Torture Nation

Now it is confirmed that the Bush Administration was having people tortured well before they told their lawyers to justify torturing people.

The Obama Administration's view that those who tortured based on the the legal memos are not going to be prosecuted. That begs the question of whether those who tortured before the memos were written can be prosecuted.

What has bothered me, besides the blatant violations of both US and international law by the Bush Administration, is the fact that the theoretical underpinning of the entire torture program was faulty. The torture techniques were reverse-engineered from the SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape) program, which was first developed by the Air Force following the Korean War. The SERE program was designed to train Air Force aircrew to resist the forms of interrogation used by the Chinese during the Korean War.

When the Chinese tortured American prisoners during the Korean War, their goal was not to gain useful intelligence. The Chinese wanted the prisoners to confess, on camera, to war crimes. The Chinese tortured the prisoners for propaganda purposes. The Chinese wanted to extract false confessions, knowing that under torture, people will say anything it takes to get the torture to stop.

One did not have to be a Ph.D. level historian to understand that torture produces false confessions. The Romans knew that. The Holy Roman Inquisition knew that, though they had the same level of concern for the truth that the Chinese did (and, apparently, still do).

The Bush Administration's willful blindness about both the illegality of torture and the unreliability of torture should be prosecuted. It will be prosecuted.

Two more thoughts: Dick Cheney is going public to argue that torture was a good thing. At this point, he is arguing less for history and more to save his own neck. Cheney knows that not every one of those lawyers involved in the torture memos will go quietly. At least one of them will lay the blame at Cheney's door.

Second: The Bush Administration has been out of power for three months and the discussion has moved from whether war crimes were committed and whether investigations and trials should be conducted to now who should be investigated and tried. Consider how quickly other nations have moved to clean up after their own war criminals. In most cases, it takes from at least a decade (Argentina, Chile, Peru) to, in the case of Japan, never, for a nation to come to grips with the criminal acts committed by its government.

We're getting there in a fraction of a year. I submit that is something we should take some pride in.