Should civilized nations use "Enhanced Interrogation" techni

[Jester]

You don't fight it, you just drown. If they smack you around, you attempt as much as possible to reach unconsciousness. If your goal is to resist interrogation, you need to deprive them of the one thing necessary for both interrogation and torture, your consciousness. Since they are committed to not kill or maim, you have very little to fear except the acute pain needed to reach unconsciousness. In fact, if you are this jihadi terrorist king pin, the best thing you might hope for is that they actually martyr you while in their detention.

Not bloody likely. The drowning panic reflex is not an emotion. It is not amenable to reason or self-control. It is triggered by an entirely deeper area of the brain, conditioned by thousands of years of evolution. I don't think there is a single individual on record who has done what you suggest. It may be physiologically impossible; if it's not, it's so hard that you certainly couldn't manage it day in, day out, for however long they were interrogating you.

This is just fantasy, I'm sorry.

In maybe that same Latin American Studies class where I read Open Veins, we had to read the collected published works of the School of the Americas and the CIA training manual for the Contras. The techniques described above were pretty mild in comparison to the interrogation techniques I've read about in my Latin American studies, and off hand, I can think of much better non-violent, non-lethal interrogation methods than what they did to the terrorists at Gitmo. Still, I don't really condone torture, but I think that some of this squeamishness is over reacting.

I agree that what's being done here is peanuts compared to what the SotA and CIA were teaching to death squads and counter-revolutionaries in Latin America. I believe my very first post in this thread contained a link to Dan Mitrione's wiki page. But there are two points here.

One: it was horrifying, immoral, and contrary to US and international law back then. It hasn't gotten any better since. "Mild in comparison" is not a defense, unless some moral mathematician has finally managed to prove the "two wrongs make a right" theorem.

Two: if the same organizations that did this a generation ago are given a free pass to use dubious methods, how long do you think it will take before they push the boundaries even further? If not in this war, then the next? As you rightly point out, it's not like this is a line the CIA has never crossed before.

-Jester