The art of water boarding

Disadvantages Of Water Boarding:
Of course, the so gained knowledge is pretty worthless. Who needs any knowledge in times where a country like Iraq can be attacked and conquered on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction, which never existed?

The purpose of any torture is not to extract truth. Old Torquemada could have told you so. The purpose of torture is always the same: to gain confessions. It does not matter, if an old woman centuries ago confessed in the practice of spoiling crops through witchcraft or if a leader of a terrorist organization today confesses a new, sensational plot.

The value of the confession stays on the same level: it gives to those in power a pretext for action. In addition, it gives to the pretext a kind of legitimacy. After all, the process of the interrogation can never happen without authorization. There has to be a governmental permit. It does not matter, if you want to open a new medical research facility for twins in a concentration camp, if you want to smear excrement into the faces of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, or if you want to play a little with water boarding in Guantanamo. In all this cases the permit has to come right from the top of the pyramid.

As a general tip: be sure to get the permit before you start, because then you will be in the same nice position as Goering at Nuremberg. You can always claim, that you just acted on orders.

It does not matter if the leader of a country declares war on another country against the advice of the United Nations, using thereby manipulated evidence of weapons of mass destruction. And so it equally does not matter if the same country is using methods of “harsh interrogation”, which clearly violate the Geneva Convention, for further extraction of so called evidence.

Yet it matters very much still to have at least a certain pretext and a cause for action. Remember history?

Hitler dressed German soldiers in Polish uniforms for a fake attack at a German radio station. That was his pretext given to the more civilized parts of the world: “Look, we are under attack and now, we will do to them as they did to us!”

Torquemada cleared Spain from Muslims, heretics, Jews and witches (most of them unwanted people anyhow) under the pretext of protecting the church.

Suppose somebody would take your dog or cat and just for the fun of it expose the animal to the above method of water boarding? Wouldn’t there be an outcry across the country?

Suppose pirates would have exposed a captured citizen of America to the above method from the coast of Somalia? Wouldn’t there be an outcry across the whole planet?

Again, we need good pretexts for doing certain things. “Just for fun” is not one of those.

There was a case in Germany some years ago, in which a man had captured a little boy with the idea of getting ransom. The police arrested the man while the boy was still missing. During the interrogation the chief of the police station threatened the obstinate suspect with torture. Under this threat the suspect confessed the crime and the murder of the little boy. During the trial his confession was considered invalid as it was made under threat.

There was a huge discussion in the media on the issue. There was a life at stake and so a parliament member of a huge party stated in public, that the case mounted to a “necessity above the law”. Needless to say that the law of Germany prohibits the extraction of confession through threats or appliance of violence.

The term “necessity above the law” is extremely dubious, as it involves the creation of a second law above the ordinary law. The question is then: who makes those laws, who applies them, where is the space to act them out, etc.?

This is the very reason, why the centers of detention were outside America, even outside the so-called “civilized” world. There was a center in Thailand for example, a country, which is well known for the harsh treatment of ordinary criminals (4000 Days, a book by an Australian prisoner in Thailand).

Let us kindly remember that almost every major religion agrees on the law of “Karma”: as you sow, so you will reap!

Therefore I am afraid, that we will get it all back. We will get it back in forms, which we might never imagine now.

It does not need a prophet to see a wave of new violence spread across the Western world. Will it be the violence of political extremists or a new terror spread by frustrated youth under the spell of disillusion with their societies?

When we have the first reports of high school kids subjecting the outsider of the class to a little water-boarding hoax, then we will have the answer! And even a late answer would be better than none.

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Tagged as: conflict, controversy, politics