I'm glad that we learned from this and took measures to prevent the US government from carrying out any more abhorrent secret operations on its own citizens. All the extra accountability and transparency that's been woven into our institutional frameworks since this was discovered makes me much more confident that it won't happen again.
Because most people believe torture works. They believe we shouldn't do it because it's "bad", rather then the reality which is that it's ineffective at information extraction.
Same problem with WMDs: people tend to think there's just tons of chemical and biological weapons which would definitely immediately win wars, and we don't use them because for some reason dying by a bullet is "better" then dying nearly instantly from nerve gas - like that makes a difference.
The reality, again, is that they don't actually work (specifically: they are ineffective against military forces in achieving military objectives, but very effective against civilians who are unlikely to have counter-measures on hand and/or too uncontrollable to be create a useful strategic advantage).
EDIT: Like to drive the point home, in Zero Dark Thirty - which the CIA got to consult on - the line is that a prisoner broke under enhanced interrogation...and while it's true Bin Laden was located by intelligence from a prisoner who was tortured...they didn't get the intelligence from the torture. All the information which was useful was found by regular interrogation before they tortured them.
> Because most people believe torture works. They believe we shouldn't do it because it's "bad", rather then the reality which is that it's ineffective at information extraction.
I think most of those people believe torture works AND is also justified to prevent "greater evil", because that's how it is being presented repeatedly in media.
It's still a quite popular trope in TV series that the protagonists "were forced to take drastic actions" to prevent "the bad people" from executing their plan.
They sometimes feel torn about doing it, but in the end it is portrayed as necessary and effective in stopping whatever threat...
I see this "torture doesn't work" claim around sometimes and personally I have a hard time accepting it. If you ask me something I don't want to tell you, I won't tell you. But you start tearing out nails (or even threaten to do so) I'll spill all the damn beans I can to make you stop.
Confessions, sure. But what about location of military bases? Obviously torturing people to make them admit to crimes is just horrible, and sure torture in general is pretty horrible.
But if you capture a soldier and want to know where his friends are, what their plans are etc it's probably worth a shot. You can often verify information and ask followup questions etc. I'm not saying it's the moral thing to do, I'm just saying I think it'd have a non-zero success rate. Maybe even a pretty high success rate. And honestly if I was Ukrainian I'm not sure I'd have any moral obligations to torturing some Russians either. As far as I'm concerned when a nation attacks another they forfeit any kind of human rights. If they wanted to stay safe they could have stayed home.
If you torture the soldier, at best he is providing you the information you can verify and nothing else. At worst he is providing you incomplete/wrong verifiable information. There are only limited studies on this, but consensus of intelligence experts is that it is an ineffective method
In contrast, if you convince the subject to give up information voluntarily, it may provide you not only the location of the military base, but also much more valuable information about the base and its content, and information you didn't know to ask for.
"Come on. We already know you're the Easter Bunny, your friend next door already confirmed it. All this can stop immediately, we just need you to admit it and tell us how you did it"
> The reality, again, is that they don't actually work (specifically: they are ineffective against military forces in achieving military objectives, but very effective against civilians who are unlikely to have counter-measures on hand and/or too uncontrollable to be create a useful strategic advantage).
Chemical weapons absolutely work - if you are the first mover, that is. In France, even a century after WW1, many of the notorious battle fields that saw immense use of chemical weapons and hundreds of thousands of deaths are "zone rouge" [1], completely unsuitable for human activity, to this very day. And there's enough stuff that can't be filtered even by the best gas masks... irritants that are so strong they force enemy soldiers to take off their masks, even while knowing that they'll die from the other toxins in the air.
They only got banned because no one wanted to see a repeat of WW1... but human memory is short and now, as there's barely anyone alive from that time any more, we're seeing an erosion of the standards. Something like Assad using chemical weapons against his population should have warranted an immediate and complete invasion of the country and a prosecution of everyone involved.
But you just explained exactly the problem: they work as a first strike. They work as a "surprise we're doing it". But they don't create a tactical military advantage...however they will absolutely massacre nearby civilian populations and non-combatants.
Zone Rouge isn't full of chemical shells, it's full of everything - just general unexploded ordnance. Chemical shells in WW1 also did not cause "hundreds of thousands of deaths" - the highest estimate is about 90,000 deaths and 1.3 million casualties[1]
Same story with the use of chemical irritants: while they worked on the gas masks of the time, they don't work today and they weren't particular efficacious. And you've identified again, the obvious problem: clouds of chemical gas in the air will affect your own troops just as much as the enemy.
Which loops around to the basic problem: two military's can have a fun chemical weapon exchange on the battlefield, and accomplish basically nothing when properly equipped: with appropriate counter-measures the shells don't do anything, they leave people, equipment and fortifications intact.
But the wounded? Nearby civilians? Anyone downwind who wasn't properly informed friendly forces are deploying chemical weapons? The weather changing unexpectedly? They're all going to be wounded or die from that. They are tactically ineffective compared to conventional weapons versus any force prepared to face them, and they are sufficiently easily produced that they do not represent a substantial advantage. Not to mention other basic problems - like your own munitions stores now not just exploding, but exploding and releasing a fast moving, possibly persistent toxin - or worse, being damaged and slowly leaking your VX nerve gas into a cloud which takes out your logistics base and the frontline guys rotating back, and then leaves all your stores intact for the enemy to retrieve when they turn up later and it's dissipated.
From an European POV: America has a cultural problem with violence and generally the concept of them showing dominance over others, plain and simple.
