Repeat After Me   - Torture Doesnt Work

It’s the favored tool of tyrants, fascists and sadists

by MATTHEW GAULT

A draft for a new executive order about torture and black site prisons is floating around the Internet. A White House staffer leaked it and news outlets such as The New York Times and the Washington Post rushed to publish it. The order appears to be an edited version of a sample executive order from Mitt Romney’s campaign back in 2012. The changes are mostly semantic, and the new order crosses out the term “jihadist” and replaces it with “Islamist” in several places.

To be clear, the executive order as written wouldn’t bring back torture all at once, it simply opens the door by asking the CIA to consider its past interrogation techniques and the use of black site prisons. Word games aside, that Pres. Donald Trump is even considering bringing back torture is both morally and strategically reprehensible. Informed military leaders from Napoleon to Secretary of Defense James Mattis know that torture doesn’t work. It’s a terrible method of interrogation, lowers the moral standing of the perpetrators of torture in the eyes of the world and creates more enemies than it eliminates.

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte was busy conquering Egypt. He was a brilliant strategist who knew the value of gathering intelligence prior to a ground invasion — and he knew that the best way to get it was observation and polite conversation. “The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished,” Napoleon wrote in a letter to his chief of staff on Nov. 11, 1798. “It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.”

Both Mattis and CIA director Mike Pompeo agree with Napoleon. During the dark days of the Bush administration’s torture program, CIA officers would inject hydrated food into prisoners’ rectums. They called it rectal feeding. “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I’ll do better,” Trump said Mattis told him. He’s right. The simple fact is that, when it comes to actionable intelligence, the carrot often works far better than the stick.

https://warisboring.com/repeat-after-me-torture-doesnt-work-b5000d015145#.ogz4iq1gv