Do Conservatives Understand Torture?

[babylonsister]

Do Conservatives Understand Torture?

Conservatives don't actually support torture. They just think it's a useful tool. Too bad they're wrong.


Matthew Yglesias | April 30, 2009 | web only


The current conservative line on the forms of torture used by the Bush administration -- from waterboarding to stress positions that produce "muscle fatigue" that manages not to rise to the level of "severe pain" -- leads to an obvious question. Why don't we do more of it? According to the right, this kind of physical and psychological torment doesn't meet the standard for illegal torture. And according to the right, it's also highly effective at producing information.

And a legal, highly effective method of acquiring information from prisoners or captives sounds like a useful thing indeed.

It seems to me that people who genuinely believe this stuff -- those who, like moral cretin and Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb want to call torturers "American heroes" and make light of waterboarding by calling it "dunking" -- ought to believe in making its use widespread. And yet somehow, I don't hear the calls. I don't hear the calls for a waterboarding apparatus in every American police station or for equipping the Afghan national army with fewer guns and more bug-filled boxes. Maybe we could get to the bottom of the Allen Stanford case with the judicious application of a waterboard. And why not? If it's not torture, why not? If it works, why not?

Most likely, they don't really believe what they're saying. Indeed, it's extremely difficult to read Jay Bybee's now-infamous memo as anything other than a bad-faith product from someone who knows perfectly well that the techniques he's describing are torture but who sees it as his job to spin out a rationalization for authorizing them.

The giveaway, if you ask me, is the contention that waterboarding does not violate the prohibition on severe pain and suffering in part because "'pain and suffering' (as used in Section 2340) is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of 'pain' as distinguished from 'suffering.'" This is preposterous hairsplitting, and the follow-up contention that waterboarding doesn't meet the standard for "severe suffering" because it's "simply a controlled acute episode" is absurd.

One suspects that the architects of the Bush torture regime, and its leading defenders, know perfectly well that it's torture. This, I think, is why they don't propose wider use of the waterboard in the criminal-justice system. They think it's torture and they think it's wrong, but they think it's useful and therefore justified under the extreme circumstances of the "war on terror." The public seems to see things the same way, with a recent CBS/New York Times poll showing that over 70 percent of Americans think waterboarding is torture, but a plurality deem it justified anyway.

This is why some form of protracted investigation into torture -- whether taking the form of criminal prosecution or, more likely, some kind of "truth commission" -- could do the most good. The evidence we already have overwhelmingly indicates that the Bush-era turn toward torture was not useful.

more...

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=do_conservatives_understand_torture

[FiveGoodMen]

1. Let's torture them and find out

[notesdev]

2. Torture is

being forced to sit through 16 hours straight of Ben Bernanke testifying in front of Congress.

[baldguy]

3. I don't know which answer is more freightening.

Either they advocated a policy without fully knowing what it entailed - and it turned out to be a war crime.

Or, they knew fully what waterboarding is and what it does and that it WAS a war crime - and they went and did it anyway.

[burning rain]

4. They're desensitized from having attended church so much.

^

[StopTheNeoCons]

5. Churchgoers more likely to back torture, survey finds

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3856029