Torture Is Illegal, Immoral and Ineffective
I was appalled by a recent letter that attempted to normalize torture. The letter writer and other apologists do this by limiting what is defined as torture, minimizing its effects and arguing that torture is necessary to save us from terrorism. I strongly disagree, and here’s why.
Torture is first of all a violation of human rights. Article 5 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights says quite simply, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” There are no exceptions.
Torture is illegal under the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Convention Against Torture, the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Army Field Manual. Redefining it (as the Bush lawyers have tried to do) does not make torture legal.
Torture “destroys the human soul.” It is not mere “mental anguish” or “enhanced interrogation.” Experts such as Alfred McCoy from the UW-Madison and Carol Wickersham from Beloit College, as well as those who staff Centers for the Victims of Torture like the one in Minneapolis, all say the effects are deep and permanent and that psychological torture is even more harmful than physical torture.
Torture is not effective. The testimony of those who have been tortured is that they confess to anything to stop the pain. Many FBI and CIA officials also say torture does not provide reliable information. Nor can coerced confessions be used in legal proceedings — which is why the Bush administration, with the unfortunate consent of Congress, passed the Military Commissions Act. The act subverts our justice system by creating military tribunals, allows the president to declare any citizen an “enemy combatant,” and denies the right of habeas corpus so people can be held indefinitely in a gulag like Guantanamo.
Torture is not going to keep us safe. In fact, there is a strong likelihood that it will make us less safe, because the practice of torture results in extremism and a desire for revenge. Furthermore, there is absolutely no way of finding every single person plotting a terrorist attack even in a police state — which is exactly what we will become if we try to swoop up anyone who might be a potential terrorist.
Fortunately our choice is not between practicing torture and becoming victims of terrorism. Torture is a response of fear and despair. We can choose instead to respond with courage and hope. We can act humanely. We can obey the rule of law. We can work to resolve international conflict with diplomacy, negotiation, and nonviolent means. We can stop the death and devastation that result from waging war. We can instead focus on development and a more just distribution of Earth’s resources.
The Web sites for Witness Against Torture, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and The World Can’t Wait provide ideas for action.
We should act on our best instincts instead of our worst. We should speak out against torture.
Bonnie Block is president of the Dane County United Nations Association and former chair of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice.
© 2008 Capital Newspapers
The real purpose of torture is to spread terror among a target population. It won’t stop until those who give the orders go to jail or the hangman’s noose.
There are two terrorized populations in the current situtation — the Muslims, and our own. When our First Amendment rights to free speech and to petition our government are being ignored and violated, when to speak out risks being arrested, the terror has spread to our own land.
Torture is stupid. If somebody was torturing me, I would say anything to get out of it. Any intelligence official worth their salt would tell you that torture gets bad and unreliable information.
Exactly, militantliberal. Torture is a weapon of terror. It is something else too, though. It is an agent of vengeance. The audience of torture is also the home population, those who are fans of Jack Bauer and who believe in revenge, at least. Their visceral fear and hatred is assuaged by the knowledge that “the good guys” are enforcing payback on the “bad” ones. As a means of raising patriotic morale, torture, like the releasing of waves of missiles and bombs on civilian enemy population, works very well. Retribution is the very core of the American judicial system after all. These guys are bad - they should feel pain. Whether they are prisoners facing execution or suspects anonymously rendered to secret prisons.
Torture is simply stupid. A, it does not work, because the guy being tortured will start to lie, and B, it exposes our own to the same treatment. To be sure, the Muslim scumbags torture anyway, but because we are seen to do it too, we lose the moral ability to criticize them for it.
Cruelty and avrice.
Torture was used extensively during the Inquisation to force a ‘confession’ from (mostly) rich Jews so that the Church could seize their property. Welcome to the Neo-Dark-Ages!
Speaking is optional, but irrelevant to purpose
Torture is immensely effective. It’s purpose is to cow the population. Worked for the soviets, worked for the gestapo.
