FBI considers torture as suspects stay silent

[David Honig]

At 10:33 PM 10/22/01 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 09:13:51PM -0500, measl at 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...