Quote Originally Posted by asdf View Post
  1. 1
  2. It's illegal.
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  3. It's immoral.
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  4. It leads to bad intelligence, corrupts good intelligence, and confessions stemmed from torture are inadmissible in court.
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  5. It damages respect and rapport for the US abroad, both among allies and enemies.
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  6. It puts our troops in greater danger of being tortured when they are captured as POWs.
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  7. It damages our credibility to condemn torture when done by other regimes.
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  8. It disrespects the humanity of all involved - the torturer, the victim, and the leadership and society that gives its approval.

Questions? Comments? Ideas for what should be done to repair the damage done by those in the US government who authorized torture?
Torture: 1. Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion.
2. An instrument or a method for inflicting such pain.

ETYMOLOGY:
Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin tortra, from Latin tortus, past participle of torqure, to twist; see terkw- in Indo-European roots

http://education.yahoo.com/reference.../entry/torture


1) Legal is your hot topic. Countries all different in what is legal or not at different periods of time. So saying it is not legal is a matter of what time you are referencing. It is not legal under Obama, but was legal under Truman or FDR is a matter of jurisdiction. Hence, if something was done legally under Bush, it should not be tried as illegal under Obama.

2) immoral. I would submit that some "torture" is not "torture" at all in the minds of most people when contrasting torture methods of the past. I.e. the Vietnamese pulling fingernails, Saddam using batteries on prisoner's genitalia, and a whole load of other such things. Typically, I viewed torture to be anything that actually permanently alter's the bodies appearance or damages any of its functions. I do not think Water Boarding permanently harmed or disfigured those terrorists that were subject to it. Obama not releasing the effects of the Water Boarding, in its prevention of other terroritists plots, is therefore just as immoral for withholding the truth to the American public. If he wants transparentcy in terms of releasing our methods to the world, he should be just as transparent to what it accomplished.

3) If you treat terror as a crime it is admissible only when the methods are presently illegal, if you treat it as civilian combatants, it is different. Again, we should see the results to see whether its intelligence was of value or not.

4) which is why Obama should never have released the information in the first place.

5) I am a soldier. I will tell you that the terrorists have no concern for POW treatment, they are not under the Geneva Convention. I wonder how many naive "human shields" that went to Iraq during the onset of the war there came to realize that Saddam was not a nice person after all when he was positioning them in areas of sites that were blatant violations of U.N. resolutions. I have seen the worst of the worst in the detainee camps, and believe me their hatred for American troops does not dissipate because of Water Boarding. They would still do to the troops whatever they intended if we were captured.

6) really, do other regimes Water Board? I mean when we invaded Saddam, did you not see and hear the stories of the types of torture he used? Do you see us doing the same as Iran when they captured the British Navy sailors and was parading them in their State run media for purpose of propoganda. I do not see this happening in the US. You need some real comparisons between the regimes.

7) back to results and the legality during the time of the interviews and advanced interigations techniques. The terrorists had no concern for humanity when they rammed two commercial jets into the Twin Towers, and the third into the Pentagon, not to mention the fourth that crashed and who knows where it was intended--White House?

If the techniques were authorized in a legal manner, absolutely nothing. If you want to change, change policy and quit looking at the past. It harms our own intelligence gathering when they have to fear litigation within the US from balancing it with doing their ***s with our real enemies.