Torture DOESN'T Work (at least not for information gathering)

Irrational, Unhinged, Neo-con jack-pipe Charles "crap-hammer" Krauthammer argues in defense of torture on the old sliding rhetorical crutch of "well, what if there was a bomb about to go off,then torture is ok, right?"

Sorry, but NO.

Unless they have been conditioned to withstand it, people being tortured will tell you any goddamn thing that they think will make the pain stop.

Interrogative torture is worthless.

But that does not stop our erstwhile war and torture apologist from expounding thus:

Our scrupulousness extends even to providing them with their own Korans, which is the only reason alleged abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo ever became an issue. That we should have provided those who kill innocents in the name of Islam with precisely the document that inspires their barbarism is a sign of the absurd lengths to which we often go in extending undeserved humanity to terrorist prisoners.

Well, Herr doktor, by that line of logic, anyone who reads the the Bible or the Torah is equally prone to violence, so if you've got more than two brain cells to rub together, i think it best not to venture in that direction.

Oh, but the bullshit gets better:

there is the terrorist with information. Here the issue of torture gets complicated and the easy pieties don't so easily apply. Let's take the textbook case. Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking.

Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?

Now, on most issues regarding torture, I confess tentativeness and uncertainty. But on this issue, there can be no uncertainty: Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty.

BZZZZT!


WRONG!

If your hypothetical bomber is committed enough, he/she will either still tell you nothing, or worse, they will LIE and divert your resources in the proverbial "wild goose chase" thus allowing the hypothetical bom to go off and leaving you look like a very real jackass. Also, since we're playing with hypotheses, assume for a moment that the person you have in your clutches has insufficient knowledge of the location of the hypothetical bomb as his hypothetical masters would have likely divided the bombing plans among small, disparate cells of hypothetical terrorists for the explicit purpose of rendering any confession worthless.

Kraphammer, in his simple-minded neo-con droolings assumes that the enemy is as simple-minded as he himself, but when you consider that there have still been major terror attacks since the Black Sites were established suggests a more sophisticatedlevel of organization and planning than can be addressed by coercive interrogation.

From my own experiences having been on the receiving end of a private-sector torture session and from my own experiences coercing information out of people as a debt collector for parties i cannot name, physical torture is typically only useful as a strictly punitive measure.

Threatening someone's pets, lovers or family members in a convincing fashion is infinitely more effective for extracting information because then the subject believes that not only will there be terrible consequences (and whether or not you actually make good on the threats is beside the point half the time) - they believe that they will be forced to LIVE with themselves having been the instrument of undue harm on their own friends/family/pets... It's an infinitely less human thing to do, but unless you've actually ever gotten your hands dirty laying a beating on someone or been on the receiving end of that sort of violence, you really should just shut the tapdancing fuck up, Chuckles.