However, the Senate report claims that enhanced interrogation, which includes such things as sleep deprivation, water boarding and, apparently, subjecting the prisoner to Barry Manilow recordings, is actually torture and is not only inhumane, but, in addition, does not achieve the intended purpose. Rather, the critics of the CIA say, use of torture causes the detainee to say anything he thinks his interrogators want to hear and, thus, produces bad information. This position is, notably, supported by Senator John McCain who was himself tortured extensively in North VietNam and is something of an authority on the subject.
I'm not going to discuss the rightness or wrongness of the practice of enhanced interrogation any further in this post---I will save that for another time. However, I do want to mention an aspect of the debate which came to my attention this morning as I was listening to National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition".
The guest being interviewed was a Harvard (or Yale--I forget which and it doesn't matter anyway) Law professor who, during his discussion of its legality, opined that the use of enhanced interrogation (torture if you like) techniques do not help our cause as much as they help the recruitment efforts of our enemies. This is an argument I have often heard before, but listening to it this time caused me to wonder why it is that the activities of our enemies don't have the opposite effect. That is, it seems to me that the logical extension of the professor's thinking is that, if torture by the CIA drives recruits into the Al Qaeda and ISIS/ISIL camps, how come televised beheadings, summary executions, suicide bombings and torture by the "soldiers of Islam" don't seem to have those "moderate muslims"we hear so much about flocking to their local Army Recruitment Offices in order to sign up to fight the terrorists?
Just a thought---I'd be interested in your views.