FYI
Heinrich Müller, Chief of the Geheime Staatspolizei [Gestapo] coined the term Verschärfte Vernehmung, “enhanced interrogation”, in 1937. The useful euphemisms are recycled forever – “homeland security”, etc.
In my experience, torture is only used as an attempt to produce information in Western Christian societies. In the rest of the world it is punishment to force conformity and/or compliance, when it isn’t used strictly to cause pain and suffering.
Consider the sacrament of penance in the Christian tradition. That is really the basis for the Inquisition and was part of Western laws for centuries in many forms like trial by ordeal.
Some “think tank” in ages past decided that souls have weight, ergo witches would weigh less than normal people because they have sold their souls to Satan. This leads to tying up people suspected of witchcraft and throwing them into deep water. If they didn’t sink and drown, they were pulled out to be hanged and/or burned. Those who drowned were obviously innocent and given a Christian burial.
4 comments
My understanding is that both the North Koreans and North Vietnamese used torture on our POW’s in order to extract confessions of war crimes from them. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. They didn’t really care which, as long as they had some confessions to parade around to prove how evil and depraved those Americans were and thus whip up their domestic populace to support the war more fiercely. For abusing POW’s most of the “civilized” world roundly condemned these nations.
I suspect the Busheviks felt the same way. All they cared about was getting confessions of crimes against humanity to prove how evil and depraved those terrierists were and thus whip up their domestic populace to support the war more fiercely. And for abusing these POW’s…. crickets from most of the “civilized” world.
So it goes.
-BT
That was the influence of Stalinism and Russian advisors. Ho Chi Minh traveled widely in the West and was educated in the Soviet Union. That was their basis for their agitprop. They were also influence by British and French colonial practices. The use of torture in Asia has a long history as part of punishments for offenses, and compliance with authorities, but no history of attempting to gain information from its use. Only the West is under the delusion that it can lead to the truth.
None of these Communist regimes attempted to get information via torture. They wanted confessions, not information, confessions to be used for propaganda purposes, not any information that the people they tortured may or may not have had.
My sad suspicion is that the Cheney regime had similar motivations.
I don’t know what to think about living in a nation that tortures. Living in a nation that tortures. If I had said, twenty years ago, that I was going to live in a nation that tortures when I was in my 50’s, people would have asked me what third world nation I was moving to. Now I know. It’s called the United States of America. SIGH.
The Soviets did attempt to gain information, but we know that it didn’t work because it didn’t produce any information that was useful to them. We did a lot of tracking on that possibility and made changes based who was captured and what they knew. Of course that was back when we had functioning intelligence agencies and principles.
I wonder if the new ban on Nazis receiving Social Security has a Cheney exemption?