After reading about people like this -- the most successful interrogators in WWII who never even raised their voices against their subjects -- what kind of sickos did we have in the White House for the past eight years? And I mean sickos.
John Cole got the info from Sullivan (which somehow I missed), but runs with it:
Via two posts from Sullivan, I have learned that the two most successful interrogators and spybusters from WWII, one German and one British, never harmed an inmate.
No German won as many intelligence coups as Hanns Scharff. Scharff worked for the Luftwaffe interrogating allied pilots and bomber crews, so successfully that the U.S. military taught his methods decades later.
Colonel Robin “tin eye” Stephens was a “bristling, xenophobic martinet” who ran a famously successful counterinelligence operation for MI5 out of a basement in London.
Neither of them ever harmed a subject, committed to physical violence against them, no degradation -- the sort of thing that became routine during the Bush administration just wasn't on their list of working methods.
Look, it's common knowledge -- since the heyday of the Inquisition -- that the only information you get from torture is whatever the victim thinks you want to hear. Everyone knows that, everyone knew it going in, so what's the fascination with hurting people who can't defend themselves? (I won't go into the latest poll that shows that regular church-goers think torture is OK: there's this whole thing in Christianity about physical torment that I think is kind of sick to begin with. There's also the fact that there's only a twelve-point spread, which I find appalling in itself -- what have we become?*) I suppose from a frat boy who thinks blowing up frogs with firecrackers is funny, that's maybe par for the course.
So now, of course, the Republicans -- and certain Democrats -- don't want to turn this stinking muck heap because it will be "divisive." This from a bunch of jokers who live on divisiveness -- they don't have any other strategy. (The Democrats, of course, are just trying to cover their asses -- they're as culpable as anyone on the right side of the aisle on this.)
Listen up, boys and girls: you punish war criminals. You investigate and you try them and you punish them. Calls to "move forward" are merely demands that we validate this status quo -- we'll torture people if we feel like it -- as acceptable behavior for America, and I ain't buying it.
* Update: A little amplification on this: My own opinions of Christianity and its focus on death and mortification of the flesh to the side, I've noticed several posts citing this poll, all dwelling on the fact that the more conservative and observant the respondent, the more likely they were to condone torture, but no one seems to have mentioned the fact that the spread is not so wide.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.
"Only" 42%? ONLY? In total, half the people in this country think that torture is often or sometimes justified. Only a quarter think it is never justified. And this is somehow OK?
What the hell have we done to ourselves?
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