Monday, February 11, 2008

torture.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080211/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_sept_11_trial

as x-dell so well put in an earlier comment, torture is best used for indoctrination, and that any information gained through this method would be unreliable at best for the simple fact that you will say pretty much anything if you think you are going to die.

it begs the question.

why torture these prisoners and then try them in miltary court if you know the evidence is virtually useless?

indoctrination?

why?

all that is left for me to deduce is that it is you and i that are being indoctrinated as we are tortured while reading and hearing reports of this type of treatment of prisoners.

8 comments:

X. Dell said...

One of the things that the CIA has complained about over the last thirty years or so is the reliznce on signals and electronic intelligence (SIGINT and ELINT, respectively), and lack of human intelligence (HUMINT).

After 9/11, the lack of HUMINT came to the fore, because the US didn't have any operatives (supposedly) in the Muslim world. Indoctrinating people at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo might produce a generation of operatives, especially among the female prisoner population. (The hints of sexual abuse could put women in grave danger under Shia law, and thus they might only have loyalty to the US and/or its contractors).

In the case that you link to, I can imagine a number of secret sources being entered to evidence under the radar, beyond the ability for a defense attorney to research and cross-examine. Namely, the sources could come from coerced prisoners claiming to be in on a plot.

As American vets did in Korea, they could even testify to deeds they couldn't possibly have committed. A show trial.

Dr.Alistair said...

x, thanks for the muddification...i mean that in the kindest sense.

i shake my head at the sheer mountain of bits of info that gets collected by collectors and collators of "evidence" in court proceedings of any type.

what was it shakespeare had to say again?

having just gone through a year and a half of lawyers i have had my fill of such games.

i recollect a lecture given by someone who`s name escapes me for the moment.... he said that until the cia stops hiring iowa farm-boys the problem with operatives in the middle-east will persist.
it is difficult to hide a blond, blue-eyed linebacker in a sandy get-up. the shoulders are a dead give-away.

besides, bill clinton cut the guts out of cia funding some years ago while rogering interns to fund the ebonics program.

Dalriada said...

Thats a hell of a point and I never thought of that about how the media reports on torture function in a way to test the publics limitations on the subject as well as frame the subject from an authoritarian stand point.

Of course propaganda shows such as 24 are perfect mythological reinforcements for the torture news cycles.

Dr.Alistair said...

ego sets us apart from the herd and in some ways blinds us to the pressure of media.

if i look around my apartment i realise it`s full of products with brands on them that have been lasered into my unconscious that i consciously "love" to own and use.

frankly i don`t care if my tv says samsung or panasonic or whatever as long as the kids can play thier x-box on it when they visit.....

and my guitars don`t say gibson on them.

mine are made in japan and say tokai.....

speaking directly of torture, i believe we are being conditioned to accept torture and other forms of corporal violence because of what may just be coming, if the biblical end-time types have thier way politically.

if you ever have the opportunity to speak with a baptist or a jehovah`s witness, realise they firmly believe in an end-time as a real live thing that just hasn`t happened yet.

have you read any marshall mcluhan?

Anonymous said...

Being preacher's son and being raised in the church I can safely agree to the how utterly real fundementalists take the book of Revelation. One just needs to watch the 700 club though to get the drift of this.

Yeah, I'm a fan of Mr. Mcluhan.

Dr.Alistair said...

it is interesting how mcluhan`s catholicism reconciles with his almost athiestic analysis of media and culture....maybe it`s his fascination with finnegan`s wake......or something.

i was raised by an intellectual jesuit father and a hippy/anglican mother who used to grow her own bean sprouts, do yoga on the living-room floor and hold seances after dinner in the library.

thier arguements over which church my brother and i were to be raised in ensured we slipped through the cracks regarding baptisms etc.

i was actually horrified at the thought of such a ritual, and would have run way and lived with the gypsys in the woods before subjegating myself to that.

Anonymous said...

Its funny you mention Mcluhan and his catholicism as a couple of weeks ago I actually caught an old inteview with him on the catholic channel. (You know, the one with that bat shit crazy fat nun)

When talking about his faith he seemed to do it in archetypal terms making your assumption about Finnegans wake quite possible. For example he said the virgin Mary is the saint of studies and that is a perfect archetype for this new age of information. Kind of a stretch but clearly he seemed to need to use these terms to rationalize why he goes to mass.

Dr.Alistair said...

bat shit crazy fat nun? my favorite.....

well, it`s all about rationalisation. fritz perls said that the problem with freudian analysis is that it`s intellectual in it`s understanding and not necessarily an integrated or cathartic process.

mcluhan always struck me as a little boy lost, never able to stop talking, but while still talking felt healed.

but a powerful visionary regarding the emergance of computers and his insights into media are a constant revelation to me as we step deeper into memetic hell each day.

he was also a marvelous chameleon, bridging the gap between scolarship, religion and commerce effortlessly.

a true jesuit.