RE: Creative cruelty and responsibility: Photos from Iraq

From: Eugene Matusov (ematusov@udel.edu)
Date: Sun May 02 2004 - 18:13:35 PDT


Dear Judy-

 

You posed a great question! My cynical but not very educated response is
that intelligence service has to provide sensitive information and its
evaluation. The "pressured" interrogations can at least provide "50%" of
this work.

 

Probably, it works like testing in education. It is well known that testing
is not reliable as the assessment of students' knowledge and/or learning but
it is easily achievable. At the end of the day, testing - whether reliable
or not - produces sorting that serves for the purpose of stratification. The
"pressured" interrogations produce information that can be later analyzed
and (mis)used by military and politicians.

 

These are my speculations to start with..

 

Eugene

 

  _____

From: Judy Diamondstone [mailto:jdiamondstone@clarku.edu]
Sent: Sunday, May 02, 2004 8:53 PM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: RE: Creative cruelty and responsibility: Photos from Iraq

 

It appears that the coalision forces institutionally create a culture and
practices that promote torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners and
socializes coalision soldiers into torture and humiliation through setting
pragmatic goals (e.g., getting sensitive info from prisoners), >

 

 

 

I have heard that the information derived from this kind of mistreatment is
completely unreliable. If so, what are the real pragmatic goals? or WHERE?
-- embedded in a broader political arena, in countries outside Iraq.



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