Foxfyre wrote:If you needed information to protect the lives of the U.S. military and contractors and Iraqi citizens, and threats of pain and death were ineffective, how would you get it?
I just posted a post in my "Americans tortured .." thread that addresses your post too, so I'll copy it here:
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Sofia, tentatively, suggested the consideration that sometimes, a degree of torture may be necessary to save lives:
Sofia wrote:We know isolation, food restrictions, nudity, cold blasts of water...happen when an army is desperate to get information about impending attacks... If you know, or strongly suspect, a detainee has information that can save innocent life--how far do you go to get that information? I think its a pertinent question.
What happened at Abu Ghraib may not fall into this basic conversation--but the application of some questioning techniques, which may be called torture...juxtaposed with the information considered vital to saving people-- considered with upholding Human Rights is a paradoxical mess.
The line of argument has been proposed much more forcefully in other posts: what happened at Abu G. was terrible, but you shouldn't forget we're desperate to get information from terrorists that could save lives. McG quoted an article on it:
McGentrix wrote:U.S. officials hate to talk about it openly, but a primary function of places like Baghram and Abu Ghurayb is interrogation. The lives of American soldiers can depend on secrets spilled there.
Now, from the start I've asked here - were these inmates that were being abused confirmed terrorists or mere suspects? And were they (suspected) Al-Qaeda terrorists or Iraqi insurgents?
By now, we know that many of those at Abu G. were indeed mere suspects, sometimes brought in on the vaguest notion of possible involvement at that. But back then (and perhaps still), people rather just skipped the question, as if it didn't matter whether it was a known Al-Qaeda terrorist we were holding there or some guy caught throwing stones and apprehended because, you know, you never know what else he mighta done -- hey, it's about "saving lives"!
Foxfyre went pretty far:
Foxfyre wrote:I personally don't care if those who target innocents and are committed to kill anybody and everybody who doesn't conform to their beliefs are comfortable or not.
In Fox's world, everybody at Abu G. was "committed to kill anybody and everybody who doesn't conform to their beliefs" - the worst kind of fundamentalist terrorist, say. Unclear what that is based on. But why is it practical for him to assume so? Because it allows for rationalising what happened as the kind of unavoidable collateral damage when one is, as Fox put it, "in charge of some of Saddam's toughest soldiers who have information you need to bring the war to a speedy end and restore peace and progress toward a free and democratic Iraq".
Note that the inmates have now even morphed into "Saddam's toughest soldiers" - by mere assertion of such. And that the assumption is that the war in Iraq could be brought to "a speedy end" - peace, progress, freedom and democracy all included - if
only we could get those prisoners at Abu G. to talk.
Anyway. This
from the NYT last week:
New York Times wrote:The questioning of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners last fall in the newly established interrogation center at Abu Ghraib prison yielded very little valuable intelligence, according to civilian and military officials.
The interrogation center was set up in September to obtain better information about an insurgency in Iraq that was killing American soldiers almost every day by last fall. The insurgency was better organized and more vigorous than the United States had expected, prompting concern among generals and Pentagon officials who were unhappy with the flow of intelligence to combat units and to higher headquarters.
But civilian and military intelligence officials, as well as top commanders with access to intelligence reports, now say they learned little about the insurgency from questioning inmates at the prison. Most of the prisoners held in the special cellblock that became the setting for the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib apparently were not linked to the insurgency, they said.
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