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Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem when your nation tortures people is you've trained people to torture; you've created institutionalized psychopaths. What do you do with them when their mission ends? Are they properly supported back into society or just dropped like most vets? Do the go home to become nightclub bouncers or security guards at your kids school?

That's why we have to clean up this mess.

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>The biggest problem when your nation tortures people is you've trained people to torture

No, I disagree. I think the torturing itself and the moral failings it entails are a bigger problem than the (admittedly substantial) problem of reintegrating the individual torturers back into society.

OK agreed. Perhaps that should have read "the best argument for fence sitters on why we need to clean this up is ..." because a disturbing percentage of Americans seem to believe torture was justified http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-po...

Indeed - and from a purely practical standpoint: you've also created hundreds of millions, possibly billions of people who hate your country and perhaps feel that violence against its citizen, who voted for and continue to vote for such leaders, is justified.

One might almost say the creation of psychopaths is the goal of military training. Without training a small fraction of soldiers ('natural psychopaths') will kill for pleasure, another small fraction will be the heroes that kill and put themselves in danger for the good cause, but the majority twill try and come out alive. The goal of military training is to make the army more effective by increasing that second fraction, but increasing the first fraction isn't that bad, either, from a direct military perspective.

(http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing:_The_Psychological..., http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology)

Yes and there's the difference between training someone to kill quickly and efficiently for a military objective and training someone to slowly inflict cruel forms of extreme suffering on another human over and extended period of time.

The former you may be able to rehabilitate afterwards. The latter is Hannibal material.

Now I'm not aware of how modern military training is built, but I have to imagine that the top priority for the military is making sure that their own soldiers don't die. Apart from the ethical aspects, training somebody takes a long time, and having people with experience on the field seems valuable.

Much like how lifeguards are taught that the first priority is making sure that they are safe rather than saving the person drowning.

Yes, you want your soldiers to survive because training is expensive, and comrades dying is bad for morale, but it is not _the_ top priority.

If it were the top priority, very, very few attacks would take place. Taking that hill, destroying that gun, or gaining knowledge about enemy positions often gets higher priority than the lives of a few (or lots of. Generals knew lots of soldiers would die on D-Day, for instance) soldiers.

Actually, psychopathic behavior is something the military works very hard to screen out. Psychopaths don't make very good soldiers because they're not especially inclined to follow orders or concern themselves with the safety of their fellow soldiers.

The biggest problem is that people are talking about whether or not its effective and inventing euphemisms. It's torture. It's immoral. It's illegal. It's also not actually very effective but that's just the icing on the cake, the rest is what's important.

I'd consider the _biggest_ problem to be invading Iraq under false pretenses. We've destroyed millions of lives because we tortured people until they told us what Dick Cheney wanted to hear. Yes, we love our children more than Iraqi children but it's not a hypothetical in the latter case.

Another problem is that it can be used by others to justify torturing US soldiers, agents or officials that fall into their hands, if those others see the US as an enemy, and feel the US gov was conspiring or operating against them. That's not a world we want to live in. Torture is wrong, period. We're not the Good Guys because we wave a wand and say so. If we want to act like we have moral authority, and have credibility, and be able to show international leadership in the future again when there may be another major good-vs-evil rallying cause, requiring a coalition, then the US needs to maintain a certain image. But one based on facts, not on lies and contra-factual propaganda.

The US already incarcerates more people than anywhere else. You guys can fit in a few more.

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