[Peace-discuss] Why "€œTorture Doesn'€™t Work" Doesn'™t Work (but it is Unconstitutional) - Steve Jonas, Truthout

[Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss]

Subject: 	Re: [ufpj-activist] "Brennan’s defense of CIA torture", Barry 
Grey, World [SJ]
Date: 	Fri, 26 Dec 2014 11:31:40 -0500
From: 	Sjonastriski at aol.com (Relayed) <strict-dmarc at mayfirst.org>
To: 	<jpstolten at frontier.com>, <ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>, 
<members at lists.cc-ds.org>



Brennan's defense of torture, "yes, it does [or at least might] work," 
is exactly why " 'Torture Doesn'€™t' Work' Doesn't Work," as spelled out 
in my column below 
(http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/torture-doesn-t-work-but-it-does-serve-itself)
With every good wish, and a Happy New Year to all, Steve Jonas
PS:  For those of you who might have received this previously, my apologies.

Tuesday, 16 December 2014 08:43

Why "€œTorture Doesn'€™t Work" Doesn'™t Work (but it is Unconstitutional)

URL: 
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/torture-doesn-t-work-but-it-does-serve-itself

*STEVEN JONAS MD, MPH FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT*

As the world that is interested in such matters knows, the U.S. Senate 
Intelligence Committee has finally released the (redacted) 524-page 
Executive Summary of its 6000-page report on torture and the CIA 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/world/senate-intelligence-committee-cia-torture-report.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0>, 
headed "Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism 
Interrogations." One cannot be sure why the Chair, Sen. Diane Feinstein 
of California, decided to release it over the mounting objections of 
both the White House and the CIA as well as most Republicans (apparently 
in favor of the use of torture, from the sound of it/them). But she may 
have been informed that one Senator or another, especially the outgoing 
Senator from Colorado, Mark Udall, would do it himself if she didn't. 
(It is rumored that Sen. Udall may still put the whole report into the 
Congressional Record. If he does, I would strongly suggest that he never 
again fly in a small aircraft.) At any rate, even just the Executive 
Summary presents a huge amount of horrifying detail. (I need not detail 
it here; it and a huge amount of commentary has already appeared in The 
Times and many other news sources, print, electronic and other 
<http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/12/11/cia-torture-report/#.VIosOLKoIww.wordpress>.)

It happens that a good deal of the information contained in it has been 
known, in relative bits and pieces, for quite some time. What the Senate 
Committee has done is assemble a huge amount of material in one place, 
and then put their imprimatur on the information, which it has been 
collecting in sometimes gruesome detail over the past six years. Of 
course the Republicans have reacted in horror, not at the details of the 
torture itself and the catalog of CIA cover-ups, incompetence, 
disorganization, amateurism, and what-have-you, but at the fact that 
they have all been made public. Of course, Sen. Feinstein and her 
Democratic colleagues knew full well that if they didn't release the 
document now, it would never see the light of day, at least for the next 
two years of a Republican Senate majority. Further, even if the 
Democrats were to retake the Senate in 2016, by that time it would be a) 
old news and b) the CIA and its allies within and outside of government 
would have had many more opportunities to a) cover their tracks and b) 
further justify their actions with the repetitive aid of Fox"News.".

One should note that Democrats hardly have entirely clean hands in this 
matter. After all, the Obama White House didn't want even the heavily 
redacted Executive Summary published. Further, right at the start of its 
Administration, the Obama White House and its "Justice" Department made 
clear that they would not be going after any of the torturers or, much 
more importantly, the torture-enablers starting with Cheney, based on 
what was even then already widely known about the program. Not only has 
it done nothing to prosecute the perpetrators, it has even allowed the 
promotion of many of them. Furthermore, we have the odd occurrence that 
Obama's current CIA director, John Brennan, who knew about the program 
when he was Obama's counter-terrorism advisor in 2009, and is a member 
of a Democratic Administration, criticized the Report 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/us/politics/cia-director-brennan-torture-report.html>not 
only as inaccurate, but also "flawed," "partisan" (sic), and "frustrating."

