In olden days, there was very little surrender. When your lines broke and the Army routed, the enemy pursued and killed as many as possible. In the Middle Ages, surrender became more common, especially for the purpose of ransoms. It made warfare more “civilized” and safe. I don’t kill you unnecessarily, and you extend me the same consideration. Professional courtesy.

Torture was mostly proscribed by the Napoleonic era. It was ignoble, and extremely undesirable from the viewpoint of the nobles who were the officer class. In the modern era, these rules were formalized. The Armies of civilized nations are completely proscribed from exercising torture upon one another. It still goes on, time to time, amount varying by nation, but is proscribed.

Somehow, the origins of its prosciption has been lost to history, and people have construed it to be a prohibition against torture of anyone. Maybe, that is the next evolution, but it is premature, because we are dealing with an enemy who doesn’t reciprocate in any way. Formal prosciption of torture is for formal Armies. Beat the crap out of the terrorists for information and don’t shed a tear.

Your first assumption, that torture does not produce reliable information, is incorrect. Torture is only one of many interrogation tools and, like them all, whether or not it suceeds depends almost entirely on the interrogator’s skill with interrogation.

Furthermore an interrogator’s familiarity with the interrogee’s culture, and with the subject of the interrogation, is more important than the particular interrogation technique employed in any given instance.

I.e., a skilled interrogator who uses torture is far, far more likely to produce accurate, reliable, information from the interrogee than a much less skilled interrogator using any other interrogation technique or, for that matter, using exactly the same torture.

My favorite example of this concerns an Arab country’s intelligence personnel who brought in a suspect’s irate mother to give him hell about going on jihad against her express orders. This so shocked the dude that he confessed everything. AFAIK, it was the Syrians who did this, and they are one of the nastiest regimes on the planet in use of torture. But they go with whatever works, and here they got the results they wanted with what is certainly one of the most unusual interrogation techniques I’ve ever heard of.

What has made torture so common in interrogation for the past several thousand years is that it does work rather consistently in producing reliable, accurate information. This is why torture is used more often in interrogation than making funny faces at interrogees, tickling them, or having their mothers tell them they were really adopted.

Those who claim otherwise engage in delusional thinking. They don’t like the truth so they deny it. They deny the plain evidence of thousands of years of history. Wishing simply does not make it so.

Those who contend that torture is not an effective interrogation technique are the lefty equivalent of creationists. Welcome to the Flat Earth Society!

Another major cause of the persistent, widespread use of torture as an interrogation technique throughout human history is that is much, much easier for relatively unskilled interrogators to use than most any other interrogation technique.

The past 50-100 years has seen a vast overall improvement in interrogation techniques, to the point that torture is now significantly less effective than many other, mostly recently developed, interrogation techniques. The chief limitation here is that much more skill is required of interrogators to produce better results without torture than with torture, and such skilled interrogators remain rare.

Another limiting factor is time. Use of more advanced & effective interrogation techniques than torture requires more time than using torture, which is why the ticking time-bomb scenario was prominent in the initial post here.

But, as my first post in this thread noted, the disastrous French experience in Algeria shows that the ticking time-bomb scenario simply should not be used as a justification for torture, because use of torture in such instances will not stop there! That merely starts the side which uses torture on the slippery slope to hell.

The real danger in using torture for interrogation is that it does work – that is what makes its use so seductive.

Denial of this does not advance the anti-torture cause.

I think of myself as a conservative. I don’t, frankly, give a rat’s ass about the rights of some loon we capture somewhere, who is part of a terrorist organization. The trick, however, is to do WHATEVER WORKS, when fighting terrorists, and leave the stupid political considerations to others. This is where the conservatives tend to go off the rails, because everyone assumes that if you torture someone enough, with enough skill and so forth, then you’ll get the information you need. Unfortunately, it hasn’t proven to be so, really, in any of the cases where torture has been tried. At least not in the war on terror, where we’re fighting these extremist Muslim.

For one thing, I’ve read on military blogs that when they capture someone from the Taliban or one of these groups in Iraq, the guys are often *looking forward* to the torture. They apparently feel if they can undergo a considerable amount of it, and then spit in the face of the interrogators, when they enter paradise (they assume this will be soon after) they’ll get seventy-*three* virgins, or they’ll be exceptionally pretty, or something. Regardless, having stood up to the Americans and their torturous methods is something of a badge of honor among Iraqis and Talibanis, apparently. It’d be interesting to find out what the Iraqis in those Abu Ghraib photos have had happen to them. You assume they’re out, wandering around. I wonder whether they’ve been stigmatized, or alternatively perhaps praised for what they endured.

Some distinctions should be made here. Let’s say we captured a terrorist who was part of a group that had planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. Say we knew he knew where the bomb was, and we didn’t, but we knew that the bomb would go off in 12 hours. The trick is that he knows the bomb will go off in 12 hours also. It’s sort of like the reverse of the problem with announcing that our troops will leave Iraq on a certain set timetable: all he has to do is hold out for 12 hours. Remember, if you cut off his fingers, he’s thinking to himself, in his head: “In paradise, my fingers will be more beautiful, and covered with rings mounting the finest jewels” or some such claptrap. A better move would be to try and convince him that New York was somehow worth saving, perhaps by showing him Muslim families that live there, and are prosperous, happy, and observant of their religious practices.

