Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Anyone will say anything under torture.
The Bush administration will go down in history as the Torture Team.
If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice.
To be fair to the Inquisition, they only used confessions extracted after the torture had ended, which let them claim that admissions had been freely given; the fact that the torture would have started again if they hadn't confessed was a minor detail.
There's been a lot of experience with torture in history. It doesn't work.
If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions.
So, it, of course, makes one wonder how many other people there might be who are completely innocent, who have been sent by the U.S. to countries where they've been interrogated, and in some instances it seems tortured.
I think people are going to return to sanity when they see how ridiculous many of these charges are, and how the predictions are not borne out.
Torture produces unreliable evidence and therefore doesn't achieve and protect anybody. Torture corrupts those who are doing the torturing.
The purpose of torture is not getting information. It's spreading fear.