Be that as it may, the most important point to come away with in 
examining the Report is the major conclusion that the Senate 
Intelligence Committee came to about the CIA's torture program: that is 
was bad because it doesn't work. And they produced huge mountains of 
evidence to support that claim. Of course its supporters and instigators 
continue to bray that it does. Consider 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/world/senate-intelligence-committee-cia-torture-report.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0>: 
"Many Republicans have said that the report is an attempt to smear both 
the C.I.A. and the Bush White House, and that the report cherry-picked 
information to support a claim that the C.I.A.'s detention program 
yielded no valuable information. Former C.I.A. officials have already 
begun a vigorous public campaign to dispute the report's findings."

And of course the torturer-in-chief, Dick Cheney, is going bananas 
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/12/torture-report-dick-cheney-110306.html#.VIjZosmmX9I>over 
the report's release. Andy Borowitz tells us (WARNING: satire) that 
Cheney has even called for an international ban 
<http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/cheney-calls-international-ban-torture-reports>on 
the issuance of reports on the use of torture. And so, we know that the 
CIA has done some very bad things (bad, that is, if you think that 
torture is bad), fully justified by the Bush Administration. In fact, 
even though the Committee said that it wasn't, the program was fully 
authorized 
<http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/12/09/3601048/why-bush-administration-officials-are-really-freaking-out-about-the-cia-report/>by 
the Bush Administration.

But the Senate Committee's whole premise is that: the program was bad 
because it didn't work. Which raises the question: would they have 
concluded that torture was OK if it had produced useful intelligence? 
Uh-oh and Oh my. If Cheney et al were/are right about the utility of 
torture, at least as practiced by the CIA, then the Committee's whole 
argument against it collapses in a heap. Indeed by focusing primarily on 
"torture doesn't work" for its primary criticism of the program, the 
Senate Intelligence Committee has let the Republicans and the Right-wing 
generally off the hook. For they can simply come back, as they are, as 
noted, doing vociferously, saying "yes it does."

The argument should have been on "it's wrong," and more importantly, 
that it violates both domestic and international law, and, most 
importantly, violates the U.S. Constitution. For example, the use of 
torture violates the clear prohibition of its use 
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations>in 
various Federal statutes. But furthermore, and to me most importantly, 
it violates the provisions banning the use of torture found in the 
Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture. The United 
States is a party to both the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention 
Against Torture, both signed and ratified international treaties. Before 
considering the Constitutional question, let us consider just what is 
"torture?"

The authors of the Geneva Conventions just assumed that everyone "knows" 
what torture is so they didn't bother to define it any detail. The UN 
Convention defines it in general terms as "Any act by which severe pain 
or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on 
a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person 
information or a confession . . ." By exclusion, the U.S. Army Field 
Manual is rather explicit 
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations>about 
it. The Bush Administration's quack law firm, Bybee and Yoo 
<http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/the-last-word-on-torture-it-starts-with-enemies-but-ends-up-being-used-domestically/10799-the-last-word-on-torture-it-starts-with-enemies-but-ends-up-being-used-domestically>, 
tried to define their way out of the quagmire, but no one outside of 
themselves and the US Right would agree that what was done to numbers of 
prisoners of the US was not torture. And the Senate Committee has 
certainly concluded that it was and uses the term "torture" 
over-and-over again.

But then comes the truly inconvenient truth that the use of torture by 
US authorities is simply unconstitutional. Under article VI of the U.S. 
Constitution, as treaties signed and ratified by the U.S. government, 
both Conventions are part of "the supreme law of the land and [further] 
the judges of every state shall be bound by them." This, and its 
illegality under various U.S. statutes and Codes, are the only arguments 
that one can make against the use of torture by US agencies that can 
withstand the "but it works" argument, even if the latter were true. 
Thus, torture both doesn't work and is unconstitutional as well as 
illegal. The CIA surely knew the first (they haven't been able to come 
up with even one provable example of its effectiveness. Further, it 
should be noted that the Clinton Administration thwarted two attempted 
terrorist attacks that would have produce much larger death tolls even 
than 9/11, the 1998 "25 airliners" plot and the "Millennium Bomb Plot" 
against Los Angeles International Airport, apparently without using one 
torturous twitch.) They may or may not have known the second that is 
unless they got all the way to the Constitution's Article VI, or read 
the Army Field Manual, if they ever bothered to start to read them at all.

