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Friday, April 24, 2009

On Hearing That Bush Used Torture to Justify Iraq Invasion...

Torture in "Good Faith'" -- Christopher Dowd
Portion below; whole thing (via Antiwar.com) here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3665-Boston-Libertarian-Examiner%7Ey2009m4d22-Torture-in-good-faith

But the truth is that torture tactics have never been used by governments to get truth. Torture is never conducted in good faith. Torture is used by corrupt governments and brutal leaders to justify the unjustifiable. It has always been so. Governments use torture not to extract truth but to generate lies they then use to justify their own power or a particular policy or plan they wish to undertake. Torture is used by governments to terrorize. In fact- governments find it preferable to torture innocent people as that only adds to the torture's effectiveness as a terror tactic.

Torture is used by governments to get people to admit to things they didn’t do. That is why torture is used. Stalin used torture for this reason. Hitler used torture for this reason. The North Vietnamese used torture for this reason. Saddam Hussein used torture for this reason. The inquisition used torture for this reason. Every government on Earth that has ever used torture as a matter of systematic policy has done so in bad faith- has done so precisely for the express reason to get people to admit to things they didn’t do so a particular evil or nefarious course of action by the government could then be justified.

But not the US. Nope. We are the only country on Earth to ever use torture in a "good way". We have the most moralist and goodest torturers on the planet! Isn’t that obvious? Men who hang other men from ceilings by their shackled arms and leave them so for a week dressed in diapers are men whose “good faith” we should automatically believe in according to people like Jeff Jacoby.

So now we have information that maybe the torture wasn’t conducted to “keep us safe” as is automatically and universally assumed in virtually all mainstream Beltway “debate” on this issue.

Could it be that the United States government has used torture, gasp, like other governments have used torture? To justify lies? Ooops. Now I’ve done it! Not believing in the inherent goodness of the US government or that its motives and actions are always pure and “well intentioned” is to be “Anti American”.

Stalin’s NKVD “techniqued” hundreds of thousands of people into admitting that they belonged to vast “Anti Soviet” plots and organizations, almost all of which were entirely fictional. He did so to justify his purges and to consolidate his power. No serious person in the West thought Stalin’s purges were being conducted because of the “threat” of counterrevolution.

Did the US government torture people to justify certain policies? To create sustainable myths and broad narratives like the existence of “Al Qaeda” itself? As part of a campaign designed to justify a police state at home and wars of blatant aggression abroad?

Oh no! We can’t even ask that! What we would assume to be the case if done by any other country that used torture is beyond the pale to even suggest about the US Federal Government. Those questions can’t be allowed to appear at all! That is to “hate America” to dare question the intentions and motives of the US government. No, instead, let’s assume, like Jeff Jacoby, that our government is staffed by saintly warrior poet paladins who used torture, only after wrestling with their super heightened sense of morality, to “defend” the good people of America from the heinous barbarism of radical Islam- just like our favorite TV characters would do.

Yeah- and the Inquisition was about getting them “witches”.

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