There has been a lot of discussion about the value of torture as of late. Speaking as someone that has some personal experience on the subject and who has studied it I can honestly say the following:
Torture elicits false confessions and information from the innocent, it produces false information from the guilty/knowledgeable who have been properly trained or should either their loyalty or pain threshold be high. It does however provide actionable intelligence from those that lack loyalty and/or a high endurance for pain/discomfort. If I had the numbers to crunch I'd bet that the percentage of soldiers or terrorists that fall into that last group is really low. What we need to figure out is if the percentage of real information were getting from torture is worth the sacrifice of America's moral authority. I don't believe it is. We're supposed to be the good guys and it's high time we started acting like it.
3 hours ago
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