The Bush administration has recently announced that two of the people whom it has blamed for major terrorist attacks have now confessed. What is more, the Bush administration seems to believe that this is an important announcement. This is a stunning demonstration of the arrogance and separation from reality that is so prevalent in our current federal government.

     I am not going to go into the details of who allegedly confessed to what. You can get that from the main stream media. I want to pose and then address some of the questions raised by this announcement from the Bush administration.

    First, how do we know that these confessions were actually made? Our only evidence is that the Bush administration released transcripts of the alleged confessions. Transcripts. Typed words on a piece of paper. With the Bush administration’s long history of lying and manipulating intelligence, this does not give me a high level of confidence that the confessions are even real.

     Perhaps the confessions are not real. For purposes of discussion, lets suppose that the confessions were actually made by these detainees. That raises an obvious follow up question. Why did the detainees confess? There are many possible reasons for confessing to a crime. There are also lots of well-documented cases where people have confessed to crimes which they did not commit. A confession is not a reliable indication that the person actually did the act that he or she is confessing to.

     A person may actually confess for many reasons. Perhaps she did the bad act and has a guilty conscience. Perhaps he has been promised lenient treatment for confessing. Perhaps she wants public fame or notoriety. Perhaps he is mentally challenged or confused, and falsely believes in his guilt.

     But none of these explanations seem to fit the available information in these two cases. These people were illegally held in total isolation from the outside world for years before their alleged confessions were announced to the world. We know from many other victims of the U.S. government’s secret rendition program that torture has been widely used on these types of suspects. There is every reason to believe that these so called confessions were the result of torture. That is what I suspect and what most of the world will suspect as well.

     Victims of torture will confess to anything in order to make the torture stop. As a result, a confession extracted under torture says nothing about the guilt or innocence of the person who has confessed. It only tells us that the captors are brutal sadists who do not care about finding out the truth.

     Our government has held large numbers of similar suspects for many years now. With its willingness to use torture on these detainees, I suspect that they have many similar “confessions” from many of the other victims of the rendition program. Why they chose to release these particular confessions at this particular point in time is not entirely clear.

     I previously wrote here about the apologists for torture. They typically resort to extreme hypothetical examples that have never existed in order to justify torture. Usually, these examples involve some sort of future act of terrorism that needs to be prevented.

     The confession transcripts recently released by the Bush administration do nothing to prevent future acts of terrorism. Instead, the release of these transcripts appears to be designed to bolster public support for Bush and his policies. The Bush administration’s belief that it can torture its way to popularity is just one more example of how arrogant and out of touch with reality it is.

     It is like saying, “the beatings will stop as soon as morale improves.”

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