Comments on: Torture is a Best Practice

By: Aion Frank

Aion Frank — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 08:21:13 +0000

Damn, that sound’s so easy if you think about it.

By: Blingoos

Blingoos — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:15:44 +0000

This brings me to an idea:…

By: John Kelsey

John Kelsey — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:44:11 +0000

ISTM that “best practices” here means something like “if I do this, nobody will complain I didn’t do enough.” And I have the intuition that a lot of people involved in questioning terrorism suspects were very concerned with being able to show that they’d done all they could do, including not only torturing the suspects, but also threatening (and maybe torturing or otherwise mistreating) their families. I suspect that the motive of being seen to have no limits whatsoever in what you’ll do to achieve your goal is a recipe for making normal people into monsters.
I still have a hard time getting my brain around the idea that this was being done, more-or-less in the open, for several years, with no consequences. As far as I can tell, this never became an important political issue. The only people who’ve faced prison time for it are a few very low-ranking folks who I suppose were disposable–certainly Yoo, Gonzales, Feith, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest have little to fear from the justice system. So we can expect the policy to resume (assuming it has stopped) the next time we’re all really worked up and scared, and someone decides he wants to show that there’s no limit to how far he’ll go to get the bad guys/protect america/get re-elected.

By: beri29@yahoo.com

beri29@yahoo.com — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:00:26 +0000

The real problem with torture, morality and ethics aside, is that it doesn’t work. You can hurt a person and they will tell you what you want to hear, not the truth or the reality, but what you want to hear. So, the really important issue, again, is morality and ethics.
The ends DO NOT justify the means. I am ashamed of our government’s actions. They have destroyed whatever moral authority we might ever have had.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:15:23 +0000

I wish that Big Pharma auditors (and their contractors) would consider best practices in that way. One of them once suggested to me that perhaps our (strong, checked through brute force and dictionary attacks) passwords should be changed every 6 weeks with a system in place to prevent re-use because quote: “That’s what we do”. needless to say, that part of their report was vehemently contested. We nonet-the-less have a policy to change passwords every 6 months to placate auditors.

By: Antonomasia

Antonomasia — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:35:14 +0000

The “Favorite Posts” section of links is broken.

By: Andrew Yeomans

Andrew Yeomans — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:50:56 +0000

We ought to start talking about “effective practice” rather than “best practice”. Which implies we have done the test. And the subsequent stage is “cost-effective practice”.