We’ve just elected a liberal president right after a conservative one reacted to an unprecedented terrorist attack on US soil by compromising some of our founding values. After these founding values were challenged by George W. Bush, we all expected the pendulum to swing back the other way when Obama was elected, but this hasn’t happened. Why?
When it comes to protecting gay rights or protecting government rights Obama’s ability to surprise remains unsurpassed. The new administration has now blocked access to information about secret “programs” during the last eight years including enhanced interrogation while quietly continuing some of them today. Obama is operating in a gray area here that both the liberal and conservative sides of America obviously find value in, but this is a value American’s don’t acknowledge so much in broad daylight.
Trying to imagine a special category separate from torture that we call enhanced interrogation just doesn’t work for me, but let’s humor those for whom it does. First of all, we have a perfect example of a conservative administration utilizing a previously liberal tactic by disarming a concept through renaming it, however, coming up with a euphemism like “enhanced interrogation” takes the kind of turdblossomesque genius that brought us compassionate conservatism in the first place. Just like it sounds, compassionate conservatism turned out to be a hybrid of the worst qualities of modern American politics, but back to torture.
What the last administration tried to pass off as nicer than torture has been around a while (we’re not going back to the inquisition, don’t worry) and in these other incarnations the main selling point of waterboarding had nothing to do with how harmless it was. More recently, waterboarding was used by authoritarian regimes in South America because the procedure was every bit as effective as any coercion technique, but had the primary benefit of leaving no visible marks (… and if things went badly they just dumped the drowned prisoner in the ocean or a lake). Today, thousands of middle aged South Americans that once fancied themselves revolutionaries happen to have a horrible fear of drowning supported by a constant lifetime barrage of waterboarding nightmares.
The Communist Chinese pioneered the institutionalization of waterboarding against American and UN soldiers during the Korean conflict as one of the most successful coercion techniques available. We dusted off an old manual about this coercion technique and utilized it on a limited basis to scare the hell out of survival school trainees and prepare them for the strongest sense of helplessness and desperation they would ever encounter (… it’s still a big difference to know the trainers are on your side, though). Somewhere after this point, the leadership of our country lost track of the fact that waterboarding was a proven technique to coerce an individual. Spend just a moment on that.
Torture is not forcing someone to be honest, torture is coercing someone to say what you want. If you want them to tell you the answer to a question they don’t want you to know, you must coerce them into saying what you want to hear. This is how the Chinese coerced American soldiers into reading confessions of a ridiculous nature and how the Argentineans coerced young revolutionaries into believing they had chosen the wrong profession. The only interesting part is how much less effective something like waterboarding is when applied with good intentions.
Trying to use such a thing for “good” (however disconnected from good we are at this point …) turns out to be the most ineffective application. You have a subject that finds it in their immediate interests to say whatever stops the pain. If you just set up the game so that they know what you want to hear (i.e. written confession to read from or just the word “uncle, I’ll go home quietly”) then the game is over faster. Otherwise, if things aren’t clear it can take something like 83 sessions and the subject becomes hopeless over their failure to make the pain stop while they grasp at any straw the interrogators will pluck up (BTW, Abu Zabaydah gave up his most valuable information before he was ever tortured (good links here; http://dreadnaught.wordpress.com/2009/04/19/waterboarding-of-abu-zubaydah-and-khalid-shaikh-mohammed/ ).
Eventually, the lab rat figures out the experiment, even if the observing scientists haven’t. The prisoner finally produces what his enhanced interrogators wants to hear, but then the leadership of our country sends down an order to turn him upside down and drown him one more time to see what else comes out … then stop. At this point, after the “drown him one more time” gesture, Cheney was uncorking champagne in a bunker somewhere over a bundle of lies made up feverishly by a wet Al Qaeda bodyguard. That’s about the size of it.
If this makes you feel like torturing someone for information is a crap shoot at best, then maybe you can agree that torture doesn’t advance our national security all that well. That’s why you can believe Obama will truly not continue this program, but the current administration claims that exposing what wrongs we’ve committed in the past can be dangerous. This is hard to argue with, but the fact remains that we aren’t living up to the standards of our forefathers when we try to censor any such information. Still, we must admit that times have changed since the founding fathers conceived this country and if they knew that information could be even more dangerous when wielded as quickly as it is today, they might have had a harder time hashing out the bill of rights when it came to national security.
I think that’s what we’re seeing from the new administration here, a respect for information, especially when it comes to us respecting the government’s right to gather it. A revealing Electronic Frontier Foundation article explains how, “Essentially, the Obama administration has claimed that the government cannot be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statutes (read this link to learn more http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/obama-doj-worse-than-bush). Obama has already done a better job of justifying illegal information gathering and government immunity from prosecution for doing so than the previous administration did in eight years. That’s what you get for electing a previous president of Harvard Law Review as President of the United States, America.
We know that exposing anymore imagery of the sanctified actions of US government enhanced interrogators would be incredibly harmful, but we must keep in mind that if we justify whitewashing the whole thing, as I’m doing now, we’ll slide even further down this slippery slope. At this point, we find ourselves operating under a unique mindset, but let’s see where it leads. Now it seems that if we don’t utilize these much more effective “enhanced information gathering” techniques (eat your heart out, turdblossom), we would be unnecessarily allowing red blooded Americans to die. You see, this worries me because in a majority dominated society, all it takes is a temporarily mistaken consensus to do major damage (remember the patriot act, oh and that warning from Jefferson too). Many of us have worried that liberals would seek the nicest way to win the war on terror and get us all killed, but I think the Obama team, in its dash for the center, has selected the most practical way to win. Practical for the government that is.
Enhanced information gathering (HUMINT, SIGINT, COMINT, ELINT, MASINT, etc) is much more effective and less noticeable than enhanced interrogation. Interestingly, the gathering of information is a rapidly evolving phenomenon while torture is an exercise in devolution. I fear the attraction such a quietly successful tactic must have on any president; especially one as practical as Obama who, like previous presidents, is just doing his best to protect the American people. It isn’t too hard for me to imagine Obama stretching out such national security based information gathering programs for a while, getting the most out of them and making progress in the war on terror if possible before it becomes necessary to shut it all down and then harvest any available political capital by taking credit for a momentous change in how we gather intelligence.
That’s the kind of politician I think we’ve elected, he’s not much different than the others, just really good. It seems to me that the ugly duckling of torture is happily being sacrificed in order to divert attention from this administration’s efforts to hold onto a more powerful tool and make quick progress in the war on terror by infringing on American’s right to privacy on national security grounds. This duckling is being beheaded in a very complicated and bloody manner now that Panetta, Pelosi and a host of other letter signing liberals have become involved and they walk a fine line as Obama watches with annoyance from the White House. Obama wants them to hash out the torture thing and get it through the news cycle, but at the same time, he needs warrantless wiretapping kept away from the news cycle. Is this just a suspicious guess? The July 15th hearing of the federal government’s motion to dismiss a case challenging federal dragnet surveillance by AT & T in San Francisco isn’t very big news right now, is it? (http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/07/13)
What do you think? Is Obama opting to infringe on the privacy of millions instead of torturing hundreds? FYI for all, http://www.youarebeingwatched.us/.
