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I've looked at every instance of a ticking time bomb that's been proposed in the war on terror. ...basically there is never a circumstance where you know that a particular prisoner has a particular information and will yield with a particular amount of pressure. In fact, gathering intelligence is a matter of pulling information gradually from a number of sources, who you recruit through rapport building.
One of the fascinating things about the ticking time bomb scenario is that it has elicited bad information, which has sent our troops on dangerous and fatal missions... --DR. STEVEN MILES, Democracy NOW!, Friday, September 28th, 2007
...all of those [torture] survivors would tell you that they would have said anything, anything at all that was wanted of them, eventually, to get the torture to stop. And so, they'll confess, they'll give the information that's fed to them, because the person who most needs a confession is the torturer. Without that confession, the torturer has no justification for what they've done. ...[morale] of their torturers [demands] that a confession emerges. And that's one of the key reasons why truth doesn't emerge from torture. Anything could emerge. --DOUGLAS JOHNSON, Democracy NOW!, Friday, September 28th, 2007
Alberto Mora, who had been the Navy legal counsel who fought against the torture policy...emphasized that the reason we have the Geneva Accords ...was the notion that if a soldier knows that they will be treated humanely... they have at least the opportunity of surrendering, but if they know they will be treated cruelly... then the total incentive for them is to fight to the last man. ... Americans die from this policy, because we have falsely thought that the creation of fear keeps us safe, rather than endangers us. --DOUGLAS JOHNSON, Democracy NOW!, Friday, September 28th, 2007
