Was harsh interrogation torture?

[hippifried]

Torture is unreliable. It always has been. The only reason people are tortured is because somebody thinks it's fun. Maybe we're looking at the wrong people to start with.

[trish]

Oli and Hippiefried are right on. Torture is immoral regardless of whether it yields results; and in fact it rarely if ever succeeds. The intelligence agencies and the military agree that enhanced interrogation techniques have been unreliable and inefficient. The resources and time spent tracking down dead-end "leads" demonstrates torture is vast waste of time. Besides that it definitely is not worth the political fallout that immoral practices tend to bring.

[hippifried]

A caveat:

As distressed as I am by the inhumanity shown by my government over the course of the last administration, I'm just as distressed by this MSNBC driven rush to create a prosecution frenzy over so called "war crimes". I don't have a problem with something like a "truth commission", but I don't see where criminal investigations are going to accomplish the goal of letting the American people know what's really been going on. Right now, all we have is piecemeal reports & lots of conjecture.

We have to be very careful how we approach this issue. I don't want to see more fiascos like "Whitewater" or "Watergate". Vindictiveness is counterproductive. We've got better things to do than tangle up the government & its resources on payback & witch hunts. President Bush is gone. President Obama has lots of political capital to spend on getting this country back on the right track. There shouldn't be a rush to flush all that capital down the toilet by revitalizing the lunatic fringe.

[trish]

http://www.slate.com/id/2210059/

[arnie666]

Oli and Hippiefried are right on. Torture is immoral regardless of whether it yields results; and in fact it rarely if ever succeeds. The intelligence agencies and the military agree that enhanced interrogation techniques have been unreliable and inefficient. The resources and time spent tracking down dead-end "leads" demonstrates torture is vast waste of time. Besides that it definitely is not worth the political fallout that immoral practices tend to bring.

There have been six occasions where the loss of airliners with the associated loss of life have been prevented by the use of torture. The question is whether you believe the lives of say 200 innocent people on each airliner is worth a westernised state losing the moral high ground and the dirty terrorist scumbag losing his or her fingernails.

I do think that we need to find a politically correct term for torture , I was thinking 'rigourous physical questioning'. Not only that but torture is such a wide ranging term. Many lefties would consider stress positons and a bit of white noise or having your eardrums blasted with Britney spears to be torture.I would agree about Britney ,in all honesty I would prefer a kicking.

My own opinion is torture is wrong except in extreme cases. For instance a well known recentish case in the 1980's I believe was the German Police asking a court for some kind of legal order so they could make a psycho sexyal child kidnapper 'talk' as they had intelligence that this girl would die soon. Permission was given he talked and the little girl was found alive.

Would you have said that was wrong and if so ,could you explain that to the little girls parents? Yes it is a soppy heart renching argument but then the left do love to trot out these arguments themselves when pleading for the 'rights' of some murderous paedophile when he has no functioning toilet in his cell.

[trish]

Of course it was wrong. But who said that some good things won't come from immoral acts? If you’re going to judge an action merely by its consequences, then you have to ask:

1) What are the consequences to our freedom and civil rights when we forego due process, suspend habeas corpus and restrain prisoners based on suspicion only? Remember, it’s due process that determines guilt in a free society not confessions extracted via “rigorous physical questioning".

2) How many al Qaeda recruits, how many insurgents, and how many suicide bombers has this horrendous policy of enhanced interrogation and indefinite detainment inspired? Have we ourselves inspired those six attempts on airliners? Does torture feed back into the cycle of violence?

3) And because of the increased number of the above, how many thousands of lives have been lost because we've been torturing prisoners?

4) How much time and money is wasted tracking down false leads extracted from people under torture, people who either know nothing or aren’t about to tell you anything worthwhile no matter what you do to them? Can you really show torture is an efficient method of acquiring information?

Torture is immoral even if very occasionally some good can come of it. And only the weakening of civil liberties and ill will await the nation that adopts torture as a policy.

Can we look the other way when a Jack Bauer tortures a citizen in the hopes of finding out where and when some evil plan is going down? I think the answer is no. We cannot endorse torture as an official policy. It’s immoral. So it’s got to be illegal. So what do we do if Jack is found out? He broke the law, so we bring him to trial, simple as that. If he actually prevented a tragedy, odds are a jury will acquit him. If his interrogation yielded bad information and the tragedy was not circumvented, Jack may have to spend some time in jail. That’s the risk Jack takes. Why do you suppose, “The government will disavow all knowledge of …etc.?” It is because we as a nation cannot condone actions as clearly immoral as is torture.

As least Jack works on the run in the field. He is one man making a spur of the moment decision. Gitmo was conceived in its entirety as an immoral institution. It has lost us credibility and respect, internationally and among our own citizens. It has to go, before it costs us more in the way of lost liberties, lost respect, ill-will and terrorist deeds.

[hippifried]

There have been six occasions where the loss of airliners with the associated loss of life have been prevented by the use of torture.

Really? Got a list?

Sorry. I keep hearing about all the attacks & whatnot that have been avoided & averted since 9/11, but I ain't buying it. All I've seen so far is bumbling ineptitude & dumb luck.

Nobody's going to be hijacking any more airliners. Not because of anything done by government, but because the flying public won't put up with it. They're never going to leave it up to the authorities to handle the situation again. Been there done that, & the whole world watched over 3000 people die at the hands of 19 guys armed only with a couple of knives, plastic forks, & a bunch of chutzpah. Those days of that kind of passivity are long gone. It had nothing to do with Guantanamo.

[El Nino]

umm, look deeper into the story

[hippifried]

No. It's not my job to research somebody else's claims. If you have something, show me.

[El Nino]

show yourself