AS93: Enhanced Interrogation

In this episode I discuss the Senate Report on Torture that came out last week. As you’ve no doubt heard by now, it’s pretty horrifying. But does Sam Harris condone such behavior? According to CJ Werleman, yes. According to Sam Harris, likely not. Here are some links I discussed.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/john-yoo-torture-report-dustbin-article-1.2039758

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/11/370055472/dick-cheney-on-senate-torture-investigation-the-report-is-full-of-crap

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/senate-torture-report-details_n_6295396.html

3 thoughts on “AS93: Enhanced Interrogation”

  1. David Haney
    about torture…
    Seems to me the biggest dispute is over the definition of torture.

    Didn’t interview the heads of the programs? Why would they? All official positions are on record and the committee wanted to use “black and white” facts that can be backed up via reports.

    The CIA lied? -gasp- imagine that! The group that is to be the masters of deception deceived us? Really? lol. This points to suggest the CIA knew they were doing wrong and they had to cover it up.

    We subcontracted out…. Blackhat(?), Blackgate (?), Blackwater (?), Psychos R Us (?), whatever…. profits were made off this bullshit… that reeks in and of itself.

    24 is fictional… Jack Bauer was not involved.

    Tortue is for the torturer not the information gained… if ppl are going to talk, they will talk before the pain… if they are fanatical to not talk before the pain, odds are, they won’t talk during or after as they would rather die for their cause.

    We didn’t torture or imprison just the “bad guys”…. We damned innocent people to this for the sole reason of being different than us.

  2. Coming from a christian conservative family who is Pro Bush/Cheney/CIA/War on Terror; I find it refreshing to hear your podcast, with many of your sentiments echoing my own.

  3. good old dick c. comes off as not just non-apologetic but as having boarder line psychopathy. Whatever happened to the ideal “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

    He could just said “at the time, we where under great pressure to get the bad guys, and we did what we thought was appropriate. We can’t change what we did, but we can work for better intelligence gathering in the future.”
    This is still non-apologetic, still “dickish”, but not “Well you killed our innocence! We’ll torture all of you if we can, guilty or innocet!” attitude he’s had on every interview.

    for torture, the issue is if a victim has no information, but you think they do perhaps because of bad intel, when exactly do you know when to stop the torture? when do know for sure they are telling the truth and your intel is wrong. Military and secret service don’t have a great history of admitting they’ve made mistakes, certainly a few looks at past wars can demonstrate this.

    Do you put a suspect through treatment 1,2,3,4,5 or just 1,2 before declaring they know nothing. what’s our threshold…who sets the threshold? What’s the oversight on this. Is there a manual for this based on reasoned metrics (and not some medieval witch torture manual, or something from the soviets or Nazis).

    There is a worry in my mind is that assuming no one is innocent means you will never find them innocent, and continual increase your torture regiment to fulfill your agenda until it has gone to far.

    If a torture victim is innocent, do you release them (risking them become radicalized for good reason) or do you keep them in jail.. for how long..forever…even if they are innocent or a non-primary suspect. Can we justify kidnapping families and torture them to see if a relative is a terrorist…how many of them can we take, what age? can we torture family in front of suspect to get them to talk? Slippery slope arguments…for sure…just fantasy like 24 with Jack Bauer….not so sure.

    While terrorist need little reason to commit violence, the stigma of torture certainly does nothing to quell more radicalization by those who are not quite there yet.

    Sadly because of the secrecy and “icky” nature of enhanced interrogation, its really hard to say if it worked or not, or if it had some form of checks and balances. Honestly IDK. Yes A bipartisan investigation would have been nice, but utterly impossible in the current political environment.

    Many secularist talk about the idea of treatment based justice over revenge based justice for criminals of all sorts… but are terrorist the exception to this rule, even those chorused into it or questioning their decisions to join? IDK. Are we, to scared to have this conversation as much as the torture one. Yes.

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