questionable intelligence
Well, the Whitehouse still seems to be trying to get away with torturing people. I don’t understand, given the volumes of knowledge that have been accumulated over the many centuries since the Inquisition that show that torture is an unreliable means of interrogation which guarantees getting bad intel, why it is being so carefully defended.
Armed with this formidable question, I spent many hours (well, a few minutes) thinking of all the possible reasons, and I basically came to three possible conclusions:
1) Bush and the Cabinet are just so stupid that they don’t know the history of torture. This is certainly reasonable; however it is dependent on them not being properly advised by those who definitely know that it doesn’t work. It is certainly possible that Bush is getting insolated from that fact, but it is unlikely that he is so insulated that someone hasn’t brought it to his attention.
2) Secondly, and perhaps more likely, they are desperate, irrational and impatient.
3) The third alternative that I came up with in my deliberations was one that is perhaps the most paranoid, and at 12:46 am, seems somewhat plausible. They are purposely getting bad intelligence (well, more accurately getting unreliable intelligence) to keep us looking around every corner rather than looking at more pressing problems, and things that are statistically more likely to kill us.
Either way, it seems to me that these people have allot to answer for as they have and are continuing to put people (who are most likely not terrorists in the first place) through life altering torture when it is well known that it will not get reliable intelligence.