Rape and infanticide have been around since the Stone Age too, and they are just as 'effective' as torture - at causing human misery and death. The fact that a practice has been in place since the beginning of human history in no way justifies that practice.

Now that we have marginalized al Qaeda to a large degree, the choice seems easy.

My point in bringing this up is that we should have said "no" to torture when the choice was still a lot harder, but I can understand the reasons that we didn't.

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."

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TWIST

This is my position: "No. The ends do not justify the means and torture should not have been used."

"The US should not torture, put its citizens in concentration camps or use white phosphorous rounds on enemy personnel."

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"In abstract terms, trained interrogators already have decent methods for getting accurate information out of prisoners. Subjecting the prisoner to coercion, physical suffer, and mental torment can certain get someone to say more things but the very fact that the "things" were coerced out of the captive by torture limits their value. You'll almost certainly get him to say some accurate stuff. He might, for example, correctly insist that he doesn't know anything more. But he'll also say all kinds of inaccurate stuff. He'll say whatever he thinks will get you to stop torturing him.

In historical terms, you don't look back on the Spanish Inquisition or on Stalin's Russia and say man, those guys had some crack investigators! Rather, you see that historically the function of torture has been to extract false confessions and to inspire a general climate of fear." [yglesias.thinkprogress.org]

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@persimmon: First of all, read some of the past posts on this subject, before you go spouting off. There are tons of liberals who make compelling, ethically based arguments about torture and then add side arguments that it is ineffective and puts our troops in more danger due to reprisals. Hamilton's whole fucking article was about someone who retracted his position on the effectiveness of torture.

I took the time out to talk to people who were actually tortured in military training exercises. One was waterboarded. Those people were convinced that it would actually work if it were a real scenario. It's a little irritating when I take a moderate position that is not conservative, but a little left of my usual stance and some idiot like you attacks me because I am not on the extreme liberal side of every issue. So, pardon me if I don't give a fuck if any part my opinion is wearing thin with you. My opinion is that we were wrong to resort to torture. I think that it is an effective but immoral way to obtain information. Period. If I'm riding a fence, it's my balls that are being chafed.

@Paul_Is_Drunk: Thank you. Sincerely. My reasons are stated above.

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Could I get a couple of cites for this? Defense of torture doesn't seem to be a terribly liberal position.

ps: Alan Dershowitz is not a liberal.

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I'm not asking for a pat on the back. Before I found out about the number of times the water-boarding was used I didn't see it as torture. If you punch me in the stomach once it's a battery. If you do it repeatedly it's torture. By the way, I'm not interested in receiving a prize from any body that celebrates Yasser Arafat's achievements.

What an asshole you are for denigrating the military service of my friends. If you do it in the future, at least be funny. You owe them that much, punk.

@valet_of_the_dolls: They weren't defending torture. I was saying that they were trying to bolster their arguments against torture by saying that it was ineffective. I said "arguments about torture" but I meant "arguments against torture," in my previous post. Hope this clears it up. My bad.

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