Thanks Kevin, well put:
Torture should be flatly illegal because that's the message we want to send both to our own people and to the rest of the world. Legal torture should be reserved for regimes like Cuba and North Korea, not the United States of America.However, in the fantastically unlikely 24-esque event that we capture a terrorist who knows the location of a ticking atomic bomb, he's going to get tortured regardless. The torturer will immediately get pardoned by the president for doing so, and would be unanimously acquitted by a jury even if he weren't. And I'm fine with that.
So please. Enough with the idiotic ticking time bomb already. If we're going to talk about torture, let's talk about how it's used in the real world.
Comments (1)
In addition to being evil, torture is stupid.
In the first place, anyone will say anything if tortured. If they are ready to die, they will tell lies. So all info thus obtained is suspect.
Second, it justifies anyone who captures US personnel--not that they need justification--to torture them.
Posted by Paul Schumacher | November 16, 2005 4:37 AM