The issue of torture has been a popular one in the press the last six years or so. Surrounding the discussion about the supposed torture of terrorist “detainees” has been a whole lot of speculation, exaggeration and outright lies. Things took a turn for the surreal this week when 0bama, at his love-in curiously called a “press conference,” laid forth this:
I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British, during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, “we don’t torture,” when the — the entire British — all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. And — and — and the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts, and over time, that corrodes what’s — what’s best in a people.
Really? The British didn’t torture? How very odd. The British newspaper The Guardian, a screamingly leftist rag if there ever was one, had something quite different to say back in 2005:
The London Cage was run by MI19, the section of the War Office responsible for gleaning information from enemy prisoners of war…
<>The London Cage was used partly as a torture centre, inside which large numbers of German officers and soldiers were subjected to systematic ill-treatment. In total 3,573 men passed through the Cage, and more than 1,000 were persuaded to give statements about war crimes. The brutality did not end with the war, moreover: a number of German civilians joined the servicemen who were interrogated there up to 1948… An assessment by MI5 pointed out that Scotland had detailed repeated breaches of the Geneva convention, with his admissions that prisoners had been forced to kneel while being beaten about the head; forced to stand to attention for up to 26 hours; threatened with execution; or threatened with “an unnecessary operation”… he was stripped, given only a pair of pyjama trousers, deprived of sleep for four days and nights, and starved. The guards kicked him each time he passed, he alleges, while his interrogators boasted that they were “much better” than the “Gestapo in Alexanderplatz”. After being forced to perform rigorous exercises until he collapsed, he says he was compelled to walk in a tight circle for four hours. On complaining to Scotland that he was being kicked even “by ordinary soldiers without a rank”, Knoechlein alleges that he was doused in cold water, pushed down stairs, and beaten with a cudgel. Later, he says, he was forced to stand beside a large gas stove with all its rings lit before being confined in a shower which sprayed extremely cold water from the sides as well as from above. Finally, the SS man says, he and another prisoner were taken into the gardens behind the mansions, where they were forced to run in circles while carrying heavy logs.
What’s exceedingly bizarre about this story is how I heard of it: NPR, a screamingly leftist radio network if there ever was one, actually ran a story today that called out 0bama on his lack of honesty regarding the British in WWII.
Now, let me be clear: torture as punishment is and always will be wrong, and should be dealt with harshly by the legal system. Torture to extract confessions is equally reprehensible, and any such confession should be torn to shreds and ignored. And obviously torture for the amusement of guards and the like needs to be stamped out with an iron boot. But torture to extract information… well, that’s where things get iffy. We go to the hoary old chestnut of “you’ve captured a terrorist who you know has just planted a nuclear time-bomb in a major city , but he won’t tell you where it is just because you ask him.” In this case, of course you use whatever means you have. To save a hundred thousand innocent lives, you lie, cheat, steal, murder, torture, terrorize. You take your own human dignity and flush it down the shitter if you have to. Hel’s belle’s, even Star Trek, a fictional universe based on one of the most optimistic, utopian visions of uplifted humanity, recognized this unpleasant fact in the best scene of the best episode of the best series of Trek. But while “whatever is necessary” is the unfortunate requirement in some cases, there are good questions to be considered as to how good torture is at extracting useful information. On the whole, it’s my understanding that it’s just not that useful, since someone being tortured will probably say whatever they think the torturer wants to hear, regardless of accuracy. So if you’ve caught Mohammad Mohammedahomida, and you know he knows where the A-Bomb is… do you smack him around? Do you give him a couple of good electrical jolts? Or… perhaps you just pump him full of sodium pentathol. I’m reasonably certain the CIA knows what actually works.
Another issue that’s become quite popular is waterboarding and whether or not it’s torture. Among the chattering classes, the answer is clear and unambiguous: yes, it’s torture. But I argue that that is far from certain. Forget all the issues about whether it causes pain, fear, panic, whatever… there is one simple test: who is willing to volunteer? As it turns out… quite a few people.
Christopher Hitchens gets wateboarded.
Some schmoe gets wateboarded on a dare.
What looks like some dirty hippie at a protest gets wateboarded.
Another schmoe gets waterboarded for laughs.
Some radio guy gets waterboarded.
Hell, YouTube is full of goofballs who have volunteered to be waterboarded. And the general concensus? It sucks, and they don’t want it to last more than a few seconds. But does that qualify it as “torture?” Well, here’s where some distinctions can be made. Would these same people who volunteered to be waterboarded volunteer for *other* forms of torture? How many are volunteering to be “beaten with a cudgel?” Or “pushed down stairs? ” Or given “unnecessary operations?” Or set on fire, electrozapulated, strangled until they passed out, kicked in the nuts, pumped full of unpleasant drugs, gnawed upon by rats, stretched on a rack, thumbscrewed, pressed, crucified or pretty much anything else that we’ve come to recognize as “torture?”
If people who have seen videos of a form of torture then decide to have it done to themselves… barring BDSM fetishists, can it be truly said that the “torture” is clearly and unambiguously “torture?”
Let’s try this. Around twenty years ago, two large men held me down while a third slit the toenails of both of my big toes right down the middle with a scalpel, then yanked out one half of each toenail with a pair of pliars. No anasthetic. This was an experience that I can assure you sticks with me quite clearly to this day. It was a pain that can be accurately described as “remarkable,” and one I’d not care to repeat. How many people who currently declare that waterboarding is torture but who would either submit to it themselves, or not do everything they can to prevent someone else from demonstrating it, would submit to having toenails pulled out with pliars? I suspect if you put that question to them, you might start to see where “enhanced interrogation techniques” separates from “torture.”
Note: It wasn’t a torture session, though it certainly felt like it. It was a botched double ingrown toenail operation. The dumbass jackass of a doctor injected the novocaine in the wrong damn place. About ten minutes *after* that little sonofabitch pulled out my toenails with a pair of pliars – all the while smiling and claiming that I couldn’t actually feel a thing – the anasthetic finally migrated to where it was supposed to be. Fricken OW.
