bjj hero said:
Therumancer said:
My holier than thou attitude simply comes down to stuff like this: With it's general human rights violations on it's own people, information control, etc.. China is not capable of handing torture. What it does is an atrocity. On the other hand in time of war when dealing with terrorists and sympathizers our actions which are directed at the enemy are something else entirely. There is a definate differance between attaching electrodes to the nads of a guy from an Al-Queda training camp to find out where the bomb/cell/hostages/etc.. are and sticking bamboo shoots under the finger nails of a pro-democracy demonstrator to teach him a lesson (or whatever the heck they decide to do this week).
Id be right with you if there was any evidence that torture actually works; and episodes of 24 don't count. Living in a country that used torture for thousands of years it doesn't work as people say anything to make it stop, even making things up. Often making things up. It doesn't tend to get accurate, actionable intelligence.
Thats why much of the world has stopped doing it. Thats not a quick decision, we Europeans used to love our torture. It just doesn't work. Unless you need a quick conviction and you don't really care if the guys guilty or not. The inquisition actually invented Spanish water torture. The CIA made it cool again when they re branded it waterboarding. I guess it wouldn't sound very American if it still had torture in the name.
Torture gets information you want to hear, not information thats accurate. Look at the Brits treatment of the IRA. All torture got us was false convictions, meaning actual bombers kept walking the streets. Theres not that much difference between the IRA in the 80s and Al Qaeda now, except one of them had American funding. Care to guess which one?
I don't think there was ever any doubt that torture worked, the prohibations on torture came about due to people (yet again) trying to moralize warfare and render it more antiseptic. The idea being that nobody should say have their fingernails removed with a pair of pliers under any circumstances.
This makes a certain amount of sense when your sitting in the aftermath of a global bloodbath, the world population depleted, and realizing how close you potentially came to literally everyone on the planet dying. At that point it seems easy to ignore the continued vision of nations, limited resources, and everything else and try and prevent it from ever happening again.
The thing is though that you can't put rules on real warfare, all it does is handicap the people who follow them.
See, the thing your missing (and I try and explain) is that when you torture someone you aren't going to just keep going until you hear what you want to hear. Things have to be put into context. When dealing with spy games and capturing operatives there are of course counter-techniques and if the person being tortured is better informed than you or your analyst he CAN play you. Especially if they did something like deploy extrea agents/terrorists just to use as a decoy in case someone was captured.
However, that's all part of the game, and it largely depends on who is involved. You grab your typical terrorist cell leader, or enemy officer, and they aren't going to have any of that kind of stuff going. When dealing with terrorists for example the use of small isolated cells has it's advantages in preventing the whole organization from being compromised if one is wiped out, but it also means that no cell has the resources to sit down and plant that kind of false information for situations like this.
Odds are if your dealing with someone who is on the level to actually resist torture and beat analysis by the other side, your in trouble anyway but you might as well try and hope you get lucky (better than nothing), as opposed to just sitting around twiddling your thumbs.
The thing is that unlike movies and scenarios created to make torture look bad or ineffective, the typical victim is going to be like some farmboy who signed up with Al Queda to attack the Infidel, learned how to shoot a gun, fire a rocket, and set off a bomb. Then he was introduced to some buddies and told "go out and kill for Allah, your virgins await". He's not James bloody Bond. So him and his buddies sit around and set up meetings and plan attacks and such. You capure this dude during a raid, you want to get his buddies too. You strap him to a gurney and have military intelligence go to work, your going to get whatever you want to know out of him.
It's just like you. You join the Navy, go through boot camp, enlist on a ship as a petty officer and some dude with a Turban grabs you in an alleyway and starts cutting pieces off of you in some back room. Your going to tell him whatever the heck he wants to know. You might claim otherwise, but in the end your just a person, the Navy didn't condition you quite like that. Of course this is hypothetical since it's a matter of debate as to what a low ranking naval officer might know to make him a worthwhile target.
