Because that’s not how it works. And because I see no reason to trust a historical record written by monsters trying to justify their monstrous acts.
If you know anything at all about Tudor England you will know that the plots against Elizabeth were very real indeed.
But it’s pointless to argue this case when you dismiss all the historical records as worthless. On such a blank slate you can fashion history into whatever shape best suits with your philosophy, as indeed you seem to be doing.
What’s not how it works? I find that rather baffling. Are you saying that people never break under torture and never tell the truth?
And why should Elizabethan writers try to justify something which needed no justification at the time?
And ? That doesn’t mean that any useful information came from torture.
Except that’s not what I said. I said that I didn’t accept the word of a torturer, or those that employed them.
I’m saying that they break right away, and say anything at all that will stop the torture. And that even if the truth is spoken it will be buried under all the torture induced lies. And that the torturer won’t even care, because the point of torture is cruelty and the production of falsehoods.
The point of torture is cruelty and the production of falsehoods? You’re clearly thinking of torture under the Communist regimes. Believe it or not (and is it really so hard to believe) some torturers are after specific hard facts and sometimes they get them.
Would you like to deny that with another sweeping generalization?
And under ours. And every torturer’s regime.
Above is the beginning of a blog posting by Matthew Alexander, author of “How to Break a Terrorist”. Alexander led the interrogations that resulted in the capture of al Zarqawi.
The point of his post is that while torture may at times be effective in eliciting the desired response, it is VERY EFFECTIVE in turning the local populace against us AND has, in Iraq, led to the deaths of many Americans.
I may have missed it, but nobody seems to have addressed the part where he asks why we should respect our governments rights to be secretive.
In my own view, after already having screwed the pooch by allowing nuclear bomb technology out of the bag into the big wide world, they should have no really big secrets to keep.*
When we live in a world society that should ideally be moving towards openness and transparency of government, we are not setting very good examples to those countries at the extreme end of the secretive scale.
- For instance if some secret R+D
Gnashingfrashingdashingcrappyeditingfunction!
- For instance if some secret R+D branch was developing some super weapon that could kill specific races, are they entitled to peace and quiet while they do it?
Because the means do not justify the ends and regimes that did not object to any means to obtain their ends are in the shitpile of history. Does anyone have any good opinion of regimes which used torture? Whether it produced results or not is irrelevant. History will judge America harshly.
It’s funny because he thinks keeping the rest of the world from developing nukes was possible indefinitely.
I addressed it. IMO bringing things out in the open is part of striking the balance between security and potential abuse of power. We won’t always be right and there are things that should not be revealed but neither can we blindly accept our leaders cry of national security every time they want to hide something from us.
I also gave the homework assignment of the Pentagon Papers and the Nixon presidency.