Why The World Is Not An Episode Of 24

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020801680.html
It damages them. It damages us.
Yeah, torture's a swell idea.

 

This thread will not begin or end well.

And the guy's e-mail is at the bottom of the article. That takes some cojones.

 

Psst .... Eric Fair's wife is a CIA agent !!!!

 

Outing Alert -- The Bat is Irving (Scooter) Footballbat.

 

And yet, there are many people who see no problem with what this guy did, and I can't understand that.

It amazes at how many people that support torture or "aggressive interrogation techniques" would identify themselves as Christians. It's a cliche, and one that's made fun of often, but what would Jesus do? Not to get all preachy, but if you go to church on Sunday and call yourself a Christian, what do you think Jesus' opinion of torture would be? Or on war? I can't get past that.

 

And coincidentally, in the most recent issue of the New York, Jane Mayer's "Letter from Hollywood" talks about 24, its executive-producer Joel Surow who is good friends with Limbaugh and Coulter and also about the torture in the show.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070219fa_fact_mayer

And funnily enough, the experts on interrogation all agree on one thing: it doesn't work.

Some high ranking military officials, concerned about the message that the show was getting across regarding torture, had a meeting with the show's execs. Lots of interesting stuff here:

Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, told me that he had similar arguments with his students. He said that, under both U.S. and international law, “Jack Bauer is a criminal.

and

“In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence,” Lagouranis (a former Army interrogato) told me. “I worked with someone who used waterboarding”—an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. “I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee’s hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened.” Some people, he said, “gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information.” If anything, he said, “physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up.”

 

OK, so what works?
What will make a man who is willing to kill himself in order to take the lives of others surrender information about those who are involved in the planning and execution of such attacks?
Or do you not even try to aquire such information? Do you just figure it to be a lost cause, because people who would go to such lengths are obviously too committed to their cause to betray it? And thus do you just sit there and wait for them to attack again?
What works?

 

Read the article I posted.

It offers some insights.

But one thing's clear from the legal and military experts interviewed for the story. Besides being illegal, torture doesn't work.

 

Mark Bowden had a good article on interrogation and torture in The Atlantic a few years back.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bowden

 

Obviously, many people throughout history have believed that torture works.
However, since torture is illegal now, you're going to be hard-pressed to find a pro-torture expert willing to go on the record to explain how and why it works.

 

I've said it many times before and I'll say it again. If you torture me enough and it's what you want to hear, I'll confess to shooting JFK.
And I wasn't born until 1966.

 

You kill them before they kill you.