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Andrew1975 wrote:

Hardly. I'm just able to recognise that torture has no real value.
The studies and experts agree with me, not you, chap.

I say it depends on what kind of torture you are looking at. Do you really believe that there would be entire schools of torture if there was absolutely no value in it? Yeah beating a guy to death may not be very effective, but the more modern techniques do produce results.

Doesn't much matter what you say, as those were the methods they were discussing.

Andrew1975 wrote:

Hardly. I'm just able to recognise that torture has no real value.
The studies and experts agree with me, not you, chap.

I say it depends on what kind of torture you are looking at. Do you really believe that there would be entire schools of torture if there was absolutely no value in it? Yeah beating a guy to death may not be very effective, but the more modern techniques do produce results.

Except, not really, which is what the research says. If the point of torture is just to be a sadistic bastard, then I suppose it does work, but getting credible information isn't one of the side benefits, and has been shown over and over. Torture gets you whatever the person being tortured thinks you want to hear. They would tell you their sister was at the Battle of the Bulge even though she was born in 2006 if they think it will make the torture stop. Creating networks and gathering intelligence through assets is far better than torture. The little bit of true information isn't worth the price we have to pay to get it, ie betraying the fundamental ideas that we are fighting for in the first place.

Andrew1975 wrote:
Why are you dead at the end of physiological torture, unless of course that was the goal, which it obviously wasn't.

Yes, I'm sure radical Muslims believe that beheading is only torturous, and not at all likely to cause death.

Read the words as written, not the ones you wish were on the screen.

Andrew1975 wrote:
I'm not going to say that nobody dies from psychological torture, but it's not the intended outcome (unless of course it is in some cases) it's used to get information.

You're assuming that death is universally less preferable than life.

Andrew1975 wrote:
Rules or war are not only there to attain a moral high ground, in fact I see that as more of a secondary effect. The rules are there to protect the combatants and civilians form some of the more ugly aspects of war.

So we should, morally, shield our combatants and civilians from the (ugly) consequences of combat, but that really's not really a moral question at all.

Andrew1975 wrote:
When fighting savages you should not become one, this is true, but you don't need to extend them all the courtesies either.

And determining who is, and who is not, a savage is totally an amoral decision too.

Yes, I'm sure radical Muslims believe that beheading is only torturous, and not at all likely to cause death.

Read the words as written, not the ones you wish were on the screen.

I read the words on the screen, you said either way you are dead. I don't believe you always die from pych torture, you sure do from beheading, which isn't torture it execution.


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Andrew1975 wrote:

Yes, I'm sure radical Muslims believe that beheading is only torturous, and not at all likely to cause death.

Read the words as written, not the ones you wish were on the screen.

I read the words on the screen, you said either way you are dead. I don't believe you always die from pych torture, you sure do from beheading, which isn't torture it execution.

You can find studies that say it works and those that say it doesn't. The facts are that if it didn't work, why would the US spend millions on it? If the militarizes own studies showed that it was ineffective wouldn't they just stop seeing as it costs them so much in every aspect.

Andrew1975 wrote:
I read the words on the screen, you said either way you are dead. I don't believe you always die from pych torture, you sure do from beheading, which isn't torture it execution.

I'm not convinced that you did, because you freely switched between the words "psychological" and "physiological".

In either case, while your reading is one possible interpretation of what was said, it isn't the only or, in my opinion most apparent, one. Torture does not necessarily end in death, beheading does, it seems to me that, therefore, any statement regarding the necessity of death (when the two are compared) is referring on to beheading. Particularly when the opening sentence directly compares beheading with torture.




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Andrew1975 wrote: The facts are that if it didn't work, why would the US spend millions on it?

Because people either believe that it works, or they believe that it should work.

Paying for X has no bearing on whether or not X works, just look at the F-35.

The F 35 works tho. So does the F 22, they fly, what do you want? hehe!

'm not convinced that you did, because you freely switched between the words "psychological" and "physiological".

Opps stupid auto correct i meant psychological

Paying for X has no bearing on whether or not X works, just look at the F-35.

Not really the same thing. The F-35 has to work now, as there is little option without blowing the huge amount invested already in a needed program. The US could just end torture operations at anytime if it wanted to if the program was proven unnecessary.

Particularly when the opening sentence directly compares beheading with torture.

