Month: January 2007

A newly-released Pentagon-funded study entitled “Educing Information” examines the “concerns about recent U.S. interrogation activities, subsequent investigations, and the efficacy of contemporary tactics, techniques, and procedures.”

Surprise, surprise: the U.S. government has little or no idea what it is doing when it tries to beat the truth out of people. A Washington Post story on the study today noted that “no significant scientific research has been conducted in more than four decades about the effectiveness of many techniques the U.S. military and intelligence groups use regularly.”

But this does not mean torture is barren for purposes of state. Some of the key “evidence” linking Saddam and Al Qaeda was generated by torture. The fact that the “confession” later turned out to be false did nothing to resurrect the scores of thousands of people who have been killed in Iraq since the U.S. invaded.

Juan Cole, a University of Michigan history professor and an expert on the war on terrorism, observed, “Torture is what provides evidence for large important networks of terrorists where there aren’t really any, or aren’t very many, or aren’t enough to justify 800 military bases and a $500 billion military budget.”

The U.S. government has a pathetic batting average regarding alleged terrorists. The vast majority of the people the feds have accused of being terrorists or labeled as terrorist suspects have turned out to be not guilty as charged.

This has often proved embarrassing. And this may be where torture comes in. Cole asks, “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. Global terrorism is being exaggerated and hyped by torture just as the witchcraft scare in Puritan American manufactured witches.” Cole explains that “Bush needs torture … 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.”

The Defense Intelligence Agency study did not examine this “benefit” of torture.

Comments & cavils on this topic are welcome at my blog here.

This article, “The Iraq Gamble: At the pundits’ table, the losing bet still takes the pot,” by Jebadiah Reed, in Radar, is a hoot — if you like your humor a darker shade of black.

Reed discusses the way-off-the-mark predictions and prognostications proffered by pro-war pundits –Tom Friedman, Peter Beinart, Fareed Zakaria, and Jeffrey Goldberg — and goes on to show that, far from hurting their respective careers, these paladins of the War Party have been more than amply rewarded for the utter wrongness of their views. Their works are celebrated, their lecture fees are up, and the complete cluelessness of their views on the war seems not to have made a dent in their celebrity.

On the other hand, those who, rightly, warned against going to war with Iraq — former Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer, Antiwar.com columnist William S. Lind, Jonathan Schell, and Scott Ritter — are in the poorhouse, but have the satisfaction of knowing that they were right.

I can think of another antiwar columnist who is still in the poorhouse, and not exactly in demand when it comes to getting booked on the tv talking heads gabfest circuit, and yet, really, when was it ever different — and who expected anything different? Surely not me. I’m satisfied with the readers I have — more, I expect, than Peter Beinart — and the recognition from those who matter to me. Sure, it would be nice to command five-figure lecture fees, but I don’t lay awake at night obsessing about it. What matters is that those of us who saw what was coming had a forum to bear witness to the truth — and that there is still some chance that the country will listen. Beyond that, we have the right to ask for exactly nothing

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So, how often do the folks at the top — for whatever reason — get it wrong?

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So, when WILL they ever learn?

Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, and a former writer for National Review, recants:

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.

But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.

More from his blog:

It’s frustrating to get e-mails from people on the Left who assume that because I’ve lost faith in the president and the war, I’ve become some sort of liberal, and from people on the Right who believe the same thing. It only shows how distorted the war has made American politics. I’m no more enamored of the Left’s social agenda than I ever was — and my conservatism is primarily social/cultural/religious. Besides, it was realizing how this war and my initial support of it violated conservative principles that I ought to have been defending at its outset that finally turned me.

Chiefly I should have been completely suspicious of the social engineering that the US government set out to do in Iraq. It didn’t work in the Great Society, and there was no reason to believe that it would work in Iraq. You don’t march in and turn a tribal society that follows a fierce religion into a nation of Western-style liberal democrats. A key conservative truth is that the material order rests on the spiritual order. Iraqi society did not have the spiritual or moral wherewithal to become the kind of nation we set out to make them. It was our Jacobin hubris, our prideful belief in our own power, that got us into this mess. There were conservatives warning against this in 2002, but most of us on the Right didn’t want to listen.

Yes, we did warn Rod and ostensible conservatives that they were marching over a cliff, but they were too busy damning us as “unpatriotic conservatives” and consigning us to the Outer Darkness to pay heed. Now that the validity of what we said, and say, is uncontestable, it’s relatively easy to come out with a recantation, but I’m wondering what the effect of this would have been if it had been done a few years back.

Oh well — better late than never, I suppose.

Antiwar Radio: Sebastian Junger

The first guest on Antiwar Radio for January 15, 2007 is Sebastian Junger of Vanity Fair about the Ijaw tribesmen who are causing trouble for the oil companies operating in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region.

Mp3 here.

Comments welcome at Stress.

Antiwar Radio: Becky Akers

The second guest on Antiwar Radio for Monday, January 15, 2007 is Becky Akers from LewRockwell.com on the subject of the NYPD’s entrapment and conviction on terrorism charges of a young New Yorker named Shahawar Matin Siraj and the persecution of his family for his supposed crimes.

Mp3 here.

Comments welcome at Stress.