The banality of torture
by digby
So torture works, which is why the supporters of the torture program insist they were right to do it. Well, it works on lily-livered terrorists, anyway.
This is the citation for Medal of Honor winner Lance Peter Sijan:
While on a flight over North Vietnam, Capt. Sijan ejected from his disabled aircraft and successfully evaded capture for more than 6 weeks. During this time, he was seriously injured and suffered from shock and extreme weight loss due to lack of food. After being captured by North Vietnamese soldiers, Capt. Sijan was taken to a holding point for subsequent transfer to a prisoner of war camp.
In his emaciated and crippled condition, he overpowered 1 of his guards and crawled into the jungle, only to be recaptured after several hours. He was then transferred to another prison camp where he was kept in solitary confinement and interrogated at length. During interrogation, he was severely tortured; however, he did not divulge any information to his captors.
Capt. Sijan lapsed into delirium and was placed in the care of another prisoner. During his intermittent periods of consciousness until his death, he never complained of his physical condition and, on several occasions, spoke of future escape attempts. Capt. Sijan’s extraordinary heroism and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty at the cost of his life are in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Air Force and reflect great credit upon himself and the U.S. Armed Forces./S/GERALD R. FORD
I can’t help but think about that sociopath, ex-CIA chief John McLaughlin’s comments on the Frontline documentary the other night in which he justified our depraved torture program by saying:
[W]hen I read the Senate report, and I read some of what’s in it, I don’t know how much to take it at face value, because I know of instances where they’re reciting emails that they have either distorted, or they have taken out of context. In one case, for example, they reported an email from an employee that they characterized as the employee saying, “Abu Zubaydah has no more to tell us,” when, in fact, if read in context, the entire email, what the employee is saying is, “He’s very resistant to interrogation techniques. He’s been well-trained.” … That’s the first point.
The second point is, there are often differences between headquarters and the field about the scope or magnitude or approach to use. Sometimes the field is right. But, frankly, sometimes headquarters is right, because at headquarters, you have people with a broader field of vision, who are looking at the large strategic picture, and who have, frankly, more information than you do in some isolated spot in the field about the larger picture.
That is such utter nonsense on so many levels it makes your head spin. First of all, he’s the one leaving out necessary context. According to those emails, some of the torturers were disgusted by their own behavior and were sickened by what they were being asked to do knowing that the guy had nothing more to give up. (“He, on the other hand, adquarters” seems to have been getting off on their titillating daily reports and just wanted more of it.)
Perhaps most importantly, there is one little fact about this that McLaughlin and company never acknowledge.
Zubaydah’s connection to Al Qaeda is now often said to have been overstated,and in response to his habeas corpus petition, the U.S. Government stated in 2009 that they did not contend that Zubaydah had any involvement with the 9/11 attacks or that he had even been a member of Al Qaeda.
You see, we didn’t just torture top military prisoners like Captain Sijan. We tortured low level grunts who knew nothing, ordinary people who were captured as part of a “reward program” that incentivized locals to name their personal enemies and sometimes we even tortured (or “rendered” to other countries to be tortured )completely innocent people and simple cases of mistaken identity. The only thing those men ever signed on to was have a middle eastern name. It’s disgusting that they continue to pretend that this sadistic program, the gory details of which “headquarters” would sit around breathlessly discussing at their famous “5 o’clock” meetings had any moral basis at all.
I wish someone, Bill Maher for instance, would tell me why this is considered so civilized in comparison to those barbaric Muslims.
Is it just the utter banality of the evil of it? That the people who did it look like this?
h/t @JakeTapper