than testimoney recieved via enhanced interrogatoin technique:

Silence.

Once you get someone talking, you can start to get at the truth. Silence, on the other hand, is impossible to break through. Pretty much why any lawyer will tell you not to tell your side of the story to a cop. Remain silent and wait for counsel.

I'm so sick of this entire subject. Half the crap we talk about doing to people is tamer than most frat house initiations, but we give them scary names. Smearing fake menstral blood on a subject, and rubbing tits against his neck (something some guys pay $30 for two minutes of) is called "sexual humiliation (which sounds like something some guys pay $350 an hour for). Playing loud music? Torture. Sleep deprevatoin? Torture. Give me a break. If we aren't whipping them, disembowling them, or making them listen to a test signal for 24/7, I'm really not too worried.

Let's just fact the facts. While there are some celebrated cases of innocents getting swooped up, most of these guys are bad news. I feel badly for the innocents, but there will always be some non-combatant casaulties in any war, historically, non-combatants are killed at a higher rate than legal combatants. That isn't desirous, but it should put the misfortune of the folks Lithwick mentioned in perspective.

headhunt33 said, "If we aren't whipping them, disembowling them, or making them listen to a test signal for 24/7, I'm really not too worried."

Actually, I think we have whipped and killed a number of suspects. And a majority of those people we inhumanely mistreat are suspects and no more- nothing has been proven true against most of them. I don't really want to get into 'Innocent until proven guilty,' but I certainly don't trust the interrogators to recognize the difference.

Finally, I think silence is generally much more useful than false testimony, especially when that false testimony is used for witch hunts, torture, and other un-American activities.

Headhunt, I presume you'll also readily say "It's ok if they do that stuff to me, because if I'm a terrorist I deserve to have it done to me." You'll also say that there is no way it could happen to you because those types of mistakes don't happen, right?

Let me ask you this, are you ok with our enemies doing those things to our captured soldiers? You''ll respond that they do much worse, of course. Some do, some have, some will. Many have not, but if they made it a policy to respond in kind, that brings it into a whole different light.

Do you understand that under the duress of pain subjects often break down and just tell their interrogators what they want to hear, and not the truth?

I know a lot more about torture and its effectiveness than the average internet poster.

All US soldiers who have been captured have had their Geneva rights violated. I was in a remote area in Iraq and can tell you that the one other american who was with me and I used to say we would save our last bullet for ourselves in an Alamo situation. Lest we find ourselves being beheaded on DVDs sold in the local market. The only countries that follow the Geneva convention in any form is the US and its Western Allies.

Lastly, your final paragraph pretty much demonstrates you missed the original point of my lede paragraph.

headhunt33 said, 'The only countries that follow the Geneva convention in any form is the US and its Western Allies.'

I would dispute that, not least because the US no longer seems to follow the Geneva conventions. I'm not sure there are many forms about them, nor leeway for their following.

I do see your original point (that talking leads to more talking and eventually potentially something worthwhile), but I still hold that sorting through an abundance of false leads is very possibly more damaging than the absence of a lead. Regardless of the value of torture, which I believe is negligible at best and detrimental at worst, I would argue that we are and should be held to a higher standard.

It's amazing you don't even see your own admission contradicting itself. "False leads are more damaging than no leads". No leads lead NOWHERE. Nothing is solved, no one is stopped, nothing is done. False leads (with some truth to them) lead to many false paths, but it also leads to the one "stream of truth" that we were looking for. Often, we have an idea about what is going on (hence, why we know what questions to ask in the first place), we're just looking for confirmation. With a (possibly false, to be fair) confirmation, we can go to the next step that we were thinking of, and work our way to the the truth. With nothing, we can't go anywhere or do anything. At least with a number of leads, we can sift through them to find the wheat amongst the chaff.

This kind of talk makes me glad that the Islamic terrorists are a religious-based group and not an ideological group. Why, you ask? Because they will target the intellectuals, the athiests, and the liberals in their ivory towers in their big "cultural icons" where liberals like to gather. Think I understand hitting a military target like the Pentagon, but the next choice of target was telling: New York City. Downtown Manhattan. The biggest ivory towers in the city, no less. And their next plot (that was foiled, by the way, by interrogation): Los Angeles.

If they ever get through with an attack, guess where it will hit? Not the heartland, not the "flyover country". It will be right in the middle of the very liberal bastions that decry our methods and the means of protecting them. Then what?

Pursuing false leads takes away resources that can be better spent elsewhere. In science, in politics, in war, you name it, it's often quicker to get where you're going if you don't have to backtrack and begin anew from your starting place. We live in a world of limited resources. Every false lead takes away from the pursuit of the real one(s).

But it is reasonless to desire information that a Pharisee would give you in the first place.

The OP and this Speed Racer dude are truly scary. I love the piece of timeless imagery represented by your 'last bullet'.

You have got to be shitting me. Torture is never ok, under any circumstances. We have had well over 100 prisoner deaths occur under our tender ministrations. Dont give me that frat house bullshit either.

We dont avoid torture for the sake of others, we do it for ourselves.

Y'all need to grow the hell up. The Gestapo spent a ton of time torturing the French during WWII, yet Gen Eisenhower rated the French Resistance as being worth 15 divisions in the field. Freaking 15.

The French are slow learners I guess, so they spent their time in Algeria inventing brand new ways of using electrodes on their way to a big fat loss.

It's not that no one ever gives up info under torture, but that the info that you get is usually useless and you piss off enough other people that you create.

But, hey, don't let facts get in the way or your homoerotic fantasies.

...create new enemies, that is.

that's the irony then, we liberals die in our ivory towers because of the hatred for idiots who think like you.

Grow up and stop lying to yourself, America sucks because of your ilk.

headhunt: you dont really get it, do you? People voluntarily submit themselves to frat initiations, just as women voluntarily submit themselves to getting their shitholes rocked. But when you remove that consent, an element of terror is introduced; hazing becomes torture and sex becomes rape. If your daughter were raped, would you tell her "people have sex in frat houses all the time..."

If you've ever been stuck in jail, you'll know how excruciating it can be to simply sit in a room. Now imagine someone is pretending to drown you...you don't know what these people are about...maybe theyre actually willing to kill you, or maybe they don't know how to do the technique properly. Thats what terror is.

And alot of those guys are innocent. Many of them got scooped up on tips from shady characters in afghanistan. Some of the warlord guys were using us as a weapon, ratting out their non-terrorist enemies just to get rid of them.

headhunt33:

All US soldiers who have been captured have had their Geneva rights violated. Well that's just plain erroneous.

I was in a remote area in Iraq and can tell you that the one other american who was with me and I used to say we would save our last bullet for ourselves in an Alamo situation. -- Pretty telling, that. Your not claiming to have been a soldier, it appears to me that you are/were much like a whole lot of those "wannabe soldiers" that I ran into in country. Only "facts" they knew were from movies/TV/imagination, too.