Quote:
Originally Posted by OneToughHerring
There's a lot of people, and I'm not just talking about peacefolks and hippies, who think that using torture is much more problematic then it helps. It may produce some info but more often then not it's false info. It also plays right into the hands of people who claim the US is using unethical tactics.
And I'm saying this from a pro-US point of view, I don't think torture is the smart way to go. There's decades of torture use in places in like US-proxy states in South America, it's not like this stuff is exactly new.
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Indeed, that's the common argument against torture. However, it discounts a couple things:
First, some methods of "torture" are more effective than others. Fear has always worked more effectively than pain, for instance. That's due to the nature of fear.
Secondly, the argument that torture doesn't work fails heavily when one considers that, if it wasn't working, it wouldn't be used.
Regarding ethics, the argument fails when the question is asked: what is more unethical? To me, allowing a disaster to happen because of weak-kneed intel methods is far worse than scaring someone into telling what they know.
Let's say we capture a known terrorist ringleader. He isn't saying anything, but we know a plot is about to unfold. To me it is morally repugnant to NOT use so-called enhanced methods of interrogation in that case. In essense, we are forced into making a decision between to distasteful things ... yet you want to fault us for making the decision that benefits us.