How Torture Costs Lives

[ihavenobias]

How Torture Costs Lives
By Cenk Uygur

In this ridiculous debate we're having now on whether America should torture people (next up for debate: Should America become Syria?), people only seem to be talking about the potential of torture to save lives. But what we should really be talking about is how torture costs lives. Which it has, on a grand scale.

I'm not talking about the nearly one hundred men who have died while in US custody (34 are suspected or confirmed as homicides, including beating men to death at Bagram Air Base and detainees whose arms and legs we broke just for "amusement"). Those are Arab detainees, though some of them were innocent, I understand that in the ugly America we live in today, people don't care about the lives of Arabs.

I'm talking about American lives that were lost because of torture. We now have declassified CIA cables that explain how we sent Ibn al Sheikh al Libi to be tortured in Egpyt. They buried him alive and beat him mercilessly until he confessed that Iraq and Al Qaeda were linked. The only problem was they weren't. He made up the story to get his captors to stop torturing him.

According to the CIA, al Libi "had difficulty even coming up with a story" on the non-existent ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The false admission beaten out of al Libi was later used by Colin Powell at the United Nations as a justification for starting the Iraq War...

For the rest, click here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/how-torture-cost-lives_b_76400.html

[ihavenobias]

1. Sorry, I forgot the video clip!

http://www.theyoungturks.com/story/2007/12/12/102148/43/tytvideoclips/Why-Torture-is-ALWAYS-a-Bad-Idea

[rcsl1998]

2. US Wounded/Casualties Exceeded d 50,000 Last January Until...

...this bunch of liars came up with a new way of counting wounded US troops - voila, dropped the number being reported down to 20,000 - Imagine what the true number is now...

[ihavenobias]

3. Do you have a link to that story?