re: #259 Killgore Trout

This again…

They still seem to ignore that he refused to talk until after he was waterboarded. The point of waterboarding is to break them so they talk.

There is no agreed-upon thing that is ‘breaking’ someone, though. That’s not something that has any intrinsic meaning to it. It’s not a dual state. And again, if the goal is getting them to talk, there can only be an assumption in any individual case that torture made them talk faster than other methods would.

You cannot leap to the conclusion that waterboarding was more effective than not waterboarding. The only way to actually come to a conclusion would be through scientific testing, which is not available due to the enormous ethical problems.

As it stands, every intelligence officer who’s ever written on the subject has said torture is inferior to other techniques, both in veracity of information and a host of other ways.