CIA Blogger Fired for Criticizing Torture Policy

PetManimal writes "A contract software developer for the CIA who had a blog on the CIA intranet was fired after criticizing torture in an entry. The title of the post: something along the lines of 'Waterboarding is Torture and Torture is Wrong.' The Washington Post reports Christine Axsmith is not the only CIA blogger -- the spy agency uses blogs to let agents and other workers share information and ideas." From the article: "Hundreds of blog posts appear on Intelink. The CIA says blogs and other electronic tools are used by people working on the same issue to exchange information and ideas. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on Axsmith's case but said the policy on blogs is that 'postings should relate directly to the official business of the author and readers of the site, and that managers should be informed of online projects that use government resources. CIA expects contractors to do the work they are paid to do.'"

Comments

Torture CREATED the fundamentalist jihad movement

[NZheretic]

View the first chapter of Adam Curtis's documentary The Power of Nightmares.

From Baby it's cold outside

VO: In the 1970s, this film was made, that showed what happened in Nasser's main prison in the '50s and '60s. It was based on the testimony of survivors. Torturers who had been trained by the CIA unleashed an orgy of violence against Muslim Brotherhood members accused of plotting to overthrow Nasser. At one point, Qutb was covered with animal fat and locked in a cell with dogs trained to attack humans. Inside the cell, he had a heart attack.

General FOUAD ALLAM, Interrogator Interior Ministry 1958-87 (speaking in Arabic; subtitled): Sayyed Qutb thought of himself as a superior sort of person. He saw himself as an important Islamist thinker and a strong character. And so on and so on. But at the end of the day, when he was in the military prison he gave us the exact details about his secret group and the orders he had given. The most dangerous was the order to flood the whole of the Nile delta and drown this corrupt land of infidels.

VO: Qutb survived, but the torture had a powerful radicalizing effect on his ideas. Up to this point, he had believed that the Western secular ideas simply created the selfishness and the isolation he had seen in the United States. But the torture, he believed, showed that this culture also unleashed the most brutal and barbarous aspects of human beings. Qutb began to have an apocalyptic vision of a disease that was spreading from the West throughout the world. He called it jahilliyah--a state of barbarous ignorance. What made it so terrifying and insidious was that people didn't realize that they were infected. They believed that they were free, and that their politicians were taking them forward to a new world. But in fact, they were regressing to a barbarous age.

Re:Two things:

[ndansmith]

When John McCain was being held in VietCong POW camps he was frequently tortured. When asked for the names of members of his flight squadron, John McCain gave five names: The offensive line of his favorite NFL team. No wonder he is also against torture for the reason that it produces faulty intel.

Re:Snark

[Valdrax]

And do you really know what goes on in Guantanamo Bay?
Yes.

Okay, you know the good event -- the press release events. Do you know the bad? Do you know about Sean Baker, an MP that was beaten until permanent brain injury in a training exercise where the guards thought he was an actual inmate? Do you know about the repeated attempts at suicide by detainees that have lost hope? Do you know that the Red Cross has said that treatment of prisoners there is "tantamount to torture?"

How our our captured soldiers treated? We've had very few, but the enemy has gone out of their way to violate the Geneva Convention, has tortured and left beheaded bodies in the street, burned and left bodies hanging from a bridge. Do I need to go on?

Yes. Please do. Please explain exactly how just being better than the terrorists is the only moral end goal we should strive for.

Joseph Stalin killed about 10 million of his people, while Pol Pot killed only 2 million of his. Does that mean since Pol Pot didn't kill as many people that he's a decent and civilized fellow? Of course not.

Similarly, we've tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram. Our administration has fought tooth and nail for the "right" to continue torturing suspects and people "of material importance." Sure, we haven't beheaded any of our prisoners (though we have beaten to death a few). We haven't been rounding up people and executing them like the Sunnis and Shia have been doing with each other, but is being better than freaking terrorists the best that we can do or should strive to do?

I disagree. I think it takes a sick level of moral sloth to advance the idea that we shouldn't care as long as our enemies are worse.