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Changelog: On Torture

765
researchok11/04/2010 7:12:03 pm PDT

re: #760 Obdicut

Your narrative is a fiction. You imagine you would understand the results of the phone call. You do not consider that the consequences might be worse, that you might torture someone to call off an attack and the result of that might make things worse, might make the attack worse, might cause the deaths of more.

No. More Jews would have died if I had. They were killing them in the fields, in the villages, wherever they found them. The camps were an obscene perversion, but they were also a waste of resources. If the Nazis hadn’t built the camps, they could have killed far more Jews.

What I would have done is drive much harder and much faster through Europe. And gone with Patton.

You are not thinking things through, in the least, because you have reduced this to an emotional narrative. It is severely disappointing.

In your narrative, you can always be sure that after you’ve tortured him, the rebel general’s phone call will call off the attack, that he won’t speak code words to let his aides know that he’s being tortured. In your narrative, bombing the camps would stop or hinder the killing.

If only the world was so simple.

But it is not.

You need to visit Auschwitz. It was a killing FACTORY- far more efficient than killings in the fields. Read Davidovic.

I will say this: A couple of years after we were in Afghanistan, we had intel that all the big Al Qaeda mucky mucks would be in attendance at a funeral of a ‘colleague’.

We knew when and where they would be. A decision was made not to take out the entire Al Qaeda leadership because some of their families would be in attendance.

Do you approve of that decision.