>I made no claim about the moral permissibility or the desirability
>of engaging in torture. I questioned the claim that it is always
>ineffective.
It isn't always ineffective. In fact torture is very effective at obtaining confessions. Who has claimed otherwise? It is your claim that it is effective at obtaining reliable intelligence that is being challenged.
Or can't you understand the distinction?
Now, what about all those witches identified under torture? Was that torture an effective intelligence gathering exercise, or was it an exercise in obtaining confessions (and the names of further people to be tortured until they confess?)
Explain, in 100 words or less, what went wrong there? You've already proclaimed that there never were any witches, so how did the whole torture exercise go so terribly wrong do you think?
>"Doing x is bad" does not mean that "doing x never works." This is
>reading morality into causality, a variant on "bad people never
>prosper." ;)
Which, again nobody is arguing. You are wriggling and squirming like a worm on a hook, trying to divert attention from the issue.
The point is that your assertion that torture is effective as a means of obtaining intelligence is a defacto defense of torture. A very slippery and cunning defense of torture, in that intelligence gathering always was and always must be a pathetic excuse to brutalise victims. No-one in their right mind actually believes that what the victim tells you under torture can be relied on to be true.
There is certainly no evidence that it is a reliable way to gain reliable information. Professional intelligence operators certainly don't bother with it.
So anyone who actually argues that (questions the "claim" that it is always ineffective, in your weasel words) is worse than the person who frankly admits that they engage in torture because they enjoy being cruel. The latter are brutes, the former are truly sinister.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas