[quote=afx114][quote=Allan from Fallbrook]You would be amazed what sitting down with someone over a period of hours or days can produce in terms of useful intelligence.[/quote]
Forgive me if I am wrong, but didn’t Saddam reveal some stuff to his guards after months of being buddy-buddy with them? What we should do with suspected terrorists is throw back a few beers with them, play some Lego Star Wars, break the ice, and shoot the shit — who knows what they might reveal.
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Even the Nazi’s knew this was the most effective form of gathering useful information from a prisoner. Their best interrogators never used torture, nor did they threaten the use of torture. They essentially used the Copenhagen Syndrome to get the prisoners to tell them willingly what they wanted to know, and ALL of what they wanted to know. A cooperative prisoner is much more useful than an uncooperative one.
Over a prolonged period of time, I don’t even think the most radical extremist would be able to hold out under this method. You can essentially “deprogram” them at your leisure. And I’m pretty sure that any extremist hard core enough to resist this would be equally difficult to break via torture.
Using torture is counterproductive. The prisoner being tortured is constantly reminded of why they despise the torturer (and by extension the country employing them), and will simply tell the torturer enough to get them to stop – and that will be whatever the torturer wants to hear – not the truth, and certainly not the whole truth.
The only situation I could see torture being even remotely useful for is in the “Ticking Time Bomb” situation – and even then, it’s only because there is no time to do anything else – it’s not because the information gained is reliable. And frankly, I agree with the people above – in that incredibly rare scenario, you might be able to justify breaking the law, but it doesn’t justify crafting the law around that scenario and assuming that that scenario is a common one (frankly, I don’t know if that scenario has ever actually occurred).