So why did the CIA develop the program and why did they continue to use 
and surely attempt to perfect it. Well, as I have said elsewhere 
<http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/the-last-word-on-torture-it-starts-with-enemies-but-ends-up-being-used-domestically/10799-the-last-word-on-torture-it-starts-with-enemies-but-ends-up-being-used-domestically>, 
first and foremost it is a major instrument of terror that can be used 
against a government's own population: it is a really good repressor of 
dissent. A principal tool of Gestapo control in Nazi Germany was to pick 
up someone who had been making mildly anti-Hitler remarks, give them a 
good session or two of torture downtown, and then send them back to the 
neighborhood. You can bet the neighbors got the message.

Second, it is indeed very useful in extracting information from 
politically active civilian regime opponents who have no military 
training or training in resisting torture, such as the civilian 
opponents of the Pinochet Regime in Chile and the civilian targets of 
the Argentine "Dirty War." Third, it is a very good tool for 
extra-judicial punishment, just as long as the regime using it makes 
sure that its details leak out, in a totally deniable way of course, to 
its own citizens. Fourth, it is a very useful tool for civilian 
repression in military-occupied territories. Just ask the Japanese 
Kempeitai that operated in Korea and Occupied China. Fifth, it is very 
helpful when a regime is out to change the culture of its country, and 
to wipe out historical memory of anything that went before it came to 
power. Once they had restored corporate-clerical control of the country, 
doing so was perhaps the next principal long-term goal of the Spanish 
Francoists. Torture was one of their stocks-in-trade to achieve that goal.

Sixth, it is really good at extracting false confessions, then to be 
used in show trials, such as those of the Soviet Union of the late 1930s 
that killed off so many of the good Communists who were already 
challenging Stalinism as the way not to try to build socialism. Seventh, 
in countries that use it but try to re-define their way out of it 
convincing no-one but themselves (guess who?), it helps to establish a 
record of lawlessness, of total disregard for the rule of law, as long 
as the government says things like, "We are doing what we are doing to 
keep our people safe and fight terror." This was likely a major 
objective of BushCheney, et al: to change the culture here. "Torture 
[except of course we don't call it torture, just 'enhanced 
interrogation'] is that is as long as we are doing the Deciding as to 
who gets it." No rule of law, no adherence to international treaties or 
our Constitution of which they are a part, just as long as they say 
there's a good reason for it.

Finally, to have torture as a useful instrument of national policy, 
there has to be a cadre of torturers, another reason for the BushCheney 
torture program. Until they came to power, Americans didn't do such 
things, officially at least. So there weren't very many, if any, trained 
torturers amongst our armed and intelligence forces. But now they are, 
or at least were. And you can bet your sweet pitootie, once you learn 
how to be a torturer, you don't forget what you learned. So, don't tell 
me torture isn't useful. It's just not useful for what the torturers 
tell us it's useful for. And whatever that may be, in the US its use is 
unconstitutional.

Indeed, "it doesn't work" just doesn't work in the battle to ban the use 
of torture by the US government, which, as it happens, may well be 
renewed if the next President is a Republican.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

/Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at 
Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of 
over 30 books. In addition to being a columnist for BuzzFlash at Truthout 
he is the Editorial Director of and a Contributing Author to //The 
Political Junkies for Progressive Democracy/ 
<http://thepoliticaljunkies.org/>/, and a Senior Editor, Politics, for 
//The Greanville Post/ <http://www.greanvillepost.com/>/. Dr. Jonas' 
latest book is //The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right 
Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022: A futuristic Novel/ 
<http://www.puntopress.com/jonas-the-15-solution-hits-main-distribution/>/, 
Brewster, NY, Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, 
and available on Amazon./


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