Waterboard This...

[Leonhard]

There were no disinterested third parties...

The question of whether torture is effective for extracting actionable intelligence, is something that can be answered by a disinterested third party.

The US is not the only one to do it. We have a set of data that can be cross pooled to answer a question like that.

I said nothing about actionable intelligence there.

Except you did, and you used those precise terms

Post #23

“...they did work and often ... They got a lot of actionable intelligence.”

[seer]

The question of whether torture is effective for extracting actionable intelligence, is something that can be answered by a disinterested third party.

The US is not the only one to do it. We have a set of data that can be cross pooled to answer a question like that.

I doubt that any one, now a days, would admit to its usefulness.

Except you did, and you used those precise terms

Post #23

“...they did work and often ... They got a lot of actionable intelligence.”

Sheesh, I was speaking to the issue about the shredding of tapes, not about actionable intelligence

[simplicio]

The question of whether torture is effective for extracting actionable intelligence, is something that can be answered by a disinterested third party.

The US is not the only one to do it. We have a set of data that can be cross pooled to answer a question like that.



Except you did, and you used those precise terms

Post #23

“...they did work and often ... They got a lot of actionable intelligence.”

Torture does work sometimes, however false confessions do make it unreliable. I do believe that torture did yield actionable intelligence. But like acceptable interrogation, one has to be careful, some claim that it can be used with care to avoid false confessions, just as conventional interrogation can be used with care to draw out truth.

If it did not work at all, then it would have fallen away, disappeared. But do not mistake this as an endorsement of torture as moral. Ends do not justify means.

[seanD]

Torture does work sometimes, however false confessions do make it unreliable. I do believe that torture did yield actionable intelligence. But like acceptable interrogation, one has to be careful, some claim that it can be used with care to avoid false confessions, just as conventional interrogation can be used with care to draw out truth.

If it did not work at all, then it would have fallen away, disappeared. But do not mistake this as an endorsement of torture as moral. Ends do not justify means.

I don't buy that at all. You're making a huge moral assumption there, something that government is void of. Folks were apparently using it for other reasons, probably reasons unknown. Maybe in some cases it was experimentation. Some folks obviously profited from it. Some folks probably used it for political gain. Other folks... I guess... got some sort of fetish kick out of it. CIA covered up the fact it was ineffective (as demonstrated by the senate investigation) for probably a multitude of reasons.

[simplicio]

I don't buy that at all. You're making a huge moral assumption there, something that government is void of. Folks were apparently using it for other reasons, probably reasons unknown. Maybe in some cases it was experimentation. Some folks obviously profited from it. Some folks probably used it for political gain. Other folks... I guess... got some sort of fetish kick out of it. CIA covered up the fact it was ineffective (as demonstrated by the senate investigation) for probably a multitude of reasons.

On an individual level, the psychology comes into play. On the national, policy level, other factors come into play.

9-11 was seen as a new kind of war, and it was. It brought the hypothetical moral dilemma of the ticking bomb scenario into the realm of the possible, even probable. Fiction dealt with the question of how far should we go, Tom Clancy novels, and tv series 24, proposed scenarios. We were facing extra ordinary challenges, something new and different from our experience. Do extraordinary circumstance call for extraordinary measures? Many thought so.

I am not so sure that government is devoid of moral reasoning. The discussion of many 9-11 policy reactions did contain the typical political rhetoric, but I remember thinking that addressing the moral dimension was refreshing, an example of religious thought in the public square. The discussion of torture, and the Patriot Act, etc., did not follow usual party and ideological lines.

Torture is effective. The French resistance told their people to hold out for 24 hours to give the resistance time to adjust(it was assumed that dedicated people could break), korea and Vietnam gave the communist propaganda scoops of servicemen reading scripts. Police interrogations are effective, but abuses can occur and false confessions can be extracted, without torture. The Innocence project has freed some inmates convicted on a confession with DNA, forcing police to reevaluate interrogation techniques.

I think that a real danger lies in the fact that torture can be combined with the same cautions applied to effective interrogations, allowing torture to become widespread.

[seanD]

Torture is effective.

Cool. If government ever turns completely rogue and turns viciously against us Christians and dubs us as the new terrorists (pretty plausible if Christian theology about the future is true), I guess we'll see if you hold that same view.

[simplicio]

Cool. If government ever turns completely rogue and turns viciously against us Christians and dubs us as the new terrorists (pretty plausible if Christian theology about the future is true), I guess we'll see if you hold that same view.

I think you misunderstand my point.

Torture has the same potential for accuracy and inaccuracy as the acceptable forms of interrogations. The same pitfalls of torture exist for the non torture techniques. The only alternatives to torture are conventional interrogation techniques.

The trouble with the moral, acceptable, and legal interrogation techniques used by law enforcement is that if the interrogator is not careful, he will move the situation to where the suspect becomes willing to say anything to escape the circumstances he is in, rather than telling the truth.

And courts and law enforcement have set policies to make interrogations more accurate, because people will give a false confession. The same restrictions on interrogation can be applied to torture, avoiding the inaccuracy charge.

The trouble with basing the argument on its ineffectiveness is that once we structure the torture procedure to make it effective, it is still wrong.