"The U.S. doesn't torture;" you're joking – right?

Something I said on one of the Internet sites concerning the despicable practice of “waterboarding” has evoked from the metrosexual male petty intellectual of the Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Duke of Plaza-Toro ilk a shit-storm of the pettifogging and fulminating invective typical of their “lead from the safety of the far rear” kind.

Okay. So let’s talk about torture. First, though, let me tell you how it was that I became expert on the subject. First, I was once trained to resist torture, that by the United States of America. Secondly, having completed basic training and waiting for advanced training in special operations, I was assigned to guard soldiers who had supposedly broken under Chinese torture and were to be subjected by their own country to torture in the form of courts martial. One, a guy named Chichester, had reportedly been “brain-washed” – that according to my superiors. Chichester himself didn’t really know what had happened to him, but he didn’t have a lot of hope in things like “truth, justice, and the American way.”

Interview with these hapless individuals made clear a depressing fact of national honor (that, presumably, of any nation and its government), the fact that once its enemy has had an opportunity to torture its soldier, the soldier’s country will probably torture him should he escape and be repatriated, that in order to learn what he might have told the enemy. All of the hapless soldier’s “interrogators,” of course, will have instituted the practice on the basis of what they know they would have done in the same straits. I had a lot of time to discuss it all with these guys, and I learned a great deal.

Having trained for a time to do covert operations against the Soviet Union or Communist China, having experienced a couple of the operational fiascos typical of almost everything this country does, I realized that I might one day stand in Chichester’s boots. As I went through Special Forces and covert operations training, I thought a great deal about the dilemma of a soldier taken prisoner. I also knew that I wouldn’t be wearing the uniform that my own side considered a ticket to treatment according to the rules of war. For insight in that regard, check the U.S. Government’s latest arguments on the topic concerning prisoners at Guantanamo Bayou. When I had had occasion during a mission to protect Soviet defectors against their country to discuss the USSR’s interrogation methods, I began training myself to resist, even preclude and neutralize “coercive interrogation” - torture. My efforts included an exhaustive study of torture.

What’s “torture?” Well, according to Webster’s, it’s “intense pain or suffering of body or mind; the infliction of such pain or suffering.” The word "torture" comes from the Latin verb torquere, "to twist." In Webster's New World Dictionary, the primary definition is: "The inflicting of severe pain to force information and confession, get revenge, etc." Even today, in the Twenty-first Century, all manner of vicious, “inhuman” – like the U.S. hypocrisy otherwise, I’ve always found that humorously ludicrous - cruelty is still commonplace, particularly in Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and all nations inflicted with Islam (maiming and physical abuse are legal in Somalia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Sudan, and other countries that observe and obey sharia; the hands of thieves are chopped off, women convicted of adultery are often stoned to death; in Iraq, Saddam Hussein's police force burned stigma into the foreheads of thieves and deserters, and sliced off the tongues of those spoke out against the state). Governments around the world, including the United
States continue to employ rape and to terrorization of family members, including children, in order to extort confessions or information from those in captivity.

“Civilized” people everywhere readily condemn this sort of thing. Civilized “America” condemns these things – all the while their government does them. As I once wrote while still in high school, “the summation of history is that man proclaims the right, and does wrong.”

Then, however, there are “coercive methods” that some people argue, fall short of torture, things like sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to induce fear, confusion, or suggestibility, “abusive” (have you notice how important terminology is?) treatment such as forceful grasping, slapping, shoving, or violent shaking, forcing a prisoner to stand until collapse occurs, or forcing him to sit in painfully uncomfortable positions, and playing upon his fears for himself, his comrades, or his family. Although excruciating, this sort of thing generally leaves no evidence of injury – no wounds or scars, and – at least supposedly - does no permanent injury.

