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It does pretty much. It means you can abduct people and torture them, that's pretty much everything a secret service would ever want to do. Google Murat Kurnaz

• toyg 14y ago
  Nope. That's why pretty much everywhere, in civilized countries, foreign and domestic spying are done by separate entities: the laws they have to follow are different, and there is (usually) a different degree of oversight. Secret services are hardly all about "abducting people and torturing them", that's actually an aberration of their role. Most of what they do is signal-intelligence of various sorts, and the most silently they can do it, the better. "Abducting and torturing" are all but silent activities; you are basically shouting at your enemy to go fuck himself, the intelligence equivalent of yokels shooting in the air. Abducting and torturing is what a secret police does, the sort of stuff you see in clueless dictatorial countries. Albeit it might be considered effective in the short term, it makes you powerless in the long run, when you've abducted/tortured/killed all the enemies you knew but you don't know anything about the new enemies.
  • mercurial 14y ago
    I don't know, the effectiveness of torture as an interrogation tool is for understandable reasons difficult to assess. However, the fact that it's a constant whenever a state is confronted to assymetrical warfare (think of the infamous Battle of Algiers, or how torture used to be legal in Israel until 1999) is an indication that it is difficult to work without in some contexts, dictatorship or not. Of course, the fact that it's perfectly unethical entails a heavy cost in terms of image, especially for modern democracies.
    • btilly 14y ago
      I don't know, the effectiveness of torture as an interrogation tool is for understandable reasons difficult to assess. Not so. It is remarkably easy to assess, and everyone who cares to know already knows the answer. After you break under torture, the victim will tell the torturer anything they think the torturer wants to hear, and has very little sense of what is or is not true. "Beating" torture is simple - pretend break early and tell interesting lies. When you really break you'll no longer know truth from fiction - nor can a questioner who has no idea which leads are true and false. Once you've hit that point then absolutely no method of getting information can work. We have much, much more reliable interrogation techniques. Ones that we can use without giving propaganda benefits to our enemies. Admittedly no other technique gives the same visceral satisfaction of making someone pay. But once you've gone the torture route, you can't undo that choice.
  • subsystem 14y ago
    Nope to what? One of the biggest problems with the CIA is that they are intelligence, secret world police and paramilitary all at the same time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chapman_attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chapman_attack etc.
    • toyg 14y ago
      Yes, but that doesn't mean this is what it should be. In fact, most other secret services are not like that.