"Enhanced interrogation" and other "techniques" are ok in cases of national security

6. Torture is ineffective6a. Torture is an ineffective interrogation toolThe torturer can never be certain that the information given is not simply to stop the pain. Under torture, the prisoner may say anything he or she thinks the torturer wants to hear. Torture victims have been documented to make up stories to prevent further torture.[1][2] Many survivors of torture report that they would have said anything to “make the torture stop.” [3][4]In the first Salem witch trials of 1692, 47 people confessed to witchcraft. Either we may believe that there were 47 witches in the town of Salem, or we may apply some skeptical thought and conclude that confessions were made to stop further torture.[5]In an examination of 625 instances of torture in France between 1500 and 1750, between 67 percent and 95 percent of victims never confessed, even “on the rack, under repeated drowning, crushing of joints, and the like.”During the Vietnam War, despite torture, only about 5 percent of the four hundred airmen captured signed anti-American propaganda statements, let alone divulged sensitive information.[6]Glenn Carle — who served 23 years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and for a time led the interrogation of a high value detainee says "almost all the information obtained from EITs [Enhanced interrogation techniques] was recalled...because it was viewed as unreliable."[7]The Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats report on enhanced interrogation techniques negated the utility of torture. The report says the notion that the so-called enhanced interrogation methods helped the C.I.A. find Bin Laden by identifying his courier is “misguided and misinformed.” In addition, the report rejected claims that tough treatment drew valuable information about Bin Laden’s courier from a third detainee, unidentified in the statement. While the third detainee did provide useful information about the courier, he did so before he was subjected to the tough C.I.A. methods, the senators said.[8]A statement issued by 37 retired US Generals says"The Army Field Manual was the product of decades of experience – experience that has shown, among other things, that torture, and cruel, inhuman and degradingtreatment produces unreliable results and often impedes further intelligence collection. Discounting the Manual’s wisdom on this central point shows a disturbing disregard for the decades of hard-won knowledge of the professional American military."[9]It is known from the civilian criminal justice system that techniques much less coercive than torture have produced verifiably false confessions in a large number of cases. False confessions are a major cause of wrongful convictions, accounting for 24% of the total. In a large-scale study, Drizin and Leo (2004) identified 125 proven false confessions over a 30-year period. The fundamental finding from this and other studies of false confessions is that as the coerciveness of the interrogation increases, so does the probability of false confession.[10][11][12][13]6b. Torture leaves the state liable to lose the propaganda war."Not only will torture create a dedicated core of anti-American jihadists, their stories will lose us the "hearts and minds" campaign with the larger Muslim population."[14]6c. Torture perverts the process of lawAn argument for torture makes the assumption that those being tortured are indeed responsible for the harming of non-combatants. However, torture takes place in detention before (or wholly without) trial. The guilt of the tortured party has not been established. Torture subverts the judicial process. A suspect has a right to trial. Potentially an innocent may be physically abused.Of the more than 700 men held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, many are now acknowledged as “merely guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Originally described as “the worst of the worst,” many were subjected to torture. Now, more than 400 of these men have been released orcleared for release.In the two and a half years following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, U.S. intelligence agencies arrested morethat 5,000 suspected terrorists. Only three of these suspects were formally charged.[15][1] Conroy, J. (2000). Unspeakable acts, ordinary people. New York: Knopf.[2] Haritos-Fatouros, M. (2003). The psychological origins of institutionalized torture. London: Routledge.[3] Mayer, J. (2005). The Gitmo experiment. Retrieved April 3, 2006, from www.newyorker.com.[4] McCoy, A. (2006). A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the cold war to the war on terror. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt. [5] http://www2.iath.virginia.edu...[6] http://muse.jhu.edu...[7] http://thinkprogress.org...[8] http://www.nytimes.com...[9] http://www.humanrightsfirst.org...[10] Drizin, S. A., & Leo, R. A. (2004). The problem of false confessions in the post-DNA world. North Carolina Law Review, 82, 891–1007.[11] Kassin, S., & Gudjonsson, G. H. (2004). The psychology of confessions: A review of the literature and issues. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5, 33–67.[12] Leo, R. A. (2008). Police interrogation and American justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.[13] Leo, R. A., Costanzo, M., & Shaked-Schroer, N. (2009). Psychological and cultural aspects of interrogations and false confessions: Using research to inform legal decision-making. In D. Krauss & J. Lieberman (Eds.), Psychological expertise in court. Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing.[14] Jeannie L. Johnson, Exploiting Weakness in the Far Enemy Ideology, Strategic Insights, 2005[15] http://www.cgu.edu...