as if either of these ought to be news

[winterbadger]

Waterboarding is torture

"Two problems with torture: It's wrong and it doesn't work..."

Sadly, they are.

Thanks to tacnukesoul, from whose LJ I ganked the links.

Comments

[winterbadger]

I think they resist the fact that torture doesn't work because it seems like it should, y'know? I mean, on the surface, the idea of forcing someone through pain to tell you what you want to know sounds like it makes sense.

Agreed. They think about what they would not want to tell someone, and how horrifying torture would be, and think "I would break and tell." Which of course they would. So would you. So would I. What doesn't occur to them is that they would tell that, and about 50000000 other things, all at once, because they would want to tell the torturers whatever they want to hear.

And what leads to more of that sort of thinking is the constant harping on the "where is the bomb" scenario. But what the SERE trainer, and all the other people who have talked about interrogation in the press have pointed out, is that rarely if ever do such situations arise. You're not asking, "Which of these three identical doors is the tiger behind?" You're asking "Who are the guys you talk to to find out where to leave the stuff? And where you do meet them? And who do they know?" It's not one one simple nugget of information you are trying to hide. It's a mass of data. And no interrogator is going to stop when he gets one piece of data--he wants everything he can get out of you. And the longer you are telling him stuff, the longer you are *not* being tortured.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

I've a friend in the Army, who was in Iraq, whose MOS is interrogation. One of the things she told me is that, once you have someone in an interrogation room, they can't be assumed to know anything about what's going to happen in the field. They can tell you about what has happened, and what they heard might happen, but their information is no longer current when they're out of circulation.

So "ticking bomb" really can't happen, unless you catch the person WITH the bomb ON them. And then they just blow themselves (and you) up.