On the other hand, say some Muslim terrorists planted a bomb in New York, and they hired a Columbian drug cartel to help with the delivery. If we captured one of the Columbians who assisted in the delivery and placement of the bomb, I’d be in favor of torturing him. He has no real ideological attachment to the cause he’s assisting, he’s just doing it because he hates our country, and presumably he’s making money. If he’s financially motivated, torture is a good idea…no one is willing to put up with that much pain, if they think they’ll never see the financial reward involved. *Then* it would make some sense, perhaps. Not with Muslim extremists, sorry, it just doesn’t work.

* It does not produce reliable intel.
* It dehumanizes the torturer.
* It undercuts our ability to condemn regimes that employ torture.
* It places the torturer in a position of having to kill or perpetually incarcerate the subject – or risk “payback” if/when the subject is released.
* It violates the Geneva Conventions.

This does not, however, mean that we should not use extreme coercion. In other words, don’t peel off the guy’s fingernails; but do let him know you have captured his family.

What happened at Abu Graib was abuse of prisoners and wasn’t torture to obtain information, much less TTB info so doesn’t fall under this discussion.

I don’t see how any discussion or policies regarding torture in TTB cases would result in some crazy increase in the use of torture by the US. I don’t see that there’s anyone in the US govt that wants to torture as a usual policy.

Three prisoners were waterboarded.

And the mask keeps peeling ever so slowly – even the so called torture moralists do not have any problems with torture per se. They call for an outright ban on torture BUT IF NECESSARY,do it without “authorizing” it ! Wow. just wow.

So basically screw around with your personnel by playing mind games with them on whether their interrogation methods are legal or not. What a “brilliant” idea ! that should do wonders for the morale of the counter terrorism task force personnel.

This is the EXACT scenario which the Bush Administration tried hard to prevent – i.e. it tried to prevent the scenario of letting people “do the dirty work” without actually “authorizing” it, thereby sowing confusion in the minds of interrogators.

This is why the DOJ made sure that interrogators would’nt be held responsible finally for what the Admn wanted them to do, didnt mind them doing it, but still wanted to escape direct culpability.

This is EXACTLY why the Administration came out saying that Geneva conventions do not apply to these terror suspects. You may agree or disagree with this position. But it is an infinitely better positon than pretending that Geneva convention rules applies to these prisoners, play mind games with your personnel and leave them holding the bag in the end even though they did EXACTLY what you wanted them to do – it is only that you didnt want to be seen “directly” authorizing the dirty work. Because your “moral values” just wont stand “authorizing” torture.

This extended to their wire tapping policy as well. They promised the telecom companies immunity from prosecution and that they were infact doing the right thing. The Govt cannot possibly ask the telecom companies help without providing them immunity from lawsuits all over the place. That would be deeply demoralizing to say the least to those people who tirelessly work to keep this country safe from so many threats.

In other words, it is easier to obtain forgiveness than permission.
In other words you are more interested in CYA operations to maintain your “moral standing” while you let your interrogators do your dirty work. I love the way you think. Your superior morality is sooooooooo awe inspiring.

I see a lot of theoretical arguments on this thread about the pros and cons of torture but i am AMAZED that neither the author of this article nor the the commentators on this thread have even talked about how it is was the Clinton Administration (where a certain Leon Panetta who was White House Chief of Staff) that actually began the practise of extraordinary rendition of terrorism suspects to the Egyptian Secret Services with the full knowledge of Hosini Mubarak ??

Or the fact that Dennis Blair, Obama’s pick for DNI chief REFUSES to categorize waterboarding as torture

The Bush administration enhanced interrogation/torture/what ever you want to call it/ policies have essentially been retained by Obama.No matter how much he has tried to show that the US wont “torture”, he still has a DCI who wont say that torture is completely banned, he has nominated a DNI chief who is so cautious that he refuses to call waterboarding as torture.

If another terror attack happens on US soil Barack Obama would be held responsible – and guess what, he DOES NOT EVER WANT to put himself in that position. This is exactly why he is maintaining the same policies for all his “optics” about shutting down Gitmo. Eric Holder now says that Gitmo mainitains Geneva conventions standards for prisoners.. Geee, how come no one knew this even though it has been around for the last 7 years ??

The “torture is immoral” crowd needs to watch what the Obama Admn IS ACTUALLY DOING instead of trying to prove their moral superiority to every one else. Or better still take up your cause with Obama. We understand that you are well intentioned. But you are un-informed or naive to think that all these “immoral” things happened only during the Bush Admn or will magically disappear in the Obama Admn.

I sometimes think that 9/11 was like Christmas to the far right in the US.

Ahmadinejad denies the holocaust and says Jews “exploit it.” So Pete, was the holocaust the Jews Hannakuh?

Peter writes: Are they ENTITLED to it? By the Geneva Convention, no they are not. Will the Geneva Convention stop a country like Iran from torturing a member of the armed forces covered by the protections of the Geneva Convention? I can answer that with complete assurance, no it would not.

It is a totally different scenario either way. A military attack on a valid target is NOT a terrorist attack on civilians with the sole intention of killing and maiming innocent non-combatants.

When you read Bowden’s articles, note his broad hint that torture should be used mostly, or only, without authorization, to minimize the possibility of it ever being allowed as policy. I.e., the persons using it would be betting their careers and freedom on being right.

In other words, it is easier to obtain forgiveness than permission.