re: #154 Salamantis

You may not be alone in the belief that it is better to allow thousands of innocent civilian citizens merely going about their day and trying to support their families to die horrible painful deaths rather than to subject a single genocidal terrorist mastermind to extreme discomfort without physical pain or permanent physical consequences in order to extract the information necessary to save them, but I don’t think you’d be in the majority on this list.

And extracting intel is quite different from extracting supposedly false confessions for the purpose of show trials, as what is important about intel is that it be true, and both the interrogator and the interrogatee know that any intel provided will be checked out, and should it prove to be false, they would be seeing each other again - so the interrogatee has an understood and vested interest in not lying about such matters.

Setting any moral issues aside, I think the biggest issue I have is the idea that we got more intel out of German POWs without torture and by taking the time to develop a rapport and relationship with them to turn them. That we could do that with people who was bent on killing entire tribes and nations of people in the middle of a war where literally 1000s of Americans were dying each day, but somehow that won’t work in this day and age, really disturbs me.