[Pen-l] torture chic

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

from SLATE's news summary:
> The NY [TIMES] must-read piece about how the "brutal methods of interrogation" came to be used by CIA officials is, at times, hard to believe. Is it really possible that high-level officials decided to pursue such a dramatic course of action without wondering whether this had been discussed in the past? Whatever you may think of Bush-era incompetence, it seems someone, somewhere would have thought to search through government archives. But that's exactly what they didn't do, concludes the NYT after talking with "more than two dozen current and former senior officials."

> The thinking seemed to be that since the interrogators would be employing methods used on American military trainees, they couldn't possibly amount to torture.<

US National Public Radio last night quoted one of the Bush lawyers --
now a judge-for-life here in Los Angeles -- saying exactly that back
in 2002: torture of prisoners is the same as the voluntary "tortures"
that soldiers underwent.

> But a quick search of government archives would have discovered that the training program was devised to give American service members an idea of torture methods employed by Communists in the Korean War, which had elicited false confessions from captured Americans. The officials were so ignorant of history that they didn't even know that water-boarding had been prosecuted by the United States after World War II. And even though veteran military trainers warned that the methods were ineffective, their insight never reached the right people. It all amounted to "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm," one former CIA official said. <

I think it was a "perfect storm" of "more macho than thou" posturing
by Bushwhackers wielding worst-case scenarios (suitcase bombs landing
at Laguardia) to push their cases. In addition, it is the logical
extension of an organization that runs on coercion (the state) in a
socioeconomic system that requires it while striving to treat people
as mere objects (capitalism).

-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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