http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

What on earth has anything i said to do with this bs?

Trolly i know you have the combination to a lock that if tampered with is destroyed and starts a nasty sequence. You can only put the code in and nothing else to disarm it. If the code is wrong nothing happens. It will activate what it has in a few days.

Now i start with you to torture you if all else has failed. I simply wont let you sleep at all and have loud music and big lights all over the place. Wanna bet i get you to talk or you die a horrible death after a few days of unbelievably hard existence that simply would have you begging me to kill you? All you have to do is tell me the combination and its over. And you have no permanent damage either other than the memory of the event. But you knew that i initially offered to cooperate with you and get the result without torturing you and you effectively forced me there. So i dont care about your memory, it was your choice and the hell with you. I did nothing unethical here.


Now if we move this into a more real life case of capturing a member of a terrorist cell or other insurgents that have connections, obviously the situation is different, we do not know what they have access to if anything and we will first try to reason with them if we are confident they are of some value. I personally would try to be very kind and tried cooperating with them and attempted to find out as much as i can about their lives and showed genuine interest why they hate me/us. I would treat them as potential friends in the future even. But there is a limit to how long this can go. If one has evidence of significant information knowledge and they are not talking, something needs to be done about it if we are confident they have key information that is of urgent nature (i am not suggesting using torture to make your war easier by the way only on very urgent cases if all else failed) . If the enemy is perverse and kills innocent civilians my crime to torture them is of little ethical consequence to me given what is at stake. No m/fer out there can come and tell me i am unethical if i first did all the good things i described. Obviously if you deal with soldiers and high officials in a regular war or civilians defending their country etc you avoid any torture and treat them as agreed by international standards and even better to gain information the right way if possible and if not so be it.

A very quick goggle does suggest there are clearances above top secret. http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/gener...a/security.htm

but by solid I meant some reason to believe you in particular. Remember the attitude here.

Because you're saying that non-torture interrogation won't work despite this thread being started by evidence to the contrary. What else am I supposed to conclude?

I guess you don't believe in psychological damage being permanent?

Masque, give me one single real-world situation that's ever been anything like this.

PS: what if these toppy top terrorists who have spent years planning **** have a code that auto-activates the device if you put in the wrong code? You electrocute the guy's balls and he tells you the code is 5387. What do you do?

Trolly is immune to most forms of torture. The only think you know that might work on him is if you bring his daughter into the room and start raping her while he is forced to watch unless he gives up the code.

If you bring her into the room and start raping her, was it his choice and you did nothing unethical here? If it is all his fault, does your answer change if his daughter is eight years old?

Damn I wish i understood people well enough to have come up with this.

Now what you going to do when it happens and they start correctly pointing out the difference between 'no evidence torture has worked' and 'torture doesn't work'

It certainly sounds like you want to experiment with lots of different tortures to see what works.

Tell them they're being pedantic morons and that the burden of proof for torture working is on them.

nope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...learance_terms

I would like to think that a guy who held a TS/SCI clearance would be more on the ball than the news and entertainment media, but who knows with rara.

Pretty funny that he searched google and found that you were exactly right.

Yeah we can say that a lot and they will care not a jot. It's not even true but it wouldn't help if it was.

We will get to cry in our beer while the torture happens yet again and people like you they once ignored or paid lip-service to are now considered fools for their nonsense.

Unless of course we make damn sure it's banned purely on the basis it's against human rights.

You realize i immediately removed from the topic any barbaric permanent damaging action ok?

You guys that apparently know so much about interrogations in all countries can you answer to me why police for example asks questions for hours in closed small rooms and not giving the chance to eat something or doing their best to make you fill threatened or not going out of their way to illuminate the situation about your rights if they do not have to? Isnt that already a form of torture? Isnt it a psychological torture to start claiming that the other guy is already talking about what you did etc...How do they manage to get so many false confessions by the way?

That would be amusing. It was a very quick search.

I'll leave raradevils to offer more if he want to.

I'd kinda prefer he didn't?

Like, this is actually an amazingly good example of how people talk about stuff. Just to score internet points, rara's told us what kind of clearance he had, what his job was, what submarines he served on on 20-30 years ago, and I don't really want to know what else. It's a lot of great intel that he's just willing to broadcast on the internet for free!

The fact that Feinstein's report had zero bipartisan support doesn't bother you at all? Not even a little?

If the Republicans put out a report with zero Democratic participation I doubt you'll be automatically inclined to believe everything inside the report.

-- Rep Peter King (R-NY) yesterday.

Pretty astonishing. Apparently people ITT aren't the only people to feel they can weigh in on the report while having absolutely no idea what it says.

----

It continues to be amazing to me that people like Sklansky and masque would rather debate inane thought experiments than look up the opinions of experts in the field with decades of experience, which are near universally that torture doesn't work, or read about the actual empirical failure of torture to work for the US in the recent past.

You guys should take this Dr Spock routine to behavioural psychology. "What do you mean people will pass on buying an item at $1,000, but also refuse to sell that item at $1,100 should they already possess it? Captain, that sounds HIGHLY ILLOGICAL!".

You can't predict behaviour of actual human beings based on logical analysis of how they SHOULD behave.

I just meant if he want's to clarify security levels. If he can't for security reasons then his in a bind.

The point still remains that unless he has something solid he can offer to substantiate his claim it's not worth mentioning his credentials here because the attitude here is so bad. It may not mean much anyway in which case there's two reasons not to mention it.

Why don't we instead discuss this instance of an American being tortured?

People being tortured will say anything, true or false, to get the torturers to stop. Frequently the torturers either do not believe them when they tell the truth, or do believe them when they obligingly lie to confirm the torturer's worst fears, as here.

Interrogation is mostly about unknown unknowns. Known unknowns can be checked out by other means (surveillance etc). The idea that interrogation consists of trying to extract some key piece of information which can be instantly checked for veracity is fiction.

I remember him. He wrote that common sense book.

Because you are changing the subject. Others have said that other interrogation methods will elicit accurate information (assuming the guy actually has it) just as well and as quickly as torture. So I ask again whether this applies to Americans in WW2 who did actually offer correct info after being tortured by Nazis. Especially those who did not receive special training to resist torture. Would they have coughed up the info as fast with other techniques? If not then what others have said is not always true. That's all I'm saying.

(I agree that if the info can't be quickly checked torture is probably no better and maybe less effective than alternatives.)

This is why I don't believe him, people who gain high levels of security clearance generally don't go around talking about it like this, especially giving details about their job on an internet account with thousands of other posts that could link to you as a person. You'd at least expect someone to be emotionally involved in the conversation and not just casually put it out there.

Bro, torture not being effective isn't an idea introduced by this report. Also it's kinda weird how you keep referring to the partisanship of this report like it singlehandedly proves you right. Like, the guys you are listening to who said that valuable intel WAS retrieved through torture are mostly the people that have to defend it because.....they signed off on it. That doesn't bother you at all? Not even a little?

reading this thread is torture.
i must be a masochist.

This report is in essence just a plank of the Democratic Party's platform.

It is filled with opinions and unsubstantiated "facts". It will have the same long term traction as any platform plank does - none.

When was the last time we wasted so much time on a party platform?

I just hope no American gets killed over this domestic political document.