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Sympathy for the Devil

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Wednesday April 22, 2009

By Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties

According to memos released by the Obama administration last week, the CIA under the Bush administration tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003 alone.

News reports often describe Sheikh Mohammed as the "9/11 mastermind," based on his confession that he was the 9/11 mastermind--a confession he made, curiously enough, after being tortured 183 times. But under torture, he also "admitted" to having personally killed Daniel Pearl; he is never described in headlines as Daniel Pearl's assassin, perhaps because there is videotaped evidence that he was not. Under a credible system, this would call his 9/11 confession into question--but then under a credible system, he would never have been tortured in the first place.

That said, Sheikh Mohammed clearly played some role of importance in al-Qaeda, so...why not torture him 183 times per month if there's even a slight chance that it could generate some useful intelligence data? Putting aside the fact that torture has been shown to generate false leads and is illegal for some very good reasons, and putting aside the fact that Sheikh Mohammed's role in the 9/11 attacks has never been made clear...there are some practical problems with the fact that he was tortured so many times.

He was waterboarded eight to nine times per day, if they tortured him five days per week--or five to six times per day if they didn't take weekends off. After the first few dozen attempts, what were his torturers thinking? After the first hundred attempts, what were his torturers thinking? At what point did the torture become effective? How did the torturers manage to keep doing this, time and time again, when it was not? And--torture affecting the torturer, just as it does the victim--what did these routine acts of meaningless physical violence do to their minds, to their inhibitions?

And what has condoning this torture done to our country?

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