As Jack Bauer would say, I DON'T HAVE TIME TO READ THIS REPORT!!!

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

What we NEED to administer to this miscreants are LIGHTNING BOLTS! - and liberally, I might add.

Well, if it's just "torture," and defined specifically enough, that doesn't really change much. There are better methods of obtaining information than ripping out fingernails. After all, psychological "torture" isn't really torture if it's only of teh disorienting kind - the most effective methods, really. After all, anything people do voluntarily (like taking LSD) can't really be considered "torture" if it doesn't result in permanent impairment (not psychological "scars")

And we'll always have rendering, no?

Wait, there's something wrong if we're NOT torturing people? I read that correctly, right? You think that physical torture is among the more effective methods of obtaining information? Let me present you with a scenario.

Let's say somebody thought you stole their car. Not just thought; they were convinced. So they took you into their house and started burning you, slowly, with a branding iron. Slowly and surely, and you're tied down so hard that you can't even move to try to get away from it, not that you could anyway. After a while, even though you didn't steal the guy's car, you're going to tell him that you did, and where he can go to find it, just so he'll let up with that heat for a little bit.

Fargus,

Let's take this slightly more real (as in it actually happened) example:

Two Phillippine Abu Sayyaf members planed a bomb in Manila and it was literally ticking. Both in the same room getting interrogated. Interrogator just "snaps" and shoots one point blank in the head with the other watching.

THe other immediately spills the beans on the bomb's location and it is diffused.

See, Fargus, you're right that physical torture of the individual will yield false positives. That's why psychological torture is more effective.

As has been said here before, if torture does not work, why does our military train our personnel to resist it?

You are right that torture isn't very reliable to extract confessions from people because, well, eventually nearly everyone will break. However, once we know someone is a terrorist (and we have a bunch that are without doubt terrorists), that same inevitable breaking will provide us with what he knows.

If torture doesn't work, we wouldn't have such a long sordid record of torture being employed by every civilization throughout recorded time. However, if you want to make a moral argument against it, that is one thing, but don't try to claim it isn't an effective way of finding out what a recalcitrant individual knows.

All interrogations employ coercion as a tactic to loosen tongues, from the police house to the CIA secret base.

The police threaten that you will go to jail forever unless you talk.

The CIA does the same.

Your concerns about false confessions and misinformation apply to ALL interrogations, and yet I don't think you'd suggest that the police not threaten a suspect with the gas chamber just because he might confess falsely or implicate someone else falsely.

The fact is, torture works, and I'll repost an article quoting an expert on that to end this debate.

Or at least to end it for a few days. Next week, someone will come in and again claim that torture doesn't work.

Pretending that torture doesn't work is just silly. Of course there are situations where torture will produce false positives. But there are also plenty of other situations where torture is the fastest, most effective way to get good information. There's a reason it's been a staple of interrogation throughout most of the world for thousands of years. If you are looking for specific verifiable information, torture can extract it. The main arguments against torture are ethical/moral. If you remove the ethical /moral component, then torture is simply one tool in the interrogator's arsenal.

If I remember right, though we don't really torture detainees, we send them to another country to be tortured for us. I've heard reports of civilian aircraft flying prisoners to Egypt and other countries to extract information. I hope none of them ever came back.