey.
People who have committed abuse/torture also feel the effects of having done so.
Just, NO. That’s all, NO.
This is our “dirty war”. Torture and the ideology that surrounded it did achieve something for governments in Latin America, I’m sad to say. It created fear: fear of the government, fear of dissent, fear that the state itself, and the stability it provided (however badly), was threatened by “unknown forces”.
This is the main pragmatic argument I have against torture: unless you plan to kill the torturers when they are done, you are going to unleash upon society people who are perfectly comfortable with — and perhaps even enjoy — doing things that only the most sadistic serial killers do.
I don’t want these people living on my street, near my kids. Frankly, I don’t want them living on my planet. I sure as hell don’t want them sitting in the White House.