I was saying if the enemy can execute our soldiers, surely we can stoop to using psyche torture, especially if is saves said soldiers set to be executed.

I think it is fair to use psyche torture, considering most of the coalition units that use these methods have to go through the same treatment their captives get.

We did train these guys to kill people, that in itself is unethicle.
But we do need them for our survival.

No, we train them to kill for the state.
That is ethical.

It is not moral - but ethics and morals are not the same thing.
They often have the same end result, but that is not the same as saying an apple is a banana.

http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/torturecardozo.pdf

Thought that was a fairly good read on the issue of torture.

These aren't some partisan soldiers holding out in the hills against a hated enemy we are talking about, these are volunteer professional soldiers. Part of being a professional is having certain ideals and expectations. Certainly they will be a bit gruffer than the average bloke, and there will be a gallows humor to be sure. I think any rational person is even fine with them liking their job. What isn't acceptable is when it crosses the line into bigotry, hatred, and ignorance. There is no place in a professional military for that kind of thing. The trick, of course, is that it isn't obvious where that line is all the time. Still, even the military knows this becuase they screen for and do their best to remove radical elements all the time. For example, White Power groups try to enlist becuase they want military training but if the Army gets a whiff of it they get rejected.

Andrew1975 wrote:I think the lesson is don't go into a war when you are not prepared to take the steps to win or don't know what those steps are. Unfortunately we have not really learned that lesson.

It's a decent lesson, but unfortunately war is about as unknowable as things can get, especially before you start the thing. The Americans were wrong in thinking they could build an effective South Vietnamese government and inflict sufficient casualties on the Viet Cong/NVA, but that's all they were, is wrong.

To make a greater case, that they ought to have known better, then you have to establish things were less known or that the known things were worse than they were when the US decided to target Germany over the country that actually attacked them, Japan, or when the US led the UN into Korea, or into Iraq.

There is evidence that the continued bombing of the north would have turned the war.

Given that strategic bombing has never turned a war, I really doubt it.


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Ahtman wrote:Except, not really, which is what the research says. If the point of torture is just to be a sadistic bastard, then I suppose it does work, but getting credible information isn't one of the side benefits, and has been shown over and over. Torture gets you whatever the person being tortured thinks you want to hear. They would tell you their sister was at the Battle of the Bulge even though she was born in 2006 if they think it will make the torture stop. Creating networks and gathering intelligence through assets is far better than torture. The little bit of true information isn't worth the price we have to pay to get it, ie betraying the fundamental ideas that we are fighting for in the first place.

Which is why torture is a terrible option to use if you're going fishing for information, like asking a person 'are you guilty of doing X?', but considerably more effective when it comes to something that's specific and verifiable, like 'tell me on this map where the training camp is?'

Limited forms of torture, basically designed to break down a person's will to reject, so sleep deprivation combined with specific people treating the captive very humanely has been known to work. It's more or less what police around the world have been using for generations, albeit in a much more mild form.

Andrew1975 wrote:
Not really the same thing. The F-35 has to work now, as there is little option without blowing the huge amount invested already in a needed program. The US could just end torture operations at anytime if it wanted to if the program was proven unnecessary.

You're missing the point, which is that simply being invested in a thing doesn't mean that thing is worthwhile. To use a more mundane example, think of women that remain with an abusive man. They are invested in the relationship, but the relationship isn't good.

Either way, you're talking about the sunk cost dilemma. My point relative to it is that however much money has been invested in the F35 has no bearing on whether or not the F35 is good.

Andrew1975 wrote:
I was saying if the enemy can execute our soldiers, surely we can stoop to using psyche torture, especially if is saves said soldiers set to be executed.

Why should what the enemy considers to be moral have any bearing on what we consider to be moral?

chromedog wrote:No, we train them to kill for the state.
That is ethical.

It is not moral - but ethics and morals are not the same thing.
They often have the same end result, but that is not the same as saying an apple is a banana.

Other way around. Morals are the community standard, which as you say soldiers fit.

Whether soldiers are ethical though, depends on personal beliefs. Some people might have ethical systems that believes training people to kill for you country is ethical. In fact, I'd say most people do.


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dogma wrote:You're missing the point, which is that simply being invested in a thing doesn't mean that thing is worthwhile. To use a more mundane example, think of women that remain with an abusive man. They are invested in the relationship, but the relationship isn't good.

