INDY500 said:
There is no denying the evil that is torture nor how corrupting it can be to the individuals and society that practice it. But unfortunately it works and elected officials, responsible above all for the protection of their citizens, have the obligation to do what is necessary--and only what is necessary--to get information that could prevent mass murder.
no! this is TOTALLY wrong! torture does NOT work -- it gives you bad information because a man will say anything to get you to stop torturing him.
and this is also to sidestep the issue of what it means to actually win the war and defend our civilization -- if we have to resort to torture, then we have already lost. further, when torture is condoned, you open up intelligence gathering to sloppy, quick-fix methods, and it degenerates into a playground for sadists. think of Stalin's NKVD who couldn't solve a crime, but terrorized the USSR. a regime that tortures will ruin it's own intelligence service and make us all less safe.
but, aside from that, let's take a look at a book i think i'm going to start a thread on, Ron Suskind's
The One Percent Doctrine. here's an except from a review of the book by the Washington Post:
[q]One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind's gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war's major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."
Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/19/AR2006061901211_pf.html
[/q]
we tortured an innocent, mentally disturbed man, and then acted on that "intelligence."