Lies You've Been Told.

Today's lie you've been told....

Torture doesn't work.

I saw this lie repeated again over the weekend on some "news" show.  This one gets me every time.  Now before I go any further, I should make absolutely clear that I am not a proponent of torture or the degradation of a human being.  It's immoral. End of story.

Having said that, let's not bury our heads in the sand and ignore obvious truths.  The fact is, if torture didn't produce results, there'd be a whole lot less of it being used.  Sure there's a certain percentage of us who are sick twisted bastards who take some sort of enjoyment by causing harm to other people.  There always will be.  But I'm talking about torture used to extract information.  

Now at this point there's a  hippy about to recite some survey taken by some Berkley professor or something that shows how the information gathered is almost always bad 'cause the victim will say anything that the examiner wants to hear.  Well, if you look hard enough and have a strong enough opinion on something, you'll find a "study" that can support just about anything.  Let's just look at reality.  If I really need information, but the information I get via torture is always bad, why would I keep doing it?  Because it's not always bad information and in fact it very often does accomplish what you set out to do.

If I could get the information I needed by making friendship bracelets with every prisoner I had, then by god, I'd have a frequent shopper card at Michaels.  The fact is, that doesn't work.  At the very least not in the kind of time frame needed to make the information useful and not with the frequency of results that make it a more better option over a water board.

So why keep spreading this lie?  My guess is because people are afraid to take on the issue based on a moral stand.  If I can find a study that "proves" the ineffectiveness of the matter, than I don't have to stand on a moral position that might force me to justify what my morality is based on.  In the end it really just makes anti-torture proponents sound ignorant and removed from reality.