The famed Geneva Convention (it there were ever a better example of a resolution “more honored in the breach than the observance,” it’s not one known to this old soldier), incidentally, makes no distinction. The Geneva Convention bans any and all mistreatment of prisoners. Unless you are prepared to argue that simulated drowning is entertainment – therapy, perhaps - there is therefore no doubt whatever that “waterboarding” is a violation of the Geneva Convention (with his declaration of war and public admissions, therefore, the President of the U.S. is a war criminal).

That won’t do it for the Sean Hannity types, however. For them, torture is anything that isn’t “waterboarding.” Or whatever else we might do, or be doing. If the Home of the Brave is doing it, it isn’t torture, whatever - beating, breaking limbs or digits, inflicting bodily pain – whatever it is. Handy. To a wimp whose reality is all language, a guy who has never endured any kind of real world physical hardship – even the like of backache or blistered palms derived from hard manual labor – that’s truth. All that is required is a twist of terminology, or the coining of a new phrase.

In fact, the shear naiveté of persons like those who infest discussion on the Internet with their ill-informed opinion and vapid pronouncements is almost invariably traceable to the likewise vacuous commentary of purported pundits like O’Reilly and Hannity – to say nothing of their supposedly journalistic counterparts on the liberal side of their Operation MOCKINGBIRD reality.
“Americans” are monumentally ignorant of history, of course, but even one versed in very recent history knows that the simple and most salient fact concerning “waterboarding” torture is that it is highly unlikely that torture will obtain useful information. Nazi German science demonstrated long ago that there are no reliable ways to make people tell secrets. So did millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer-funded Operation MKULTRA (and others the like) experiments. More, it is a fact that everyone in the intelligence community knows that. Where have all these pundits and “analysts” been all this time?

Face it, folks you don’t “waterboard” anyone because you want information having to do with intelligence – unless you are of the character of the Nazi Gestapo or its Einsatzgruppen.

Then, too, the fact is that U.S. soldiers have already been tried and convicted of torture for having inflicted “waterboarding” on captives. After the Spanish American War, the US Army used waterboarding – it was then called the “water cure” (remember that terminology is everything these effeminate days) or “Chinese water torture.” One Major Edwin Glenn was court martialed and sentenced to ten years hard labor for waterboarding a suspected Philippine insurgent.

Let’s take further as an example of torture – this time, the torture of words and language for propaganda purposes – the term “waterboarding” and the discussion thereof: Waterboarding, the Operation MOCKINGBIRD media has succeeded in convincing the public, is among the least severe of possible “coercive interrogation” – note the innocuous-sounding euphemism – methods. By the rhetorical device of loaded question (implying, in this instance, that a question exists), the media has created its own – and its master, the federal government’s – question and resulting doubt as to definition.

Tell yourself what your worst fears are. If the fear of drowning isn’t among them, you are the rare individual. In fact, the reason that, with torture by fire, torture using water has been throughout history the method of torture most frequently employed – and successful – has to do with both the fact of man’s certain familiarity with them and with their fearsomeness. All torture, after all is directed against the mind. Not the body. Oh, sure, you hurt him, but you hurt him in order to pressure his mind, to make him want to avoid the pain anticipated or being experienced.

Not death. There are many case histories of men threatened with, even assured, execution, men who nevertheless went to their deaths implacably – even smiling or laughing. Despite stories like one I heard again and again during my military career, stories like that of a Special Forces Trooper who said to make a man talk shoot his compatriot to his left, then the one to his right. “Then you can’t shut him up.” Try that with a zealot who thinks your shooting him will give him seventy-two virgins to deflower and paradise.

Uh-uh. Torture is about fear, especially fear of pain. Its ability to inflict fear has to do with what the victim is most fearful. In Orwell’s 1984, “Winston” feared rats; and the threat of being inundated by ravening rats broke his otherwise firm resolve.

Notwithstanding all that, there is the ancipital fact that the “waterboarding” being video-demonstrated almost daily by the media, the Internet, and almost all forms of electronic media is both the sort of thing used in military training like SERE (an acronym for “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape”) and certainly not what is being done by U.S. to its captives; more, a mealy-mouthed media of the O’Reilly, Hannity, metrosexual male ilk have no real way to recognize the torture about which they pontificate almost nightly. That, folks, is a very telling scenario, one I’ll address in a moment.

