Waterboarding, Steve Harrigan gets waterboarded on Fox

If you were wondering what it is: link

video

Quite an effective technique to get someone to talk and still have them healthy within minutes after. This is what is said the US does to get people to loosen up.

Torture doesn't work:
1. you get people to talk, but they will tell you anything to get rid of torture
2. you don't know when to stop -- if you twist my finger how will you know if you twisted it enough for me to tell the truth? Torture might work for testable things, for example if you want to obtain a code and then you can test it, but most of the info is untestable imediatelly, so the people who torture won't know when to stop. So if you waterboard somebody, and the guy starts to give you contradictory info, how do you know when the info is accurate, should you torture a little bit more just to make sure?

oh yeah, it loosens them up alright - like loose bowels maybe.

for one thing, i don't believe that people are reliable or honest when under duress.

secondly, i can't condone that kind of behavior for the sake of the "war on terror".
if someone is suspect, they should be considered innocent until proven guilty, not abused.
if someone is guilty, deal out the punishment. if someone is guilty, it doesn't mean that they deserve sub-human treatment as part of punishment.
if someone is innocent because of lack of evidence or because they're proven innocent, let them go.

in the u.s., we're standing on this high pile of moral superiority, but really it is fairness that is usually only accorded to other americans or allies of americans. i think it's a twisted ideal; we either stand for absolute fairness or we're full of shit, IMHO...just my 0.02