Discussion: John Oliver Has Helen Mirren Read The Senate Torture Report (VIDEO)

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Discussion for article #237437

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John Oliver does more high quality, in depth reporting of a particular issue or controversy than some of the best news organizations out there. His dissection of the Miss America Pageant was a classic. It’s odd to think if you really wanted to know about an issue his research staff would be what you chose over that of the NY Times, 60 Minutes or most others.

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I think it’s what makes the whole explosion of comedy-journalism both frightening and wonderful.

The Daily Show really started something. Now if we can get The Nightly Show to step up a little more (I still enjoy them, but not quite as much), it would be wonderful.

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Torture appeals to raw emotional urge for revenge - & for those consumed with these urges - the more painful, brutal & gruesome - the better, and they will distort a rationale about “effectiveness” to justify their cravings.

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In one of the earliest books I read, the protagonist was tortured. She went down the training she had received about being tortured and that included things like saying anything so that, if you do say something that is true, it will all be muddled up so much they won’t be able to tell what is true and what isn’t, and constantly lie about what the plans were.

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Are you talking about espionage or coordinating all the logistics of the Christmas Holidays with your spouse?

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Actually…kind of espionage. The character in the story was a high ranking member of the government that her captors were antagonistic too.

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The use of Helen Mirren here was fantastic.

The segment was great. It added the usual argument that torture simply doesn’t work. I don’t believe that. It very well might in certain cases. Let’s be honest about that. There are ways to show this – people have via torture told information that was found out to be true. Let’s say a mobster using it to get information.

This doesn’t make it right. It is still wrong & the fact that as a whole it doesn’t work well even on a sociopath pragmatic ground is true enough. The examples given by John Oliver here show this. It also causes blowback. So, along with it being against our basic values, torture doesn’t “work” in the end.

But, the idea it never works is an unnecessary exaggeration.

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Larry Wilmore’s starting to find his stride, I think. It’s still only the first season.

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To accept that torture would work, one has to be massively, stupidly egocentric - and assume that your side is so totally freaking divinely right - that even the bad guys deep in their guts know you are right & are aware of their own evilness - and that the bad guys are, at their core - evil pansies who will fold & confess heir evil schemes - you absolutely cannot think that the bad guys might have an endless belief in their own ‘correctness’ - you cannot think that they have the ability to stoically die for their ‘beliefs’ -

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The problem is that it doesn’t work as a way to gain reliable information. Individuals being tortured reach a point where they’ll say anything to make it stop - including making things up if they have no answers to give, or think it’ll work. And there’s simply no way to know if the information you’re getting is real or not without treating every scrap as if it is real and then devoting significant resources to investigating it, hoping to sift out the maybe 2-10% that might be the truth - or might be close to the truth by pure chance.

The example of the mobster… unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up. Organized Crime, by its very nature, doesn’t just go indiscriminately torturing people to find out information. Do they do it sometimes? Sure. Do they literally just pick people up off the street because an anonymous tip told them a previously equally-anonymous individual knows what they want to learn? No. More common and effective ways to get information from someone are to build a rapport, earn their trust, let them spill the beans in ‘casual conversation’… and then lose the body. They’re successful because they’re not stupid. Our problem is that the massive military/intelligence apparatus we have allows us to be stupid and successful, without catastrophic blowback or consequences on the career idiots who make decisions like ‘we should waterboard people’.

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Well, we certainly have tortured the English language in trying to cleanse ourselves of actually committing torture. In order to somehow make torture palatable we have to call it “enhanced interrogation”. Which makes about as much sense as calling a massive spying bill the “USA Freedom Act”.

When we have to use such measures to convince ourselves that a thing is something other than what it really is, we have really gone down the rabbit hole. We are in Orwell’s 1984 doublespeak-land now.

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Oh definitely. I still love the show. I just hope it gets better as time goes along :smile:

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This reply doesn’t refute my argument. The general tenor of it is that as a whole, as a system, it is very unreliable. I said that. I cited Oliver’s examples. Ditto the talk about the “more common and effective ways,” which again doesn’t refute my ‘never works’ concern. Simply talking to the choir here.

The mobster example “holds up.” We can say that even a mobster might want to avoid torture though (as is likely a reason for the U.S.) the “value” there is in part simply to send a message of terror. The example is cited as a case where at times torture might work. This is something some are loathe to accept since it seems (wrongly) to give the other side too much ammo.

Examples can be shown, as I noted where information was shown to be correctly obtained (if you crush my fingers, I will not just indiscriminately talk – in certain situations, I will tell certain specific things), where torture worked. This doesn’t make it a good idea, both morally and because as a system it doesn’t work. The idea police beating suspects never gets useful info is likewise wrong but that doesn’t suddenly mean beating suspects should be allowed. One can go down to list – corporal punishment is to me a bad idea, but “never works” (on a specific basis, such as not touching a hot stove) is an exaggeration. And so on.

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So your point is that torture can produce the right results in some situations without anyone ever being able to predict if a given situation will be the one that does it.

So does indiscriminately carpet-bombing an entire city trying to get 1 guy, y’know.

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Not quite so.

It’s probable there is a limited number of cases where we can “predict” (which means “not be sure”) that torture can “produce the right results” & if nothing else was there to make it a bad idea, make it possibly worth doing. And, torturing even 1000 people is not the same as “carpet bombing an entire city” to “get 1 guy” unless it is a very very small city and the stakes in torture are generally more than one guy anyway.

Again, as a whole, pragmatically not useful, and morally wrong even if it was. This is so even if there are a few spare times where it is a good guess that mistreatment will lead to intel.

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Fair enough.