The Historical Use of Torture and Its Ineffectiveness for Interrogation.

[caseymoz]

Cheney talks about the information gathered from torturing terrorist and terror suspects, but I think his people told him what he wanted to hear, and it seems that Cheney would inspire that "level of respect."

Torture is not used to get information, at least not by people who have even average standards of evidence. Its main effects favored totalitarian states and dictatorships, but not because it actually yielded any evidence.

In the Soviet Union, when authorities "interrogated" prisoners, those authorities were already required to find and execute maybe 10,000 traitors, by quota. The pre-existing assumption was that traitors were everywhere, all the authorities had to do was shake tree. The interrogators just needed a halfway likely story in order to make the case, and to sentence or execute the unfortunate prisoner. The story gathered was then used to arrest, torture, and sentence or execute, other people he implicated. The standards of evidence were very low. Nevertheless, it had other effects favorable to maintaining a totalitarianist regime. Torture was punishment that actually broke people and made them compliant, and made them examples when they were released. It terrorized the population and kept it compliant, as people knew there was hell on earth prepared for them and wouldn't even think of opposing the state. It had a psychological effect. Interrogators were edified in their superiority by the dominance torture entails, and by extension, felt their own ideology superior. Dominance of that sort warps the soul in that way, many of the interrogators had very high posts in the party, and many important party members had a direct role in the interrogations.

If you look at other regimes that tortured, like the Nazis in Concentration Camps, they didn't do it really to gain intelligence or information. With the Nazis, for example, the very fact that people knew that there was a "secret" hell kept them from questioning the State, and kept them from even talking about the regimes torture. It's the same with the Ton-Ton Macquote in Haiti, or General Pinochet's thugs in Chile. Torture terrorizes the population, it punishes a prisoner in very short order, the dominance entailed solidifies the torturers dedication to their cause.

So, it is my opinion, torture has nothing to do with getting information. If Cheney and the rest of the Bushacrats thought it did, they are incompetents as well as criminals (who's surprised at that assertion?). If the memos are any indication, they never comprehended the effects of torture, thinking that it was effective for gaining factual intelligence. My conclusion is that they drew the wrong lessons from the Cold War. It is almost like they learned that if the Soviets had wanted intelligence bad enough to torture for it, then we had to torture too. The Soviet Union, North Korea, and Vietnam used torture as a matter of course. The Bushacrats failed to understand that those regimes never put a high value on truth. That those regimes probably gained very little good information from torture, but it was an absolutely essential for totalitarian states for other reasons.

However, what can we expect from people who thought Vietnam was a great undertaking, if that press hadn't been so pesky and if those politicians would have just let our military win? And that Nixon was a good president who was just hounded out of office by the liberal press? Or who think that Obama never released his "real" birth certificate. Like the the old Bolsheviks, conservatives themselves don't put a high value on truth either, and they have very low standards of evidence. I wouldn't doubt that Cheney completely agrees that intelligence gained by torture kept terrorism at bay. He is just the sort of man who would have to believe it. Where does that leave Bush? He never understood, and his job was never to understand.