John Yoo Slimes Up the WSJ’s Op-Ed Page Again

This one subject remains the one that tears at me from two sides.

My heart and soul tells me that torture is wrong - period.
My intellect tells me that you cannot get information to protect your citizens by tickling their feet and saying "pretty please".

When it comes down to it.....
If I could save one person between a terrorist being tortured and an American civilian who is about to blown to bits....
That would not be a tough decision.

My intellect tells me that you cannot get information to protect your citizens by tickling their feet and saying "pretty please".

Well, give your intellect a good solid eight hours sleep, and when that's done you'll slap your head and tell yourself, "Jeeeez! How could I have been such a silly silly boy to think the only alternative to torturing someone is tickling their feet and saying 'pretty please.' " And if that doesn't work, go talk to some of the intelligence officers who have interrogated suspected terrorists at great length for weeks and months and gotten important information by building rapport and trust. Example: the U.S. officer in charge of Iraq interrogations whose traditional interrogation methods got the information about al-Zarqawi's location that allowed an airstrike to be called in and a couple of 500-pound bombs dropped that flattened his house and sent him to his reward. Or, for that matter, like the F.B.I. agents who successfully interrogated KSM and got most of the information out of him that the C.I.A. thugs and Dick Cheney are taking credit for after they got their paws on him.

There is no need for torture to get good information and even more important torture is so much less efficient than traditional interrogation methods at getting reliable intelligence that there is just no comparison. Torture produces almost nothing but junk.

For bonus points, you might also want to consider the small detail that torture is completely and absolutely illegal under both U.S. and international laws to which the U.S. is a party.

I've always wondered how popular torture programs would be if bankers and politicians, who were being investigated for their destructive scandals, were also candidates.

JD Please explain how WW2 was won without US torture. The FBI bailed when we started our sad fling with torture. Clowns in the CIA and outside contractors did the sadistic dance...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/...
Yoo is just trying to cover his ass from future prosecution...

To me Jefferson's dilemma is a false dichotomy. From a position of love of country, I would like us to continue to be the beacon for freedom and "real" democracy in the world. It is with practices like these that the USA has fallen far from grace. Secondly, I am very surprised our "loyal enemy" (Deep bow....whoops) has not chosen to do the same to our troops. If their are no rules, or the USA does not follow the rules, why should they? So it protects our troops and invests in them a certain righteousness of cause, currently lost out there. Just as we are perceived as cowards for dropping bombs from drones that kill indiscriminately. In religious terms, we become the devil incarnate, willing to do anything, to stretch the human form, beyond its capacity to bear. It is my belief as well, that it profoundly and adversely affects the ones doing, witnessing, participating in torture. The rest is just hypothetical, if A were threatened we torture B to save A, but I don't believe it is so simplisitic.

All criminals will do anything possible to prevent evidence of their criminal acts from becoming evidence.

JD, "This one subject remains the one that tears at me from two sides."

I understand your dilemma. For me I would want the government to do anything it takes to protect the nation. However I know that if someone tortured me and if I thought that telling them my father was the real mastermind behind 9/11 then I'd tell them to make the torture stop. Military people undergo training to resist torture, but even then everyone has a breaking point. If you were tortured a couple times you might be able to resist... but seriously hundreds of times? And what if you really didn't know anything? If the interrogators thought you might know something but were keeping it from them, then there's nothing to prevent them from continuing their torture. And these people weren't even brought to trial and convicted. Many of the Gitmo detainees were "turned in" to the military by someone who had a bone to pick with them.... not because they had anything to do with terrorist activities.

But the bottom line for me is that the US has laws and principles. If anyone, including the government, disregards tour values then we have let the terrorists win. After all the goal of the terrorists is to destroy the way of life in the US. So far they are partially successful.

Before 9/11 the US was a pretty free and enlightened place, though by no means perfect but we were working on it. But after 9/11 our government has clamped down on dissent no matter how benign, tortured innocent people, instilled fear into its citizens to launch preemptive attacks on others and taken away our constitutional protections. The US is more like a middle-eastern country that tortures, has a repressive society, does not fight for human rights, invades others at its own whim and does not follow either its own constitution or its own laws.

Seriously... why fight the terrorists if we're just going to be like them anyway?

Unlike all of you above, I can sympathize with JD looking at both sides of this issue. Many of you only see one side of many an issue (or won't admit it you did see the other side). As a general rule, I don't agree with with torture, unlike the Taliban and AQ.
Unusual scenario: a little girl has been kidnapped and the kidnapper caught. But he won't divulge where he has buried her with a days worth of air to sustain her.

Probably the most important point was quoted by Kathy here:

"And Eric Holder is convinced there’s plenty that comes from clean sources."

