Just great
The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.
The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.
Um, you haven’t got much of a reason to bitch, Oliver. You support torture, remember? This is prime example of why torture doesn’t work/fails to work. Under your ass covering “ticking time bomb” qualifications, law enforcement agents would have even less time to torture info out of more hardened suspects. And yet for some reason, in your scenario torture just magically works.
Your tax dollars at work. Thanks, Cheney Administration.
Oliver you are one good cherrypicker.
Cherrypicking? A supposed link between Iraq and al-Qaeda was oft repeated by Dick Cheney as crucial reason for why we had to topple Hussein. This guy’s testimony was paraded out as evidence of that link. So to was the infamous Prague meeting that no one but Dick Cheney still believes anymore. That’s two pieces of evidence that have since been proven to be total bullshit. I don’t know Ian. How much bullshit are you willing tolerate in your arguments for war? I don’t know. MaybeI’ve just set my standards too high.
Ian:
Please polish up your expository writing skills, as your talent with one-liners is…well, nonexistent. On the other hand, judging from your blog, you have studied at the Instapundit School of Political Blogging (aka linkfarming). So perhaps you’re just playing to your strengths.
Frame:
If you’ve set any standards at all, I suspect you’ve done better than a lot of war supporters, who seem too frequently to fall into the “someone hit me, so now I’m by-god going to hit someone, and it doesn’t matter who” school of thought.
I am not supporting torture hear, but there is a question nagging at me … So many state, with great certainty and conviction, that torture does not work. Ever. Period. End of discussion. If that is the case, why has it survived over all of this time ?
I support torture under very limited, controlled circumstances and they won’t like your very logical question JD.
Dugger
Logical? Haw!
If I follow your reasoning, only things that are effective survive the test of time.
Please fill us in on the “effective” uses of incest, rape, murder, blackmail, and reality TV.
Sorry JD…I don’t buy that there’s any logic in that question at all. The mere existence of a phenomenon is not prima facie evidence of anything other than its existence. There’s no conclusion to be drawn about efficacy, justifiability, or anything else.
By your logic, both Communism and outright despotism must have at least some effectiveness as systems of government, since both continue to exist. Mercury in the water must be good for us, since it persists in spite of efforts to remove it. Lots of people continue to tell us they see UFOs, so they must exist.
I think everyone sitting around the table here would agree that those are all silly statements, but they all start from the same “logical” assumption you make. Just because you assume that an inference is logical don’t make it so.
“If that is the case, why has it survived over all of this time?”
The very question reveals how little you know about what torture is and how its most often used.
Torture is not a reliable means of extracting information from someone. I’d like just one person who supports this “ticking time bomb” scenario to find one example in the history of mankind in which this scenario has ever played out and torture played a decisive role in saving lives. Dugger already failed miserably at this challenge. The best he could muster was a genrality about how it happens in Israel all the time. Really? Let’s see the facts. Give me the case.
The reason why torture has such a shelf-life is not because it is an effective means of gaining information. Torture is notoriously unreliable for gaining information but it is wickedly effective as an intrument of political terror. By and large, most states do not use torture to extract information for law enforcement puporses. They use torture to scare the living shit out of the political opposition. Some states use torture to deliberately extract false information and false confessions that nevertheless can be used for propaganda purposes. In short, torture survives not because it’s useful for interrogation, but because it’s extremely effective as a tool for silencing the opposition. And you wonder why its so abhorent to democracies.
Read all about it here: http://web.amnesty.org/pages/stoptorture-index-eng
And yes, JD, people do break under torture and give up information. But the reason why torture is notoriously unreliable, as well as ineffecient and ineffective, as a law enforcement tool is because people will tell you ANYTHING under torture to make the torture stop. This al-Libi case is a perfect example of that. As I already asked Dugger when he and I went at it over this issue recently, if I put a blowtorch to your balls, JD, and asked ‘Where’s the bomb?’, how long would it take before you told me that you put the bomb in locker #12 at the downtown bus terminal in Los Angeles? Dugger never answered the question. I bet you won’t either.
Then why do we interrogate anybody ? Ever ? Why bother … a criminal will only tell the police what they want to hear. A terorist will only tell the interrogator and translator what they want to hear. What is the point ? And since this process is so utterly unreliable, why has every military and government in known memory done so?
JD –
I’ve just given you two cases in which torture was confirmed to be ineffecient and ineffective as well as unreliable. Could you please find me a confirmed case in which torture was used to save lives?
JD –
“And since this process is so utterly unreliable, why has every military and government in known memory done so?”
Did I not just answer this question? Because torture is a highly effective tool of political terror. And as I also said, there are reliable and effective means of interrogation, torture just doesn’t happen to be one of them:
“A similar stance was articulated last year by Merle L. Pribbenow, a 27-year veteran of the agency’s clandestine Directorate of Operations. Writing in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA’s in-house journal, Pribbenow recalled that an old college friend had recently expressed his belief that “the terrorist threat to America was so grave that any methods, including torture, should be used to obtain the information we need.” The friend was vexed that Pribbenow’s former colleagues “had not been able to ‘crack’ these prisoners.”
Pribbenow sought an answer by revisiting the arcane case of Nguyen Van Tai, the highest-ranking Vietcong prisoner captured and interrogated by both South Vietnamese and American forces during the Vietnam War. Re-examining in detail the techniques used by the South Vietnamese (protracted torture that included electric shocks; beatings; various forms of water torture; stress positions; food, water, and sleep deprivation) and by the Americans (rapport-building and no violence), Pribbenow reached a stark conclusion: “While the South Vietnamese use of torture did result (eventually) in Tai’s admission of his true identity, it did not provide any other usable information,” he wrote. In the end, he said, “it was the skillful questions and psychological ploys of the Americans, and not any physical infliction of pain, that produced the only useful (albeit limited) information that Tai ever provided.”
http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1119nj1.htm
“… criminal will only tell the police what they want to hear.”
Which is also why the police rely on, you know, policework to verify what they get from interrogations. They cross check answers with other information, forensics, eye-witness accounts, the stories of other suspects. It is a time intesive, labor intensive process precisely because a) criminals lie b) criminals, in this country, have civil rights. It’s called due process.
As I once quoted for Dugger’s benefit, a line from Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, delivered by Charlton Heston: “Police work is only easy in a police state.” If all the cops had to do was beat a confession from someone, whether it was true or not, their jobs would be really, really easy. But we don’t live in a police state and we shouldn’t go around finding police states in the mistaken notion that they get the job done where we can’t. Al-Libi lied repeatedly under torture about al-Qaeda links with Iraq. One could say that torture worked in this case, but only in the sense that al-Libi gave his interrogators the information they wanted to hear, which was not necessarily the truth.
frame – As is your wont, your proscribe a position to me that I do not hold. I am not advocate of torture. I was simply attempting to understand the side of the debate that declares its positions in such absolutes.
Okay, you’re not advocate of torture. You just wanted to know why I say that torture is not a reliable, effective or efficient form of interrogation. I told you repeatedly why and have given you real life examples that back up my point. Do you have all the information you need now to make up your mind and finally decided if you support torture or not? Or do you still need more information?
Why is it that you on the left excoriate others for viewing things in such a black/white context, but in your own internal belief systems, it is abundantly clear that you proscribe right and wrong to any number of issues ?
JD, grow a sack, take a stand. Are you in favor of torture or aren’t you?