Cliff May went on the Daily Show yesterday for an interview that was supposed to be about six minutes but stretched into about twenty, and as a result only part of it was able to be shown on tv, but when these things happen on the Daily Show they always show the entire interview uncut online for those that want to watch it, so here it is in two parts:
It's a very interesting debate and none of them backed down from their positions, and there was even a bit of agreement there towards the end. I think the scenario constantly brought forth by the pro-....torture/intensive interrogation/whatever advocates is a bit besides the point though, because it assumes that US intelligence gathering is already at something near peak effectiveness and just needs a tiny bit of tweaking in order to bring in that little bit of extra information the country needs to keep its citizens safe. However, since that's not even close to the case there's not even any reason to start thinking about changing the location of the red line one draws when conducting interrogation, since there are
many way easier ways to improve intelligence gathering, such as simply hiring people that speak the languages the CIA needs, cooperation with agencies in other countries, etc. So in that light the idea of intensive interrogation on high-level targets really is besides the point.
In addition to that, the argument can also be made that maintaining a moral high ground results in a mitigation of so-called "soft" terrorists, those that aren't completely committed to their cause, but have allowed themselves to be convinced into joining due to being influenced by propaganda manufactured by vastly exaggerating a grain of truth. The problem with this though is that it's very hard to show - it's very hard to show concrete examples of terrorists
not being created, whereas extreme examples of very evil people are very easy to pick out. This is similar to the growing of a forest compared to trees being cut down - when a tree is cut down and falls it does so with great commotion and is impossible to ignore, but it's very easily possible that during the time a single tree falls down, the total mass of the forest could have grown by an amount even more than this tree, thus resulting in a larger forest than before in spite of all the commotion of the one tree falling down.
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