"Death is worse than torture, but everyone except pacifists thinks there are circumstances in which war is justified. War means killing people. If we are entitled to kill people, we must be entitled to injure them. I don't see how it can be reasonable to have an absolute prohibition on torture when you don't have an absolute prohibition on killing. Reasonable people will disagree about when torture is justified. But that, in some circumstances, it is justified seems to me to be just moral common sense. How could it be better that 10,000 or 50,000 or a million people die than that one person be injured?"
AL Qiada operatives do not respond to questions asked politely in this case yes it is OK Boxman55
Quote"Death is worse than torture, but everyone except pacifists thinks there are circumstances in which war is justified. War means killing people. If we are entitled to kill people, we must be entitled to injure them. I don't see how it can be reasonable to have an absolute prohibition on torture when you don't have an absolute prohibition on killing. Reasonable people will disagree about when torture is justified. But that, in some circumstances, it is justified seems to me to be just moral common sense. How could it be better that 10,000 or 50,000 or a million people die than that one person be injured?"John Yoo, defending the torture he helped legalize under Bush. Here is the whole article:http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=5c3b3463-bc14-4c00-879b-2b7b432d1e79Is it acceptable for the US government to torture people? My answer is "NO!". Once people are detained and completely under our control it is unacceptable for us to torture them. It is shocking to me that this point is even under discussion and I believe that the acceptance of torture by the current administration will result in damage to the interest of the United States for generations. Today's children and tomorrow's grandchildren will be paying the price for decisions made in our name today. I think future generations will curse us.
Have we become so low we have to resort to torture? We're supposed to be above that type of treatment. We're supposed to be the good guys. What the F happened to us?
I found this comment from Bigsky in a earlier postThe US has not tortured anyone as it is not our policy. Even the commander at Gitmo stated to the affect that the things done in Gitmo are not torture as because if they were done to our captured troops we would not consider it torture. But you might notice we have yet to cut civilians heads off and broadcast it on the web and tv like terrorists do.Boxman55
It's hard to tell what the Pentagon's objective really is in releasing the transcript of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession. It certainly suggests the Administration is trying to blame KSM for al-Qaeda terrorism, leading us to believe we've caught the master terrorist and that al-Qaeda, and especially the ever-elusive bin Laden, is no longer a threat to the U.S.But there is a major flaw in that marketing strategy. On the face of it, KSM, as he is known inside the government, comes across as boasting, at times mentally unstable. It's also clear he is making things up. I'm told by people involved in the investigation that KSM was present during Wall Street Journal correspondent Danny Pearl's execution but was in fact not the person who killed him. There exists videotape footage of the execution that minimizes KSM's role. And if KSM did indeed exaggerate his role in the Pearl murder, it raises the question of just what else he has exaggerated, or outright fabricated.
ON NEW YEAR'S EVE in 2003, I was seized at the border of Serbia and Macedonia by Macedonian police who mistakenly believed that I was traveling on a false German passport. I was detained incommunicado for more than three weeks. Then I was handed over to the American Central Intelligence Agency and was stripped, severely beaten, shackled, dressed in a diaper, injected with drugs, chained to the floor of a plane and flown to Afghanistan, where I was imprisoned in a foul dungeon for more than four months.Long after the American government realized that I was an entirely innocent man, I was blindfolded, put back on a plane, flown to Europe and left on a hilltop in Albania — without any explanation or apology for the nightmare that I had endured.
American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency. The violence raging there today is evidence that those tactics never worked. My memories are evidence that those tactics were terribly wrong.
Although reports of abuses by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have angered much of the world, the response of Americans has been more tepid. Finnegan attributes the fact that "we are generally more comfortable and more accepting of this," in part, to the popularity of "24," which has a weekly audience of fifteen million viewers, and has reached millions more through DVD sales. The third expert at the meeting was Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator in the war in Iraq. He told the show's staff that DVDs of shows such as "24" circulate widely among soldiers stationed in Iraq. Lagouranis said to me, "People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they've just seen." He recalled that some men he had worked with in Iraq watched a television program in which a suspect was forced to hear tortured screams from a neighboring cell; the men later tried to persuade their Iraqi translator to act the part of a torture "victim," in a similar intimidation ploy. Lagouranis intervened: such scenarios constitute psychological torture."In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence," Lagouranis told me. "I worked with someone who used waterboarding" -- an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. "I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee's hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened." Some people, he said, "gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information." If anything, he said, "physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up."
Balls? You know what I think takes balls? Standing by your principals even when there could be a short term price takes balls. It takes balls to set an example and it takes balls to do what's right when doing right is the hard thing to do. It does not take balls to torture. It use to take balls to be an American.
Hmm.............Have a set of balls and do what needs to be done to ensure the safety and survival of this country and lose a little morality or Sit back and watch the nuke show over a US city one day because we were "too moral" to do what needed to be done to keep it from possibly happening.However btw it is NEVER immoral to do what needs done to protect oneself from an enemy that has committed numerous attacks on us and killed thousands of civilians.Will innocent people get caught up? Certainly, it has always occurred in every war. Better for a few innocent people to possibly get caught up I say than to watch a million innocent people die because we were to "moral".
You do what must be done when you are fighting a war.This war must be fought,And by the way the US is not, I Repeat ,The US is NOT getting there ass kicked . This is what one reply had stated to my, Iraq war comment. This will be a long war and yes it is much different than WW2.There for if you have to use torture to protect your country,and other troops in the battle field thats how you justify it. Do you think for one second if we pull out that this country will be safe,no way,they hate America because we are free. They started it,,We will finish it...
That's how our choice is always presented isn't it? Torture or accept sharia law. Either or.bleh
When it comes down to life, death and freedom it is always either or. It seems to escape you that when fighting a group of people that have no regard for human life at all that certain things must be done.
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