Look. I don't like torture. I don't like that we're doing it. I don't like that we're inciting fear and terror to get information we need, and most likely won't know about because what we learn goes down an intel black hole - until we get the news that another AQ shit's been taken out because we "acted on intelligence findings."
Do you know how many nutjobs there are? When I was five years old I had a cartoonishly villainous plot to get George Bush 1 out of office. There are a lot of nuts. Some are five. When our government "acts on intelligence findings" what they are really doing is stopping attacks that are barely in the conceptual stages, none of which actually pose a credible threat to US security, and often are not foreign in nature. Then, our government trumps them up to serve as propaganda, to keep idiots like you scared and condoning torture.
If there's anything, anything at all, that's good about Gitmo (I'm neither discussing nor condoning Abu Ghraib) it's that we're not breaking arms, pulling out fingernails, using electroshock, or oh, I don't know, taking a cordless drill to someone's kneecap like the IRA goons did in Ireland, to get information.
No, we are just doing far worse. Imprisoning people without trial forever because the evidence we use as the basis for the charges against them is inadmissible anywhere in the civilized world, all the while torturing them for information that they cannot possibly have, using methodology that cannot easily be proven to have taken place to avoid prosecution for warcrimes.
I don't like it, but I understand why our military is doing it.
No. You dont. The reason they are doing it, is really just the same effect that happened in Zimbardo's Prison Experiment. You take regular people, give them power without oversight, and you end up with sadists. Said sadists might not even stay sadists after the power is taken away. Some of them might actually feel guilty enough to kill themselves.
Christ on a unicycle, if you had rumors that a terrorist attack was planned in Brisbane, and you had one of the fuckers responsible for the planning in your custody, what would you do if he refused to talk? Do purely psychological approaches to interrogation work, and if so, do they take longer to be effective than ratcheting up the pain and fear level in someone until they break? My guess (and as mentioned earlier I'm not versed in torture, so this is only a guess) is that physical plus psychological stress/pain get answers more quickly.
And it seems you have been ignoring what the others here have said. If you torture him, he has no incentive to tell you the truth. You have no way of knowing whether he is giving you accurate information or not unless you already know enough to stop the plot anyway. So he can just lie, and get the pain to stop. If he has been through any training at all, he will have been trained to resist, either by breaking in the right direction (so he starts rattling off D&D terminology or something) or through the ability to withstand things like sleep deprivation. So in a ticking time bomb scenario, he probably wont even break before the city gets nuked anyway.
There's not a whole lot of good in the fact that we're fighting fundamentalist Muslims, or that we have to torture them to learn and foil their plans.
Except idiot that torture does not give us useable intel.
Remember, though, that these prisoners ARE NOT INNOCENT BYSTANDERS.
Some of them are fuckwad.
They are terrorists, ideologically little different than fundamentalist Christians but far more violent. I'll trade the moral ambguity of torturing a few "enemy combatants" by waterboarding them (IIRC, waterboarding was only used on three prisoners) to stop more bombings that could kill dozens or hundreds more innocent people.
Actually no. People capture in the field are often not terrorists. They are insurgents, and in fact perfectly lawful combatants resisting foreign occupation under the geneva convention. In other words, we are committing not only domestic crimes, but war crimes, by torturing them.
If they are grunts, they probably dont know much more than our soldiers do right before they receive a specific order. Read:Nothing. If they are high ranking, the plans get changed upon capture, and you will gain no useable intel no matter how much he squeals.
"Shame real life isn't that simple, I guess." Do you really think that the soldiers torturing people in Guantanamo Bay really want to do it? I'm guessing not, or the Abu Ghraib fuckups would not be so universally despised.
It is actually a shame they are so universally despised because you can get just about any 19 year old kid to do even worse things than what they did on a much lower budget.
Do you or I actually know what intel they're getting? No, we don't.
Appeal to ignorance, and frankly is akin to saying "But your honor, if he was arrested by the police, he must have done something wrong"
Anyone who's remotely familiar with interrogation techniques can tell you that physical and psychological stress will not get you reliable answers and incorrect answers are as useless as no answers.
Actually they are even worse because they send you on a wild goose chase.
The point I was TRYING to make is that there's not a clear cut answer to this
Except that there is. There is only ambuguity in this matter in the magical fantasy land you live in.
