(THREAD ON TORTURE) Yes, waterboarding is torture. US convicted Japanese soldiers of war crimes for waterboarding in WWII. Watch video of it (not recommended)--it's obviously torture. But no, torture's not "entirely unreliable." Torture opponents should stop saying so. Here's why https://twitter.com/DocPeteyJ/status/974044222071259136 …
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Throughout history, people from many cultures used torture. If the info garnered from torture was always unreliable, then this is a millennia-old mass delusion. Armies, police, criminals, etc. kept getting bad info and yet kept doing it. Much more likely: it worked sometimes. 2/x
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Modern torture--employing waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" that US used in the early War on Terror--is more sophisticated than causing pain and promising to stop in exchange for info. It's more psychological. Actual psychiatrists helped design it. 3/x
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The goal of modern torture is to create confusion: pain and sleep deprivation so the prisoner messes up. Interrogators aren't stupid. They don't naively believe whatever someone says under torture. They pay attention to what prisoners don't say, and look for contradictions. 4/x
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At the extremes, the goal of torture is to induce depression. Make someone give up. Then, when they're starved for the most basic human kindness, have someone new be kind to them. Sort of like a prolonged, incredibly messed up good cop/bad cop. 5/x
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Some professional interrogators say this psychological torture yields info better or more quickly than non-torture techniques. Others strongly disagree. Scientifically, it's impossible to answer. Can't run an experiment with a control group. 6/x
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The reason not to torture isn't because the technique always fails. It's because it's wrong. Deeply, morally, inhumanely wrong. 7/x
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"Torture never works" is the wrong argument to make. It's illogical, countered by many interrogators who have used torture, and, ultimately too easy. If the moral and the practical line up perfectly, there's no debate. But there is a debate, because they don't. 8/x
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Don't torture, even if it works. We're better than that. We have to be. We'll find another way. That accepts an element of risk: What if we don't torture and then there's a terrorist attack? We didn't do absolutely everything. Right. That's what makes it a moral argument. (END)
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