Perhaps I've missed it, but I haven't been hearing this perspective on the torture scandal, so I proffer it here. It seems to me that the logic for the war in say, January 2003, was this: 1) Iraq has WMD. 2) Hans Blix and his UN weapons inspectors, using their bumbling methodology, are never going to find those WMD at the rate they're going. 3) The only way to find the WMD is to capture Iraqi leaders / scientists / etc, and either bribe them or pressure them into revealing the location of the WMD. Therefore, the US would wage war on Iraq in order to achieve #3. That's the way I understood the logic for the war. But it seems inherent in #3 - indeed the main reason for the war - that if the bribes didn't make the captives talk, the pressure would be applied to achieve the same end. What was that "pressure" going to consist of? Who knew. The CIA's special sauce methods of interrogation. We only knew that we had the best damn interrogators in the world and that they were going to go in and interrogate the hell out of the captives, and then we were going to find our WMD, and the world was going to be safe again. So perhaps we were all a little naive in believing that the CIA's special sauce brand of interrogative pressure was going to be so far distant from torture. It's a lot to ask of any intelligence body to get the info, without resorting to some unpleasant tactics. Placed in the larger context though, the above logic would seem to lead one to the conclusion that the entire war was predicated on torture, or at least a reasonable presumption that "pressure" amounting to "torture" was likely to occur. And that is what America was geared up to inflict. Had our torture wound up revealing WMD, people wouldn't be so upset. But it's hypocritical now to be all "shocked" by America's pressure pictures.  ¶ 5/26/2004 06:11:00 PM 0 comments links to this post