Okay — Here goes. I am going to ‘burn the bridge’ with you all, so to speak.I have not been a frequent commenter at all, maybe 5 or 6 times in all anyhow, so it sure won’t hurt this community of RIGHT folks . . .
Right. Yep. I agree with almost every single comment I read posted at the end of these here articles. You all are pretty right for the most part. I read the articles religiously. Common Dreams is my homepage and the first thing I read over coffee in the morning.
Yep.
Right.
Right, as in YOU GUYS KNOW EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW.
You are all, to a person, damn smart.
Damn negative.
Damn angry.
(So am I, believe me)
I read the stories, then scroll down to see who is saying what (Kem, you are one of the only people here that has any real wisdom and prudence, imho) and all.
I have slowly over the last few months become more and more disgusted with this ‘commenting’.
It is just gross.
Ugly.
You are all ‘preaching to the choir’ and it makes very little if any difference at all.
I know it feels good to vent.
It feels good to be real smart and have great convictions and insight, but WTF do any of you plan to accomplish by raging back and forth endlessly???
“Gee, maybe if I say the absolutely smartest and wittiest thing, someone will get inspired and do something . . .”
Yeah, you all are so smooth, so slick, so RIGHT and so Full Of Shit too!
I am done reading the comments.
I get too depressed seeing all of you well-meaning folks talking to each other inside of this little bubble and just going around and around in circle — and wasting time and energy.
Get a life people.
Organize.
Write passionate responses on conservative websites.
Go head to head with the real deal, the people that need to hear all these insightful and angry retorts and opinions.
Or would you all rather just be cool and right amongst each other?
I’m done here.
This sucks.
Later.
You are correct, of course, and all civilized people agree. Sadly, many federal courts, most of Congress and our most recent, and probably current, Attorney General disagree.
Go, Bonnie!
Signed, an old friend from Madison!
Paul
Resistance of any kind, especially blogging, especially liberal blogging, especially progressive liberal blogging, is useless. You will do as we say, as we conservatives say, and you will do it now. Stop all this thinking and feeling and writing stop it stop it stop it!
hey now
but I do post on other sites. I’m posting over at haaretz today
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/943955.html
(lacking imagination I am posting under the name colleen)
I come here to gain information from the other posters. It strengthens me to be with others who are somewhat like minded. Last time I went to vote I had a shouting match with another voter outside the voting location over water boarding and it is intimidating to be told to “Go hang yourself.” Imo the right wing have some violent people, who easily progress into violent actions.
I think some can enjoy torture just for its own sake, without it having any purpose like gaining information. The right wing has some people who are sadists imo.
Imo there is no amount of reasoning that would stop a sadist from wanting to engage in torture, because that drive to torture is not based in reason.
Part of the definition of what is or is not torture, used by people in the Bush administration, was that no pleasure would be derived by people engaging in “enhanced interrogation.”
Does it take much imagination to imagine someone who is doing waterboarding etc and getting pleasure from that kind of physical control over another person’s life… who then can not show how much pleasure he is recieving..and how that would actually enhance the pleasure for a sadist?
Rather than another article on the political and moral implications in torture, I’d like to read an article that explains why people torture from a psychological perspective.
Is it possible to stop sadists? and how do you stop them?
AP Top News at 1:30 a.m. EST
9 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — “The nation’s intelligence chief says waterboarding “would be torture” if used against him or if someone under interrogation actually was taking water into his lungs. But Mike McConnell, in a magazine interview, declined for legal reasons to say whether the technique categorically should be considered torture.”
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g8-DEMtAE9q4i4ySQ0eV_qZefmRQD8U4R1FG1
Torture, stress positions, and other ‘interrogation’ techniques are not primarily attempts to gain intelligence but attempts to break the will and morale of an enemy. These are techniques of what Gen. Rupert Smith calls War Among the People (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_among_the_people), where an ideology is the real enemy of the dominant power. The power of an ideology can be broken by weakening the minds of its overt actors. This aspect of warfare has been happening since the wars against communism in the latter half of the 20th century, and it will increase as multiple forms of resistance to hierarchical powers continue to increase (see http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/). The torture we have seen in Iraq and the hidden torture programmes of the CIA are aimed at this end. Remember Winston Smith’s experiences in 1984?
