McCain vs Mukasey - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views
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what Thiessen articulates is, in many ways, more disturbing. What we are talking about is a system of violence and torture against whole swathes of prisoners to turn them into wreckages lacking human autonomy. The idea is that this makes them more likely to tell the truth because they have lost the will to resist. So Gitmo is really a camp designed to destroy human beings, not merely detain them, which was what Abu Ghraib revealed.
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Are all detainees at, say, Gitmo subject to these techniques routinely? That would be the natural inference. If this is how torture was used, isn't it light years' away from the initial "ticking time bomb" scenario - in fact, a complete rebuke to such a scenario?
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And if the torture creates a broken soul that cannot lie, why do the torture defenders acknowledge that KSM lied to them long after the torture - which is what allegedly tipped them off to the salience of previous intelligence about the alleged courier? If he had been broken into compliance, why on earth did they believe he was lying?