Why Did We Torture? The answer now seems to be: “Ignorance”

The last two posts on UP@NIGHT have addressed the issue of torture.  Today we learn, according to a New York Times article, that incompetence and ignorance led the Bush administration down the path of torture.  The article is a must read.  There is an excerpt below.  I will say that it raises as many questions as it answers; for example. how could the moral imagination and understanding of our leaders be so impoverished that they were prepared simply to heed the words of so-called experts, without asking probing questions and paying attention to what could be called common sense?  (I mean, certain actions seem like torture….it doesn’t take a rocket scientist.)  Or how about, are the proposed “harsh” methods really as reliable as other methods?  (Opinions from different camps were called for.  But instead the advice our leaders wanted to hear, “we’ll get quick results,” was all that was needed to give the green light.)

Of course further investigation may reveal that they were not as ignorant as this article suggests.  Time will tell.

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use (excerpt)

By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: April 21, 2009
WASHINGTON — The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.