We Do Not Torture
Not so sure that Bush’s statement still stands up to the laugh test, but this article from the Times should chip away at any remaining trust you may have had in the integrity of our War On Terroring.
He was asked when he had gone to Afghanistan and how he had met Mr. bin Laden. When he replied that he had never been to Afghanistan and had not met Mr. bin Laden, the Egyptians tortured him with electric shocks, he said. “I cry and I yell,” he said. “Also they gave me brain electric shocks.” He said he was forced to consume liquids that were laced with drugs “so you don’t know what you are talking about.”
In early April, he said, the Americans flew him to Bagram, the American air base outside the Afghan capital, Kabul. He was held there for almost a year, at times shackled and handcuffed in a small cage with other detainees, and further interrogated, he said.
“A C.I.A. person said, ‘We forgive you; just accept you met Osama bin Laden.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not going to say that.’ ” Even though polygraph tests showed that he was telling the truth, he said, he was shifted from cell to cell every few hours and deprived of sleep for six months.
Listen. Reading the article, this guy sounds like kind of a douchebag, but we don’t need to be torturing people for being douchebags. We shouldn’t be torturing people at all, but we do, and will continue to. We can play all kinds of games like letting the Egyptians do it for us, or defining torture as anything that kills you or ruins your organs (so if you’re not dead and your spleen still mostly works, I guess we didn’t torture you!), or Bush’s weirdly circular logic of “Torture is illegal, we don’t do illegal things, therefore what we’re doing isn’t torture, because I’ve made what we do legal.”
Whatever. These individual cases often have enough ambiguity to allow pro-torture conservatives to wiggle out either with patriotic platitudes or straight up insults (“would you rather die at the hands of a terrorist or risk mistreating a few dumbasses who where in the wrong place at the wrong time anyway?”). What this article is pretty useful for, though, is illustrating that there was clearly a well-oiled torture machine that shuffled the guilty and innocent alike from one shithole to another, beating them up and asking irrelevant questions at every stop.
What also seems obvious after reading this and dozens of articles like it, is that the machine was designed to torture people, it was NOT designed to glean information from them. I’m all for national catharsis, but this is gross. Beating up Pakistani loudmouths is not going to bring the Twin Towers back.