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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group

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To: Orcastraiter who wrote (160461)	4/14/2005 2:08:37 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) of 281500

Torture won't work. Expert interrogation is the best option. Can you read? The example of physical pressure that I used was sleep deprivation. Do you call that torture? The experts do not. Expert interrogation does NOT exclude, by its own description, the possibility of some forms of physical pressure and threats. It is you who are running away to pretend that there is some nice clean technological magic way to get information over here, vs. useless torture over there. If that were true, then every professional would know what to do and nobody would ever have a hard choice to make. There is no such dichotomy. Instead there is a spectrum of possible actions. It is not a nice business, getting information from criminals and terrorists. When police question criminals, they routinely threaten and lie to them. They tell them they will be charged with capital murder and get the death penalty. They tell them their buddy has already turned snitch whether it's true or not. They pretend sympathy and and understanding in an effort to get the criminals to explain their motives for the crime. They insult the criminals in an effort to get them to lose control in rage. They threaten to arrest their mothers and girlfriends as accessories. They tell them that if they don't talk now to Mr. Good Cop, Mr. Bad Cop is going to lose control and beat them to a pulp. None of this qualifies as 'torture' but it still involves extreme duress and is not a nice business at all. The terrorists have even more motive for not cooperating than ordinary criminals. Plus, it's even more likely that their interrogators are not just trying to prosecute a crime that has already been committed, but prevent something even worse that is about to happen, thus ratcheting up the desperation to get the information quickly before more innocent people die. Pretending that "oh, experts say torture doesn't work" so there's no problem and no decisions to think about is simply burying your head in the sand. It's juvenile.

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