Is it okay to torture?

[ReichCreamTruck]

Hell yes, but only if the person is innocent but really ugly and/or annoying.

[harshash]

I really dont mind torture against members of alqaeda, they scare me

[carlairving]

@harshash So, if you were living in Afghanistan for example, and that your house would have been destroyed and your mother killed in a "collateral damage", and that therefore you would be scared of american soldiers, it would be morally okay for you to capture and torture them?

[moroccanroller]

Torture

1. doesn't work - people will say anything to make pain stop.

2. justifies others torturing us

3. makes torture here more likely.

4. helps accumulate torture expertise

5. erodes national/international law

6. is used largely NOT to extract information but to destroy personality of tortured (political control)

7. erodes moral justification for saying we're better

8."Revenge" incompatible with rule of law, democracy.

9. "Revenge is mine sayeth the Lord"

[gameragodzilla]

torturing a torturer is justifible. We're talking about people who don't give a **** about human rights, so why should we care for them? I'm not even talking about extracting information. I'm talking about getting some payback for what the terrorists do to OUR OWN TROOPS! seriously, terrorists are gonna torture our troops whether we torture them back or not, so we got nothing to lose, and we can also get some payback for all the lives the terrorists ruined.

torturing a torturer is ok for me

[dave777blaster]

The Geneva conventions were laughed at by the Japanese during ww2 and we made sure to prosecute them if there was evidence of water boarding.

The same should apply to any American who thinks torture is ok.

The world watches, prosecute or you will end up in the third world .

[joba606]

When time is of the essence - waterboard the terrorist.

[LadyLibraNMore]

The American Government needs to do its OWN work!

[Rog6789]

I'm just playing the devil's advocate here... Suppose they found out that the terrorists had an atomic bomb and were going to set it off somewhere in the U.S. within the next 48 hours. You had one suspect that you knew had the information for you to find it before it went off. Is it still immoral to torture him? To save 100,000 lives? How about 1 million? Just a thought for discussion.

[shiizaa]

Great Stuff.!!

[shiizaa]

Once you open youself to the torture others then you support the use of torture against your own soliders. The honourable solider is not one who digs to depth of hell to win. The intelligent solider does not need the enemies "intelligence" for his "supposed" cause, espicially when it is he who is the instigator. A valiant commander does not subject his soliders to crimes against the humanity of the world.

[Whoo69]

That argument might work IF WE WEREN'T AT WAR WITH ISLAMISTS. These people do not care about rules of war. They've tortured and beheaded and killed dozens of people from Baghdad, including several soldiers. I really don't think torturing terrorists is gonna increase the chance of our men getting captured anymore (or that much, anyway). And if we stopped torturing, would the terrorists really stop beheading? I doubt it. Those people are insane.

[dave777blaster]

No the Iraqi did not torture until America did it first you see if you ok torture under any circumstance you will lose your allies.

and Alone America can't fight it's way out of a wet paper bag .

[gameragodzilla]

dude, the terrorists tortured and attacked America first. They KNOW that if they fought a war that "followed" the rules, then they'd lose, hard. So, they just threw away all the rules, counting on idiots like you guys to keep us from doing the same thing, and then actually start doing some damage. It's like playing soccer, and the other team can use their hands whenever they feel like it, but you can't. Terrorists torture our troops, so we should torture them back.

[sirjames45]

Terrorists who may have information about a nuclear bomb being set off in our nation, are subject to ANY method of getting the truth out of them. Amnesty should spend no time on whining about terrorists, and START spending time on helping Christians in Asia and China.

[milotube]

From the U.S. Army Field Manual (as of June 2006), which the U.S. Army calls its 'capstone manual' and 'vision for the Army': "Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

[sirjames45]

I agree. What we are talking about is a very rare circumstance to begin with. But after all other methods have failed, and the intelligence indicates that thousands would die, I say use any means that could give us the answer we need to save all those lives.

[milotube]

Sorry, sirjames45, but force doesn't yield reliable results, whether it's a first recourse or a last ditch effort, to say nothing of the fact that it's an egregious human rights abuse.