And, it’s hardly my “instinct” as we have linked to like a half-dozen books and studies on the subject. And, you have posted exactly zero cites that say torture is productive and efficient. That’s pretty definite proof.
And yes, even with a 100MM lotto , it’s not a productive way to invest your money.
No. No it doesn’t. Are yous till maintaining that TORTURE NEVER WORKS? Or can we move on and say “yes torture works but we should not use it because GIGOBUSTER doesn’t like it” which is a perfectly reasonable argument if you point out why you don’t like it.
I don’t see anything other than opinions from both sides of the debate saying that torture is either counterproductive or a useful tool depending on who you ask. So I don’t think the facts are actually TELLING us anything. The facts are being interpreted different ways by different people. one group of people are pushing a politically popular stance and the other is taking a politically unpopular stance.
And for the French in Algeria and in several other situations it was productive. So is torture ALWAYS counterproductive?
That’s a ridiculous argument. You might as well say that because the Germans lost WWII, rocket science doesn’t work.
I’m not a torture proponent,. I am an anti-bullshit proponent and the notion that torture never wor4ks and torture is always counterproductive are bullshit.
America may very well be doing the whole torture thing wrong but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done right.
That is a really roundabout way of saying “when we say torture never works, we don’t actually mean torture never works, we mean something else entirely”
Human dignity is important to all of us but is there never a time when we can put that aside temporarily for some greater good?
Who the fuck thinks torture is moral? It may be a necessary evil but who has argued that torture is moral?
If the overwhelming majority of people feel the same way then we might call it a commonly held social value and we can legislate based on that. but do it with your eyes wide open. You are removing a tool from the interrogator’s toolchest. one that might only be useful in limited circumstances but one that has yielded valueable information in the past (that some people claim we could have gotten in other ways).
I have cited similar books by people on the other side of the debate, what makes your authors more credible than the authors on the other side of the debate? The studies you point to don’t say what you think they say. And most of the cites seem to be opinion pieces by people who would be against torture regardless of their efficacy.
And torture is not actually like the lottery, we were using that as an analytical tool. The information that we get from torture is not actually the result of blind luck and happenstance.
It can never be legal, but you can use it. Afterwards, like the soldier who willingly goes into battle knowing he might die, the person must be prosecuted and jailed. We can appreciate the effort while still denying the legal protection to do so. I think torture is such a line that any crossing of it must be punished to ensure we never mitigate the harshness of that rule and never, even for an instance, justify it.
For any immorality, there are those who argue for it. Just look at those who said it was fine to torture the people in Guantanamo because they’re “terrorists”. And not only that, you have people arguing its not torture. Rumsfeld famously claimed that he works all day on his feet so that those pictures of people stacked no top of each other or forced to stand in Abu Ghraib. When it comes to us or them, plenty of people have argued its perfectly moral for us to do whatever we can to them to save us.
Torture doesn’t work, no information has been received. Even claims of it comes from the people who tortured, so I’d be wary of their truthfulness. And even if that is somehow true, so what? I’m fine with removing that tool from an interrogator. I’m fine with removing it, locking it up, and throwing away the key. And if we ever are in a situation where we need to use it, a person should volunteer to do it and then volunteer to go straight to jail after doing it because torture should never be legal. And despite what you may think, it is a commonly held social value that we don’t torture. I dunno where you’re getting that its not
Can not do, because you continue to make an absolute “yes, torture works” into the conclusion, when it has been shown that it does not work as the proponents insist, and less often than they wishfully think. On top of that it has been shown that most of the time it is used to justify the repression of the enemies of the state, regardless if any information is gained.
Like if we did not point to the evidence before:
Not likely as one of the Generals that defended the practice had to admit that he was sorry that many died before giving any information; as pointed before that is really what has been noticed by many that investigated the torturers before, virtually all that defended the practice were caught with most of the torture not getting the information they were supposed to be getting, but information to justify more torture and the killing of the victims.
