Waterboarding scene, when the white guy says, 'Get me a knife'

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yeah, mother russia is really against torture guy...leader in human rights they are, would never think of torturing anyone...they actually get very sad everytime they hear about violence in the world....very intelligent thought

"Why go through the hassle of having to explain why your prisoner has been bashed about blah blah blah "...explain? explain what? to whom? you think the guy doing the beating takes it upon himself or do you think he was told to extract information by higher ups? whattya think the interrogator is worried about being reprimanded? WTF?

ANYONE that thinks waterboarding is being used because it ISN'T effective or DOESN'T succeed and instead thinks it's being used b/c as you put it, "it doesn't leave marks" is moronic...

buddy, you're accusing me, anyone, about looking like an idiot? c'mon....you're an idiot and a loser..that's fine...i wasn't going to call you out on being both...but you can't walk around spewing stupidities and then calling people names...you're doing it wrong? one, or the other...



it is better to have a gun and not need it, than to need a gun and not have it

well the main argument would be that torture by its very nature is designed to give false information as much as correct information. the point of toture is to make it so unpleasent that someone would rather betray their beliefs, their country, their own family if need be to make it stop. which is also why people who dont know anything say ok ok i know stuff, to make it stop. thats why you get people admitting to being terrorists and naming as their co conspirators the 1987 afghan national football team, they just throw out a list of names so you will stop. it also makes it look like torture is always used on the guilty, because even the innocent will confess to stuff they werent involved with to make it stop, or it just carries on until they do, that is the arugment used by countries that do use torture and is regarded as a fallacy by all civilised nations which is why they are pressured not to use it anywhere, they can have whatever laws they want, even banning homosexuality, but torture is seen as a human rights abuse in all situations. everyone breaks in the end so people just say yeh ok i did it and you end up looking down false leads.

so yeh grab some russian green grocer by mistake and eventually hel confess to being stalins secret love child and sponsoring bin laden, doesnt make it so.

if you make the torture so a truly innocent person could resist so you didnt get false results, it would be a waste of time against the truly guilty, so just unnecersary cruelty. this is why evidence obtained by torture cannot be used in a legal case as evidence becuase its less accurate than palm reading the terror suspect. usually what happens is the interogator already has someone they want implicated, they just torture you til you admit guilt and that that guy they keep mentioning was involved, giving them their reason to go bust someone they have no evidence against.

people always use these bogus examples of oh yeh say you had a nuke about to go off and you know you have the guy, but that doesnt happen, torture is used for truly petty stuff and it has never led to any major successes that could not have been simply gained through standard interogation and rapport building, in fact its less reliable, only useful for falsifying evidence. tell me one concrete example of torture working, because there were attempts by people in the military to defend 'enhanced interogation' so if they had evidence of it ever really working, theyd shout it from the rooftops as soon as the intelligence was no longer active, which would be a few months, look how much they released about the seal team six op into pakistan to take out bin laden, theres no oh well maybe it works and we dont know, no, it doesnt work, this is why the top brass of mi6 testify that they will refuse to act on intelligence from torture without collaborative intel from a source not tortured or phone calls etc because its like making security decisions with a ouija board otherwise.

in fact thats what happened with the bogus ricin poison plot in london, algerians tortured a guy that was innocent they had assumed was a terrorist by mistake, he definitly knew at least one nutjob who wanted to carry out violence for religious reasons, but that seems to be it, finally he had to tell them something so it would stop, so he claimed his brothers family in england, who were out of their reach and should be safe, were involved in a plot. the algerians alerted the uk police who raided the familys place smashed it to pieces, nearly killed one of them, arrested over a dozen innocent people in total, then it turned out it was totally bogus, because the info came from torture, it became a scandal that uk police had even used the information when there was so little gurantee of it being true as torture was involved.

the ricin plot was used as an example of torture working and iraq finally having one link to actual terrorists, george w bush announced it while standing next to tony blair, complimenting the uk on their great work foiling a terror plot, watch the footage and you will see tony blair get real uncomfortable and his face go tight because it was already known to have been a total disaster and that there was no real poison, but a reporting black out was put in place for 2 years on national security grounds, so it was covered up that while one lunatic would have liked to use ricin and other poisons to kill lots of people, he never had any and never had any realistic means of getting any. he was a nut who wanted to cause mass mayhem, just like if the guys who carried out aurora/viginia tech/ columbine would have loved something really nasty to cause many more deaths, but just because theyd have used a nuke if they had one didnt mean they had one. so in that case a bunch of innocent people were arrested, all released except the one actual nut who stabbed police during his arrest, all the other 'conspirators' and the 'conspiracy' itself were invented by a guy tortured in algeria to stop being tortured, he just named everyone he knew as being involved. the press reported that 250 thousand people were nearly killed and that a death factory of ricin had been found but none of it was true, it had been said by the guy being tortured, the police said that is what they were looking for, then when nothing was found they blocked the press finding out any new information like that the whole thing was a hoax for 2 years til it had calmed down.

