Justified has nothing to do with it. They did what they did and if it was effective it was effective.

I'd like to think we're better than that, and that we would only stoop to that level when all other techniques are exhausted.

Weigh the value of the information to be discovered (possible attacks on our soil) against the disturbing reality of having to torture someone.

You may stand on principle and say we can NEVER torture no matter what. And doing that would make the perfect the enemy of the pragmatically sensible. When I've done that in the past, you've chided me for being unrealistic. Rightly.

There are other reasons to torture. The lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough are not a recent invention.

That said, I'm willing to acknowledge that torturing people will sometimes get useful information out of them. I think we ought not torture people anyway, for a variety of reasons: (1) it's wrong, (2) as a method to extract information, it generally doesn't work as well as the alternatives, and (3) to take a longer view, torture doesn't "work" because it is a strategic blunder -- it undermines us in larger, more important ways.

I think U.S. law should bar torture -- I still find it surreal that the point is even in question -- and that anyone in the government who finds themselves wanting to use torture should make damn well sure that the circumstances are so compelling that a prosecutor would not bring charges. For a variety of reasons, there is a great temptation to turn to torture, and if you just trust people to do the right thing, often they won't.

I don't think this position is particularly absolutist. It is, after all, what the law was for the first 225 years of this country.

So you can't bring yourself to say that the North Vietnamese were wrong to torture U.S. airmen because they might have gotten effective information out of it. I'd like to think that we are better than that, too, but 30 years ago there would have been no real disagreement in this country that what the North Vietnamese were doing was wrong, and now we find ourselves on a slippery slope.

It's always wrong when it's happening to your guys. Different story when you're the torturer. We're nothing in this country if not unbelievably self-righteous and stuck on this silly notion that, as Zell Miller amazingly put it, "God is not indifferent to the future of the United States."

We're not on any slippery slope. The only difference between now and then is the media is a lot more powerful. We did it then and no one knew. That we said it was wrong means nothing.

Your position is clarified. We're not that far apart. Really, the only difference is, you want torturers to have to work around a law, which they do (hence, rendition). Since that's the reality already, I could even agree with that. Make torture something akin to dope in Amsterdam. Illegal on the books, but the law's not enforced when we ship people to other countries so they can torture them.

This is one of those odd debates where the reality of our animal nature and the ugly realities of armed conflict run up against the law. Which should trump which is a tough question, so we wind up with quasi-legal loopholes as the only soultion allowing both systems to co-exist and not interfere with one another.

Setting aside the obvious problem here, you lose the ability to have anyone else in the world take you seriously when you say, do as I say, not as I do. Since most Islamofascist terrorists are hiding out in other countries, this is not just a pointy-head intellectual concern.

I believe he is not just a "former JAG Officer", but the former Judge Advocate General of the Navy.

Carry On.

S_A_M

P.S. Interrogation techniques can and often should be classified. That said -- the idea that interrogators make false threats is sort of like the idea that police will lie to you in interrogation -- no big surprise, and I don't see the justification for classifying THAT technique.

Arrests and coercion of innocent people should surely be actionable -- not to say he should collect, or how much, but he should not be thrown out of Court. That's the quickest way to allow society to moderate the inevitable excesses.

P.P.S. We should apologize to the innocent Canadian we shipped to Syria to get his balls electroshocked. Yes, Canadian intelligence made the initial false identification as a "terrorist" [and have since paid him about $10mm I think] but for god's sakes we should at least say: "Sorry about your 'nads, Dude."

P.P.P.S. And if we're really fighting a War without end, which I think we are, where and when does it all stop if we let this stuff go unchecked?

I'm calling this one. 34509-19

S_A_M

I don't really see a principled reason to think that government agents should have the unbridled discretion to torture people but can't be trusted to decide whether to prosecute others for torture.

As much as anything else, this whole debate is about the Bush Administration's desire to do away with checks and balances so that the executive branch can do whatever the hell it pleases. All government agencies would love to be free of oversight. It doesn't mean they make better decisions -- quite the opposite.

How do you know it was a false threat? I asked Hank that question, and he never tried to answer.

We do not know -- the circumstantial evidence we have is that we have no information that Egyptian security actually did anything to his family.

In the "right" case, I wouldnt be surprised if we did such a thing.

S_A_M

You could just as easily say that there is no evidence that the FBI wouldn't have done exactly what it said it would do had the man not given a false confession.

Indeed.

There is no easier way of knowing you are wrong than when you hear yourself saying this.

You do realize I'm offering this as an indictment of the way most people view this issue when their country is criticized for torturing enemies of the state, don't you?

I assume you know sarcasm, or satire, or cynical humor (or whatever you'd call my parahprasing of our nation's self-righteousness) when you see it.

is ty being sarcastic with this "guilty until proven innocent" rap on the threats?

Your phrasing suggests that you might actually think there's something wrong with siccing the Egyptian secret police on a guy's family to get him to talk. How about that.