Comments on: Enlightened Hard-Boiled-Ness https://www.isegoria.net/2014/12/enlightened-hard-boiled-ness/ From the ancient Greek for equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts, large and small Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:41:07 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 By: Slovenian Guest https://www.isegoria.net/2014/12/enlightened-hard-boiled-ness/comment-page-1/#comment-2039686 Slovenian Guest Thu, 01 Jan 2015 10:09:17 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=37066#comment-2039686 The question if torture does or does not work is moot when according to the Seton Hall reports most of the detainees in Guantanamo, 440 of 517 detainees (86%), appear to have been captured by bounty hunters in return for a $5,000 reward from the US for each prisoner, in a country where the annual wage for a good government job is around $1,000!

Perverted incentives on top of unintended consequences, sure, I’ll turn in my neighbor for half a decade of wages.
The air force was even dropping pamphlets reading “you can receive millions of dollars for helping catch Taliban”…

Police departments for example don’t like offering cash rewards and also discourage family members to do so, because It’s counter productive.

How to extract useful information?
Step one, get an actual enemy!

What a mess, in the future they will refer to those two wars as the Biden wars, because everything that could be done wrong, was done wrong with gusto.
(For anyone not familiar, that’s the running gag in DC, that Joe Biden is like a broken clock, wrong every-time, you can be on it.)

I guess the war planners shouldn’t have given Edward Luttwak the boot, but he does sound crazy, the bad road is the good road because it’s the bad road… get out of there!

]]> By: Bert E. https://www.isegoria.net/2014/12/enlightened-hard-boiled-ness/comment-page-1/#comment-2037761 Bert E. Wed, 31 Dec 2014 19:24:03 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=37066#comment-2037761 Interrogation methods and techniques that will work in one war will not necessarily be so successful in a subsequent war when faced with another adversary whose mindset and culture is different.

American interrogators prior to 9/11 had been told that in most cases 95 % of prisoners would readily talk and reveal information. The terrorist captive not only does not talk but spits in your eye and almost in 100 % of the instances.

They are not SO MUCH AFRAID OF YOU AS YOU MUST BE AFRAID OF THEM!!

That language problem is a difficulty with the Arab in particular. And you have to be careful of the Arabic translator who might have a degree of sympathy for the captive. Bad instance of the Chinese interrogator Larry Wu Tai Chin prolonged the Korean War by as much as a year due to his deliberate mistranslations of interrogations.

The U.S. has a significant population of native Arabic speakers in this country but refuses to use them as they are Christian. A valuable asset totally denied.

]]>