Torture is Effective

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Let’s face it.  Torture is effective.  These programs would not be happening if they weren’t effective in some manner.  The examples throughout history, particularly during the medieval ages, prove it.  There is no doubt.  So lets not get into this torture is effective or not game. It is, period.  It’s not effective in getting the truth to prevent a “24” type catostrophic incident, the “ticking time bomb” scenario.  But that’s not why a broad scale torture program is initiated.  It is most effective in getting false confessions and spreading terror to a population.  Think of the Vietnamese torture program at Hanoi Hilton.  It was designed to strike fear at the American soldiers and pilots, individually and as groups, and to gain false confessions or statements to deploy propaganda.  The idea that the primary reason is to “gain actionable intelligence” as Cheney and his cohorts claim, is ridiculous because they know that rarely happens.  

That was clearly the purpose of the U.S. torture program during the Bush administration.  Terror and propaganda.  Torture and assassination programs during previous administrations – Clinton, Bush Sr, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhauer, and Truman were geared in the same vane, although at times aimed at specific targets, such as enemy country intelligence agencies, i.e, Russia, North Korea, and China, or specific regimes in Latin American, Africa, and elsewhere.        

That is the problem concerned citizens worldwide now face regarding the Bush administration torture allegations and possible investigations and prosecutions.  It was not a new thing.  The hubris of the Bush administration with their fake Global War on Terror (GOWT) made them think they could actually justify it.   All previous administrations vigorously denied it and outwardly decried its use and effectiveness.

The CIA has been torturing and training others to torture since the 1950’s, with Executive approval.  Two famous examples are the KUBARK CIA Torture Manual of 1963 and the Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual of 1983.  This is why former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey, writing recently in The Wall Street Journal, lamented that under President Obama, “the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.”

So here we are today.  Bush, Cheney, Feith, Tenant, Rice, Rumsfeld, Addington, Gonzalez, Libby, Ashcroft, Chertoff, Cambone, Flanagan, Wolfowitz, Black, Hayden, Mukasey, Bybee, Yoo, et al, went too far.  They actually thought torture could be legitimicized and made legal.  So they ordered it done and it was made so.  No problems right?  

Well, evidently, if they are allowed a free pass.  Bybee and Yoo are making good salaries at American universities.  Bush and Cheney are on pension and focused on “clearing their good names”.   Bush is focusing on a presidential library when it should probably be a torture history museum.  Democrats were complicit, regardless of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid’s backpedaling.  Dear Nancy has the temerity to claim that she was informed of enhanced terrogation techniques, but not specifically what that meant.  Oh my.  If only I had the un-imagination that she does.  Not that I believe her anyway.  Rice is still riding some sort of adulation that defies imagination.  Stanford will be forever tainted.    

President Obama, bless his heart, seems to be under a rock and a hard place.  He’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.  Unfortunately for him, the answer is simple.  And if he doesn’t take it, his reign over the U.S. will be tainted and probably ruined from the outset.  

It doesn’t matter what the right is saying about this.  We know what their idol, Ronald, the Actor, Reagan, said about torture.  From his signing statement ratifying the UN Convention on Torture from 1984 (this was while he was presiding over the CIA torture training program via the Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual!)  

“The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention . It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.  The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’ Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

The right can in no way repudiate that, even though he was lying through his teeth.  It doesn’t matter what the centrists and Obama himself are saying that investigating would be a political barnstorm taking away time from more important policy initiatives such as health care.  That is nothing but a political excuse with no merit.

The whole world is watching now to see what happens.  This is a seminal moment in human history.  Perhaps the Roman and British empires had such seminal moments that ultimately contributed to their demise.  The difference is that the world is much more knowledgeable than during those times.  We now know and understand the control the elites have over the world.  We know why torture happened, that it is not peculiar to the Bush administration, why the Iraq and Afghanistan wars occured, why the Vietnam war occured and most of what the CIA has been doing for the last sixty years.  

So Obama has a choice.  To refuse to investigate and tell the world in black and white that the Empire is not changing.  Or direct an investigation that will once and for all clear the slate and begin the changes we all hoped for.  It’s a clear choice that places the United States history front and center for all to see.  He doesn’t have a choice for a “Truth Commission”.  Those only work when the coverup has been so complete and evidence so whitewashed, that the truth cannot be ascertained.  The evidence in this case is too overwhelming, too obvious for a whitewash.  Decisions will need to made and the future of our country hangs in the balance.

Crossposted at Daily Kos:   http://www.dailykos.com/story/…