There is one issue about the prison abuse problem that is never really debated. It is the issue of why did they want to torture and did it work. Now I think most people believe that the reason for the torture was to find out who was responsible for the increased violence in Iraq since its "liberation" in April of 2003. Seems logical. The problem arises with this rationale when one realizes that, as an intelligence gather tool, torture does not work -- Torturing Can't be Defended, Doesn't Even Work and What's Wrong With Torturing a Qaeda Higher-Up? -- as a method of intimidation it does. So what does this tell us. Sadly it tells us once again that we are being lied to. Not only by the Bush administration but once again by the mainstream media that fails to report this. So why would we want to intimidate the Iraqi people? Well it worked so good for Saddam it was worth a try. I think this about sums it up:

In Iraq, a man named Saddam Saleh Aboud told The New York Times that after being hooded and handcuffed naked, doused with water, threatened with rape and forced to sit in his own urine over 18 days at Abu Ghraib prison, he was ready to confess to anything.

"They asked, 'Do you know the Islamic opposition?' '' Mr. Aboud recalled in an interview in Baghdad. "I said yes." At one point, Mr. Aboud said: "They asked me about Osama bin Laden. I said, 'I am Osama bin Laden. I am disguised.' "

But if torture doesn't work, why is it so widely employed? The answer, Mr. Rijali and others say, is that it does work as a tool of intimidation, if not intelligence gathering. In authoritarian countries around the world, where leaders struggle to assert their authority, the threat of torture is often enough to keep some kind of social order and inspire informers to come to the government with information - as it did in the Iraq of Saddam Hussein.

But that same intimidation effect, experts said, could undermine the efforts of an occupying power, with waning international support, to win the hearts and minds of a people.

"You know if you are strong and if you have a strong logic you can convince people by your ideas," said the Egyptian writer Nawal Sadawi by phone from her home in Cairo. "Torture means your logic is very weak, so you need power to impose it on others."

So our government did all this hemming an hawing with its lawyers so they could torture people and now we know that it wasn't done to get intelligence it was a tool to intimidate the people we are trying to "liberate" that they better obey, or else.
- posted by Mom/Dad @ 8:29 AM