It's Official - US is anti-torture

[iceman5]

Spoken like a true Swede. Im sure its real easy for you guys. Nobody is attacking you. You can rely on others to stop people like Hitler from taking over your country.

You dont need to police the world. Someone else will do it. You dont need to spend billions of dollars on your military because someone else will.

I wish I could walk around all day with no fear because I had a 6'5" 300 pound brother walking beside me and I knew he would take care of anybody causing me a problem.

Theres no fairly tale world where everyone plays fair. We have to stretch the rules to protect ourselves.

I swear this is my last post in a political thread.

[Irexes]

Is what he says wrong because it's fallacious or because he's Swedish?

Cause if it's the latter I agree with him entirely and I'm English.

[sondring]

[excession]

[k3nt]

What if you tortured someone and the result was that 600,000 people died?

It looks now like a key piece of "evidence" that justified the war in Iraq -- which turned out to be false -- was produced via torture.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1209-07.htm

Short version of the story. We caught a guy. We sent him to Egypt. They tortured him. He told us what he thought we wanted to hear -- that Saddam and al Qaeda had close ties. He told us that because he just wanted the torture to stop.

This is not surprising at all, of course. Torture almost always produces false intelligence. People will say anything they think they want their captors to hear, to make the pain stop.

You know what would make us safer? Not torture. Not illegal wiretaps. Not restricting habeus corpus.

What would make us safer is having people in government who were at all competent at their jobs. The Bush administration's incompetence in the Iraq situation, and in fact the whole war on terror, has been breathtaking from start to finish. They literally did not plan for the aftermath of the war. No plan. At all. Don Rumsfeld reportedly said he would "fire the next person who asks about that" -- namely, planning for the postwar situation. Absolutely sickening incompetence, stupidity, self-righteousness, arrogance.

And it is these idiots, these morons, who think that torture is the way to get information. None of the people running this war ever served in the goddamned military. They know nothing about how to do it right. The military people -- all up and down the line -- were against this turn to torture. The JAGs fought against it. The top brass fought against it. It was implemented as a policy by lifetime civilians.

We didn't torture during the American Revolution. George Washington explicitly said: the British torture us, but we're not going to torture them. We're going to show them that we're different.

We didn't torture during WWI.

We didn't torture during WWII.

We didn't torture during the Cold War.

We used to be a better nation than that. And, you know, at the same time, we used to win wars rather than losing them. We used to make the world more safe rather than more dangerous. There's a connection here. There really is.

This is a new development in American history. We were always the good guys, at least on this issue -- we were the ones who condemned torture rather than participating in it. We were the good guys, and we won the wars, and had the civilized world on our side. Now we're the bad guys, and we lose the wars, and we have the civilized world lining up against us.

We see North Korea readying nukes. And what can we do about it? Nothing. We have no army to fight them with. We have no moral standing to condemn them with. And we have no real pull with any of our allies to help us confront them. We can do nothing about it. We are becoming weak internationally. It's pathetic.

Torture does not make you safer. It makes you less safe. It's sick and disgusting and horrible and evil, to boot.

[DoctorHandles]

[Irexes]

[DoctorHandles]

[DoctorHandles]

One more question for all the "no torture under any circumstances" people here, if had 10 captives and 1 of them knew the locatoin of a nuclear bomb which was planted in London or whatever the capital of Sweden is, would you torture them all? Is torturing 9 innocent people worth saving millions of lives?

And yes, I know you can never know for sure someone is guilty or torturing someone will save thousands of people's lives, but as Ice already said, we're not randomly picking people off the street here. And as stupid as everyone seems to think everyone in the military is, I'd guess a lot of the people making important decisions do in fact have some idea of what they're doing and aren't just angry rednecks who want to torture innocent for'ners.

[Stoneburg]

[Stoneburg]

[Molina]

[excession]

oh yes -'deontological'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology

Because John Rawls is particularly concerned with the utility of the least well off, he is sometimes associated with utilitarian and/or consequentialist schools of thought. What John Rawls has in common with thinkers like Kant and Locke is his use of the distinction between the concept of the right and the concept of the good. Whereas consequentialist theories argue or assume that an act is right (and should therefore be carried out) if it maximizes the good, deontological theories assert that an act can maximize the good yet still be wrong (and therefore should not be carried out) if it violates some deontological principle such as a right or a duty or the categorical imperative.

here of course the deontological prinicple suggested is that it is morally right to refrain from torture...

[Felonius_Monk]

[Irexes]