I blogged Sunday on
Juan Cole's piece last week on the reasons governments want to torture people. Here's further confirmation of his theory that
it's to manufacture bad intelligence, to justify their "war on terror".
This time confirmation comes from the dead -- from the most courageous Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist slain Saturday, in her posthumously filed final report on torture.
From her final article
We Declare You A Terrorist, filled with photos she obtained of torture of Chechens by government security forces, as
excerpted in the New York Times .
"When prosecutors and the courts work, not for the sake of the law, but on political commission and with the only goal of providing good reports for the Kremlin, then criminal cases are baked like pancakes," Ms. Politkovskaya wrote. "An assembly line producing `open-hearted confessions' effectively guarantees good data on the war on terror."
The news is full of stories about Politkovskaya this week, but to me nothing beats the photos in Novaya Gazeta, even though I can't read a word of Russian. And for perspective here's an old article written two years ago, before martyrdom caught up with her. Her courage wasn't a momentary thing, but a way of life.
If anyone finds a complete English translation of her last article, please post it.