It would be helpful to see a reasonable definition of “torture” established to make it more difficult for apologists to weasel out because it is only “enhanced interrogation”. Here is one reasonable definition.
(n) torture, torturing: the deliberate infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons in an attempt to force another person to yield information, cooperation, confession, or for the sadistic pleasure of the torturer, or for any other reason.
It would also be helpful if it were more widely pointed out that torture has shown to be not only unreliable, but is counterproductive. The “ticking bomb” scenario is clearly bogus and accepted only by the most gullible among us. Imagine yourself as an innocent swept up by chance, as most detainees obviously were, and held for years and tortured. It is far more likely that the resultant ‘blowback’ recruits people hostile to the US and increases threat potential. “We are being consumed by the fires we set to fight the fires we flee.”
Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” presents a frequently-cited example of how to impose meaning by fiat: ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
Ms. Block left out one more reason, possibly THE most important one, for NOT legalizing torture, as torture has become under the Bush administration.
Never in the history of the world, not today, and not in the past, has any political body that has embraced torture as a solution to a perceived problem, NOT eventually used torture against its own citizens to intimidate its citizenry into NOT speaking out against its policies. Never!
Torture is one more tool that despots use to get a democracy to turn against itself. If this isn’t, all by itself, grounds for impeachment, I don’t know what else is.
Our enemies use torture to a large extent. Someone should ask them if they find it effective or not.
“Torture is one more tool that despots use to get a democracy to turn against itself.” (LindaS)
Like others before them, the Bush administration has used torture to demoralize both the ’source’ and ‘target’ populations.
Torture is done for two reasons. The first is because the government can. The second is to terrorize the population. Dubya, Cheney, & Co. want to turn the US government into a Third World entity. Torture is what Third World governments do.
The consequences of torture is to
while doing also as DREAMER TOO states as well:
In a state of fear and panic, both populations, will jump and act as instructed - almost automatically - to avoid immediate and sometimes permanent consequences (or expectation of them becoming real).
T O R T U R E is a very public act as hidden pain has no ability to warp more than one person’s mind, the more the M$M spreads the message the more equivalent painful crys and reactions are created.
Having terror/torture on M$M, is like having a “propaganda car” that goes 300,000 mph while doing it with 100,000 mpg, but your own mileage may vary.
I have an idea for a new documentary…please steal it!! If I had a billion dollars, I would offer the top ten MMA (Mixed Martial Arts…should be tough enough guys) fighters X million dollars (X being enough) to keep a secret that would only pay them Y% of X (so X & Y may take sometime to determine) if they can keep the secret. Assuming you get 1-3 to buy in to this plan, I would hire ex-CIA and others to get the information from these tough guys using “enhance interrogation techniques.” At given intervals, I would ask a group of pundits (accepted public idiots) if these tough guys were being tortured.
Enhanced interviews would start with words, then stress positions, then isolation (with extended light, darkness, and/or loud noises), then hypothermia, then head slaps, then water boarding, then the next technique, then the next technique…until they break, and they will break.
I think Americans need to SEE these techniques before they can realize what is being done in their names to fully realize what torture is. I am afraid the average American lacks the imagination, or is too busy/lazy, to realize that the above techniques are torture.
I want to give the average American the benefit of the doubt. Therefore, I want the documentary to end with the image of the tough MMA fighter before the interview, along side the image of the broken MMA fighter.
If I wanted to throw in a low blow, I would bring up Jesus Christ and ask WWJD?
I personally think this sight was the means of change. I mean in 2004 people like myself was declared basically a terrorist. That changed and I do credit the people here, I truly do. It took persistance and courage to stand by our convictions. Now it is a majority not a minority in support of…of…..of (Oh, God I have to say this,) our president. We have had Cindy Sheehan on this forum and many of us gave her our support. So don’t say all we do is preach to the choir.
