I just saw a headline that amazed me.
Can't believe that no one has diaried this. Headline:
Unresolved debate in DOJ memos: Does torture work?
Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems like a sea change.
I haven't said that since Election Day.
And since then I've had my doubts about whether I was right then, or not.
http://news.yahoo.com/...
Here're the first three sentences (I think that's ok under fair usage, no?).
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 38 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Interrogators have centuries of experience extracting information from the unwilling. Medieval inquisitors hanged heretics from ceilings. Salem magistrates used fire to elicit witchcraft confessions. And CIA officers waterboarded terrorism suspects in clandestine prisons.
Yet it has not settled a debate as old as interrogation itself: Does torture work?
I know we're not supposed to post diaries without "adding" to a topic. But, as Hunter S. Thompson used to say, "Res Ipsa Loquiter." The thing speaks for itself.
Better than I can.
Torture has neither good press nor a good track record.
Thousands of witches confessed on the rack. How many of them could REALLY fly and consort with the devil?
Not many, I'd guess.
If I were waterboarded, I'd darn sure come up with something to say, just to get them to stop.
Wouldn't you?
If I had enough of my wits left about me to think about it rationally, I'd give my inquisitors something that might seem possible to believe, but impossible to check.
Such as "Yes, we have 100 Uzbek co-conspirators who are going to come to the US on tourist visas and each will attack a large shopping mall with an assault rifle on the first Friday after Thanksgiving."
Or,
"We have renegade Chechen scientists working on a rabies virus variant that is transmitted by mosquitoes."
But that's enough of me. What do YOU think? Is this a sea change?