Informed Comment today has a
great take on the Bush adminstration's motives for doing torture, especially in Iraq. Bottom line:
torture is useful because it produces bad intelligence -- which is the goal!
Extended excerpts below the fold.
If you want to
"fix the intelligence around the policy", in the words of the immortal
Downing Street memo, you need to boil someone alive who can be tagged as a "terrorist", until he tells you whatever big lie you want to hear.
Then you have your justification for a "war on terror" where there isn't one.
But the problem is that we now know that serious al-Qaeda is probably only a few hundred men now, and at most a few thousand. Look at who exactly did the London subway bombing. A few guys in a gym in Leeds. That magnitude of threat just would not keep a "War on Terror" in business. The embassy bombings, the Cole, and September 11 itself were done by tiny poorly funded cells that functioned as terror boutiques to accomplish a specific spectacular operation. They don't prove a worldwide, large organization. They prove tiny effective cells. Most of what the Pentagon does and can do is irrelevant to that kind of threat. You'd be better off with some good FBI agents.
So how do you prove to yourself and others a big terror threat that requires a National Security State and turn toward a praetorian society? You torture people into alleging it.
Cole cites Craig Murray on Uzbekistan as a country where there is no actual Islamic terrorist threat but the dictatorship there has used torture to invent one. It's a fascinating look at an oil-rich country in bed with the Bush administration, which bears out the thesis that to Cheney et. al., it's all about military control of the oilfields. But Cole goes farther -- he hypothesizes that Uzbekistan model of lies-drawn-from-torture is what the Bush administration is using on a global scale. Deliberately.
Global terrorism is being exaggerated and hyped by torture just as the witchcraft scare in Puritan American manufactured witches. It is even to the point where 5 African-American and Haitian Christian cultists in Miami can be identified by the FBI as an "al-Qaeda threat" interested in "jihad" after an FBI informant offered to hook them up with al-Qaeda.
Isn't it interesting how we keep falling back into The Crucible?
Bush needs torture for the same reason as Karimov does. He needs to generate false information that exaggerates the threat to his regime, so as to justify repression. He needs the ritual of confession and naming others, to have it down on paper so he can show it to Congress behind closed doors. But Bush/Cheney's ambitions are global, not just internal.
Go read the whole piece.