As pointed before you are the one making the ridiculous show horn of the blitzkrieg in an effort to make my argument ridiculous, it does not work because it is based on a straw man, I never did say what you are trying to make me say, I concentrated on the torture of the Gestapo.
As the evidence has been noted before (and the Torture report did not only look at the present failures, but also the historical evidence) it is clear who is pushing the bullshit that torture is not counterproductive.
As pointed before you are still only pointing at wishful thinking, no good evidence.
Not really, the lottery metaphor is more valid because it shows why one can talk about it being the fool’s tax. And that it is counterproductive, while accepting that someone can get lucky, but it is not a good idea to use as an investment for all.
There’s a key flaw with the argument - used repeatedly in this thread - that torture is ineffective because it produces false positives as well as true positives.
Yes, if you are a spy, and your espionage comrade is captured and tortured by the enemy, he may give away your identity as well as some innocent folks’ identities, thus complicating the task for the torturers. But, one way or another, * you are among those named*. You should **not **feel safe.
What it is clear to me is that many are forgetting that the OP is quoting Politifact, as the evidence shows you are continuing to make a false equivalency; the point is that it is not a key flaw, but that taking the big picture into account, one can be more accurate to report that torture does not work, while at the same time acknowledging that there are some times when the torturers could get lucky.
Of course, but once again, getting lucky is not a good argument to deny all the failures and the main reason why torture is used by bad governments (and makes the democracies that use it into the bad guys too). Getting good information is only an afterthought, terror is the main reason. And torture is more prone to getting the wrong people and it is many times deadly to the victims.
Then don’t bother appreciating the effort? Why not treat the information derived from torture the way courts treat evidence gained from torture? Don’t use it.
After WWII, there was a small subset of actual scientific knowledge that the Nazis and Japanese gained through unethical human experimentation. The scientific community has deliberately forgotten and ignored that knowledge because of the source of the information. Should we do the same with information gained from torture?
And some people would say that you should be wary of the truthfulness of claims made by people who are morally opposed to torture. They wouldn’t be the first people in history to lie in defense of a greater good or what they thought was moral.
I’m getting it from the fact that its controversial. If it was as commonly held as you think it wouldn’t be any more controversial than murder, rape or child molestation.
And who exactly do you expect to volunteer to torture? If hundreds of lives depended on it, would you torture someone if it seemed like the most effective means of extracting information at the time? No? Then leave out the contingency that we can still use it sometime if we really need it. Just say you are willing to live with whatever consequences might arise from wholly rejecting torture and leave it at that.
So if, through torture, a government finds out that terrorists are planning to detonate a bomb and kill hundreds - and the bomb’s current location is also told - aforementioned government should just pretend, “OK, we didn’t hear any of that?”
Not evacuate anyone?
Not try to disrupt the bombing?
Not have bomb-sniffing dogs, security teams sweep anything?
“*we likely foiled the LA Towers plot months before KSM was captured! *”
""In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush’s characterization of it as a “disrupted plot” was “ludicrous”—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn’t captured until March 2003.
How could Sheikh Mohammed’s water-boarded confession have prevented the Library Tower attack if the Bush administration “broke up” that attack during the previous year? It couldn’t, of course…But the plot was already a dead letter. If foiling the Library Tower plot was the reason to water-board Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then that water-boarding was more than cruel and unjust. It was a waste of water."
By this logic, no spy, terrorist, enemy agent, saboteur, etc. has ever given out truthful information to their foe. Hey, why would he give his opponent information that compromises the goal.
Like if that excludes what they learned in WWII about torture, that was not forgotten or ignored, except by the Bush administration. The evidence does support what I have been saying all along.
Again, you are the one pushing bullshit by making it an absolute about “Torture works” You claim that you are not doing that, but the discussion so far leads many to doubt that. As the original cite from the OP noted:
The context there was that if torture worked as proponents expect much more good evidence would had surfaced thanks to the efforts of the Bush administration. What that showed was that what was reported before is the truth about torture, in the vast number of cases torture does not work, and it is really wishful thinking to expect that the ones torturing are not themselves affected by it into seeking justifications for their use, by using torture again.