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Monday, April 27, 2009

Hypocrisy of American waterboarding


Here is my problem with the hypocrisy of American waterboarding, beyond the fact that such torture doesn’t actually provide anyone with any real information, beyond the fact that ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ can’t be defended by torture beyond whatever jaw dropping bullshit defense an apologist like Cameron Slater at Whaleoil manages to scrape together to defend torture – beyond all that which makes torture totally unjustifiable is the hypocrisy.

What did America do to Japanese interrogators who waterboarded American GIs for information on a weapon of mass destruction (America of course ended up using 2 nuclear weapons of mass destruction on the Japanese, so their paranoia was actually a lot more justified than American paranoia post 9/11). What did America do to those Japanese interrogators who waterboarded American GI’s? They executed them for torture, here we are now with the Americans DOING THE EXACT SAME THING which they executed Japanese interrogators for, and what’s the response? A half hearted ‘we’re looking forward’ – well looking forward is all well and good but that comes second to actually learning the mistake, transparent justice and punishment of those who allowed ‘simply following orders’ to become a defense.

Democracy and Freedom are strengthened by the prosecution of those who torture, it is weakened by defending those who torture.

2 Comments:

At 27/4/09 10:30 am, Blogger Brewerstroupe said...

It gets worse.

It seems that torture was introduced in order to secure confessions that linked Saddam with Al Quaeda:

"The excellent and much-respected Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild of the USA and Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has discovered that waterboarding was first approved in July 2002 by Condoleeza Rice, specifically to force confessions of links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein."http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/waterboarding_a.html

 
At 27/4/09 12:54 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Right on Brew.

When they say that torture works, they are not wrong.

It's just that what it works at is not getting intelligence, but confessions. Confessions that are useful for all sorts of things. The Soviets used them for show trials, the Koreans and VC for POW propaganda.

Cheney and co used them as classified pretexts for war.

 

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