As distasteful as the thought of torture can sometimes be, it is a necessary fact of life in today’s world.
There are (as much as Dianne Feinstein thinks otherwise) a lot of people out there who wish only the worst upon us. Those people will stop at nothing to inflict great harm on us.
The short answer is: We should use whatever means are necessary (torture-wise) to get the information we need from terror suspects. If’t it the use of psychiatric medicines or just good ol waterboarding, nothing should be off the table.
Nothing.
>> nothing should be off the table
Well, I’d take off the table pulling their tongues out by the roots. Or shoving a piece of rebar through their eardrums. Or gouging their eyes out with a screwdriver.
But only because those “persuasions” would interfere with their ability to understand and communicate the intelligence we are after.
(Once we have all the intelligence we need from ‘em, knock yourself out!)
Physical torture (inflicting pain on the body) doesn’t work. The subject will tell you whatever you want to hear, just to make the pain stop.
Like during the Witch Hunts and the Inquisition. Teenage girls would admit to having sex with Satan, just to make the inquisitors kill them and get it over with.
What the CIA did at their Black Sites in the ugly parts of Europe can’t be considered torture by modern standards, because most of it was more mental that physical. If the subject comes from a warm climate, they put him very cold room and leave him there. If the subject comes from a cold climate, they put him in a very warm room and leave him there. They invade the subject’s sleep with a form of White Noise, which has a very negative affect on REM sleep cycles. In other words, it induces nightmares. So that even when they are allowed to sleep, their sleep is tortured.
And you can’t threaten to harm an Islamist jihadist’s family, because they don’t have the kind of family structure that we cherish. Their sons have been raised to die for the cause. Their daughters are chattel, to be sold off in marriage as soon as they are old enough to feed themselves. And their wives are slaves who’s sole purpose is to breed more jihadists.
Physical torture doesn’t work, but psychological torture does. But that waterboarding thing, they need to let that one go. Messy, takes too long, and often doesn’t work.