Thursday, November 22, 2007

Advertising Torture

Amnesty's Unsubscribe Me video reenacts CIA stress-position torture - Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing


For the longest time I've wondered why one of the more leftist organizations with a good deal of money and connections haven't produced advertisements or short films showing the effects of declared 'coercive interrogations'. It a pretty well known thing that most Americans have no idea what coercive interrogation means nor the effects on the body. They hear the words 'sleep deprivation' and think of the times when they had to go into work early for a week. A stress position doesn't sound so bad. And waterboarding has become such a confused concept due to the rightist punditry that most people completely misunderstand the idea. I've had the urge to hire someone to climb into a filing cabinet and stay there until they're screaming to come out (this is in public of course). And I often point to the experiment a radioman did back in the fifties in which he attempted to stay awake as long as possible. By the end of it, he was seeing spiders coming out of his shoes and other such hallucinations.
Naturally, papers like the Weekly Standard, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal will cry foul and declare these aids nothing more than scare tactics by a bunch of leftist radicals bent on destroying America, the rule of law, security and puppies. Of course, that is their right (no matter how wrong they are). I simply hope that those of use who do oppose torture show these aids and make the appropriate arguments. The whole idea of 'coercive interrogation' is bunk as it often leads to false confessions weeks or months after any possible 'good' intelligence has become useless. And as for the 'ticking-timebomb' scenario, you are describing a situation where we have an individual in custody perfectly willing to die as a martyr who, more than likely, will simply lie to his captors long enough for said bomb to explode. Now even if such a scenario took place and did result in the stopping of an attack, no grand jury in this country would even let the case go to trial. It's akin to justifiable homicide. Of course proper procedures would take place but that's simply the way our justice system is supposed to work.
So next time you meet someone who knows little to nothing about 'coercive interrogation' or even supports it, remind them of the consequences and how their supposed killer arguments fall rather flat.

No comments: