Quote Originally Posted by nightflier
How exactly does that make me a liberal? The more people see torture, the more people think it's OK. That gives our foreign service men, military, and all the shady folks in between license to do the same. The problems with that whole way of doing things are:

1. Those that survive our "treatment" and those who know them, will hate us that much more. Call it blowback or whatever, but this is one surefire way to create more American-hating planejackers. Let's all remember that the folks we now refer to as Al Qaeda, are the same folks we trained and called freedom fighters back when Reagan was in charge. Good one.

2. When our guys get caught, our enemies have absolutely no guilt about yanking out their fingernails, tearing off eyelids and boiling their feet. Don't believe me? Check out what's happened to some of the poor bastards who got caught in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Their stories will turn your stomach.

3. To get results from torture, you need to capture a large number of folks, fry them to a crisp, and hope that one of them knows something. Never mind the fact that 99% of people tortured don't know anything, but the whole single-guy-tortured / ticking-time-bomb scenario is a fiction, perpetuated by shows like 24. In reality it's much more like finding a needle in a haystack, except that the haystack are all the inocent people who have to be tortured to find the one needle.

4. The people who really do know stuff don't break. They will reveal partial truths, misleading info, and implicate others who know nothing, until their minds are mush. Most people who are tortured to that point are complete vegetables afterwards. Check out what's happened to our service men who've come back from soviet prisons or the poor saps who've spent some time in Chinese prisons where the technology to break people is unlimited. In the real world, Jack would never have survived that without becoming a complete head-case - showing him completely recovered is telling the public that torture isn't so bad and that people can survive it. Not likely.

5. The success in breaking people depends entirely on how long the "technicians" have to work on the victims. The gruesome stuff you see on 24 and movies like Syriana is actually hollywood theatrics. If information needs to be extracted from a group of people, the prolonged psychological effect of long-term abuse is the most likely to get results, however unreliable these results may be (see above). Gruesome torture is actually widely used throughout the world for punishment rather then acquiring information. 24 completely misleads the public into believing a fantasy description of torture - it's really pretty disgusting.

6. Finally, because of the large numbers that need to be tortured to get results - call it an assembly line of torture, if you will - it turns out that only large bureaucracies are capable of doing it. Only countries like China, the US, and Russia really have the means. Some states like Romania, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and pre-2001 Iraq have/had to spend extensive resources to maintain a repressive system that brings useful results, and much of this bureacratic apparatus is more for spreading fear rather than actually getting results (a good book about how this worked in Iraq is called The Republic of Fear). So ironically, torture at such a scale is really a modern product of an industrialized state. The US has been at the forefront of this disgusting trend - and that is why they typically don't support effective international anti-torture legislation. I hate to break it to you, but after China, the US is the largest manufacturer of torture tools, techniques, and research.

These are simply the facts. You can do your own research if you like, but it's a pretty F'up system. What is portrayed on 24 is just Hollywood nonsense that fuels American ignorance, xenophobia, and calousness about what is really a horrible legacy of abuse. There's nothing liberal about pointing that out, but there is something absolutely moronic in applauding a show like 24 for doing this. I don't know if the director of 24 has an agenda with this, but one thing I can say: he either has no clue about the real world, or he willfully seeks to mislead his audience about it. In either case, it's a gross asault on Human Rights, the historical record, and ultimately our legacy as an "advanced" civilization.

Bleeding Heart Liberal? Yeah, whatever.
Good comments.

To be fair I think my buddy Rich's comments were meant to be light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek after some of your earlier rounds, and not to provoke you. He's got a new year's resolution to avoid political threads

But a good, somewhat on-topic comment...how much does 24's use of torture desensitize us to its immorality? If simple, fictional TV violence is enough sway their opinion, then surely the "in the interest of our country" attempt at justification of the use of torture would be enough to win support too...I'd like to think people are smarter than that. If they're not, it's too late and additional TV violence isn't going to cause any more harm anyway.

As for torture in general...I always thought the difference between the good guys and the bad guys is that the good guys would exhaust all options before using any means necessary to win. But at some point I guess your back gets pushed against the wall, and as much as I hate to admit it, I think deep down inside I always knew that we elect and appoint people to make that ugly decision for us when it has to be made.

I'm probably in that group that publically doesn't like it, but silently, if it came to the point where it saves our lives I...not accept, but rather consicously ignore its use...which is probably just as bad. Just being honest.