Ugly Intersection

Chet: “An enormous majority of the American public—68%—either thinks that it's OK to torture people in at least some circumstances, or doesn't care enough to answer the question. Only 32% said it's never OK.”

More at the link, including a breakdown by religious affiliation. As I’ve said before, I can’t understand the reasoning of Christians who support torture, people who pray to a savior who, when facing certain torture and eventual death, fell to his knees and prayed that he might be spared.

And I also cannot begin to comprehend why anyone supports torture, other than simple hatred, since it doesn’t fucking work. Especially the way we practice it—rounding up people on the broadest of suspicions and hoping to extract information from them. The scenario that supporters of torture love to invoke to defend their position is the kind of crap that you see in the movies, or on 24, where agents capture someone whom they know to have information directly related to a plot, the thwarting of which will save lives.

“Tell me where the bomb’s going to be detonated, or I’ll squash your nuts between these bricks!”

“I give, I give! It’s going to go off at the Maple Tree Mall at 3:52pm central standard time!”

“What store, you scoundrel? What store?!” [Bricks are waved threateningly.]

“Outside the Cinnabon! Don’t hurt me!”

This is not the typical scenario with our detainees, whom our right to torture is currently being codified into law as we speak. Often, these are people with tenuous ties to suspected terrorists, or even proven ties to suspected terrorists—but rarely are we rounding up people mid-plot with detonators in their hands, left with the singular option to extract information from them by any means necessary to prevent an imminent explosion. We’re torturing people hoping to get information, the content and very existence of which we’re not even certain. Torture only works when interrogator and detainee both know that the detainee has a very specific piece of information that the interrogator wants. Otherwise, all kinds of bullshit might pour out of someone just to save themselves from further pain, whether they really know something we’d want to know or not. They’ll offer up names of other people who might not have any more information than they have, creating a never-ending cycle of useless “intelligence” that yields nothing but goose-chases and more futile torture—and angry victims.

Thus, irrespective of one’s opinions of the morality of torture, logically there’s no reason to support it, either. And yet here we sit, with 68% of America supporting it, and Congress about to pass a heinous bill in support of it, in a most spectacular intersection of the ignorance, fear, and hatred which has enabled the Bush administration since Day One.