Guns, the amazing fact that bare nipples in a TV show can cause a national scandal while it's no big deal at all if a kids show like the Simpsons can contain absolutely ridiculous amounts of violence, gore and other highly problematic behavior, not just bending but outright stomping over rules being commonplace in virtually all major police (e.g. Law & Order, NCIS, Cold Case) and medical (e.g. Dr. House) shows and movies, "rolling coal" on bicyclists and road rage in general being a thing...
Torture being accepted so widely as well also ties in with what makes the US penal system so unique among Western ones - everyone else has switched their penal system to rehabilitation and prevention (i.e. try your best to make sure that felons don't commit more crimes in the future), whereas in the US you don't just have stuff like ridiculous prison times or being released with no assets, no help, no nothing after a lengthy prison stay, it's widely accepted to the point of being the butt of jokes that you get raped in prison ("don't drop a soap bar") or that you have to deal with massive overcrowding, roaches, mold in food... in any civilized society, the courts would intervene immediately for such reports, but in the US? Nothing has changed there in decades, partially of course because the US political system is dysfunctional, but IMHO more because people accept inhumane treatment of people who "have done something wrong, so deserve it".
And to add on the 9/11 thing: the US is already a deeply traumatized nation at its core. Stuff like MKULTRA, the Vietnam war or the 1st Iraq war never got addressed and dealt with as a country in a healthy way - and completely forget about the even older stuff like slavery or the discrimination of e.g. Japanese-Americans during WW2, there's more than enough politicians in power who do everything they can to repress even teaching about that! 9/11, Afghanistan and the 2nd Iraq War, the multitude of financial crises since then - that also didn't get dealt with.
How can anyone expect healthy attitudes from a society that never allowed itself to heal from its past?
King Leopold II established his brutal fiefdom in the "Congo Free State" in 1885 .. school shootings in the US and mass shootings from Las Vegas Hotels, etc are all rather this decade.
You have a stale point, Europe has moved on from colonialism and hasn't engaged in the home soil atrocities to the extent embraced by the US.
I'm not sure what I think about it, but I have heard the statement that "Hitler didn't do anything that the Empire[0,1] hadn't done before him; his mistake was in not realising one was supposed to limit that kind of activity to brown people".
[0] or others: let's give Leopold a hand, everyone.
[1] Having been reminded by the recent unfortunate fall of an imperial cosplayer: I have lost an image that was floating around the innrnetz, of a stormtrooper in a locker room, half in (or is it half out?) of uniform, sitting dejected on a bench with their hands facing us and I M P E clearly tattooed on one set of knuckles, with the other set reading R I A L.
I’m sorry but this is rather stupid. Europe has done incredible damage to the world that persists to this day. Until they address this damage, it absolutely is not a stale point. Assuming you are European, do not attempt to weasel your way out of your debt to the world.
I get what you’re getting at but you’re engaging in whataboutism. Just because parts of Europe also did damage to the world does not mean we get to ignore or dismiss what this person is saying especially when it’s pretty on the nose. Firthermore (and I don’t really think it matters regardless), this comment or could be from some small European country that did nothing major and you’re accusing them of a cognitive dissonance that may not exist.
With the exception of the Brits (whose deconstruction from its Empire days keeps fucking stuff up to this day, just look at Israel/Palestine or Pakistan/India), we have learned from our mistakes.
I'm not foolish enough to claim we're perfect - far from it, especially when it comes to restitution towards former colonies and looted art from there - but at least we recognized how and where we fucked up, and we're teaching our children about that in school. We don't skip over the horrors of WW1, we don't skip over WW2 and what led up to it, we don't skip over the various genocides committed on European soil. We acknowledge and own the stuff that our ancestors did.
In contrast, as I mentioned, more and more American schools outright ban books and teaching about its problematic past, or (like MKULTRA) it isn't taught about at all.
So what mistakes do you believe you have learned from? From here, it appears you have very much retained your paternalistic European attitude toward other cultures which you deem to be less learned or morally inclined.
While you scratch around for an answer, you might also like to remind yourself that European countries maintain undue influence in their former colonies to this very day.
Look, they are comparing Europe to the US, the current hegemon, and criticise that the US does not include it's history of violence and abuse in its curriculum to the same extend as they do in Europe.
I honestly don't think your comment addresses this criticism at all. You seem to look for reasons why the US shouldn't be criticised to start with, which sort of strengthens the point op made.
> From here, it appears you have very much retained your paternalistic European attitude toward other cultures which you deem to be less learned or morally inclined.
Well, the current issues that the US face are so large they are hardly to ignore here. Y'all's regular occurrence of mass shootings even makes national headlines in our media, and we see the cultural issues seeping from US-made media (both entertainment and social media) into our societies. We don't have a real answer to that other than regulation though.
> While you scratch around for an answer, you might also like to remind yourself that European countries maintain undue influence in their former colonies to this very day.
Fair point, France does have its issues in Africa, but at least the colonies are their own independent nations (and do exercise that right, as we've seen the last few months).
American GOVERNMENT. 99% of Americans have never tortured anyone at all and don't ever want to, so I'd hardly call it an obsession. I guarantee if Europeans were pulling their own weight in "world defense of democracy" there would be lots of Gitmo and Faluja incidents as well, toxic masculinity is alive and well in ALL militaries and this is what happens when they aren't supervised 24/7 against it, especially when it's mixed with war fatigue.
If anything we (and by we I mean the CIA) learned how not to mind-control people, and moved on to more effective and subtle means of manipulation through the media.
