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TORTURED THOUGHTS updated three hours later

I am totally confused by the 'torture bill'.

I am sure that there is some other name for it. The bushies have a gift for covering over evil shit with benign names.

I didn't fall for the McCain compromise thing. We have had that act before.

But with all the compromises and add ons and the two Houses having different bills, it is mental torture to to untangle it all.

I find that I am, at times, sort of sliding/edging into favor of the bill.

I think that 'maybe it is OK'. Surely all these people voting for it do not really want to shove a cattle prod up someone's ass. Do they?

In the middle of all this confusion I am surprised to find that there is a small part of me that thinks that non-Geneva torture might actually work; that there are circumstances when tougher tactics could or should be used.

It is like the fact that a small part of me is racist. Always was an always will be.

A small part of me wants to inflict some pain on others.

But, if I take my inner torturer and subject him to the facts, I have to admit that the kind of torture I am thinking of seldom works. Experts in the craft of interrogation use far more subtle mind-games to pull out their information and always have.

I have just read a thoroughly researched novel about espionage and spy work prior to WWII. The good stuff always comes from 'friendly' interrogations.

Are there nasty interrogations in the novel?

Yup.

But they are for a different purpose. These 'wet' interrogations are to extract information the way you want it. You want your victim to implicate someone or you want a confession to justify their own conviction. It is all manipulated.

There is also the revenge factor. We want to hurt someone. We need propaganda. These guys on the fringe are hurtable with some rationalization because they are Muslims, because they are brown, and because they took the field against us. They are not 'us'. Xenophobia.

So.

Do I think that there ought to be a special class of interrogation where you get to hurt people to extract faux info that you can use to get someone else?

Or do you want to use interrogation as a tool of revenge.

Or, try this one. Do you want to use torture as a means of terrorizing the victim's friends or peer group? Are you perpetrating a terroist act by torturing?

I think that these are good questions to ask myself when I feel 'me' sliding toward thinking the 'compromise' is OK.

It puts me on the right moral ground.

The legalities are mind boggling.

The morality is not.

I get a strong NO to all of the moral questions.

Enough said.