I would love to see a section of the forum in which we attempt to apply the same standards of skeptical inquiry that we would like to see used in discussions of the paranormal to discussions of the political. Instead we have a section in which the same standards of non-skeptical inquiry which enable people to hold on to paranormal beliefs are used as the standard for presenting and examining political beliefs.
The OP of this thread -- quoted above in its entirety, since I'm joining this thread late and we're already on page 6 -- strikes me as a good example of what is wrong. A claim is made that the use of torture elicited useful information. But instead of presenting the claim clearly, we are given little more than a headline ("Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style Attack on Los Angeles") and a link. The claim is then treated as a proven fact.
This is how non-skeptics operate. A skeptic, in contrast, should lay things out clearly and in detail. If the claim being made is correct, then spelling things out allows other skeptics to see this for themselves.
The use of confident assertion is a common tactic of non-skeptics. It allows them to act as if something has already been established and that anyone who doesn't know this is an uninformed idiot who is scarcely worth paying attention to. This is useful for discouraging casual participants in the discussion from asking the obvious questions. (And if someone does raise the obvious questions, it sets up the non-skeptic to dismiss these derisively with a didn't you read the link?)
A good skeptic should not be afraid to present their claims simply, clearly, and in full detail. If the claim is good, then stating the claim clearly and presenting the relevant information others will need in order to see the truth of the claim will enable others to judge the claim's validity for themselves.
A main reason not to present such details is that the claim is not as rock-solid as the claimant would like to pretend. Then, bluff and bluster are needed to sell the claim. That's what too many people who post in this section of the forum appear to me to be resorting to.
In the OP, the broad claim is that torture produces useful information and the particular claim is that the prevention of an attack on LA is an example of this. But the details of the particular claim are omitted, and people are expected simply to accept this as true.
What attack is being referred to? How was it aborted? What was the information that enabled the attack to be aborted, who was it obtained from, and what are the details of how it was given to the interrogators? These are basic questions which a skeptic would be inclined to ask if presented with this claim -- and therefore these are basic questions which a skeptic should attempt to answer in presenting the claim to others.
That information is missing from the OP. I suspect there is a good reason for this: namely, the details do not support the claim. ***
There is no known attack on LA which was foiled subsequent to the water-boarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. There is, however, an attack on LA which appears to match the details in the CSN story and which was foiled in February 2002 when the cell leader was captured. Since this is prior to the water-boarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, it is difficult to see how any information obtained by him could have foiled the plot.
The Bush administration spoke frequently about the foiling of the LA plot. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a 2006 "Press Briefing on the West Coast Terrorist Plot":
Here is George Bush speaking of this in 2008:
Here is Washington Post coverage of the foiling of the plot:
There are many other sources available with details on the LA plot which was foiled prior to the water-boarding of Khalid (and thus prior to any information obtained from him by the use of water-boarding). If there was another LA plot which was foiled with information obtained from Khalid, there is as yet no evidence of it.
Far from supporting the claim that water-boarding has been useful in producing information that prevented terrorist attacks, what this incident seems to show is:
(a) that examples to support the claim that water-boarding is useful in preventing terrorist attacks are hard to find;
(b) that the main example presented to support the claim is a deception;
and (c) that many believers in this claim were unable to examine the evidence clearly enough to see through the deception on their own.
This does not speak well for the people propounding the claim, the people who believe in the claim, or the claim itself.
*** Please note: I am not trying to say that Kallsop was aware of the details and deliberately chose to present the claim in a misleading fashion. I am inclined to believe that Kallsop was simply unaware of the details (but chose to present the claim anyway -- and in a way that made it appear as if Kallsop were actually familiar with the details and that the details would support the claim.)
Either way, this is not how skeptics should behave. But it is representative of the behavior of too many people who post in this section.
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