I have spent the last six years fighting conservatives. You just can’t get through to them because they are so brainwashed, angry or on drugs or alcoholics. They want someone to blame for their hardships and they have NO more faith. They have gone over the edge. I actually find myself having pity for them. They are uneducated victims. It is embarrassing for them to admit that. They have been baboozeled.
It is up to us to educate, educate and educate. Our country is in a sad state of affairs and this didn’t happen over the last 6 years. This is an ongoing process.
I come in here because I know I can get the support I need to continue the fight. We are social creatures and we need each other.
We are up against the slime of all slime, to be honest I don’t even think these people are human. They are aliens trying to take over our world.
MA MATRIARCH — Yes, this is all so TRUE. Thank you
This is an example to the person who said our rantings are useless.
This is a true conservative talking about women and children on Welfare and abortion.
“Hard to disagree .. the taxpayers are damned either. We either pay for the essentially “elective” surgery, or we pay for the unwanted kids.
I’ve seen way too many very young women with 2 and 3 kids wheeling them around the projects in Southie, Charlestown, Roxbury and Dorchester - it’s not a racial issue, it’s socio-economic with multiple generations feeding from the same trough.”–Iccprez
“Please provide documentation that the government pays for abortion. Women are held financially responsible for the killing of their own children, not the government. The government takes NO responsibility. Self-alienation works on the government’s (Corporate America) behalf not women or unborn chlldren; which is the way its supposed to be by most peoples standards. (Not mine.)
Who is at fault for the social-economic problems, women? So in other words if the poor didn’t procreate poverty and low wage jobs would cease to exist?
What tax are you personally paying that they are not? Income tax? Do you have a clue what bills income taxes pay? I will tell you this it is certainly not welfare.”–MA_Matriarch
Most people think that income taxes pays for welfare. They believe if all these freeloaders worked they wouldn’t have this tax burden. For decades politians has been leading them on as if this is true. Conservatives don’t know this is to pay “interest” to the private banking industry for the loans our government takes out at the expense of all of us taxpayers. A great deal of it get pocketed.
During the last 6 years theft has been the highest it has EVER been. Billions of dollars have disappeared but you don’t hear conservatives complaining about that. I mean after all they have the victims to whip around.
I am not done with my rant. Conservatives and democrats alike have the destitute to denigrate for they are not paying their fair share because they are too LAZY to get off their butt and work 3 jobs. How dare them considering having a family when there is a national debt to be paid off.
Rev. Martin Luther King was “right on” decades ago. The same thing he said about the Vietnam War could be said about the Iraq War right now. Why didn’t people listen to him? I will tell you why, it is because he was BLACK! He only was out to serve negro’s with our tax money. Rascism has not disappeared. It is still alive today.
As far as I am personally concerned, we don’t have any candidates currently running that represent the people of this country. The path towards the destruction of this country will continue. I believe WE MUST make http://www.freedomtofascism.com/ a campaign issue instead of controversial issues such as gay marriage and abortion. Aaron Russo was white so maybe there is a chance the message will be effective.
MA MATRIARCH — ¿ When will be have the thought that Generals riding around in their multi-trillion dollar tanks, helicopters, airplanes, and submarines …
We need more ranting, until this injustice is obliterated - both at home and aboard.
Yes, a very crucial point that income taxes barely even pay for interest on Federal spending, while we also have inflation as a hidden tax that regressively hits the poor and least able the hardest.
The Federal (w/o) Reserve is the enemy of every taxpayer and citizen, and only exists for the benefit of the richfilthiest - which although also citizens - MOST have more money than they could ever spend - to more than fully compensate the inflation bite that they cannot avoid.
Damn, I’m angry too
Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
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We must put an end to this corruption. If we don’t more and more people are going to become destitute and will have no problem torturing people. It is all a psychological game. We can’t allow them to win!