It's hard to believe that there was a time where people were hung for crimes they didn't commit, where the accused had two options: confess or be hanged. But it is even harder to believe that these days of forcing confessions out of "criminals" are not over. In 2002, military trainers at Guantanamo Bay interrogated prisoners using a list of torture tactics that had been designed and used by the Chinese in the 1950s to evoke false confessions from Americans. And so, the tactics that the U.S. military have been using have been designed to get a confession, whether it be false or legitmate, out of the accused. Senator Paul Levin comments "People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don't need false intelligence." It is hard to understand why these methods would be used because it seems as if no good can come from them, as the information gained from confessions is unreliable.
A 35-year-old Tunisian admited that while in Afghanistan, after spending two months in the dark without sufficient drinking water, he falsely confessed to having trained with militants. He later "denied having received the training, saying "he's been treated well" during two and a half years at Guantanamo and "felt there wasn't going to be any retribution" if he told the truth."
On a moral level, this torture is not all that different from what occured in Salem. Accused terrorists are tortured before they are given any sort of trial, and are then coerced into confessing to crimes they may not have committed. However, while the witch trials were the talk of the town in Salem, the U.S. goverment does anything but advertise the events transpiring at Guantanamo Bay.
I cannot help but wonder why interrogators seek confessions if they might not be legitimate. Maybe it is because they do not consider the possiblity that the accused is innocent. Maybe it is because they feel they need to rid the world of every threat to their people's safety, just as the people of Salem wanted to cleanse their society of those who were harming their children. Or maybe it is because in perilous times, people become blind to the irrationality of their actions.
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2 comments:
Nice GITMO parallel, and keep this in mind because it will be one of the options for our final "Perilous Times" unit assessment.
Isn't so interesting... hundreds of years ago, torturing suspected witches elicited confessions of flying on sticks and kissing Satan's anus! And yet, here is the U.S. government today, unwilling to disavow torture as a means to obtain information.
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