I would presume that if the majority of interrogators in the US felt that torture was effective the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency would not report as follows (below) to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
(bolding mine)
But hey…since the people who wrote this probably never attached electrodes to some guy’s nutsack what would they know? They simply must just be making all this up and handing it to the Senate. :rolleyes:
My irony meter is now broken. I will be sending you a bill for its replacement.
That’s true. There’s no guarantees of everything.
But as I’ve noted before you can play that game both ways. A good number of those cited as disputing the effectiveness live in societies in which torture is widely regarded as abhorrent.
Reread the thread. Start with the OP.
It’s frequently the case that an agency’s policy and views, as expressed in memos, reflect the judgment of the senior leadership rather than that of the majority of members in the field. In fact a lot of people on your side of the argument seem to be saying this is exactly the case in this instance, WRT the CIA’s position.
In this case, the ones who disagreed with the memo were “military psychologists in the SERE program”, who sound like guys with both expertise and (most likely) hands on experience.
Really?
Hmm…here is the assessment of torture as handed out in the CIA’s KUBARK Manual from your PDF link in the OP (p. 133)
And you’d be wrong on that count.
Look, you didn’t f-ing address John McCain in the OP. You made vague allusions to torture not resulting in truthful answers being torture misapplied.
I’m asking a specific question. One would think you could debate in good faith, hold your own views, and respond in a coherent manner. Is John McCain signing a confession of being an air pirate an instance of an effective torture?
I don’t understand what your point was with this. Please clarify.
I don’t think that necessarily follows from your quote.
The whole SERE program was not about conducting interrogations. It was about training soldiers to withstand interrogations. I don’t know if anyone in the SERE program had expertise conducting interrogations, since that was not the function of that branch of the military. The point of that quote, and one of the primary points of the entire article, was to dispute the appropriateness of the application of SERE tactics to terrorist interrogations.
If you want to say that the SERE program shouldn’t have been brought up to begin with, your argument is not with me, because I’m not the guy who brought it up. Kobal2 brought up a memo from the SERE people and said that even the SERE people agreed that it’s ineffective. So I responded that the military psychologists in the SERE program disagreed with this.
In sum, these two people had relevant experience in the context of the SERE program. If you think SERE experience is irrelevant, then you need to accept that WRT the memo itself, unless you have other evidence as to what type of study and experience formed the basis of its conclusion.
You are the one who chose to exclude any information that did not come from sources of which you approved, (chosen for their agreement with your position). If you do not like that, next time, don’t start a thread in which you attempt to set rules that are designed to favor only your outcome.
My source provides a significant amount more information than does your abstract. That would such statements as
A claim, of course, that I have never made. What I pointed out was that your little abstract, (cited to show that some people actually believed themselves to be witches), referred only to discussions, held near the end of the period of witchhunts between accused witches and prosecutors, in which the witches were portrayed as willingly participating in the discussion–not the act of a tortured person.
Actually, we do not even know what the position of the SERE psycholgists might have been. The story notes only that the “logic” (of a long and many-faceted paper), was disputed by some (undefined) number of SERE people, without identifying which arguments were actually in dispute.
So, when vague references are made to undetermined disagreements with unidentified numbers of people, you dismiss the official statements as lacking in substance and when statements are published for which we have no evidence of disagreement, you dismiss them as the whims of “senior leadership.” How conveeenient.
The fact that rational and logical rules favor my conclusion adds to the strength of my position, and does not detract from it.
That’s a misleading use of the quote.
That quote was contrasting treatment of accused witches in church courts with treatment of witches in secular courts during that same time period - they say that there was little torture in the former but a lot in the latter. That you attempt to pretend that it supports your claim that there was little torture at all during that time period is highly misleading, but not surprising, in light of:
This is a false statement.
Actually that’s not what you said (although I can understand you wanting to back away from it now). Regardless, your new version is also untrue, at least as regards this abstract, which says:
So it’s pretty clear that both were taking place at the same time.
I don’t know if you’ve been following this thread, but in subsequent posts it was noted from other sources that these two guys are thought to be the main designers of the interrogation techniques actually used, so your speculation - highly dubious and a stretch in context already - turns out to have been incorrect.
This is also a false statement.
I am saying we do not even have to look at who in the CIA thought torture was a good idea. Their own interrogation manual calls into question its effectiveness.
You tried to use the military psychologists in the SERE program as expert sources with hands on experience who disagreed with the memo.
Those psychologists are experts in running the SERE program. They are NOT experts, not even remotely, in interrogation and what works and what doesn’t in order to obtain useful intelligence.
So, holding those guys out as support for the effectiveness of torture in gaining information is a non-starter.
OK. But the point I made and to which you responded was that sometimes policy gets set at a senior level and does not reflect the views of the majority of the hands-on practitioners with expertise. Based on your CIA example, I assume that you agree with this.
But the same goes for the SERE people as a whole.
You can’t discount these guys based on your logic and then accept the SERE memo as proof that people with expertise say it doesn’t work. Either SERE esperience is applicable or it’s not. I’m OK either way.
Is avoiding simple questions part of rationality?
I suppose if answering various questions and acknowledging the expertise of those who disagree with you would lead to a discussion that concludes in your case being undercut, then yes, you appear to have rationality on your side.
Of course lots of policy decisions are made without regard to the “best” way to do something. Politics, pre-conceived biases, other considerations and so on can change things. Happens all the time, particularly in the government and its agencies. It is pretty clear Bush & Co. wanted this so made their wants known and down the chain it went. Those who were resistant were sidestepped or replaced till they found the yes-men they needed (there are always some out there).
SERE experience is applicable in that they are experts in torture without actually physically damaging people.
What SERE instructors totally lack is actual interrogation experience. So far I see no case made that SERE people had reason to believe their torture methods would be an effective intelligence gathering tool. Maybe some of them thought it would but they had no expertise to base that opinion on.
Fotheringay-Phipps, you will refrain from labeling every point of disagreement as a “false statement.” I disagree with what I consider your misreading of what I have posted, but I do not claim that your “interpretations” are lies. You will adhere to the same standard.
I stand by my previous characterizations.
You can tell, by the carrot on their noses, and they weigh less than a duck. :rolleyes:
Exactly!
And if you waterboard someone dozens of times, so that they ACTUALLY BELIEVE that they are really a terrorist, and give you all sorts of information then the torturing was effective. It does not matter if their information was made up, it is the fact that the BELIEVE the information was true that counts.
Same as with the witches - it does not matter if witchcraft does not exist, and that Mary Smith did not really cause the neighbors chickens to die with a spell… If she BELIEVES she’s a witch, then she was one, and the torturing worked.
That’s the kind of tortured (sic) logic that Mr. Fotheringay-Phipps is working with here.
So you’re defying a mod (who, to be fair, has not put on his mod boots), and revealing that you clearly didn’t read the rules for GD.
Sweetie, some “experts” disagree the Earth is round. Are you, in fact, arguing that we can’t know anything and reality is entirely subjective ?
I would think that if a study concludes that the methods are not useful information gathering tools, the majority of the people conducting that study believe it is not a useful information gathering tool. That seems straightforward and logical.
Cute. Especially when you still have to present cites of your experts, or even a simple example of torture used “correctly”. But hey, feel free to base your conclusions on your own predicates.
Sweet mother of God, my irony detector just blew up in my face !
It’s sad that anyone even cares if it’s effective. Torture is evil. If we had a means to catch all the terrorists, eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, and balance the budget, and all it cost was that we dismember a dozen babies, would you do it? I hope the answer is “Screw that, let’s settle for the most effective non-evil approach.”