The banality (and stupidity) of Evil
Last edited Wed Jan 23, 2013, 08:52 PM - Edit history (3)
Interrogation is a method to get a person to say what he knows.
Torture is a method to get someone to say what you want him to say.
This distinction is widely (though perhaps not universally) understood within the military and intelligence communities.
After 9/11, elected officials and political appointees demanded that torture be used, as a show of seriousness of purpose.
Since we (previously) did not use torture in any organized, sanctioned way we did not have professional torturers... no manuals on how to torture people.
Our only protocols that described how to do torture did so as part of teaching American personnel to resist torture if captured, a useful sort of training for military and intelligence personnel.
So we adopted the torture methods described.
The torture methods described, that we adopted, were methods developed and used by North Korea, and later North Vietnam, for the specific purpose of coercing American soldiers to confess to crimes they had not committed. These confessions (like John McCain's) were recorded and released for propaganda purposes.
Again, the awesome torture techniques we used were things that had been used against us to coerce confessions known by both torturer and tortured to be false. (Similar to confessions to witchcraft back in the day. The point was not discovering whether a person was a witch. The point was to force someone to confess to being a witch.)
So we adopted illegal international crime against humanity techniques developed only for forcing people to say things that are not true... to discover the truth.
And also because we really, really wanted to torture people.
It is best to not ever forget the evil... or the stunning stupidity.
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