But but … what if there’s a ticking time bomb? And your girlfriend is tied to a nuclear missile set to go off at noon? And you have to make a choice to save her or Chicago?
Besides, it’s quite satisfying to torture bad guys. Cause they’re bad.
What in God’s name do you get out of someone when you waterboard them for the 182nd and 183rd times that you did not find out in times 1 through 181??? After the, say 147th time, were the agents just starting to get off on it or what??
Well, you see, it’s a bit embarassing, really. The spooks didn’t realize he couldn’t speak English until the 78th time. They thought he was just cursing at them the whole time.
Interestingly, 1,257 out of 1,260 (i.e. 99.76%) of interrogations of so called terrorists led to no useful information whatsoever. The other 1 (0.24%) gave information about what kind of coffee Osama liked best. Does this not convince you that you are wrong?
(no factual content was used in the formation of this post)
So…other than the other 1, what did we learn from the other two?
Oh, you don’t want those two. Those are the ones that would soundly defeat our- I mean, nothing. Nothing at all.
They died. But we sent a nice fruit basket to the families, so it’s all good.
Man, you know you are evil when the Nazis were gentler than you.
To torture or not to torture, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to make others suffer the water boarding or cruel beatings of outrageous inhumane treatment or to take arms against unfair policies done in our name…
(sorry, that’s about all of Shakespeare’s poem I can remember off the top of my head and crib outrageously for the above…but every time I see this thread pop up it’s the first thing that comes to mind)
-XT
To die. To sleep–to sleep perchance to dream, but not on our watch! (well, maybe the dying part more than the sleeping part)
Thought I would kind of lay out how intelligence gathering is done by the US. It referenced too earlier in this thread, but not fully. My explanation is very rough, but you’ll get the general idea.
Step 1 - Consumers of intelligence set their requirements. (“We need to know how group x is organized”)
Step 2 - The intelligence agencies gather raw data. CIA (spies on the ground), NRO (image intelligence - radar, infrared, ect), NSA (electronic communications), Open-Source (newspapers, academic data, internet…just public info), Ect.
Step 3 - Analysis of all the raw data collected in Step 2. This produces the actual intelligence (if any) that would meet the requirements laid out in Step 1. *It’s important to note that the purpose of multiple sources of data is redundancy; this is critical to produce intelligence (intelligence, as opposed to just data).
Step 4 - refine and repeat based on any intelligence gathered.
So, to tie this in with torture, that would fall under Step 2, collecting data. Whatever that tortured person said, would be collected and then analyzed against other data to confirm or deny it to produce actual intelligence the US could use and act on.
I’m not advocating torture or opposing it with this post, but just showing the cycle it’s used in.
And a crisp new $100 bill, out of the bales we shipped over by the planeload.
Actually, that was the plan at first. But by then, no one seemed to know where those bales were, so the bill was replaced by an extra ananas on top of the fruit basket. It’s the thought that counts, right ?
And I think we can all see it in that spirit. The problem here is with this:
You are, of course, correct…this is where in the cycle torture would come into play in the cycle. The problem though is that the information collected would be suspect and would need to be independently verified anyway. People being tortured might give you accurate information…or they might intentionally deceive the torturers if they are committed enough…or they might tell the torturers whatever they want to hear, or whatever they THINK the torturers want to hear.
So, reasonably you’d only have (at best) a third of a chance of getting correct information. You could further parse this of course (for instance, the tortured may believe the information s/he is giving under torture, but simply be wrong).
-XT