There’s a poll thread now.
@Damuri Ashaji do you play the lottery? Do you consider spending a few thousand dollars a year on lottery tickets a wise investment?
Seems about the same to me. In fact it almost seems like the exact same people on both sides (most people don’t seem to give a crap).
First of all you are saying that torture works. Something that some people don’t seem to be willing to admit.
People who pretend torture doesn’t work are like Conservatives that pretend that Keynesian stimulus doesn’t work… until we really need it. Then they just look the other way and wait until LATER to criticize it and shut it down.
So every post that says Torture never works really means something else? OK, good.
Are you finally admitting that torture does work on occasion? Its a pretty simple yes or no answer. Throw as many qualifiers you want into a parenthetical after the yes or no but do you think that torture can work?
You have a very different definition of nothing than the rest of the world. Or is this like the use of the word NEVER in the phrase “torture NEVER works” IOW, I don’t have as much as I thought=I have nothing. And torture doesn’t always work=Torture NEVER works
From original cite:
“This doesn’t necessarily obviate any of the other “high value information” but it would undermine the most impressive of the examples offered.”
How do you think we captured KSM? We tortured Abu Zubaydah got information that eventually led to KSMs capture…
The fact that the Nazis misused torture does not really say anything about whether or not torture NEVER works.
[/quote]
how is this information any more or less reliable than information acquired with bribery?
Annette Sisco thinks this? Who the fuck is Annette Sisco?
Probably not.
Do you try to hammer nails with screwdrivers? Would you throw away all your screwdrivers because they were not useful for hammering in nails?
Did we get information or not? Regardless of whether or not we already had the information KSM didn’t know we had the information and that we had already foiled the plot. So we got information as a result of torture. It just just information we already had in this case.
I say torture works sometimes. You say torture NEVER works. I think the evidence is CLEARLY on my side.
And the ones who have an instinctive aversion to torture might also be seeking bullshit argument for why torture shouldn’t be used.
Useless information nevertheless, and in more ways than one:
piffle, everyone can see that you only willfully ignore a lot off evidence to claim that absolute, and in the case you pointed last you were misled by the torture proponents with real bullshit. So stop straw maning what others are saying, I already granted that torture may work in few occasions but it is indeed counter productive. That you only pointed at cases that were already shown to be debunked as evidence many times in the past only demonstrates that you have a larger problem, that of not being able to identify good sources of information.
Everyone can see that you only avoided dealing with the argument, once again if you were correct more convictions would had been gained logically if torture worked as often as you continue to imply.
Then why torture?
Its more than that. Nazi and Japanese experimentations represent something that already happened by the time the Allies took over. They were faced with the choice of using what’s already been obtained, or ignoring it. I would rank use of that information more moral than if someone tried to justify a current or future action, or a upholding a law that says we can torture. That’s something we have control over. Nobody’s starting a war like WWII just so they can run some experiments, Unit 731 was not a motivating factor in Japan jumping into the war. On the other hand, government officials have been trying to justify torture ever since the public found out about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and secret CIA black sites. We can stop that right now, we need to stop it, and we need to ignore and destroy all the information we’ve gotten from torture so that future government have a harder time justifying its usage
Luckily there’s no lying among the non-torturers, there are overwhelming studies saying it doesn’t work.
Controversial doesn’t mean its a commonly held belief. It could be a minority saying something incendiary. The people who don’t support torture vastly outnumber those who do. Not torturing is an American value
I say that because I’m sure Republican administrations will continue to do it, I don’t say it to try to have my cake and eat it too. I don’t care how many lives they think it would save, we should not torture and anyone responsible needs to go to jail for a long time. However, I am also human, I get emotional, I may personally want to torture a guy because I’m not a good person, but I will still say that I deserve jail for it. So too does anyone who tortures be thrown in jail, with no exceptions, to preserve that value.
Why would we need something that doesn’t work?
As someone who has worked in the field of interrogation I can tell you that it doesn’t work and it’s not worth trying.
Again, no one is saying torture never works. How many times do we have to say this? The OP doesn’t say that either, we have corrected you on* this time after time after time*. :rolleyes:
Yes, just like a blind squirrel finding a nut of a stopped clock being right twice a day, it occasionally works. But it is not efficient, and not only is it not productive, it is counter productive. It wastes more resources than it brings in useful Intel. Even in the few times it did work, there’s nothing that shows that the intel would not have been gotten anyway, in a less evil and more moral way.
So, Torture doesn’t work as (just like the very first post in this thread says) …* because it is extremely inefficient and, in many ways, counterproductive.
*
Would you say a stopped clock “works” as it was right twice a day?:rolleyes:
Whether torture “works” or not depends heavily on individual perspective.
From the perspective of the torturer, it may be inefficient, generate false positives, or be less effective than other means.
But from the perspective of the tortured, or those who may be jeopardized by a fellow agent/spy being tortured, it most certainly works.
As pointed before, torture does not lead to willful transactions were the subjects say whatever is needed to stop the torture. Most informants (the ones that the Nazis overwhelmingly used to deal with resistance forces) did not accepted bribes, they had the same ideology as the fascists, but accepting bribes was not beneath many of them.
Killing the messenger is, again, illogical. She is a writer/reporter that pointed at Lieutenant Colonel Jerome T. Hagen and his book (1996). War in the Pacific, Chapter 25 “The Lie of Marcus McDilda” by Hawaii Pacific University.
OK then, we are done. Debate over. I win.
Hey, that broken clock just happens to be showing the same time as it really is! That clock thus is a great way to tell time!:rolleyes:
Exactly. If you were never allowed to use the information you gathered from torture, you would remove all legitimate incentives to use torture. That is the purpose behind an exclusionary rule.
So you agree with the exclusionary rule, right? lets get rid of any useful information we have gotten from torture even if it would save lives because torture is abhorrent enough that the cost to society of using torture is to high a price to pay for those handful of lives.
Other than the senate report (which is not a study), what are you talking about?
I mean if you want to talk about scientific studies, there are studies that have been done on how long people can endure torture before divulging information (SERE training studies) and there are innumerable accounts of when torture has produced favorable results but I am not aware of a scientific study that says that these innumerable accounts are all fiction.
Maybe the al Jazeera pollsters are secretly in on the torture conspiracy.
You realize that our administration has been torturing people (at least via proxy) for the last 8 years with a Democrat in the white house, right? I mean, what do you think happens when we deliver high value prisoners to our allies like the Kurds or Pakistanis or any number of other folks (who conveniently have military contractors helping them out).
We as a nation have probably been torturing spies since at least the cold war with little difference between Republican and Democratic administrations.
Because you are only pretending it doesn’t work because it offends your political or other sensibilities.
Do you think torture works by accident? that the prisoner cobbles together a group of random words and they just happen to form sentences that just happens to coincide with useful information? No? Then your analogy is stupid.