Political Bloviation

It seems bizarre that it’s necessary to explain why torture is bad. I found this Rolling Stone piece via Andrew Sullivan on the path taken by a 15 year old prisoner from the early months of the action in Afghanistan. What happened to him at the hands of Americans is flatly, obviously torture. They took techniques designed to prepare Air Force pilots to resist attempts at coercion and tried to make them into interrogation methods, as described in this post. It’s wrong under American laws, international treaty and common decency. If your moral compass is so completely fucked-up that you don’t care about little things like right and wrong here’s purely practical reason to not torture:

Follow Omar Khadr From an Al Qaeda Childhood to a Gitmo Cell : Rolling Stone
There is no scientific evidence that such coercion is better than any other kind of interrogation; it is probably worse. SERE techniques were not designed to be used in the real world; they were designed to test the psychic endurance of Air Force pilots. When the FBI sent some of its best counterterrorism agents to Guantanamo soon after the camps opened, the agents chose to use what is known as rapport-based interrogation, which apparently worked. The FBI agents found the coercive tactics used by military intelligence both disgusting and stupid: The abusive treatment instantly destabilized detainees, making the information they provided unreliable as intelligence and useless in court.

I find the comments to the article to be sad. Many seem to believe that a 15 year old, fighting for a national army, deserves torture. It says much about our savagery and lack of humanity has a nation.

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