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Gone, But Not Forgotten? What The Internet Will Look Like Under SOPA Fearsgiving Week Jesus Approves of Waterboarding Beware of Asteroids 
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Torture Doesn't WorkWednesday, May. 11, 2011 7:14 AMThe cavalcade of war criminals otherwise known as the Bush Administration have been making the rounds to attest to the efficacy of torture and how it Played A Major Role in finding Osama bin Laden. Nothing new here, of course - it's the same Jack Bauer fantasy world as ever, insisting that how every last one of us would be insisting that torture be used if it could stop the ticking time bomb scenario. Yet, if we began enhanced interrogations the moment we had suspects like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in custody (March 2006), it took us six months of interrogation and another five years to run down bin Laden. That ticking time bomb would have long gone off by now, wouldn't it? Or can you torture someone faster? The other bit of disinformation is that the same technique is used in SERE training, and therefore it can't be torture if we do it to our own troops. It's my understanding that SERE is meant to be brutal in a clinical sense, without the emotional jollies professional sadists like Liz Cheney get from it. Survival for when you're down/stranded in enemy territory and possibly injured. Evasion because the enemy isn't just sitting on their arses playing Canasta, they're looking for you. They have the advantage of numbers and can field troops around the clock, whereas you can't. Resistance assumes you will be captured and put to the question. You're going to break, so it's not some magical ritual that makes one impervious to torture (if waterboarding were not torture, our enemies would use worse, yes?). It's techniques to resist the long- and short-term effects of such interrogation. Escape not only includes engineering your own escape, but in gathering information about your interrogators, the location, the areas of interest. Lastly, waterboarding is used because it is both non-lethal yet highly stressful and trips all of the necessary physiological alarms without having to wound/injure candidates. It is most certainly torture.
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