At 10:33 PM 10/22/01 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 09:13:51PM -0500, measl@mfn.org wrote:
It seems that in todays hyper-"patriotic" environment, this is would be not only an "accepted practice", but even a _preferred_ one by many Amerikans :-(
Yep. It's going to be a hard political sell to insist that yes, this indicted hijacker who was caught trying to bring down another plane and was captured with detailed plans of a planned nuclear bomb attack in the next three hours shouldn't be, um, strongly encouraged to turn over the passphrase to "nuke-location-gps-coordinates.txt.gpg"
Two random late night thoughts: 1. Since death in combat is far more heroic [1] to these folks than it is to Americans, the torturers will have to be careful. Three hours is not much time to break a person, and cruder torture methods are fatal. 2. Cyanide pills were standard issue for folks dropped behind enemy lines in WWII (see _Between Silk & Cyanide_). [1] Though one wonders whether psyops -mutilation of corpse and cliched pig games- would help. One last random thought: since moslems don't drink, they may not handle their pentothal too well. [Na Pentothol is a fast acting barbituate; barbies act very similarly to ethanol.] However, those methods aren't too reliable and again that 3 hours would be a real problem...