Torture

Its rare you find someone who wants to talk truthfully about Torture. Probably because if you do, you have to rip open so many layers of bull****, it's like trying to get eighty years of bad wallpaper off a bedroom wall. Ever help a "friend" get a dozen layers of old wallpaper off? You don't need to fear Hell if you've done that.

Anyways, the biggest lie is that you can do counterinsurgency warfare without torture. Bull****. No army ever fought a CI campaign without resorting to torture. Goes with the territory. At most, it's like holding by your offensive line: you don't want them doing it where the ref can see it, but if you had an Offensive Guard or tight end who refused to do it, you'd fire his ass.

Because you can't win without it.

I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.

 

... unless you can read minds like that guy on Heroes.

 

The Phillipines. Torture may have been used but it wasn't necessary to the eventual outcome of the campaign.

 

Matt Parkman!!!

 

Bull****. The entire population of the Phillipines was against us. One of the reasons we did win was because of how brutal we were. Burning villages, concentration camps, water torture...we beat those flips into submission.

Showed em who the boss was. Uncle Sam.

 

Actually, the guy who was boss was a gentleman by the name of Aguinaldo. If we hadn't convinced him to tell his boys to stop fighting the insurgency would have grown and grown - and no, we didn't torture him.

 

What the? How does this help your case? We tortured and killed until we'd beaten the rebel leader and he surrendered. One of the reasons he surrendered was because of how brutal we were.

"When I first started in against these rebels, I believed that Aguinaldo's (insurgent) troops represented only a faction. I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon--the native population that is--was opposed to us and our offers of aid and good government," General MacArthur reported in February 1900.

 

Bunch of mamby pamby liberal wimps led by the media think scaring people with dogs and making them put underwear on their head is torture.

 

He didn't surrender. He was captured and converted by being convinced that continuing the fight was bad for everyone.

 

Derr....you dont get captured unless you surrender...

Insurgency's can'not survive without the support of the people. If you really think that the capture of just one man lead to our ultimate victory your completely deluding yourself.

It was the complete and utter demoralization of the Philipino people. Concentration camps, torture, rape, murder, burning down villages. We told them it was either our way, or they would all die.

And eventually they saw it our way. The figured becoming Nephews and Neices to Uncle Sam just wasn't that bad of an idea after all. We walked up to em with Brass Knuckles and a bouquet of Roses. And they eventually respected us for it. The way it should be.

 

Torture is good. Jesus would torture. God said children should be tortured. One of the founding principles of our country.
We need concentration camps too. And to teach the kids to spy on their parents and narc them out to the Homeland Security. We need a wire tap on every phone. After all, the innocent have nothing to hide. Seig Heil!

 

well thats a bit radical? but you are aware of the concentration camps that DO exist in this country right? many were built for the REX 84 program in the reagan era

but recently there was a contract awarded to Halliburton to build MORE camps in the US you know thats where they shipped all the exiles from new orleans right?

 

He himself was captured. He was caught by our forces; his own forces were still very much intact and continued to fight even as he was in captivity. However, while he was there, he was convinced to endorse the US, rather than fight us, and thereafter...poof, no more war.

Our "demoralization" of the Phillipino people was more like "wholescale war crimes that caused them to retaliate in kind." In all fairness, they started the summary executions of prisoners and we only started doing that afterwards. Sure, we killed the hell out of them - but there were always more willing to fight until Aguinaldo said, "all right guys...screw it." After that, the Phillipine Army went through a succession of idiotic leaders who eventually had to give up altogether.

 

I spent Time in the P.I back in the 70's
it was a wild place like the wild west with Fillipinos instead of cowboys.wow the stories I could tell you.

 

The point is, for a succsesful counter insurgency to work, you HAVE to have the support of the people. The reason the other leaders failed, is because they lost the support of the people.

To understand why torture is so fundamental to CI warfare, you have to remember that in guerrilla wars there are no battles, there are just ambushes. And an ambush is totally different from a battle. Let's say your squad is patrolling through a village just like it's done for the past two weeks, right? Everything's hunky-dory: the little old lady who sells veggies waves and smiles when you go past, the kids ask for gum, and you start to feel like a liberator. You're just turning a corner when there's a big boom and two of your buddies are on the ground screaming, two others are dead. You look around, where's the old lady? Where are all the smiling kiddies? A blast that big should've killed a dozen locals, but somehow the only casualties are your buddies.

Somehow the smiling locals magically disappeared two seconds before the IED went off. So either they all have some pretty effective ESP...or they knew it was going to go off. In fact, they were part of the set-up. The smiling kids, the friendly grandma, all a set-up to relax you, make you walk into the kill zone.

That's how torture starts. You know they know. They're weaker than you. But they won't tell you anything. You start hating them more and more. Sooner or later the idea of grabbing some of them and making them talk is going to occur to you, or somebody higher up.

If you've got good NCOs, they'll try to keep you under control, because you're likely to pick the wrong people to start whacking around. That's the nastiest part of the whole CI picture: the villagers may not be involved by choice. They may not want to mess with you at all. Most people, even crazy tribes like Chechens, just want to get by. But they have to deal with the insurgents, who are putting as much pressure on them in the nighttime as you are during the day. Maybe the little old lady's grandson is being held with a knife at his throat to make sure she goes to her usual veggie stand and looks cheerful, just to make the set-up more convincing. You can't know.

You'll never really know what's happening to the locals. Finally you get a decent tip, somebody snitches on an old enemy from the neighborhood, you go to his house and dig up a fully-functional RPG with a dozen rounds. Just think of the pure hate you feel for this guy: he and his little friends have been bushwhacking you for weeks without the guts to show themselves. Well, now you've got him. Not even your NCO can stop you now, even if he wanted to.

Besides, it makes good military sense to torture him. Like I've said a dozen times, the key weapon in CI warfare is info. You want names and addresses, fast, before another patrol gets blown up.

That's how most improvised, low-level torture starts: working out on somebody you think tried to kill you. Every CI force in history has done that kind of torture, and so do we. Duh!