Naomi Klein: Torture's Dirty Secret Is That It Works

[BurtWorm]

"As an interrogation tool," she says, "torture is a bust. But when it comes to social control, nothing works quite like torture."



http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050530&s=klein



lookout by Naomi Klein

Torture's Dirty Secret: It Works



This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's will and the collective will.

This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."

Yet despite this body of knowledge, torture continues to be debated in the United States as if it were merely a morally questionable way to extract information, not an instrument of state terror. But there's a problem: No one claims that torture is an effective interrogation tool--least of all the people who practice it. Torture "doesn't work. There are better ways to deal with captives," CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 16. And a recently declassified memo written by an FBI official in Guantánamo states that extreme coercion produced "nothing more than what FBI got using simple investigative techniques." The Army's own interrogation field manual states that force "can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

And yet the abuses keep on coming--Uzbekistan as the new hot spot for renditions; the "El Salvador model" imported to Iraq. And the only sensible explanation for torture's persistent popularity comes from a most unlikely source. Lynndie England, the fall girl for Abu Ghraib, was asked during her botched trial why she and her colleagues had forced naked prisoners into a human pyramid. "As a way to control them," she replied.

[JNelson6563]

1. Very good article

Thanks for posting! :toast:

[BurtWorm]

2. De nada.

Naomi Klein rules.

:hi:

[kenny blankenship]

3. That's right, even for getting information...

torture works --but only if you torture A LOT of people.

One captive will tell you whatever you want to hear under torture. Lies, truth... anything at all and it's hard to know when they are telling what they really know. Torture a bunch of people who know the same things and you will get it all eventually, by torturing them when their lies don't match up.

They know this from assisting other torture friendly governments over the decades. They learned it from ex-Nazis, from our escapades in Indochina, from Chile, from Central America and from Israel. And this is now their plan too.

As a rule whatever an elite uses in dominating the outside world and that it finds successful, they will eventually begin to use against domestic "subversives" too.

[The Magistrate]

4. As A Point Of Curiousity, Sir

Do you imagine torure a modern invention, unheard of before Hitler, or the middle of the twentieth century?

It has been the routine practice of governments for millenia, and any statement implying the contrary cannot be taken seriously....

[BurtWorm]

5. I just read Voltaire in Exile, sir,

about his years in Ferney and Geneva, when he wrote Candide and developed an intense interest in opposing miscarriages of justice. I had not really grasped, in all my years on the planet, that the use of the most vicious sorts of torture by autocratic government at the behest of the Church, of all things, was not only commonplace in the Europe of the Eighteenth Century, but considered perfectly normal. Of course torture is ancient. Of course it still goes on. But there was once a time when it was seen as a good by intelligent people--including Voltaire, until the very end of his life.

[The Magistrate]

8. And That Sea-Change, Sir, Is An Important One

It is both distressing and disgraceful that our government today is making some contribution to eroding the new standard you speak of before it has fully taken hold....

[kenny blankenship]

6. er, What?

I can't imagine what your beef is,
SIR.

Nothing in what I posted suggests I think torture is a modern invention. The United States of America as a world dominating hegemonic power IS however a modern invention. They have had to learn from past would be hegemons like the Nazis, and from local barbarians like Pinochet.

[The Magistrate]

7. Nonsense, Sir

There is nothing useful, save perhaps a sense of restraint, to be learned from failed attempts such as that of the Hitlerites; one of the chief reasons they failed was that they indulged themselves in the joys of mass sadism too soon, while their grip on conquests was still unstable.

All governments, without exception in human history, expand their authority to the practical limits of their capability to do so. It is a process quite literally as old as human governance itself. So is the calculation that people fear pain, and will go to great lengths to avoid feeling it.

Your list of tutors, therefore, is as unncessary as it is incomplete. Even confined to the twentieth century any competent list would have to include a great many prominent names, and many more deservedly forgotten save by specialists, that you have seen fit to omit.

You will find, Sir, in speaking with people who do not already agree with you, that the line you have chosen here is useless....

[kenny blankenship]

9. The list of tutors is derived from

those from whom our CIA and military intelligence has had DIRECT instruction from and collaboration with, as colleagues. I don't know why you think it should be exhaustive. (?)

I think you're swinging at phantoms, imagining perhaps that I propose torture as a legitimate practice. (That would be a typical, kneejerk DU bad reading comprehension reaction--I can't tell if that's your difficulty since you are roaming so far afield from any point I raised.) You continue to swat at some assertions I never made: eg that torture is new, that this list of governments that have tortured is supposed to be somehow historically exhaustive, etc...
Frankly, it's baffling.

[The Magistrate]

10. As You Wish, Sir

"On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."