At its logical peak of severity – what anyone not a fool or one stupefied by today’s MOCKINGBIRD media propaganda must realize - “waterboarding” is in fact drowning, then reviving the victim. It is not, contrary to the general opinion among those with whom I’ve been discussing the matter, the least severe of interrogation techniques. In fact, it is among the worst.

Ask anyone who has drowned, lost consciousness, and been revived by the lifesaving technique of empting the victim’s lungs of water and providing artificial respiration. Taken to its possible extreme (you expect something less of anyone so desirous of information that he is willing to inflict “coercive interrogation?), “waterboarding” is nothing less than – intended or otherwise - repetitive drowning and resuscitation. Get the timing wrong, fail in resuscitation, the interogee dies.

Oops!

To date, one hundred and twenty U.S. captives have died under U.S. “interrogation” (Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to General Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, said not long ago that he knew of more than seventy of what he termed "questionable” deaths among persons under US supervision as detainees, that being up to time he left office in 2002. That figure, he then added, “is now around ninety.” This, of course, is 2008.

Since the tenure of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld we have heard again and again of captured terrorist leaders has yielded "an awful lot of information" and had "made life an awful lot more difficult for an awful lot of folks." More, the media is striving mightily to make it appear that all these captured Islamic fanatics are talking their heads off. The sycophant media – most notably of course, FoxNews – has reported intelligence coup after coup like that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who supposedly sang his head off under “waterboarding” interrogation.

Hmmmmmm. If that were the case, anyone thinking about it would think, U.S. interrogation has al-Qaeda in position to be plucked for its leaders like a tree its fruit. It just happens that Mohammed, for instance, didn’t know enough to let us capture Osama Bin Laden or his supposed second in command, Aiman Al-Zawaheri. Gee, I wonder how that happens.

I also note, by the way, that about as much of what we’re being told about this matter adds up as do all the other media stories and analyses thereof. If all the supposed intelligence victories over al-Qaeda are true, then a whole lot of fanatics eager to go to Allah are suddenly changing their minds and spilling the beans all over the place, or we’re torturing a hell of a lot of people.

With the credibility of the Bush Administration what it is on the record, moreover, there is no way to corroborate anything, including all the stories of U.S. interrogation successes. What we do know is that we are still in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we are still fighting an enemy of undiminished capacity to wage ware, we have not killed or captured either Osama Bin Laden or Aiman Al-Zawaheri, and U.S. propaganda has reached levels unprecedented in our history. The Bush League in Washington, D.C. is going to say al-Qaeda leaders are caving in under questioning whether they are or aren’t (in fact, even an honest administration would probably be well-advised to do that: men like Sheikh Mohammed, and the like are heroes in the Arab world, and word that they have been broken is enormously demoralizing).

As usual, we are being treated like mushrooms – kept in the dark and fed garbage. Neither I (I did interrogations professionally for twenty-three years) nor any of my friends who happen to be in the business of tactical and strategic military intelligence puts any stock in any of these tales of interrogation success. Professionals know better, and it all smells “made for television” and people who know no better than Hollywood. If a supposed top-level al-Qaeda leader like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed talked so much, why haven’t we seen any sign of the logical results? The fact, as I said, is that no one in any competent organization knows enough to make his capture devastating to his cause. It just isn’t done that way – except, of course, in Hollywood and FoxNews.

But since the U.S. admits torture, it’s pretty certain we’re doing it. Prisoners in U.S. custody in Afghanistan have died. As many as two dozen prisoners at Guantánamo Naval Station have attempted suicide (one prisoner survived after hanging himself but remains unconscious and is not expected to revive – on the other hand, that happens to victims of “waterboarding,” too . . .). And that’s only what we know about (too bad torture doesn’t work – we could get the truth from our government).

