--- Jordan Hayes <jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com> wrote:
>
> [*] Yes! It does happen! Sometimes you pick
> someone up who does have
> actionable information and "Yes, you can!" beat it
> out of them (never
> mind how else you might have gotten the same
> information). This is what
> has happened in the last few years: a few people got
[WS:] How do you know that they have "good" information? Recall a scene from the WW2 flick "The Guns of Navarone" in which British comandos leave their wounded colleague behind, and knowing that he will be tortured by the Germans, feed him false information about their mission. The Germans of course do as predicted, act on that false inforamtion, which allows the commandos to complete their true mission.
I think that arguments for torture need to be taken in their cultural context i.e. who is making them. If such arguments were made by a proponent of a dirigiste behavioral model (i.e. a model claiming that strong external controls and regulations lead to more efficient behavior) - they would be internally consistent - since torture is perfectly in line with the dirigiste model of human behavior.
However, if the arguments for torture were made by proponents of voluntary action and free markets - one must ask "how come that voluntary participation offers the most efficient outcomes for Amerikans, but not for others?" I would imagine that a staunch proponet of the free market would argue that coercive measures (including torture) would lead to undesirbale results under any circumstances, and argue for voluntary cooperation through bribery, cajole, decpetion, etc. And if one profess reverence for voluntarism and freedom form coercion as the guarantor of efficiency on the one side of his mouth, but praises coercion inclusing torture on th eother - i would call that person an intellactual fraud no matter how high he scores on IQ test and what offices he occupies.
To sum this up, there is a diffrence between incidental use of torture and the incidental effectiveness (or lack thereof) of this method of information gathering on the one hand, and philsophical a priori arguments for the use of torture. The latter should be consistent with the overall philosopjy of human behavior. Therefore, arguments for torture made by the advocates of the "Amerikan way of life" - which praises voluntarism over coercion - are invariably intellectually fraudulent.
My own position is that torture is intelligence garthering of a fool. It does not take rocket science to figure out that such information is unreliable, not only because people would say anything to end pain, but also that pain and fear may drastically impede recalling information from memory. A smart interrogator would try to obtain information by voluntary confession - which in most cases can be obtained by a combination of deception, bribery and cajole, if one knows what one is doing.
I think that those who use or condone torture are sadistic fucks who hide beneath rationalizations of "intellitgence gathering" to cover up their perverted pleasures.
Wojtek
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