Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
The Torture Debate
For the nobodies who never read this blog, it may be an item of marginal interest that there is a specific reason why this blog is called “House of Eratosthenes.” It has to do with rules about how to think. Now, over the last year this blog has published a lot of posts that adhere to these rules, without a single mention about the rules; I’m not big on rules, especially rules about how to think. I think these are things we form for our own use and there’s very little value to communicating them to others — even in a blog nobody reads. But by popular demand, from the people who never read this blog, maybe I’ll describe it. Sometime.
Meanwhile, for those who really want to know, my suggestion is to load the name into Google and check out the dude who had the name. The library administrator. It has to do with finding out big things by applying critical thinking, when at first blush it might appear you lack the tools needed to find anything out. That’s all I’ll say now.
Suffice it to say the rules I have in mind about thinking, are being not only violated, and torn asunder, but shredded into fine mulch within our current Torture Debate. For one thing, we have allowed our media to define the credibility of each proposed cognition, against how much said cognition helps or hurts our current President. That’s bass-ackward; obviously, how friendly a proposed finding-of-fact is to the current administration, is completely unrelated to whether it has truthful or logical merit or not. Another problem is that the word “torture” is being used at all. The T-word has no bearing at all on what is being debated, and on this, both sides — provided they are informed and sincere — emphatically agree.
In this broadcast from NPR Talk of the Nation, November 28, the producers have done a great job of presenting both sides of the argument and just generally cutting through the bullshit. However, it concerns me mightily that some things were outside the realm of dispute four years ago, and sometime recently have been moved, for political purposes, back into that realm. This violates another one of the above-mentioned rules about critical thinking. I refer, here, to the proposition that “torture” or whatever you want to call it, actually works.
To demonstrate that, I quote from the write-up of the compassionate, progressive mindset that appeared in October of 2001 in Slate, not exactly an online mecca of neocon dittoheads:
There’s no doubt that torturing terrorists and their associates for information works. In 1995, Philippine intelligence agents tortured Abdul Hakim Murad, whom they arrested after he blew up his apartment making bombs. The agents threw a chair at Murad’s head, broke his ribs, forced water into his mouth, and put cigarettes out on his genitals, but Murad didn’t talk until agents masquerading as the Mossad threatened to take him back to Israel for some real questioning. Murad named names. His confession included details of a plot to kill Pope John Paul II, as well as plots to crash 11 U.S. airliners into the ocean and to fly an airplane into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. His co-conspirator Ramzi Yousef was later convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Similarly unappealing methods helped the CIA uncover the millennium bomb plot of 1999, after al-Qaida terrorists were questioned in Egypt and Jordan.
[Update Oct. 23, 2001: In stating that the millennium bomb plotters were tortured prior to divulging the plot, I am guilty of over-reading an Oct. 15 article by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post. Pincus writes, “The CIA worked with Jordanian, Egyptian, Canadian and Pakistani services, picking up terrorists, some associated with al Qaeda, and moving them to either Jordan or Egypt” and that information from those sources disrupted the bombings. While Pincus did not report, and we cannot know, whether those terrorists were tortured in Egypt and Jordan, he states two paragraphs down that many foreign countries use torture and threats to family members in interrogations. Egypt and Jordan are two of the best-known users of torture in interrogations. Nevertheless, the millennium terrorists questioned there in 1999 may well have been interrogated with full regard for their personal and constitutional rights.]
The CIA has always known that torture works. According to declassified CIA interrogation manuals, the CIA has taught others how it’s done, in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and other Latin American countries. The manuals refer to using “deprivation of sensory stimuli,” “threats and fear,” “food and sleep deprivation,” and pain to extract information. The most famous case of CIA use of domestic torture was that of Yuri Nosenko, a former KGB agent who defected to the United States in 1964. Believing he was a Soviet spy, the CIA kept Nosenko in solitary confinement for more than three years in a 10-foot-square concrete cell. He was, for long periods of time, denied food, sunlight, reading materials, and human contact. He claims to have been given LSD. When he attempted to build toys out of lint, they were confiscated. The CIA freed Nosenko in 1967, finally concluding he was a bona fide defector after all. This episode and government inquiries into similar situations prompted the dismissal of many executives of the counterintelligence department in the 1970s.
A more recent case of CIA-sanctioned torture involved Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a Guatemalan revolutionary. His widow, Jennifer Harbury, alleges in a lawsuit that the agency financed and indirectly participated in efforts to torture information out of him, leading ultimately to his death in the early 1990s. She also alleges that the Guatemalans who tortured her husband were paid by the CIA and that two had been trained in torture and interrogation techniques at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. Last January, in Harbury v. Deutch , the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the torture had not violated Bamaca’s Fifth Amendment due process rights. Prior case law holds that noncitizens’ rights are violated only in cases of: 1) physical presence in the United States at the time; 2) their mistreatment in a country where the United States exercises de facto political control; or 3) abuse in the course of abduction for trial in an American court. The D.C. Circuit relied heavily on a Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990), holding that evidence found during an illegal Fourth Amendment search of a nonresident alien’s property in a foreign country was admissible at trial in the United States.
Folks, we’re being snowed big-time. You can’t write an article in December of 2005, for any magazine, periodical or website, outside of perhaps the most courageous, right-wing, or just plain deliberately offsensive, that blossoms forward with a mini-thesis demonstrating “There’s no doubt that torturing for information works.” You just can’t do it. And yet between October 2001, and now, there has been no mega-scandal involving torture that demonstrably failed to work. We have had a scandal involving torture that offended people — and that’s it. Nothing to demonstrate, or even to imply, that the practice is ineffective.
So flailing around for reasons, between 2001 and now, to believe that “torture never works” or “torture very often doesn’t work,” we’re left concluding the grasping exercise empty-handed. Yet we have some media shills dictating to us that this is the opinion we are supposed to have. We don’t have access to the classified information that would demonstrate this; in most cases, neither do the shills; and applying our best, critical forensic thinking to the information we can get, the most reasoned inference we can form, is that torture works just fine and dandy.
Especially when you compare it to the alternative. Which is to just sit on your ass, make sure the prayer rugs are clean, double-check to make sure the good cream cheese is getting spread on the bagels you’re serving, and pray to whomever you want that the terrorists you’re watching didn’t somehow get ahold of anything sharp when you weren’t looking.
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