[A-List] Info obtined through torture

["Nestor Gorojovsky" <nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

H. Liu:

"The arguement has been made that torture sometimes does provide 
critically useful information that saves lives.

Those who make this arguement need to ask whether any useful 
information were extracted from the victims of torture whose 
photographs the world has senn in recent days.  The military is 
silent on that information, preferring to let the force abstract 
rationale carry the day.  Since between 70-90% of the prisoners were 
admittedly wrongly detained, that they were in fact innocent 
civilians caught up in a net of feeding frenzy,that they could not 
possibly have any information that would be remotely of interest to 
military intelligence,  torture then serves no purpose except to 
dehumanize a alien population."

Two points:

a) in fact, torture _does_ provide info.  The Argentinean (and Latin 
American in general) experience of the late 70s and the 80s,  is 
definitive in this sense.  Let us face it.  But it has to be massive, 
cruel, utterly dehumanizing, of the worst kind, pervasive and 
enduring.  The photographs of soldiers pissing on a prisoner are 
simply child's play for those who know what actual torture, the 
seriously info providing torture, means.

Since most of this repugnant torture was executed by non-First World 
personnel (though trained and ideologically drilled by Western 
Imperialist academies, etc.), and since news agencies were unsinkably 
absent from the place where action took ground, this useful torture 
has been closed off the eyes of the world.

Not that under specific conditions the Western military will not 
resort to what they taught to others.  But this ordeal that the Iraqi 
are enduring would have been the idea of Paradise of any desaparecido 
while falling down to Earth, in a drug induced slumber, from a low 
height flying plane above the River Plate.

b) On a lighter note: there is _one_ thing abuse and "light" torture 
provides, and _this is for certain_ (thus, best quality info):  
people who have passed through it will hate the torturers for ever.

Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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"Sí, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos".
Simón Bolívar al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de 
Buenos Aires, 1822
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