Um, I hate to ask the obvious, but if torture doesn't work then why do people get tortured?

Anyway, torture does work. So does sleep deprivation and other tactics permitted by Geneva that the US uses, which is only classified as "torture" by the intellectually dishonest.

Later,
bbeck

We torture because we can, Bbeck. It's a trick we learned from Bill Clinton.

How f***ing stupid is Bush? He's letting this crucial issue be decided by political football-itis, with no apparent playbook of his own.

What on earth is going on?

So, from your example of our captured pilots in Vietnam we learn that torture works because these guys eventually lied - by reading anti-American screeds on tape - to end the torture. Or were they broken into telling the truth by the torture they were subjected to?

Depending on the answer you and I may have a different definition of success.

Heh, Sobek. I see that Hillary continues to torture us with her presence.

And Too Many Steves, the pilots were broken by the torture and did what they were told regardless of the truth. If you want someone to say, "I have brown hair" and you torture them into saying, "I have brown hair," then you achieved your goal; it doesn't matter if the person has brown hair or not. And, when you achieve the goal you were aiming for, that is "success" by definition.

Later,
bbeck

Sorry, but I have to say, respectfully, no.

All the recent discussion of torture has been about using it to gather intelligence, not to force people to make anti-american videos. So the example of our fighter pilots in Vietnam is irrelevant to that discussion except in that it demonstrates that those being tortured will, eventually, do whatever they think necessary to end the torture; including give false information.

False information is not valuable intelligence.

To the initial premise, Glenn is pointing out what I have tried to point out, that there is a legal determination of which parts of the Geneva Conventions have been retaified by the U.S., and of those parts what rules apply to which enemy combatants. That's the question Gonzales was answering in his memo, and he did it correctly.

Whether we should, in the absence of any legal requirement not to, torture anybody, is a wholly separate question. Too many people are confusing these separate issues. Because some people feel that they answer to this issue is "no", they attack Gonzales for not pretending that there was an international law that would compel that result.

SteveL,

Precisely, and well-put.

Too Many, the example you gave above was not forcing intelligence information, but it was forcing a confession to war crimes. So with your example, success is not based upon the truth of the confession but whether or not they got the confession they wanted. That is Success no matter how respectfully you disagree with it.

However, if you want to use another example that deals with getting intel out of someone, and if they gave FALSE intel while under torture, then you're right, the torture was not successful. False information is not helpful whereas a false confession is.

However, torture works to get truthful intelligence information out of people, which is one of the reasons why soldiers are not required to only give "name, rank, and serial number" anymore. The code of conduct for soldiers and POWs has been changed from "Give no information" to "Resist as long as you can, and if you break, then continue to resist afterwards but don't beat yourself up about it" -- or more basically, "Return with honor" -- because it's known that tortured soldiers will either talk or get killed, and you can't RETURN if you're dead.

Later,
bbeck

I think the most important thing is to separate the general issue of rules that the US fights by, from the issue of Gonsalez or whatever persons might be involved.
Another separation that must be made - and I think Insta is helping make it - is that torture and Gen. Con. are two different issues.
There is no doubt in my mind that Geneva Conventions are useless when dealing with terrorists, and that Andy Sullivan is currently undergoing a change from being full of crap, to being simply and boringly stupid.
I agree that to say that torture doesn't vote is to avoid the question. I haven't seen any torture policy, and I don't know where to look for a good one. I think that such a policy can't be adopted, until enough people realize that Geneva Conventions are useless, and that there is no international law that really deals with our problem.

I think the most important thing is to separate the general issue of rules that the US fights by, from the issue of Gonsalez or whatever persons might be involved.
Another separation that must be made - and I think Insta is helping make it - is that torture and Gen. Con. are two different issues.
There is no doubt in my mind that Geneva Conventions are useless when dealing with terrorists, and that Andy Sullivan is currently undergoing a change from being full of crap, to being simply and boringly stupid.
I agree that to say that torture doesn't vote is to avoid the question. I haven't seen any torture policy, and I don't know where to look for a good one. I think that such a policy can't be adopted, until enough people realize that Geneva Conventions are useless, and that there is no international law that really deals with our problem.