CelticBear’s Musings

BoingBoing has posted a video showing an interview with a former FBI interrogator discussing the uselessness and the harm of using torture on prisoners.

♦ FBI interrogator: Torture doesn’t work, breeds jihad

The TV show “24″‘s shtick of showing the torture of the guy who has the vital information in a “ticking bomb” scenario is fiction. He’s never encountered that kind of scenario, other interrogators he’s worked with haven’t, and even the Israeli’s who deal with terrorism and bombs all the time, have never needed to resort to torture in a “ticking bomb” scenario.

This whole idea of “any means possible” to wrest vital time-sensitive info from a prisoner is absurd. Worse, it horribly harms our standing as a moral authority in the world.

“We’ve squandered our ability to do effective foreign policy.”
The use of torture simply elevates the hatred against us from radical Islamists, as well as the world community in general.

One BoingBoing commenter had this to say:

The use of torture is completely understandable when you view it from the angle that you want to maintain jihad against your country because you need a real basis for constant public fear in order to rail through military spending increases, reduction of public freedoms and massive citizen monitoring.

If you can find another explanation as to why our government goes literally out of its way to conduct torture in the face of all evidence, argument, and outrage against it, shout.