While ObamaCo's decision raises all kinds of alerts in normal people, and we'll worry about revelation of sources and methods or wrongful declassification of information (with a perverted view of holding to a "higher" standard of conduct, no doubt), the real issue is that -- assuming they have not bungled this as badly as they have other things so far this year -- they checked and are reassured that they have good evidence against the suspects that was not obtained through torture or otherwise faces exclusion.

dduck12, "Unusual scenario: a little girl has been kidnapped and the kidnapper caught. But he won't divulge where he has buried her with a days worth of air to sustain her."

How do we know she's still alive? Did we torture the kidnapper until he told us she was alive, which is what we wanted to hear?

Military people undergo training to resist torture, but even then everyone has a breaking point.

Also, torture-resistance training is torture-resistance training -- it's not torture. In other words, when military people go through the SERE program and are waterboarded, for example, the intent is to help them resist the torture. The intent is *not* to break them and force them to confess or to reveal information (whether or not it's true). Without trivializing the seriousness of the training, what they experience is nothing like what an actual detainee would experience.

There aren't two sides to this issue. Not every issue has two sides, and torture only has one side: It's absolutely wrong and illegal, in all instances. And ineffective.

"As a general rule, I don't agree with torture" is a non-starter. There's no such thing as "Sometimes it's okay to torture." The prohibition against torture is absolute.

Your scenario is old, old, old, old -- tired, cliched, utterly without validity, a total red herring. It exists only in these arguments about torture; it has never happened in real life, and never will.

And it's a good thing, too. Because if your absurdity ever happened, that little girl would die because torture is *the* most inefficient and unreliable way of getting accurate information that there is.

Stockboy,

I agree entirely (well 99%) with your statement above.
I stand wholeheartedly AGAINST all torture.

I also contend that if you are acting LIKE the enemy, then you are no better THAN the enemy.

The one statement you made that makes my spine shake is that "Before 9/11 the US was a pretty free and enlightened place". Not sure I can get behind that statement. "Enlightenment" is WAY too subjective a term - as it means something different to everyone. We either get "enlightened" toward humanism, or are enlightened toward God. That's MY version of enlightenment. Everyone else's may be different.

Who are you to say whether there are two sides to any question? You seem to have a very high opinion of your righteousness and accuracy.
My very old, old example may be tired and cliched, but kids are being kidnapped, raped and sold into slavery all over the world, today. As far as my poor old example goes, however, your preferred interrogation method would take too long to prevent a potential tragedy. But, hey, its only a far out story. In real life the mastermind (and it was a masterful plan, well executed, give the Devil his due) of 9/11 and other murderous acts, would not have any potentially useful information, now would he?

Who are you to say whether there are two sides to any question?

Um, a rational human being? After all, I also say that people who say there are two sides to the Holocaust, the Jewish side and the Nazi side, and most people aren't looking at the Nazi point of view, are making a totally illegitimate argument. There aren't two sides to the Holocaust. Or, okay, to be more precise, there may be two sides, but one side is legitimate and the other side is not.

In real life the mastermind (and it was a masterful plan, well executed, give the Devil his due) of 9/11 and other murderous acts, would not have any potentially useful information, now would he?

In real life, you would not know, with certainty, that the person you had before you had the answers you wanted to the questions you were asking. You don't know if he's the perpetrator. You don't know if he knows the perpetrator. You don't know if he planned the kidnapping or took part in it. You don't know if he knows where the little girl is. Because if you knew all those things, then you would already have your answers, and you wouldn't need to question the person before you, correct?

The above being true, torture is a highly unreliable and time-consuming method of extracting accurate information. A person will admit to anything under torture, and tell an interrogator whatever they think the interrogator wants to hear, to stop the torture, but that doesn't mean it's true. And if it's not true, all that time has been wasted.

As far as my poor old example goes, however, your preferred interrogation method would take too long to prevent a potential tragedy.

And your preferred interrogation method would almost certainly not get you accurate and reliable information. You would be spending lots of time chasing false leads and having to go back to the person and torture him again, and still not know if the information was accurate. When you torture someone to get information, you are giving that person HUGE incentives to tell you lies and give you junk instead of facts. Why you would be so eager to push that kind of method if your goal is to save a life is beyond my ability to understand.

You must have a black and white television, cause you sure think that way. And, I still say you are not necessarily a rational person, implying I am not, but a highly unreliable one because of your tunnel vision.
You know very well what that story meant and all your cute little what ifs don't change the meaning. Again, too many words, not enough rational reasoning.

"How do we know she's still alive?"

Or "she was still alive," demanded Harry's superior, letting Scorpio walk free...

"You must have a black and white television, cause you sure think that way."

At least "DirtyHarry" was in color. Most viewers took Harry's, not the brass's side, incidentally.

"Your scenario is old, old, old, old"

Like good old Kezar Stadium. (Brodie)