Given that, I’m not sure why he thinks there’s a tension between our values and national self-protection. And I’d be against torture even if I thought it worked.
But it’s good to know that the professionals don’t agree with Cheney, Krauthammer, and their fellow sadists. Unfortunately, sadism and cowardice seem to be popular with the voters right now.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mark A.R. Kleiman. Mark A.R. Kleiman said: RBC: http://bit.ly/9NYcd7 [...]
I see three possibilities:
1. Torture isn’t particularly effective. (I find this quite plausible.)
2. We weren’t torturing all that much to begin with.
3. We’ve outsourced a lot of torture, so that we can claim we’re not doing it anymore. (Alas, I do find this plausible, too.)
“2. We weren’t torturing all that much to begin with.”
Considering how much we were known to have done, and how easy it is to keep it secret, and how casually the US government treated the known and public cases, I’d disagree with that a lot.
You’ll note that’s NOT the option I labeled plausible. Just threw it in for completeness’ sake.
The question was about waterboarding, which hasn’t been used since 2003. I’d expect that abandoning a technique that hadn’t been used in 5 or 6 years wouldn’t have much effect.
Brett Bellmore says:
“You’ll note that’s NOT the option I labeled plausible. Just threw it in for completeness’ sake.”
I agree with you there. It’s pretty f*cking likely that the US simply hands over a prisoner with one hand, and a list of questions with the other hand, and then declares the two hands’ work to be separate.