The more interesting utilitarian question is this: it it more effective to torture people, or to not torture them? I am not well-placed enough to provide an answer, but there is plenty of evidence supporting the hypothesis that you get more and better information by not torturing.

Also, I think it’s self-evident that in modern conflicts, torturing people gives your enemies mor advantage that it gives you.

Finally, it’s morally reprehensible and you should not do it as a matter of strict policy.

Holy crap, I’m arguing over state-sanctioned torture on a webcomic! FSM help me, I wan’t out of this Philip K. Dick novel!

So are “torture is wrong”, and “the end cannot be separated from the means”, by the way.

Note that that same people who think that the government can’t do anything right makes only one exception – torture.

Torture always ramps up to an industrial scale. Over and over we see it becomes a routine tool for interrogating innocent people. A significant number of them will die because they are in less than perfect health. Heck college students die during hazing, right? So you have to accept a priori that you will be taking innocent people and torturing them to death. Torturing innocent people to death? Who’s the good guys.

Broomstick riding witches who dance with Satan are real. The Salem witch trials proved this since we know that torture is so effective at getting the truth. Even in small rural villages, industrial scale torture operations have their place.

But its proponents can always say ‘well, this is different’ and put forth various hypothetical scenarios to try to justify its use in utilitarian terms.

Only by ignoring the actual mechanics of intelligence gathering.  You seem to be ignoring the argument you’re responding to: the utilitarian argument only works if you’re sure this instance of torture produced good intelligence.  You can only be sure that the intelligence is good with independent corroboration.  With independent corroboration, you didn’t need to torture to get the intelligence.

More realistically, torture produces intelligence that you cannot trust.  It may be good, it may not, but there is no way to know except the likelihood of torture producing good intelligence.  If the likelihood is low then torture is simply a poor means of gathering intelligence.

I agree that it’s worth making the moral argument independently of the pragmatic argument.  If you want to do that, go for it.  I prefer to make the pragmatic argument.

The significance of the Library Tower plot was really the fact that it was apparently the best the Bush administration could do to justify torture and it was still laughable.

are you willing to trade Bin Laden being neutralized for not torturing?

Frankly, yes.  I think he was mostly a boogeyman.  I don’t think he was dangerous except when he had money to give to dangerous people and I don’t think he was important enough to justify the ridiculous shit undertaken to — if we’re being honest here — get revenge for 9/11.

If the torturers adhered to actual interrogation technique then they too might discover real facts, but by the time you’re a torturer you’ve already thrown competent interrogation technique out the window.

Edit: that was supposed to be a reply to wysinwyg. Damn disqus anyway.

There are a lot of scientific studies indicating reasons why this tends to be true, but the main one is that torturers do not possess magical lie-detecting abilities.  They’re as likely to torture a true statement into being changed as a false one.  And much more likely to torture nonsense out of an innocent than a confession out of the guilty, since that’s much easier to do – and torture is a lazy interrogation shortcut.

It’s important to bear in mind that the Bush-era tendency to approve torture was from the top down – i.e. it was mostly encouraged by civilians with no interrogation experience, intel experience, or relevant competence of any kind.  (These are the same people, let’s bear in mind, that fired about five different generals pre-invasion for telling them that the Iraq war wouldn’t be completely over in two years with the kind of forces they were committing.)

There are much more overwhelming systemic reasons why it’s an intelligence and military disaster that I haven’t touched on, but that’s reason enough by itself.

So the difficult questions are: are you willing to trade Bin Laden being neutralized for not torturing? (I realize it’s a slippery slope) but still – it can go both ways.  What if a few more bombings claiming dozens or hundreds more innocent lives were prevented by eliminating Bin Laden then instead of 2 or 3 years later through zero-torture methods?  There’s a bloody trade-off either way – even if it’s hypothetical…

More importantly, your point seems to ignore the nature of intelligence gathering.  If you can confirm whether a piece of intelligence is actionable or not trustworthy independently of the provenance of that intelligence then you simply didn’t need that intelligence in the first place since you could get all your information from the independent source.  What counts in intelligence gathering is provenance — whether a source is trustworthy.  If torture tends to yield faulty intelligence then intelligence obtained through torture has a poor provenance and can’t be trusted — unless it can be independently corroborated in which case you didn’t need to torture in the first place.

I think you should be asking if there is evidence that enhanced torture works. That is a meaningful question.