oh yeh and they even announced in 2003 the ricin poison had come from iraq as part of colin powells presentation the un on the case for invading iraq. even though it was known but kept secret, that no ricin had been discovered, so it couldnt have come from iraq, it didnt even exsist. finally 2 vials were found in paris with traces of wheat germ which was mistakenly reported to have been traces of ricin, but again no ricin exsisted. also part of the foul up, ten actual terror suspects were put under a control order by the british home secretary in connection with the poison plot, even though the poison plot didnt really exsist, but also the alleged plot happened while these guys were all in prison and could not have been involved. 2 weeks later when people noticed this the allegation of their involvment was dropped, it seems they just tried to link actual terror suspects to make it sound more real to cover the fact theyd messed up so bad.

so even when you get real intel they exagerate it to make it seem they are cooperating fully and not holding back, so if they only know one thing, they cant just tell you that one true thing, you might think they know more, so they add in 20 made up things to convince you. its always a total mess.

thats why we dont use it. if it was so genius we would do it, it is now considered illegal, wether you call it enhanced interogation or not, there is a reason for this. west point actually wrote to the makers of 24 asking them to stop showing fictional examples of it working because it was making the case of the fairytale of torture being effective as it was actually being believed by some cadets they were trying to teach effective real methods to gain real intelligence, who seemed to believe they could get information faster by just being a lil rough, and in a real emergency to hell with the consequences, the clocks ticking, il do what it takes. except its not, its a romantic fairytale, that is not how intelligence work really happens, the time it would take to find out if he just pulled a keyser soyze making up a story by describing places he visited on holiday and names of people from his favourite soap opera or wether its real would make the whole thing irrelevant.

also, think of how many criminal cases where it appeared someone was certainly guilty, and it turned out to be circumstantial. the only way you could be so positive that this person was definitly involved in something that was truly going on, would be to already have enough evidence that would render the torture pointless anyway. the only way in the real world you would be sure those russian nukes were actually heading to your country and not just a fable told by some walk in hoping for a pay off like the iraq war guy, would be if you already knew where the nukes were, so you wouldnt need the torture. it is a proven fallacy.

again, the iraq war guy, the con artist who every intelligence agency said was lying, including US intelligence, that is a perfect example of someone who will tell you fairy tales of nuclear threats etc, naming real people as being involved, even though its not true, so you could capture and torture all those people for months, and it all be nothing but torture for tortures sake. to ever be in a situation where it might really be any use, you would need a ton of collaborating evidence, which would make it unnecersary. in case you dont know, the iraq guy was just some poor down on his luck iraqi who had done some chemical engineering at college, he ran out of money in europe so tried to sell his false intel to german intelligence. while he was in germany, he was also getting weatlhy iraqis to send him money, claiming he was going around top european schools to find the best one for them to send their children to, but just pocketing the money and doing nothing. the germans knew he did stuff like this and did not believe him, he made up the story of their being mobile chemical weapons factories on trucks that moved around which is why no one could point to a place that was making the imagined wmd's. he knew just enough chemistry to make it sound kind of believable, but experts in the field, when they were given the information said the set up he described was impossible, it just wouldnt work. the white house by that point, as we now all know, had started telling the cia to find a link to iraq, the bush administration wanted war in iraq, they didnt care if they were involved, they were to keep digging until they could make it look that way. so even with parts of the cia saying il eat a turd if this is true, they went to war on the basis of that guys story, just some con artist guy who happened to be from iraq and know some chemistry. when whole countrys can fall for that kind of malarkey, how can you ever be sure enough to torture? if one guy points at another guy and says he is a terrorist, scouts honour, that is not evidence. people lie, people get paid and get a new passport for their lies, there are big rewards for anyone who has worked on their story enough to make it pass the sniff test, and they actively work to sell their lies to intelligence agencies. even some soviet defectors were plants, sent over to make accusations of innocent agents to cause confusion and distrust, the intelligence game is all about lies and misinformation, using torture when you have no idea if what you find out is true or not just adds to the chaos.