>It occurred to me yesterday that there's a win-win-win in here.
>Cheney wants to prove that waterboarding produces the truth. We
>want to find out the truth of all the things he did, and we want to
>punish him for it.
>
>The obvious solution is that we should waterboard him. If he tells
>us what we what to know, everyone will be happy.
This is exasperating.
Torture isn't used to learn things, its used to force people to say things you want to hear. Or that the person being tortured think that the torturer wants to hear.
It was very effective in getting that Kalid fellow to confess to the 9/11 thing. In fact I recall he was reported to have confessed to thousands of other similar crimes as well. Torture was very effective at getting people to confess to being witches.
So it would be a good way to get Cheney to confess to war crimes. But we wouldn't learn anything new. We already know he's guilty of war crimes and anything else that he confessed to would be of doubtful use, because he'd be likely to say anything. We wouldn't know what was true and what was made up because he thought that's what we wanted to hear.
So everybody just try get that through your thick heads - torture is not a useful intelligence gathering tool.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas