Any torture is unthinkable. The fact that we tried and hanged Japanese soldiers that waterboarded people during WW2 should indicate that it is a pretty serious practice.
Define torture.
Because there are ways of getting more reliable information just as effectively without resorting to going against everything the United States stands for.
Waterboarding
may be a crapshoot, but that doesn't mean other methods that aren't tea parties and polite conversation don't work.
As soon as we stop abiding by our own laws, Deck's fantasy of a big controlling government becomes a reality. As soon as we stop abiding by our own laws, we are becoming terrorists.
The Geneva Conventions? They don't apply to terrorists. No seriously, look the damn thing up. You need to be in uniform in the service of the nation. Otherwise you'd be arguing Timothy McVeigh and abortion clinic bombers are subject to the protections of Geneva.
As to big government taking over: Dictatorships exist, do they not?
Since the people in question are tortured before they are convicted, you can't say what they were intending to do.
What part of "caught on the battlefield" don't you understand jrrr? These people are not randomly picked off the street like a drug dealer. It is fruitless arguing with you if you do not concede this point. No one brought in for interrogation is innocent, they were caught in the act of an attack or plot. War is not a civil offense. Clinton tried calling the police as a response to terrorism, and it got him nothing. You cannot pretend your sworn enemy caught attempting to kill you is innocent before proven guilty, that will get you killed.
And yeah, torturing helpless inmates who haven't even been given a trial to determine if they are guilty is really comparable to being attacked from behind.
Three people have been tortured. None of them were at Gitmo. None of them are inmates now. Your argument is irrelevant.
Torture does not protect American citizens. It only endangers them, both by stirring up anti-American sentiment and by providing (usually) unreliable information.
The people who are attacking us now have been calling us The Great Satan since before Jimmy Carter came on the scene. These motherfuckers celebrated on 9/11 as 3000 people died.
They.
Celebrated. Anti-American sentiment? Please. They hate us no matter what we do, they are the new Nazis. Was Hitler any nicer after we conceded Poland to him? How about France? No? I wonder why. Probably because people think America is to blame for all the world's problems, and if only we were a little nicer and didn't completely outclass their culture, social mores, and individual liberty in every conceivable way they would like us more. Maybe because blaming vague "policies" for resulting violence is idiocy, especially foreign policy, the most vacuous and impossible to control policy of all.
Nope, torture has proven to be an inferior tactic in attaining information. "They did it hundreds of years ago, so it must be OK now!" is really your argument? I mean, I know youre conservative...but you really want to regress our system of law by 700 years?
My argument is merely that torture has not been done for kicks. It obviously had use as a deterrent in previous centuries. It may be considered ugly now, but being ugly and being useless are two different things.
Yeah, shipping him off to a secret prison was just so useful in preventing terrorism plots. I'm sure you would say that waterboarding him 183 times and abusing his children was justified?
Links please for abusing his chilren.
To clarify, just so there won't be any conclusion:
If "torture" works and it can save lives, it should not be prohibited from use in the most dire of cases.
If "torture" doesn't work then obviously it is an inherent waste of time.
The main problem is that like anything else, some methods of coercion are more effective than others. Thus you cannot ban "torture" itself but must first define a practice as torture and then determine its usefulness in gathering information.
