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Notes -
But ... if you agree there are scenarios where you'd never get a particular piece of information without torture, then I don't understand how you can claim it's "inherently useless"...? I'm confused what we're even arguing about now.
A fair point! I'm never going to argue with "government is incompetent" being an answer. :) But still, agencies using it is evidence that points in the direction of torture being useful - incompetence is just a (very plausible) explanation for why that evidence isn't conclusive.
I get at this in the other threads: because I think in practice those scenarios are exceedingly rare, and specifically for the US who purports to not be a totalitarian state, essentially nonexistent.
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