Torture

[HGervais]

The Atlantic's Ross Douthat has an excellent essay up on the subject that I think sums up a lot of what people are feeling.

[TemporalWisdom]

But again, these are people that are willingly ready to blow themselves up and thousands of innocents in the name of their cause.

Yeah, and? You'd like to sink to their level, is that it?

It's a new century, and a new style of warfare. Right or wrong, the administration did what it felt it needed to do to protect Americans.

The justification you give for torture is that it's used to save lives. First, wouldn't that have been the objective if we'd tortured a North Korean to find out which South Korean village was going to be bombed? How is that different from saving American lives, if we assume you don't know the victims either way?

Second, torture doesn't work. Aside from the fact that the Bush administration, which leaked the name of a CIA operative for political gain, hasn't furnished proof that it works, this fact is obvious on its face. Pretend for a second that terrorists who want to kill your family are torturing you to find out where they are, and you happen to know where. Are you going to:

A: Tell your torturers everything after the nineteenth bamboo shoot
B: Keep your mouth shut until you, mercifully, die or
C: Lie -- say your family is anywhere but where they actually are?

These are people that are willingly ready to blow themselves up and thousands of innocents in the name of their cause. You honestly think they're going to cave and choose option A? You're so confident of that, that if a nuclear bomb is ticking and you think cutting the green wire is the secret to disarming it, you'll cut the red wire because a terrorist you've spent a couple days waterboarding said so? Really?

There is no reason to think that torture works at all. There is plenty of reason to think that if it ever works, it does so intermittently. It either gets us no information or information we can't trust. Morality aside, what's the point?

[Dan Mancini]

The Atlantic's Ross Douthat has an excellent essay up on the subject that I think sums up a lot of what people are feeling.

Great piece. Maybe the best I've read on the subject.

[HGervais]

Well, there is reality and then there is Dick Cheney's version of reality. Oy.

[Future Man]

The Atlantic's Ross Douthat has an excellent essay up on the subject that I think sums up a lot of what people are feeling.

Great piece. Maybe the best I've read on the subject.

A great read.