>
>
> I agree that torture can be used that way (and for the record, I'm
> against it); in the context that we're discussing -- the signing
> statement by Bush last year, the recent veto, and McCain's
> concurrence -- it is not being used that way. It is specifically being
> used to gather 'high value' intelligence in particular cases.
>
> That's the example that, for instance, Scalia and Hillary bring out: if
> it can prevent an imminent attack.
>
> The position has to be: preventing an imminent attack is not an
> acceptable excuse for it.
>
> /jordan
Jordan confuses the ideological justification for torture with the uses of torture; the excuses for using torture with the actual purpose of torture.
The ticking time bomb scenario (TTBS), for instance, and like situations was a fiction from the beginning. It doesn't exist and it is not likely to exist. The TTBS is simply a wedge argument to get the auditor to use a false cost-benefit analysis.
It is important to look at how torture is used and no the excuses for the use of torture. Torture, in every regime that I have ever known that uses torture, including the U.S., uses torture against selected classes of people. The information gathered from torture is never "valuable intelligence", but rather social networking information which is used to gather more people in the torture regimes net. It does not matter whether the social networking information is "true" or "false." It does matter that it is more.
People such as Scalia and Hilary are either liars or self-deceivers, take your pick, when they use the TTBS. They know, or they should know, that the U.S. has systematically used torture and trained torturers for at least 60 years. (See the documents I gathered here. http://community.livejournal.com/jerry_quotes/tag/torture+before+9-11 ). They know or should know that torture as used by the U.S. today casts a big net over a class informants and prisoners. The myth of torture as "precisely targeted" is greater than the myth of a smart bomb. I am not sure why people buy into it. Maybe too much television, where heroes are allowed to save the day within the TTBS all the time.
Further more torture always engages a wide range of techniques -- to the systematic "softening up" of masses of prisoners as at Abu Ghraib or in the ancient dungeon, to one on one "torture-interrogation" techniques that require a high level of training. The torturers in Northern Italian city-states were always highly trained in extracting the proper confession and the right names. They knew their techniques quite well and spent much cogitation and training trying to decide how much pain the body could stand.
If you read the various Latin American "Truth Commission" you will find that the one-on-one torturers in those regimes were also highly trained and often tried to match the level of pain to their victim. I have know doubt that our current torturers are also well trained in their "techniques" also.
By the way all of the Latin American regimes used the TTBS as an excuse also. But many of the torturers themselves when they testified knew that the main goal of their torture technique was to extract as many names as possible in order to spread as much terror as possible. This kind of terror-torture was always used against selected classes of people who were considered disruptive. But within the selected class of people the selection of who to torture specifically was pretty indiscriminate. From all reports this is exactly how the U.S. is using torture today, in its various black prisons and in Afghanistan in Iraq.
Why Jordan has convinced himself to believe the deceptions of the Posners and Scalias and their "imminent danger" scenarios I am not sure.
I just don't see from any of the empirical cases that torture is for anything but terror. Those of you who are arguing (Jordan, Doug, etc.) that torture is to extract "intelligence" have never studied how torture "works" in practically all past cases. Confessions, true or false it never mattered, are not "intelligence." Collection of names in social networks might be considered intelligence but the names are usually collected perforce as if gathering a whole net of names was an end in-itself. (The torturers are in fact playing a demented and perverse game of "six degrees of separation" and they know it. Which is why they limit their torture net to defined classes of people.) Finally, torture for punishment sake is not "intelligence" either. If anyone knows exceptions to these uses and ends of torture outside of fiction and the feverish scenarios of war crime advocates like Scalia, I would like them to point those exceptions out to me.
Jerry Moanco