Opinion on "The Senate Committee's Report on the CIA's Use of Torture"

Ever since "The Senate Committee's Report on the CIA's Use of Torture" has come out in the public domain there are two extreme views that I see. Those who would be saying the reports stand that torture was not required and it was extremism and compromised on humanity etc. The other's who would characteristically say the report is wrong, and it was because of the torture that many lives were saved.

I believe the truth is perhaps somewhere in between. Till now I was avoiding to write on it, but now at-least there is one expert who thinks on the same lines although they have left some questions in their article. Obviously since it seems like an American author so I wouldn't get into the details of his biases.

Now coming back, before getting into the moral questions lets try and recall what had happened. In India it was approx 9 in the evening in India when America was attacked.

It was typically a situation that was 1. Not anticipated. 2. And no one had any clue. 3. The top management, in this case the bureaucrats and the politicians who were perhaps thinking they were back in the wild wild west, where everything is my-way or the highway. And hence what followed next was more of a logical conclusion

Stratfor has perhaps got the entire thing closest to reality that most people while are calm now, were jittery then. They correctly diagnosed the problem: "The use of torture was not part of a competent intelligence effort, but a response to a massive intelligence failure."

On torture and what went wrong with US was perhaps quoted by the report as: "The problem with torture — as with other exceptional measures — is that it is useful, at best, in extraordinary situations. The problem with all such techniques in the hands of bureaucracies is that the extraordinary in due course becomes the routine, and torture as a desperate stopgap measure becomes a routine part of the intelligence interrogator's tool kit."

As far as the moral dilemma is concerned. There is a time when you don't know anything, so you get people who deliver with perhaps dubious means and then you build capability and transfer to achieve things in the right way.

This could have sound counter-intuitive and extremely grey. But we need to accept, not everything in life is in black or white. Many things are out-rightly in between.

Sharing Ideas for hiring website

People are shy of sharing ideas, I believe knowledge should always be shared. 

Recently while checking some websites for jobs I came across some ideas and shared it with one of the job site founders. I don’t know if the mail was correct or not but looking back I find it quite funny, wonder what the person at the other end thought.

Let me share the mail here.

Hi,
I will skip the formalities of introducing myself because that is irrelevant and get to my suggestions.
On the hiring side I think you should collect two set of data/response to question/
1. Are you looking for someone with the same industry experience?
2. Are you looking for people with skill set that would suit your company and bring in diversity of skill-set and perhaps lateral thinking capability?
And accordingly mark all jobs either (1) People with industry experience or (2) cross functional experience.
This will help identify HRs on what they want. People from within industry may not always get them fresh thinking but maybe the HRs don't want it. If it comes out clearly then it can be mapped to the persons field. Hence making acceptance and rejection easier.
In any domain, a job can be bracketed in between creative, operations/coordination and management. You can start the paid module where each applicant's experience is distilled into these either manually or programming and from there you can advice on best matches if the HRs are looking for cross-functional hiring.
I don't think there is any job website which looks from this perspective. If I have not been articulate enough about my suggestion but you are interested then let me know when you are in Mumbai and relatively free.
Its merely a suggestion based on my observations. Good luck!
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Warm regards,

It was nice of the founder to actually reply that they were working on something similar. Which confirmed that I was not the only one thinking about the problem. Rather there were people who were also thinking about the solution.