N.B.

[pecunium]

For those of you who stumbled in here because ginmar, matociquala, geekchick, patgreene or some other person I know not; who chose to link to me, welcome.

Read the info page for an idea of who I am. Read the rules for some idea of how to take part (and please take part, this is just wanking if no one comments).

I said something in that last post which was meant to tell the regular readers of this thing how strongly I feel about this. I trust most of them saw it, and that it had some (if only subliminal) effect.

I'm an interrogator, for the U.S. Army. I convince people to betray their friends, so my friends can kill their friends. And that's OK with me. I sleep well at night (mostly, but that's not what wakes me up and haunts my dreams).

I hate torture. It doesn't work. I would not mentally; nor morally, able to sit on a jury where torture is the charge. I would be too prone to convict. I'd want to hurt convicted torturers. I am not completely rational on the subject.

If you doubt me, just google my name, and interrogation, or my name and torture.

So when I say this is worse than torture, I mean it's as bad as bad can be.

Torture warps and destroys those who use it. That's bad.

It gets bad information, which leads to bad intel, which leads to bad decisions. That's bad.

Bad decisions leads to the wrong people getting killed. That's bad.

This is worse.

Comments

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

I keep trying to tell people this, but arguments against what you and I say generaly go "blah blah ticking time bomb, blah blah not really torture, blah blah must use all tools at our disposal, blah blah our troops can do no wrong."

It's horseshit. But nothing I say seems to get through to people who support torture.

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

Torture is evil and wrong. Full stop.

It's ineffective, too.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

I wish our dear leaders would get that memo.

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

No kidding, huh?

When they guys whose job it is to get information out of people say "Um, yeah, that doesn't work so well," you'd *think* someone would get the message.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Just keep repeating it.

If they voted for it, just keep repeating it.

It's kind of like the start of de-programming someone, first you have to get them to a state of semi-compliance; by which I mean they have to become receptive to the idea of really talking about it, rather than knee-jerk defense.

Bush lied, we know this; but lots of people will try to shade his mendacity with explantations of how it wasn't really lying, after all he has more intel than we do, and lots of other people thought there was a stockpile of WMD, and Hussein's agents talked with the plotters of That Tuesday, and, and, and.

All of which is flummery. Once you get them past the point of defending these things (some of which is going to be in self-defense, they after all were duped) you can show them the facts, but first they have to be willing to listen.

Torture is wrong. It doesn't work.

Those are more useful points than it's being against a whole lot of laws.

Torture is wrong. It doesn't work.

See how effective it is.

TK