There was this guy named Calvin — who I once met by hanging out with people who worked for the International Trauma Treatment Program in Olympia — who always balked at the idea that torture, as many of its detractors alleged, didn’t work. Calvin ran one of Uganda’s many refugee camps through Pilgrim and was himself a survivor of all sorts of horrors and the first to admit that anyone can be driven to give up anything under the right conditions.
Torture can make anyone tell their tormentor exactly what he wants to hear. If he wants to hear that an insurgency or operation or whatever is doing either this or that, the victim will divine exactly what he needs to say and eventually say it so convinsingly that she or he will even believe it himself.
So it’s not in and of itself stunning news that much of the United States government’s bad intelligence about Iraq is the result of the use of torture. What is interesting is the how of torture, though, and possibly the why, which are both explored in Katherine Eban’s Vanity Fair online article on the use of psychological torture by the U.S. military’s reverse-SERE program. People are getting job skills in today’s Army, it’s just not the sort of jobs in computer repair that those recruting ads tout. — Link
- Interview with Katherin Eban on Democracy Now
- Geneva Convention’s findings on torture, which the Bush Administration say don’t apply
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