it's time to stop pretending that evil keeps us safe

[dilletante]

apparently the most pernicious pervasive myth propagated by action movies and tv is not that cars explode when they crash or that shootouts are glamorous and bloodless; it's the myth that torture works to extract informationthis shows up all over the place. it's taken for granted; it's always assumed that the debate around torture is about whether

Comments

[intuition_ist]

never understood the "torture = information" theory myself. especially in movies. nor the "blackmail is successful" theory. but that's a conversation for another day. :)

[voxel]

it's hard to say much about the drone program, except that the fact that it's a big recruiting tool for al qaeda and has caused us a lot of foreign policy hassles is public knowledge; and if it had made any great successes, the government would certainly have publicized them by now (unlike the spy programs, there would be no reason to keep them secret).I don't know how much you've been paying attention to the drone program, but it has had a number of successes, many acknowledged, if not publicized, by the government, most recently Abdullah Haqqani, leader of the Haqqani Network. Other successes include the CFO of Al Qaeda, Mustafa Abu Yazid; Abdullah Said al Libi, leader of Al Qaeda's Shadow Army and considered to be the #2 overall commander; and Zuhaib al Zahibi, a general in the Shadow Army

[laurie_robey]

Very well said.

[gravitrue]

I've been reading a fair bit of stuff written under the handle "the war nerd