First,I’d like to thank Timothy for hosting us Inactivists while our blog is inactive. If I ever get up some gumption or something I’ll go out and buy him a thank-you present. But I’m too inactive for that sort of thing. In the mean time, it’s only fitting that my first blog post in the wake of an IT failure should be Dilbert-related:
Scott Adams has come out against torture:
I used to think that torture probably worked well, at least in selective cases, based on the fact that it is so often the method of choice. All of those law-enforcement professionals around the world couldn’t be wrong, could they? Plus, I imagine that if someone attached electrodes to my scrotum, I’d be talking plenty compared with the “let’s be friends” interrogation method. So torture certainly passes the sniff test.
Yet the media have trotted out expert after expert to say that regular non-torture interrogation is more effective than torture. I discounted those experts as selectively chosen by the liberal media. One thing that all the experts seemed to have in common was that none of them had actually used torture. So how would they know that torture didn’t work as well as an alternative?
But much time has passed since this debate began. You’d think that the proponents of torture would have produced one credible torturer to say, “Torture works great! I get all of my information in minutes and I’m home by 5 to help the kids with homework!”
Or perhaps the media could find one torture victim who would say, “I wasn’t going to tell them anything until they started waterboarding me. Man, that stuff works!”
Now granted, it may be hard to find someone who will confess to being a torturer. And it may be even harder to find someone who was tortured and then is willing to endorse it. But it seems that with all the torturing going on, you could at least find a friend of a friend who saw it work.
Or the American government could find some CIA operative willing to be filmed in silhouette with his voice garbled saying that he has seen torture produce excellent results.
Exactly. Leaving aside the moral issues, for a moment, if it really works so well, why can’t they give us some evidence of it? Surely by now there must be some guy who’s yielded everything he knows, or at least everything relative that he knows. (I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that when a terrorist goes missing the other members of his cell quickly change passwords, safe houses, etc. If they don’t, then they’re so stupid that we have nothing to fear.) So trot him out and say “Look, see the electrode burns on the scrotum? That’s how we prevented terrorists from blowing up a subway tunnel in DC.”
Or, like Scott Adams said, they could get some guy to speak way, way, way off the record.
But all we have is the government saying “There’s nothing in the Geneva Convention that says we can’t!” Yeah, well, so what?
Plus, he said “All those law enforcement professionals can’t be wrong, can they?” Well, America’s public employees have a long track record of getting false confessions via torture. (It’s probably done every week, if not every day, in a police station somewhere.) So even if the “ideal Platonic torturer” could get useful information, in the real world, torture gets plenty of false information.
Anyway, glad to have Scott Adams aboard the anti-torture bandwagon. Ain’t it sad that America has reached the point where the previous sentence would actually make sense?
Well, if Bush were to trot out an expert saying that torture worked, that would indicate that he NEEDS to show that it works. That would undermine his status as The Decider Who Decides the Decisions. Defending the legitimacy of his actions to us would be admiting that somebody other than him might have a say in the matter, which is the last thing Bush wants. He’s just staying the course on his tactic of deflecting all criticism by looking bewildered and saying ‘But I’m the PRESIDENT and there’s a WAR on!’
lunchstealer
January 10th, 2007