Posted: Mar 01, 2013 4:52 pm
The salient point in your quote from the commentary on the 6000 page document:
"Officials familiar with the report said it makes a detailed case that subjecting prisoners to “enhanced” interrogation techniques did not help the CIA find Osama bin Laden and often were counterproductive in the broader campaign against al-Qaeda."
One reason for the counter-productivity is that those interrogated "harshly" will furnish you with a lot of misleading rubbish, especially if the torture victim lacks the information that the interrogators are looking to extract, or if the detainee does have the information you want but has enough fanaticism to risk further torture just to send you on a wild goose chase. In either event, you end up spending a lot of time and resources chasing the wisps and shadows of fantasies created to pacify or mislead interrogators.
In the Late Middle Ages, the Inquisition went much further in their "harshness" and "enhanced interrogating" than the CIA in the present day. That people could often be "persuaded" to "admit" to transforming into cats, flying on broomsticks, and causing thunderstorms ought to give us a hint about the reliability of much information elicited by torture.
Is the onus on the sceptic to "prove" a general lack of reliability, or on one who thinks that torture is more likely to yield reliable information than misleading rubbish? That is, to show some evidence that it is generally effective. Torture is surely effective, sometimes, in turning a human into a puppet who'll say whatever he thinks you want him to say. (I say "sometimes". A few heretics "asked" to renounce their heresies would hold out even against the methods of the Inquisition.)
And, again, I would say the threat presented by bands of terrorists who hope to destroy civilisation with a few explosions is not as great as the threat to our civilisation if civilisation abandons its own principles at the first sign of danger, and instead adopts the methods of, well, terrorism.
"Officials familiar with the report said it makes a detailed case that subjecting prisoners to “enhanced” interrogation techniques did not help the CIA find Osama bin Laden and often were counterproductive in the broader campaign against al-Qaeda."
One reason for the counter-productivity is that those interrogated "harshly" will furnish you with a lot of misleading rubbish, especially if the torture victim lacks the information that the interrogators are looking to extract, or if the detainee does have the information you want but has enough fanaticism to risk further torture just to send you on a wild goose chase. In either event, you end up spending a lot of time and resources chasing the wisps and shadows of fantasies created to pacify or mislead interrogators.
In the Late Middle Ages, the Inquisition went much further in their "harshness" and "enhanced interrogating" than the CIA in the present day. That people could often be "persuaded" to "admit" to transforming into cats, flying on broomsticks, and causing thunderstorms ought to give us a hint about the reliability of much information elicited by torture.
Is the onus on the sceptic to "prove" a general lack of reliability, or on one who thinks that torture is more likely to yield reliable information than misleading rubbish? That is, to show some evidence that it is generally effective. Torture is surely effective, sometimes, in turning a human into a puppet who'll say whatever he thinks you want him to say. (I say "sometimes". A few heretics "asked" to renounce their heresies would hold out even against the methods of the Inquisition.)
And, again, I would say the threat presented by bands of terrorists who hope to destroy civilisation with a few explosions is not as great as the threat to our civilisation if civilisation abandons its own principles at the first sign of danger, and instead adopts the methods of, well, terrorism.