Another example is my university.
About 10 years ago, the expenses were $322M with about 24-25000 students.
Now it’s over $600M, and only 30000 students.
77% of expenses are salaries.
Why did they need to double their work force expenses for 1/5-1/4 more students?
It’s insane.
Same thing with car insurance, only one place to go, Autopac.
Same thing with hydro.
Same thing with public schools.
Same thing with healthcare.
Same thing with liquor commission.
Same thing public sector unions.
It never fucking ends.
I have a 16 year old son who I fight every day to try to make sure he understands what America is, and how easily it can be destroyed. It’s so hard every evening to undo what he’s heard for 8 hours that day in school.
Not only does it not work, but it’s counterproductive. In the context of counterterrorism, it exacerbates that which it is intended to counter. The empirical record supports this, from Alegeria to Afghanistan to Iraq.
There are numerous top military officers, intelligence officials, and scholars who have eloquently argued that torture is not only against American values, but that it is simply ineffective and further endangers American lives. Oh, and its grossly illegal and immoral.
Who is foolish, those who abide by American principles and have empirically and comprehensively examined a practice to come to a reasoned conclusion, or someone who formulates his foreign policy from “the shows”, like Donald Trump? 24 is not an accurate portrayal of reality.
Gideon Rose: There’s a debate going on about the role of torture in American policy, what constitutes it and how important and necessary a tool it is in counterterrorism. What’s your take?
I teach a seminar at Yale on leadership, and in one of the classes, I decided to bring up the issue of torture to rouse their indignation at the idea. And more than half the class said, “Well, if you need to do it, it’s OK.” And I was shocked.
Stanley McChrystal: I’ve never been in a position where I had a detainee or prisoner who knew where a nuclear weapon in New York was and if I was able to get the information out of him in three hours I could save millions of people. So for me to say I would never torture anyone under those circumstances, I don’t think anyone can answer that question, particularly if my family was there or something.
That said, I think torture is an absolute mistake, and I made that clear within our organization. Whether or not torture works is an academic argument I don’t even want to be a part of, because at the end of the day, I think the torturers are weakened. They’re weakened internally individually, and they’re weakened strategically as a cause.The thing that hurt us more than anything else in the war in Iraq was Abu Ghraib. When the pictures came out in the spring of 2004, many Americans felt our government was being honest – that we had a problem with a platoon operating in the prison mistreating prisoners. The Iraqi people viewed it very differently. Many of them felt it was proof positive that the Americans were doing exactly what Saddam Hussein had done – that it was proof [that] everything they thought bad about the Americans was true.
Rose: So what we thought of as an exception, they thought of as the rule?
McChrystal: That’s right. They thought that was the broader reality. And there were hundreds of foreign fighters that came in [to Iraq] because they were responding to Abu Ghraib. Using torture is ultimately self-defeating. It’s morally wrong, and it’s a strategic mistake.
Yet, one side of the argument is well supported by empirical evidence, rigorous inquiry, and the professional opinions of subject matter experts. The other is not.
As the neuroscientist Shane O’Mara writes, torture techniques “create problems for memory, mood, and thinking, and sufferers predictably produce information that is deeply unreliable—and, for intelligence purposes, even counterproductive.” Not only is it ineffective and even counterproductive for intelligence purposes, but it exacerbates that which it is intended to combat. There is much evidence that torture increases the mobilization and radicalization of insurgent and terrorist organizations. Our model should be that of Napoleon: “It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile.”
IIRC wasn’t the name of Osama Bin Laden’s courier, which ultimately lead to the discovery of Osama’s location in Pakistan, discovered through waterboarding? I’m pretty sure I read that in Panetta’s book.