To come directly to the question at hand.

No.

Torture is no option. If we torture, we are not better then the oponent. If that means risking your own life for the risk of war or terror, I am willing to take it. Hundrets of thousand ppl put their lives at stake and often enough lost it to fight for human rights and dignity throughout the centuries.

It all comes down to the question of whats more important. Values, or life. If the answer is life, then everything's exuseable for something thats ending nevertheless sooner or later.

Are we talking about physical & mental torture as one or separate?

Torture can be many things, for example your restrained under a dripping tap that drips on your head which is not really physical but can be after a number of hours mental torture.

I have two reasons for voting against torture under any circumstances.

1. If I condone it for my own reasons, I have no basis for criticizing others who do it for theirs. So, then, torture, by anyone for any reason, becomes defensible.

2. In order for torture to occur, you need people willing to carry it out. That in turn means that a society that tortures people provides a haven for those who are good and skilled at committing torture. One can even see where it encourages such people to work to develop their craft to the utmost. I do not want to live in a society that preserves such people and gives them security to practice their craft. Those people are just as undesirable as those they torture, to my mind.

Walking the moral high ground means exposing yourself to risk, that's a given. I understand that, but I find the alternative requires me to adopt a stance that I would rather not live with. So my choice is made by that.

P.S. as others have said, I too do not feel that torture is a reliable nor effective means of intelligence gathering. Given that, my two reasons above don't even enter into it - it's a waste of time, effort and resources that could be better used gathering more reliable information in the first place.

I ordered option 6 with special fried rice, home delivery. ;)

Isn't that a stroman? :hmm:

Do you mean a straw man, one set up just so you can knock him down again? Possibly. Possibly, but it could happen. I voted #6, but with reservations. Of course if my child's life were on the line I would do it without hesitation, which makes me more than just a little hypocritical.

In the 1988 presidential debate Michael Dukakis was asked if he would change his mind and support the death penalty if his own wife were raped and murdered. Though on the face of it he stuck to his guns, his answer was like he was reading from his script, and the transcript doesn't describe the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look on his face at the time. Personally I would have respected him more if he had said something like "Yes, I would still be against the death penalty, because I wouldn't want to fry for what I did to the ****** after I caught up with him!"

Stroman...? What is that? Both my printed and my PC dictionary fail on that.

I think he said "strawman" as in "strawman attack".

I think I said that in my post just above.

Don't knew that phrase. If I understand it correctly now (strawman is translated as Strohmann or Scheingegner, in German it more often is used as "bait"), Fsh asked if I have added that sentence to option 6 to make it attackable to chose that option.

well, that was not my intention, but a consequence. Option 6 is a moral dilemma in my opinion, and if you rule out torturing for principal reasons, in that scenario that means to eventually pay for that by willing a high number of innocents being murdered. that is my primary reason to vote not for option 6. On the other hand, using torture ma save these victims for getting killed, but as some have said will serve as an example formtohers to torture - maybe for different motives - as well, which again leaves you with a dileamma addti0onal to the dileamma of having to risk abuse of torture and inncoents become subject to it.

I find myself unable to make a general stand of pro or contra on this issue, that's why I said somehwereabove that it should be judged and weighted on the actual case at question. Which leaves it open to the risk of arbitrariness - which again leaves you with a moral dilemma.

As I said in the introduction: this is a tough one. I could even understand if somebody would want to vote for all six options simultaneously.


Sailor Steve,
you posted your posting while I was typing mine. ;) The time difference reads two minutes.

Skybird:

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "set up a straw man" or "set up a straw man argument" is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent. Often, the straw man is set up to deliberately overstate the opponent's position. A straw man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it is in fact a misleading fallacy, because the opponent's actual argument has not been refuted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

And my point is I value my life over theirs...:yep:

Thanks. In German a Strohmann means just a (unimportant) conctact person one party is exposing to hide it's own real identity.

Nice tip! Not even i knew that. Just went and had a look now.

Assuming it's not for the purpose of taking blame, we'd call that a "front man". If it is for taking blame we'd call him a "scapegoat".

I thought you were a pilot? Bloody war from what ive seen and read.
Ive been reading the areas history from the times of Cyrus the Great,
funny how little things change and 2000-3000 years feels like a short time.:hmm:

Yeah, strawman it is. :yep:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

Okay, then I have answered your initial hint or question in posting #50.

As a former officer in the United States Army, I will tell you strait up that in the Officers Basic Course, in Military Ethics, you will be instructed that torture is absolutely something that an American Army officer will not condone.

And the reason is it saves lives.

Take the moronic example from the presidential debate.

Would you torture a suspect to get info on a terrorist attack?

According to the avowed ethics of the United States Army Officer Corps, the answer is no, because you will create far more "terrorists" who will then plan future attacks.

Many, many, many lives have been saved over the years because folks just surrender to us because we are the good guys. There going to get a blanket, an MRE and some cigarettes.

But I don't expect the cowardly draftdodgers in our current adminstration to understand military ethics.

Later on, yes. At the time, no, I wasn't. I only flew for about 6 months, though, and that was riding shotgun.