Who Cares if Torture Works or Not?

Beefeater

You are so far above the fray - legal and military - that your moral preening is meaningless. Does your moral absolutism justify making nasty assertions?
Do you get a frisson from making unwarranted accusations that the interrogators are sadists - safe in the knowledge that nothing hinges on it?

Richard

You are talking crap again, Massie. Beating people is torture. The whole point was that the 'harsh interrogation techniques' were not beatings, and no beatings were ever authorised. So no, the non-torture techniques have not killed anyone, you are just redefining them to include torture so you can say that. Dishonest to the point of simply lying. The fact that someone else supports your lie does not make it any less dishonest.

Yes, I have undergone enhanced interrogation myself. No it was not torture. It was unpleasant, at the time the most unpleasant experience of my life, but it was not torture.

Peter Davis

I don't have a lot of love left over for the guy that slowly hacked off that journalist's head, what was it? Pearl. This, of course, before all this "torture" nonsense from you types.
Sorry, pal, I'm on the side of those who are trying to keep those headhacking nuts away from my grandchildren.

What we did to those prisoners was far less than I went through day to day as a rifleman in the Southeast Asian War Games.

Keep talking though, maybe they'll kill you last.

A. MacAulay

“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Remember the words of Pastor Niemoeller. The tolerance of torture is not the first step on the road to a police and terror state, but a very significant milestone. Once passed, a cornerstone of our understanding of justice, which is hard won and has been defended with blood, is broken.

To Richard, Beefeater and Peter Davis, I suggest considering the difference between conservatism and fascism. When the moral and ethical foundations of our civilisation are destroyed then our material ruin is assured. What use then a "War on Terror" that eats what it purports to defend?

Max Kaye

"They're in favour of torture because, frankly, they like the idea of torturing people."

With that one sentence you have blown any credibility you ever had. For all time.

Fergus Pickering

Well, I don't know, Max. I saw a TV programme some years ago and there was this Harvard professor putting forward the case for torturing people, though of course he didn't use the T word. he was very intelligent and persuasive, except for the fact that I was quite convinced he DID like the idea of torturing people, or, if not actually doing it himself, having other people do it on his behalf. A very creepy professor, I'm telling you.

Olaf Rye

I agree with Richard--enhanced interrogation techniques have been used by military throughout the world in training and they do not kill people. It was highly unpleasant when I did it in my resistance to interrogation training, but being shouted at disorientated, scared and tired does not amount to torture.

We have this curious situation in which the military and intelligence services are supposed to act like policemen, policemen like social workers, and social workers ... well, God knows what they do anymore apart from protecting their jobs when things go wrong.

We need a good definition of torture, and not work on this premise that if it is unpleasant, it must be torture. Moreover, these people are unlawful combatants and therefore they are not criminals entitled to the softly-softly treatment that we give them here, which incidentally has achieved nothing.

David

If you people want torture, why don't you go and join the Taliban?

ndm

Richard boasts:

-- Yes, I have undergone enhanced interrogation myself. No it was not torture. It was unpleasant, at the time the most unpleasant experience of my life, but it was not torture.

Now we don't know the circumstances in which Richard experienced "enhanced interrogation" but we do have the CIA Inspector Generals report which states:

-- One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency’s use of the technique differed from that used in SERE training and explained that the Agency’s technique is different because it is "for real" and is more poignant and convincing.

A hard man would not have found this "enhanced interrogation" more poignant and more convincing.

Salamantis

Let me get this straight; if Khalid Shaykh Muhammed had been captured on 9/10 and we knew that a massive terrorist attack was in the very near offing and that he knew enough about it for us to be able to prevent it if we got the info. he had by the end of the day but didn't know enough to stop it WITHOUT that intel., and the decision as to what to do about the situation was yours to make, you'd rather let thousands of innocents die than waterboard a single genocidal terrorist mastermind; right?

You just made the perfect-in-abstract-principle the ally of atrocity-in-concrete-reality, and forfeited all claims to morality and human decency in my eyes.

Eudaemonic

Salamantis:

If someone's attempting to kill me, I'm allowed to shoot them, right?

Not many people will argue against that. But does it mean we should decriminalize shooting people? Since, after all, there's one circumstance in which it would be okay.

And by the way:
You just made the perfect-in-abstract-principle the ally of atrocity-in-concrete-reality, and forfeited all claims to morality and human decency in my eyes.

Ace of Sevens

Salamantis: Look at all the improbabilities in your hypothetical. We have to have KSM, know for sure a major attack is happening the next day, but not really know anythign about it or we wouldn't need information from him. We also somehow have to break him and sift through any lies he tells to throw us off track within 24 hours.

The issue isn't that torture never works so much that it isn't at all reliable and thus gives us a marginal benefit at best. This has to be weighed against the damage torture does nto just to the poor sap we think knows something (and we may or may not be right) but to relations with his community and the rest of the world and to our own society. Look at the U.S.'s status in the world now vs. eight years ago.

Kennybhoy

Where are you Mr Massie....?

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