I have come to the conclusion that when one advocates the use of torture or, in fact, uses torture, they are betraying a certain mindset.
Torture is not used to determine the truth. Torture is used by the torturer to get the victim to confess to whatever the torturer already believes the victim has done. Torture is used by governments whose agents already think they know that X is guilty of doing Y, so all they need to do is get X to confess to doing Y.
When the Bush Administration justifies the use of torture (and let's not fool ourselves with semantics, what they are doing and what they have done is torture), they are showing that they have abandoned 230 years of American ideals and jurisprudence, a system where the goal was to arrive at the truth of the matter, not merely to extract false confessions. That used to be done, to some extent in this country (look up "the third degree"), but anyone who looks at this objectively will likely conclude, as people have for the last two thousand years, that information extracted by the use of torture is unreliable.
They are torturers. And they are doing it in our name.
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In the old Soviet Union, torture was primarily used to extract confessions, the more lurid the better, which were then publicized in show trials in order to terrify the Soviet people that there were capitalist conspiracies to destroy the Soviet Union and that if they did not redouble their efforts for The Party, the Capitalists were coming to render them all for their body fats.
Down at Gitmo, torture is used to extract confessions, the more lurid the better, from people in order to publicize said confessions so as to terrify the people that if they do not vote for The Party, the evil islamawhatchacallits are gonna swim the Atlantic with knives in their teeth and sneak into our bedrooms and KILL US ALL!
Busheviks, Bolsheviks, same bullshit, different packaging.
- Badtux the "Seen it before" Penguin
Well, that's just it. It is all about having show trials to justify their rampant lack of humanity.
It's all about power, and how to scare people into giving them power. That's all it ever has been, whether Bolshevik or Bushevik tortures, that's all that torture is about -- power, not information.
- Badtux the Power Penguin
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