re: #38 Daniel Ballard

BTW, I sincerely believe any President real or prospective (looking at you Al Gore) would easily have made “over reaction” motivated mistakes in the weeks and months after 9/11. Maybe not torture.

Maybe we would have invaded Pakistan too, and fought a short battlefield nuclear war. That could have been the big mistake as bad or worse than invading Iraq for one example.

Maybe we would have decimated Afghanistan, looked at the history of occupiers there and just walked away to let them die & suffer under the warlords unaided by the rest of the world. Or who knows what might have been?

Yes that is true. But I just could not hold out with lies I don’t think. They would get the truthful words from my mouth and then who knows what all else. Not a very masculine a thing to say but that’s a poor substitute for sincerity anyway.

Consider a situation where the information being sought might endanger the lives of your family. You’d do whatever you had to do to get the torture to stop, but you’d certainly explore any possible way to get it to stop, including providing incorrect information. Consider that you might have been trained in ways to provide information that wouldn’t be useful. You have to consider context, but clearly the plurality of expert opinion is that the information you get is unreliable and that using torture is likely counterproductive to the process of gaining useful information.

Note that we have no proof that any of the information they obtained from these techniques was useful in any direct or immediate way.