One Libertarian trying to make you think harder about the world.

Those who can, do. Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, administrate. Those who can't administrate run for public office.


Monday, April 20, 2009

Torture Is Not Effective

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It has long been debated whether or not torture actually gets any valuable information out of a person. The majority of psychologists say that it does not because the person will say anything to get you to stop the pain or panic, whatever one is trying to induce. Now we have an example to back this up. Apparently, one Al Qaeda prisoner was waterboarded 183 times. Let me ask this question, if you have to do an interrogation process 183 times on someone, is it really effective? Even after a few times the guy probably figured out a way to fool the system by acting like he was closer to passing out than he really was, or purposely passing out to stop it.

The United Nations has defined waterboarding as torture and the United States prosecuted top Japanese personnel after World War II for waterboarding some of our people. We should apply the same methodology to our own people who were in charge of this. I know some people will say "oh but they do it to our guys." You know what? Yes they do it to our people sometimes if they are captured. That is what has made us the good guys in the eyes of the world in the past. As much as some people would like to deny the fact that that matters, it does. If a lot of other major countries don't like you, they can put serious damage on your economy and make all of our lives a lot worse. Things work better when you are liked. The other bonus to having very humane treatment of prisoners of war is that soldiers from nations who are corrupt and are being forced to fight are a whole lot more likely to just surrender if they know they are going to get food, water, and shelter and not get killed.

1 comment:

  1. This is probably the most beautiful post you have ever written. Well done in my eyes. I don't agree with the administrations decision to declassify those memos (at least not now). But lead by example, by good and by values is what will ultimately get us to win. We may have a lot to prove still on the values part but this is a big step forward in terms of foriegn policy affairs

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