Quote Originally Posted by Cloud No.9
dying for morality is exactly what to do. that was the nuremburg principle.

channel 4 did a season about the american torture. in it they had a ex cia, mossad and mi5 and asked them if the ticking bomb scenario (where torturing someone had given information about an imminent threat) had ever happened. they all replied, no.

torture acheives nothing. unless of course you believe the witch hunting and spanish inquisition were valid. torture is used in a situation when guilt cannot be proved. that is normally due to lack of evidence. if there was enough evidence then it would be used and a confession would not be needed. it is based on blind guesses. look at the prisoners in guantanamo bay. in there we have a blind cripple who was according to all intelligence in pakistan (he was the taliban's ambassador). kids. another blind man (though that was admittedly done in custody).

and we are talking about an intelligence system so flawed it led to the iraq war and the refusal of entry to cat stevens and the false arrest and torture of many released.

and we are talking about a military which has soldiers such as lindy england and the ones using a website in which they trade porn for pictures of dead iraqis.

is this the system we want to use to decide who deserves torture so bad the US had to ammend it's own position on torture and leave the international court.

and i'll judge any man who tortures another. unless you want to absolve all blame for the nuremburg guilty.
I'm honestly talking more about the ticking bomb scenario of prisoners caught in Iraq who are known to be in the insurgency and thus may know of planned attacks in Iraq. We aren't getting "confessions". Most in Iraq are captured with uzis in their hand, so we don't need to get them to confess. This isn't "punishment" either, it's being used to extract information that may very well save the lives of a troop convoy of 12-20 people. And honestly, we have no idea how often it had prevented an attack, because you never hear about the bombs that don't go off.

And as I said before, it isn't so much whether I don't approve of torture, or whether you disaprove of torture, or even what the War Crimes Court thinks of torture. The question is whether you are willing to have other people die for your moral indignation. I don't think that's a moral thing to do. I could see where I'd rather die than torture, and I know that you'd be willing to die rather than torture (and would doubtless risk life and limb lest he go to his cell and not find a mint on his pillow). All of that is perfectly legitamate. But it's when you say "Die for MY beliefs, and die rather than doing something that will make ME uncomfortable" that we part company. It isn't fair to the people you are asking to die.