Either way, you're talking about the sunk cost dilemma. My point relative to it is that however much money has been invested in the F35 has no bearing on whether or not the F35 is good.

It also presumes that such a decision is made on a purely rational cost beneift basis. Reality is that there's significant political cost in looking soft on torture, and that means tough sounding options will get the go ahead, whether they work or not.

Andrew1975 wrote:

You can find studies that say it works and those that say it doesn't. The facts are that if it didn't work, why would the US spend millions on it?

The Soviet Union spent a hell of a lot of money trying to prop Communism up. Did Communism work as an idea?
The idea that money spent equals value is a fallacy.

Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:

Andrew1975 wrote:

You can find studies that say it works and those that say it doesn't. The facts are that if it didn't work, why would the US spend millions on it?

The Soviet Union spent a hell of a lot of money trying to prop Communism up. Did Communism work as an idea?
The idea that money spent equals value is a fallacy.

What other choice did they have, when your whole system is based on communism you are pretty much pot commited? It would be easy for the US to just not torture and spend millions on studying torture if it was not effective.

Creating networks and gathering intelligence through assets is far better than torture

Fat lot of good that did for finding Osama...

you can find studies saying that torture works, because all you need to do is adjust what you mean by "work."

I think everybody agrees that you'll get more information with torture. That doesnt' mean better.

It's also likely that different people will respond to different forms of interrogation, ranging the full gamut.

And congress will spend money on things that don't work based on all kinds of arcane reasons. Hell, they spend money on themselves...

In the case of the CIA waterboarding, it wasn't strictly to elicit info from the perp.

It was done to break the perp. Once that was done the real interogations began, and by what is available to the public, this seems to have worked in these cases.

You also have to note that No One relied soley on info from those or any other interogations. The info gathered is then vetted through other sources/used to cue other assets to confirm/deny the validity of the info.

The crap bags at Abu Ghraib were not interogators. They were prison guards. Sadistic prison guards. They were not intelligence MOS troopers nor were they interogating anyone. They were simple crap bags abusing their power for kicks. To use them as examples of torture for interogation is very much off base. They were poorly supervised and poorly lead sadistic people.

Haha I remember they had a whole piece on interviewing those prison guards and they all had a bit of a cry, trying to excuse themselves for what they did by blaming it on someone else. It was all pathetic.

Andrew1975 wrote:It would be easy for the US to just not torture and spend millions on studying torture if it was not effective.

Except, as I already explained, it really, really isn't that simple for the US government to just stop using torture. It is very important for anyone looking to reach higher office to look tough on terrorism, and that means being a tough man who makes tough decisions, even if they're pointless and don't achieve anything.

Whether or not torture works has little to do with why it is so important to talk about why it's very important for politicians to talk about what they're willing to do to protect the country..

CptJake wrote:
The crap bags at Abu Ghraib were not interogators. They were prison guards. Sadistic prison guards. They were not intelligence MOS troopers nor were they interogating anyone. They were simple crap bags abusing their power for kicks. To use them as examples of torture for interogation is very much off base. They were poorly supervised and poorly lead sadistic people.

The only death at Abu Ghraib was presided over by a CIA interrogator.

The most egregious offenses of Abu Ghraib may not have been carried out by authorized interrogators, but the entire situation should be a reminder of what happens when you dehumanize a group of people over whom you have power.

Actually there were several prisoner deaths at AG. Most the result of a mortar attack in Apr 2004. But since they were killed by AQI types it doesn't fit the narative you like it is easy to ignore them.

CptJake wrote:Actually there were several prisoner deaths at AG. Most the result of a mortar attack in Apr 2004. But since they were killed by AQI types it doesn't fit the narative you like it is easy to ignore them.

Casualties as the result of an enemy attack are not relevant to interrogation or torture.

The "narrative" I "like" is that the use of torture has further consequences, beyond any impact it might have on information gathering.

You seem to be implying that I think soldiers are evil, I'm not. I don't believe evil is a sensible concept, certainly not when attempting to find truth.

The modern interogation methods are somewhat flawed mainly because your enemy knows you have limitations and have to look after them. Being wet, naked and sleep deprived is a far cry from getting your fingernails ripped out or an arm decapitated. Hell get some crazy bastard wielding a machette to your throat and most people break down revealing anything they wanted.