General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I just learned where the CIA got the term "enhanced interrogation." [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)pretty common in many cultures.
But that does not mean it is legal today or that it is excusable today. Haven't we learned yet that it is not a good way to obtain intelligence?
Sure. You may occasionally get bits of intelligence of value from torture. But mostly you are going to get a bunch of rubbish that the tortured "give up" to please you. Torture is not just cruel. It is a crap game.
For any one bit of valid information you get, you may get a lot, even mostly rubbish. I should think that people who are tortured begin to fantasize and begin simply talking about their nightmarish hallucinations. I don't know that for a fact. But I can read between the lines. We got a lot of false information from people we tortured.
And then think of the money we wasted on the whole torture experiment. It is a total loss.
Note that the NAZIs who tortured during WWII to get information LOST THE WAR. Same for the Japanese.
Fact about torture is that those who delight in it, who believe in it, waste resources that could be used to analyze the facts and obtain intelligence through more dependable means.
ENIGMA during WWII produced enormous amounts of valuable intelligence about what was really going to happen. It did not reveal long-range plans necessarily. But it did give our troops the heads-up on events to come in the short term.
Countries that rely on torture to provide them information are njot only morally corrupt but probably not using their resources wisely.