[Aramike]

If American soldiers were being waterboarded by an enemy, we'd call it torture.

So what do you call beheading American civilians and non-combantants?

Torture gives you plenty of information, but most of it is garbage.

Hogwash. The military and CIA interrogators aren't foolish - they are unlikely to continue employing interrogation methods which don't work.

What people like you are doing is demonizing such patriots as sadists looking for a cheap thrill through hurting others. There's only three options here:

• Either enhanced interrogation works and that's why we used it.
• Enhanced interrogation does not work, and it's used only for the interrogaters to get their jollies.
• Enhanced interrorgation does not work, and the military and CIA operatives who employ the methods are morons.

Usually what makes the most sense is the answer.

Everybody who has spoken about waterboarding from personal experience says that they'll do anything to make it stop. That means that the guy who knows nothing will start spewing stuff about any terrorist plot he can think up on the spot.

You're presuming (as many of the left do, who don't independantly research the issue) that waterboarding is being used indiscriminately. What, do you honestly think that you're the only one to figure out that, should the method be used on someone with no information, that person is likely to make something up?

They're not just pouring water on people and asking "what do you know?" - that's foolish (ironically it is also the left's main argument against the method).

The method is used when we KNOW that a detainee has SPECIFIC information, but we don't know what that information is. For example, let's say we know that detainee X was at a planning session for a terrorist attack 2 years ago. We know this via satellite photography and humint. We use traditional questioning but the detainee won't reveal the contents of the meeting. That's when other techniques would be applied.

Sure, we may not stop a terrorist plot this way (plans may have changed due to the detainee's captivity, etc.) - but it IS worth a shot, considering that we're judging a known terrorist's comfort against the well-being of American civilians.

The problem for American intelligence these days isn't a lack of information. If anything, they have too much information.

You obviously know very little about how intelligence works. There's no such thing as "too much" information.

Their problem is digesting all the information and picking out the useful stuff.

That's absurd. If you're referring to, say, NSA intercepts (sigint) than yes, there's a lot to absorb. However, like I said, you obviously know little about how intelligence works.

The biggest enemy of intelligence gathering is counter-intelligence - something that Al Qaeda is very good at. Prior to 9/11, almost all of our intel on terrorism was communications (comint/sigint). This is easily defeated by simply not using the phone, for example. The problem is that we have traditionally had very little human intelligence (humint) as these groups are difficult to compromise due to their insidious nature. Even so, should a group actually be infiltrated, how do you suppose getting any information out? The groups are so small that tracing leaked information would be a fairly simple task, and due to a clear communications black-out, just getting the word out in the first place would be nearly impossible.

It's like going through a massive car junkyard to find the exact parts you need, and there's only one of each in the entire place.

This is more like going through a massive junkyard looking for a certain part, and trying to find it on a specific car. Makes more sense than arbitrarily looking through the whole damned thing, doesn't it?

Adding more junk to that pike isn't going to help us, and it might end up hurting us.

Again, you demonstrate that you don't know how the intel community works. "Adding more junk", as you put it, can be immeasurably helpful if the information proves to be accurate. If it doesn't, then we're in the same boat either way.