I questioned the claim that it is always ineffective.
Jordan responded:
This is precisely the question that leads you to Cheney's position, spelled out clearly in Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine" -- if there's a chance, even a small one, that it could be a threat, you must presume it is; if there's a chance, even a small one, that torture could lead to an intel win, you must do "whatever it takes" ...
..........
Jordan's precisely right.
We don't have to settle for hypotheticals; in the 'War on Terror' (or, Global Struggle Against Extremism, or... whatever the title is today) and War Plans Iraq and Afghanistan, arguments very similar to Chris' 'aw shucks I'm just exploring the philosophical angles' were used by Alan Dershowitz and fellow travellers to outline the conditions and circumstances in which torture could (and, we were encouraged to believe, should) be used.
For example:
Dershowitz: Torture could be justified
<http://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/03/03/cnna.Dershowitz/>
I'm sure Washington didn't wait for clever arguments before proceeding with its mad program. Still, conceptual artifacts built around the idea of 'ticking time bombs' (a variant of Chris' Rommel example) helped create a climate in which torture became an acceptable debating topic.
The boundary of discourse was changed.
Not for the better.
Once again, I'll take an opportunity to quote Zizek, who recognized this problem very early during the Bush administration (and who anticipated the Obama admin's continuation of many Bush era policies):
From, "THE IRAQ WAR: WHERE IS THE TRUE DANGER?"
<snip>
We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation": in a first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the "foreign threat"; in a second negation, the "decent" democratic center, in the very gesture of pathetically rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message in a "civilized" way - in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of background "unwritten rules" has already changed so much that no one even notices it and everyone is just relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And the true danger is that something similar will happen with the "war on terror": "extremists" like John Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy will remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible ethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: they will no longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the mainstream.
from -- <http://www.lacan.com/iraq.htm>
.d.