The Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, has said techniques such as waterboarding could be justified if they saved lives, following comments by President Trump this week that torture “absolutely” works.
The issue has been one of the main focuses surrounding Theresa May’s current trip to visit the new US president. In a television interview on Wednesday, Trump said he believed waterboarding and similar tortures worked, and his country should “fight fire with fire”.
Sigh… Torture doesn’t work. The victim will tell the interrogator anything to make it stop. Evidence secured using torture is tainted and unreliable – which is why sensible countries don’t use it. Of course, there’s the humanitarian and moral argument, which should go without saying, however, it seems it does need saying; we should not be as bad as them, or there is no point. We are supposed to have a moral code, which is supposed to make us better than our enemies. If we indulge in medieval interrogation techniques, then we are no better, so there is nothing to defend.
So, Dicks all round, but no surprise there.
God, please don’t let UKIP go native – they’re my only hope.
As for Trump, He’s been in the job for a week and I’m torn between admiration, and horror that a) he insists that his inauguration turnout was bigger than Obama’s and if the evidence says otherwise then the evidence has been doctored and b) the POTUS really, really cares about this.
Same here.
Individually I’d agree, however when used to compare answers as to a group, I’m afraid it does as you can use it to eventually match the answers to the other members of the group. Eventually they realise that the answers have to be the same to stop the torture.
Just saying.
There’s a flaw in that reasoning – the need to know principle. Terror cells operate on need to know, so if you have a group of people, the likelihood of them all having access to the information you want is unlikely. They cannot tell you what they do not know; which is the point, of course.
Eventually they realise that the answers have to be the same to stop the torture. Just saying.
The answers will eventually be the same. But not usually the truth. They will be what the examiners want to hear the prisoner say.
Solzhenitsyn talks about how the new prisoners in the gulag were loathe to believe that they had to make up stuff in order for the torture to stop. But eventually they too would admit to spying for the USA in order to make the pain go.
And even if the truth, by the time a proper idealist is broken the truth is too late. What use is it to find out what terrorists were planning two years ago?
Of course torture works! I would tell Trump that you can build the Forth Road bridge out of jelly if you tortured me!
Presumably Trump is planning to waterboard anyone who questions his popularity figures, or indeed questions anything he says at all?
Which is pretty much what the guy who was tortured in Suadi Arabia a few years back said.
What if it’s not for getting evidence but information? Like the SAS’ “interview without coffee”?
I couldn’t care less if torture revealed the secrets of the universe. It is immoral and as the host points out that if we sink to that level then wtf is the point of it all? They will have turned us into them and they will have won.
Whether it’s evidence or information is moot. The noise to signal ratio is too high for it to be of value – and that is beside the moral argument.
The chap who shot up those in the nightclub wasn’t caught because they politely interviewed those who eventually lead to his capture.
In certain circumstances, such as when you know you’ve got to move very fast because there’s a ruthless killer on the loose, then use whatever drugs work fast, use whatever psychological methods necessary or simply beat the crap out the weakest link.
In Turkey they chose the later – and they didn’t give two hoots that it shows.
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/istanbul-new-years-eve-nightclub-shooter-caught-turkish-media-813431335
How’s Turkey’s war on the Kurds going then? Turkey take the “hard man” approach, and it doesn’t work.
The UK and Spain have managed to halt the IRA and ETA without extensive use of torture.
The only time torture does work is immediately after capture, while the prisoner is disorientated. With the emphasis on immediately — before you even get them back to a cell. Very little pain is required generally, although threats of it help. (This is why armies generally don’t torture — information needs to be extracted upon capture, not once they make it to POW camp.)
This is not the situation Trump is talking about. He’s talking about prolonged exposure to torture in a prison. It’s basically just cruelty for the sake of it against people you don’t like.
The only fly in the narrative ointment being that Trump has put James Mattis into the position of Secretary Of Defence, and publicly given him authority to make decisions contrary to Trump’s stated beliefs on this very issue.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/trump-james-mattis-override-torture-2017-1
Which leads to the possibility that Trump might be happy to be seen, nay *deliberately*, talking a load of bollocks… but takes sensible action in the background?