oh, wait…

Both you and Marcel either misunderstand, deliberately ignore, or worse, are advocates of torture because the idea of meting out suffering and misery to others excites you in some way.

Doesn’t it? Really? You can be honest here.

That it can be done in (supposedly) carefully measured doses makes it somehow antiseptic, and the fact that someone else is doing it in your name completes things, keeping your hands clean at a comfortable distance while vicariously taking pleasure in the pain of others.

No one captured in battle (or a raid) has meaningful information after 48, or at most, 60 hours. And before you bring up the tired “ticking bomb” scenario, let me remind you that if a bomb is set to go off in an hour, all your victim needs to do is hold out for 59 minutes and 58 seconds.

No, torturers and their apologists are simply sadists, delighting in harming others under cover of “authority” and “national security” and similar misbegotten umbrellas. They do it because someone, somewhere, gets off on it.

Prove me wrong if you can.

Not only are torture techniques like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced stress positions evil, they don’t work very well for interrogation.

False. They work terrifically well: they produce bad intelligence that was determined-upon before the torture, false intelligence that in the torturer’s mind legitimizes said torture. Stop repeating this meme! The torturers weren’t trying to get “good” intelligence: they did this on purpose.

*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZRRRRRRRRRRT*

Now, when the day comes that you can be strapped into a sufficiently advanced MRI and your interrogator can tell when you’re lying, that’s when it gets scary.

That is exactly why we have to do this to a lot of them.

So we can cross check what they’re saying, and if some of em say the same shit, well then that’s gotta be the real shit, innit?!

Torture is both ethically and pragmatically unsound.

If we cause enough pain and fear … maybe people will be too scared to do … whatever it is that we don’t want them to do. Kind of like the death penalty, but without the death.

I want a 50%/50% mix of innocent control subjects to be waterboarded along with real terrorists, and I want the torturers not to know the difference during those trials.

We could accomplish that by having US troops offer a bounty to the locals for each ‘terrorist’ they hand over – then there’d be a financial incentive to provide innocent people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong tim along with some no-doubt genuine terrorists. We could send them all to be tortured at Gitmo.

oh wait…

For the record, I agree with Tdawwg. The only information they were ever interested in getting is information that would justify their actions.

@karlJones, you make it sound like fear of punishment works. Like all the drivers that never ever speed again after getting a speeding ticket?!

And, along with great pain and fear comes great anger and desire for retaliation. Torture produces desparate people with nothing to lose happy to carry a briefcase dirty bomb in a town near you (and me).

Which I have to suspect was part of the plan all along.

Yes, I was being ironic/sarcastic.

Pain and fear of more pain does not make people obedient — it makes them rebellious.