“Waterboarding” and the Bush League “War on Terror,” however, are providing enemies of the U.S. massive intelligence. The fact that our government must sees as necessary torture is very revealing. An old combative sportsman who trained in wrestling and judo for the purpose of training for actual war-fighting, I know as does any combative sportsman that an opponent who stoops to fouling his opponent betrays critical weakness. More, “waterboarding” is in character for this fiasco of fecklessness, demonstrating as it does our inability to defeat even an enemy we outnumber overwhelmingly both in numbers and weaponry. With arms and armament in such Brobdingnagian proportions as to beggar the imagination, costing seven to eight hundred billions of dollars yearly and costing since 1948 fifteen and a half trillion dollars, we cannot defeat a tiny force armed basically with small arms and improvised explosive devices.

Yeah, I know, a man of the cloth, Jeremiah Wright said something like that the other day nearly cause certain of us a stroke. The truth is a real bitch, isn’t it? Just so you know, there are on the public record fifty-two discovered and admitted instances since 1948 of U.S. experiments using unwitting citizens as Guinea Pigs. Remember that “virtual reality” I’m continually talking about?

And, you don’t believe a government willing to “waterboard” captives is one capable of using its citizenry for experiments like those to which the Reverend Wright had reference? REALLY?

Let me tell you what I know about torturers, the stuff I realized when I was sure I might one day be their victim. Assuming for a dizzy minute that you really think you can get useful information from torture, then why not always use torture? Why bother with any other means? Why stop at FoxNews’ “bomb somewhere” or the people who know where the bomb is? Why not the people who perhaps made the explosives, or saw them, or hauled them, or might have? How about people who might have heard or seen something concerning it all? How about people who may have contributed money to the people who made the explosives? Why stop at the torture victim himself? Why not torture his family, his relatives, their relatives, their neighbors?

If the end justifies the means, where would you draw the line representing restriction upon the means?

Twenty-three years ago today, May 6, 1985, I stood and watched agents of the United States of America burglarize my home. They had no warrant, didn’t even - ever - bother to claim probable cause for one. The agents of Internal Revenue Service weren’t, in fact, interested in my tax liability, in tax collection, or in anything remotely having to do with the U.S. Tax Code. The king-size garbage bags with which the hauled away my property (law books, family photos, and papers having to nothing to do with financial records) contained nothing of forensic use in court or in prosecution of an income tax or other criminal case. The Land of the Free and its nefarious agents were interested in cruelty, in demonstrating to a recalcitrant citizen the absolute power of their office and agency. They were engaged in intimidation, the infliction of fear, just as they were months later when on the evening of October 6, 1986, their rifleman shooting from ambush wounded me three times.

In the years that followed, the more than one hundred and nine traffic stops on the streets and highways of the nation,* six motor vehicle assaults, repeated attempts at mugging and murder, attempts at arson, vehicular sabotage, poisoning (twice), more than sixty burglaries like the one already described here, and more - including wounds inflicted by gunfire, the United States had no legitimate interest in internal revenue of tax collection (totally ruined by the government’s interdiction of credit, prevented by their efforts from return to business or even gainful employment, I had no income whatever).

No, the form of “waterboarding” – strangulation – the United States employed where I was the “captive” had nothing to do with intelligence or information. It had to do with inflicted terror.

It succeeded – at least where my family was concerned. First one wife, then – when I had recovered my business and remarried – another, deserted under the merciless pressure of the government in the form of postal and telephoned threats and lies. A teenage son was driven to three attempts at suicide. All of it was done with in order to inflict the maximum amount of fear. Torture, in other words.

How do I know about torture? I know about torture the same way I know about the United States Government the torturer, because for twenty-three years I, too, underwent torture by the United States.

*Apparently the U.S. Government hoped by means of falsified public record including police reports to incite an incident like the Amadou Diallo, Sal Culosi, or Sean Bell shootings. The leg wound here was inflicted by a federal sniper on October 6, 1986.