I disagree with the OP'S first premise, that the U.S. uses torture to extract information from the enemy. No, that is not it at all. The Bush Regime uses torture for the same reasons GHWB and Reagan used torture during the American Holocaust in the Central America of the eighties -- i.e., to terrorize a target population for the purpose of breaking its will toward freedom and self-determination. The idea is to create paralyzing fear, apathy, and silence while the USG furthers its own self-serving agenda.
(This does not mean the low-ranking tools of the State, the intelligence officers and special ops forces and simple privates trained to inflict torture, are not told the purpose is to extract needed information. Surely they are told that by waterboarding this one, or tying this other one upside down, or by rendering this one to even more fiendish men, they are keeping America "safe". It takes a lot of psyop to turn a moral human being into an immoral State torturer.)
The USG is not stupid; they know very well about the ineffectiveness of torture as a means to uncover information. The history of the USG and torture, as with all regimes that deploy such means, is one of unleashed terror -- again, it's a means to instill terror into an insurgent population, to create fear and submission, to get one's way. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are not exceptions except we've dropped the pretense of proxy. Now we do it ourselves. And why not? We have a half-century's experience teaching technique to the world's most vile right there in Ft. Benning, Georgia (SOA).
USG foreign policy is in major part about punishing those that show signs of opting out of neo-liberal arrangements that benefit our owning class (this the legacy of Nitze, Kennan, et alia). We don't invade Panama, escort a leader out of Haiti at gunpoint, mine the harbors of Nicaragua, or illegally bomb Baghdad because anyone perceives them, in themselves, to be a genuine threat. It's all about crushing the example of alternate models. The capitalist says Greed is Good in one breath and whispers apathy is better in the next -- all the more easy to exploit those who have no hope for a better future!
So leveling a Falujah, setting up shop at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, Eastern Europe, elsewhere -- think of it as a brutal public narrative, meant to be
seen by the family and friends of its victims. It is meant to intimidate, and it will grow more shrill (more vile) before it gets better as populations at home and abroad rise up against the USG and shout "ENOUGH!"
While I agree that the Bush Regime is something extra special -- for example, with Bush we for the most part drop the pretense of proxy, up till now we've generally just funded, equipped, trained, and coached -- but you have to acknowledge that torture has been part of the clandestine arsenal for some time. And it is meant to destroy the community from which the tortured are snatched. For example (from
Torture: State Terror vs. Democracy, by Orlando Tizon, 2002),
Modern torture is designed to destroy the personality of the individual and by extension the community. Ultimately, it is a strategy designed to defeat democratic aspirations at the root, which makes it a tool of choice for unpopular regimes around the world.
<snip>
Torture as practiced today is primarily for the purpose of maintaining unpopular governments in power. "We therefore refer to torture as an instrument of power. Our research has shown that the torturers who work for governments try to break down the victims' identity, and this affects the family and the society as well." Thus the main purpose of torture is not to extract a confession but to break the individual's humanity and make an example of the victim before the community and thereby suppress all political opposition. Torture is the ultimate weapon for terrorizing and controlling the individual human being and the community. When members of a community are made powerless and lose trust in themselves and in one another, building a democratic community is rendered extremely difficult and complex. Torture then is an instrument to destroy democratic aspirations and actions, as history has clearly shown.
I completely agree with this assessment. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, too, are good sources for the history of how torture is used by the United States and other repressive states. You're aware, of course, about the School of the Americas, about the roles of John Negroponte and Elliot Abrams while U.S. trained fiends tortured and disappeared labor leaders, students, peasants interested in better schools and hospitals. The fact that people like Negroponte, who denied that El Mozote ever occured, and Abrams who looked the other way while Batallion 3-16 was on the loose, the fact that they and others were invited back to positions of power in the Bush Regime told me where Bush stood with regards to use of torture before we ever heard of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. None of this surprises me.
We torture in the full light of day for audiences in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere as public narrative intended to strike terror into the hearts, minds, and will of those who stand up against the U.S. neo-imperial oil agenda. That is the purpose, not to extract information. Torture, in my opinion, is terrorism in microcosm -- if we as a nation torture, we as a nation are terrorists. Macrocosm or microcosm, both are public narrative, both intend to intimidate, both are despicably immoral.
I leave you with this (apologies, I often use),
...And so, you say, you've learned a little
about starvation: a child like a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were cut from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
lie in bed at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
That they cup their own parts
with their bedsheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to the wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands of those who erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer have the hearts,
the strength, the lives of women.
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.
-- Carolyn Forche, Return, 1980 (about her experience in El Salvador)
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