>
> On Apr 23, 2009, at 4:19 PM, Chris Doss wrote:
>
> Now that I think about it a second, I think you seem to be assuming that
>> the person being tortured is just some guy who may or may not know the
>> information being sought and so will just make up information to get the
>> torture to stop. That is not always the case. If you capture Erwin Rommel,
>> you can be pretty sure that he knows a lot about specific German battle
>> plans and you can probably confirm whatever he divulges with relative
>> accuracy.
>>
>
> Of course, that example is completely irrelevant to the cases at hand. It's
> now come out that the reason that those guys were waterboarded so intensely
> was to get them to confess to the nonexistent link between Al Qaeda and
> Saddam Hussein. It had nothing to with "preventing another 9/11."
>
> And, Rommel's a shitty example anyway since what you want is a far more
clearly evil, rather than patrician nationalist, Nazi... but, of course,
then you've once again generated another example of bringing up Nazi's...
and the rule is... "you bring up Nazi's (esp. in an unnecessary and ad hoc
manner), you lose the argument."