What do you think is the REAL reason the neo cons were so eager to torture people?

[Philosoraptor]

The reason they always give, is 'to protect America' but that's total bullshit.

What do you think is the REAL reason they have such a hard on for torture? Is there a sadistic/sexual angle, or a religious angle?

'Keeping America safe' ain't it.

[Psychic Consortium]

1. Cheney needed to compensate for his inability to perform in the bedroom?nt

[olegramps]

30. It the nature of the beast. Fascists torture.

[zippy890]

2. cowardice

pissing-in-their-pants FEAR
plus ignorance made them into bullies

[Skidmore]

3. They are paranoid, power-hungry, sadistic, miserable

excuses for humanity who have the social skills of rabid dogs.

[annabanana]

4. To get the false intel they needed to operate the way they wanted to.

You can get a person to say exactly whatever you want them to.

[Philosoraptor]

6. & you'd confess to shooting Lincoln after being tortured 187 times

[surrealAmerican]

19. That's it exactly.

While torture is not effective if you want reliable information, it's a very effective means to get people to say what you tell them to, and sign statements you prepare for them.

[alsame]

27. Totally agree with this. I think they wanted false info to justify

expanding the war from Afghanistan to Iraq. And then from Iraq to Iran.

I think the Afghanistan/Iran/Iraq route was the real endgame for them.

[Mari333]

5. dont forget there were Dems who approved it too

no one back then even thought to check a law book or history book. dumb as a box of rocks, many of them. hysterical handwringing. Thats what brought about the torture policies and the patriot act . They just sat there and approved it , and flew their little flags on their cars. It took some guy with a cell phone at Abu Ghraib to expose the truth. The MSM were cheerleading the occupation and nary a peep out of them on torture.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

7. Sadism and jealousy of real dictators who get to torture as much as they like

without pesky things like laws and morals.

They wanted to be FEARED as much or more than they wanted to be respected. Remember Bush saying a dictatorship would be great, but only if he could be the dictator?

[SpiralHawk]

8. Because they are psychotic, psuedo-Christian Pharisees?

[deminks]

9. One or more of them had a jones for torture, IMHO.

I think someone was watching. Why else would the Bush misadministration solicit a 'wish list'?


http://rawstory.com/08/blog/2009/04/21/senate-report-after-soliciting-torture-wish-list-bush-admin-ordered-chinese-communist-techniques/

[JVS]

10. Because they're fucking evil!

[Stinky The Clown]

11. I can only speculate. And there is no sound bite/simple answer

Those who ordered it had the most complex issues.

The actual practitioners were likely closer to being just garden variety sociopaths.

Some of the middle guys - Gonzo, for example - seem more likely to simply be toadies eager to please the cool guys who let them (the toadies) hang around.

The hardest one to figure out is Cheney. Is he a mass murder? A delusional paranoid? A simple sociopath? What that boy is not ...... is right.

[PA Democrat]

12. Neo-cons by nature are extremely authoritarian and punitive.

Just look at their foreign policy. They feel war and the threat of war is the only way to go. If they do not respect human life on a grand scale (like the civilians in Iraq) why would they have any more respect for individuals who they think may or may not have information about terrorism?

Conservatives in general LOVE punishment and get their power through the use of punishment and fear. Kids who don't exercise abstinence should be forced to deal with the consequences of disease or an unwanted pregnancy. People who fall behind in their mortgages don't deserve help even if they did nothing wrong. Fill up the prisons rather than rehabilitate people.

I think they have the need to look down upon, to publicly make "an example" of other people they feel are inferior (in their minds) in an effort to hide their own insecurities and inadequacies.

[no_hypocrisy]

13. To send a message to the world (they never intended for this to be a secret)

that the * administration could do anything to anyone or any country at any time, even destroy them, without being stopped and/or held accountable.

[Postman]

14. Here's why....

It's all about Iraq.

When Bush invaded Iraq, they knew at the time that the reasons for going in were false. They counted on their operation being fast and highly successful. With such a massive, swift victory and the Iraqis openly accepting American occupation and exploitation, no one in America would have cared what the reasons were for invading. We would have won a great victory. End of story..

When the wheels started to come off and Iraqis resisted the invasion with a home grown insurgency the Bush Administration was unprepared and became bogged down in Iraq.

Now they needed proof that Iraq and Al-Qaeda were linked in order to "prove" Iraq was an imminent threat to national survival.

Let's torture some people to get some false confessions and our allies in the lap-dog press will help us propagandize the American people.

[90-percent]

16. agree

I think Postman nailed it above. They were thinking the invasion would go even better than the first in 1991. They were utterly unprepared for the failure after the initial success; remember the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner?

After the initial invasion, the clusterfuck corruption and evil that followed is well beyond my comprehension or understanding. Pallets of cash? WTF was up with that?

My question about America's invasion of Iraq is this:

Who on earth received clear and tangible benefits from this fiasco?

Big Oil?

The MIC complex?

American War Profiteers?

Wall Street?

For all of those Neocons who made this happen, who among them is happy with the results of their collective actions?

I guess they all just banked on their "Permanent Republican Majority" to keep extracting their benefits?

I hope the lot of them are truly scared shitless of criminal prosecution! I hope all their lives are forever wrecked as a result of their Un-american actions.

-90% Jimmy

[chimpymustgo]

26. Bingo. Justifying the clusterfuck in Iraq.

[HamdenRice]

15. They wanted the rest of the world to fear us. Their motto: "It's better to be feared than loved"

Having read their crap going back decades, I know they always had a perverse admiration for how the KGB and Soviets operated overseas and how much Soviet citizens feared their own government.

That's what they wanted for America. They adore Machiavelli. As Wiki says:

In answering the question of whether it is better to be loved than feared, Machiavelli writes, “The answer is of course, that it would be best to be both loved and feared. But since the two rarely come together, anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved.”

[jmowreader]

17. It's because they could. Simple as that.

I don't think they tortured to extract false information from anyone. They were perfectly capable of manufacturing false information without using torture...or without using the people they captured, for that matter.

When you consider they didn't give the prisoners any information, nor did they allow the outside world access to them, they could have interrogated them humanely to get order of battle and personalities information, imprisoned them humanely just to keep them from refuting what comes in the next bullet point, then created fictions worthy of Hollywood to justify continuing their wars of choice. At the end of the day, the completely synthetic "confessions" would have been just as accurate--perhaps MORE accurate--than anything you can get from torture. And as long as no one comes forth to admit they're making shit up, no one would ever have to know. Come on. You read 1984. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

As to the torture, they knew it doesn't produce accurate information. It certainly didn't matter. They tortured because they could. Whether it's some sort of perverse psychosexual thing, because they're generic bullies or because they wanted to use it to extend the war--they torture, they release information about the torture, the Iraqis get pissed off and make more powerful landmines at a higher production rate, and we use the fact the landmine attacks have become more frequent and more deadly to justify increases in troop strength--isn't critical. What IS critical is they decided to torture just because they could get away with it.

What I would really like to know is, who the fuck came up with the idea we should torture people in the first place?

[Philosoraptor]

18. I believe there's a religious angle, based on ancient hatreds

Christians, Jews, and Muslims in other words.

[valerief]

20. I think some people find that behavior "fun". nt

[stray cat]

21. I think the majority were trying to protect people although there are sadists in any profession

and I'm sure a few people enjoyed it but even schools have bullys.

[Waiting For Everyman]

22. It's to neutralize witnesses to they MIHOP.

Zubaydah gave them the "rosetta stone to 9/11" under milder interrogation - including the names of Americans involved in it. That's when they shifted gears and started the torture. SERE techniques are designed to increase resistance, not to get information. At worst, it would scramble his mind so bad, he'd be useless as a witness - he'd be not credible anymore.

Is this hard to figure out?

If that's not enough, look at the role(s) of Porter Goss. This is going to unravel 9/11. It might take a few years to get that far. Watergate took a year to really come out.

They're sick pervs alright, but there's more to their motive than that.

[Junkdrawer]

24. From Vanity Fair 2007: “Rorschach and Awe”

Abu Zubaydah was a mess. It was early April 2002, and the al-Qaeda lieutenant had been shot in the groin during a firefight in Pakistan, then captured by the Special Forces and flown to a safe house in Thailand. Now he was experiencing life as America's first high-value detainee in the wake of 9/11. A medical team and a cluster of F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents stood vigil, all fearing that the next attack on America could happen at any moment. It didn't matter that Zubaydah was unable to eat, drink, sit up, or control his bowels. They wanted him to talk.

A C.I.A. interrogation team was expected but hadn't yet arrived. But the F.B.I. agents who had been nursing his wounds and cleaning him after he'd soiled himself asked Zubaydah what he knew. The detainee said something about a plot against an ally, then began slipping into sepsis. He was probably going to die.

The team cabled the morsel of intelligence to C.I.A. headquarters, where it was received with delight by Director George Tenet. "I want to congratulate our officers on the ground," he told a gathering of agents at Langley. When someone explained that the F.B.I. had obtained the information, Tenet blew up and demanded that the C.I.A. get there immediately, say those who were later told of the meeting. Tenet's instructions were clear: Zubaydah was to be kept alive at all costs. (Through his publisher, George Tenet declined to be interviewed.)

Zubaydah was stabilized at the nearest hospital, and the F.B.I. continued its questioning using its typical rapport-building techniques. An agent showed him photographs of suspected al-Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that "Moktar," or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then proceeded to lay out the details of the plot. America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely.

It was an extraordinary success story. But it was one that would evaporate with the arrival of the C.I.A's interrogation team. At the direction of an accompanying psychologist, the team planned to conduct a psychic demolition in which they'd get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death.

…


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x297712

[spanone]

23. they are sadistic republican'ts

[HereSince1628]

25. Because, as authoritarians above all law, they COULD. n/t

[timtom]

28. They are inherently depraved and purely evil.

Seriously. I mean it.

[Iwillnevergiveup]

29. In recent weeks Cheney has gone out of his way

to state that much valuable information was gotten from "enhanced interrogation" techniques. And further, that using these techniques is what have kept us safe since. What hogwash.

Every day what I see (purposely?) overlooked is the fact that 9/11 happened on BUSH'S watch in the first place. His administration was completely blindsided because of their incompetence, and torturing people represents an over-reaction. I can just picture all these weasles sitting around in a room coming to the groupthink, "They're not gonna get away with this. We're gonna get 'em!" Even Colin Powell was co-opted.

[havocmom]

32. Cheney is building his defense.

After hearing him wheeze through his comments, one might surmise that he is under a LOT of stress lately and the ol pacemaker is not keeping up with the damage.

I hear heart attacks can be very painful. For some, they cannot be painful enough.

[havocmom]

31. Part to reward the sadists out there they wanted to be able to call on for ANYTHING

part to find WHO the sadists were, and yes, I figure part may well be sadistic/sexual in nature.

As to a possible religious angle, yep, for all the same reasons. The Inquisition was a way to insure who had power and that was accomplished by letting the sadists have their way which kept them loyal AND instilled enough fear to ensure everyone else stayed on the side of power. SSDE*

* same shit, different era