It worked for the good people of Christendom who hunted witches and heretics. It worked for Communists to find capitalist pig traitors. It works for the Iranian government to find American spies. It worked to find Pinochet's enemies. It's worked to confirm every wild paranoid conspiracy theory every tinpot dictator has ever had. It's worked to find the state's enemies and put them on TV so they could confess their crimes to the revolution.
Torture is great... for hearing what you wanted to hear in the first place. The victims say what must be said in a desperate bid to end the suffering. Whatever crazy, Kafka-esque nightmare of a regime used the torture uses the "confession" to punish dissidents even more brutally. All to reinforce fear. But, that's not what we did. Oh, no. We kept our tortured prisoners secret, even from the Senate committee that was supposed to know about them. We destroyed video of what happened. So, why torture people if you don't use forced confessions to bolster a illegitimate government?
Those who defend it today claim it was for information. But that's been knocked down by the report issued last week. We didn't get anything we didn't already have, and everything else was stony silence or wrong. But hey, that wrong stuff was useful. Our government tortured because the people in charge of national security at the time know that torture doesn't produce information. It produces propaganda. It produced utterings that "justified" every bomb they planned to drop. It produced screams that "backed up" every gun they fired. Torture was never supposed to find the truth. It was supposed to support their efforts for unending war and occupation.
Because, when tortured prisoners tell you that all the crazy stuff you think is happening and going to happen is true, you get to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and had no capability to harm us. You get to keep those soldiers there indefinitely, or at least until your successor partly cleans up your messes, because you've got "intel" that terrorists are all over the place. Those who ordered the torture, those who defend it now, need enemies all over the place. To justify military build ups that benefit their campaign contributors. To justify invasions that benefit mercenary companies. To justify wiretapping with no warrants. To justify entrapping Muslims into criminal conspiracies. To justify bombings that reinforce America's military might to the world.
And, to be honest, we, or at least some of us, the American People, wanted all these things too. Dropping bombs on civilians half a world away avenged us after 9/11. Watching a nation crippled by our invasions and the resulting chaos comforted us, that we were still #1 after one of our skyscrapers became concrete dust. Seeing Muslim guys with their dark skin and black, uncut hair in court wearing prison garb made us feel superior. Hearing that guys who admitted being bad under torture were being tortured made us feel like we were returning pain for pain, damage for damage. An eye for an eye. Oh, yes, torture worked. We just need to stop acting like national security was the goal.
