Your stand on torture

[Skybird]

This is a tough one. It really is. Take a slow breath and leave your hot emotions behind, we do not want this to go up in flames. Just give your reasons, calm and reasonable please. If somebody starts to voice juvenile rants here, I will be the first to ask the mods to lock this thread.

Question: what is your stand on torture?

The poll is open for 10 days. The poll is public, that means your name is visible under the option you have chosen.

You have these six options, that I explain in detail here, since the poll headlines only allows limited number of characters. Use these descriptions to decide your pick.

Originally Posted by poll options

1 Yes, no problem with torture if society and/or government can be made less vulnerable to terrorism that way. Innocents trapped is the price to pay. the interests of the many overrule the interests of the few.

2 Yes, no problem, since the authorities always make it safe that no innocents get tortured.

3 Yes, no problem with torture if it is really only terrorists receiving it.

4 No, the risk of innocent ones becoming tortured for false is unacceptable.

5 No the risk that the government abuses torture for it's own agends not dealing with terror alone is too great.

6 No, torture must be considered unacceptable under all circumstances imaginable, even for terrorists. If we suffer terror attacks for that human behavior, then it is the price of having free societies. hundreds killed by terror is better than to do torture ourselves.

Read the options twice to make sure you really understood the sometimes ethically complex implications. I intentionally left out thenoption for multiple choices, since either you torture, or you don't - you can't have it both, and you cannot torture in a humane way. You need to make a choice: Yes, or No. Saying it is jutsified for some reasons, but it should be avoided for other reasons, is no option that can be practised.

The story behind this poll:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7185648.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7138144.stm

Bush has excluded the CIA from being prhibited to use waterboarding, but now "US national intelligence chief Mike McConnell has said the interrogation technique of water-boarding "would be torture" if he were subjected to it. (...) In December, the House of Representatives approved a bill that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation techniques such as water-boarding. President George W Bush has threatened to veto the bill, which would require the agency to follow the rules adopted by the US Army and abide by the Geneva Conventions, if the Senate passes it. (...) If it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it," he said.
CIA officials have been quoted as saying that water-boarding has been used on three prisoners since 2001, including al-Qaeda recruiter Abu Zubaydah, but on nobody since 2003."

I was involved in treatment of torture victims ropughly ten years ago, so my perpsective on it is a very close and personal one. I know what torture can do, I have seen it. It cannot only make people speak, it also can break them open and rip the soul and living will out of the body.

Therefore I am sometimes shocked to see how easy and thoughtless some big mouths sometimes talk about it on TV, or on the streets, and deal with it as if they were talking about wether or not the penalty for jumping the traffic lights should be raised by ten Euros or not, or they make it an issue of binary law-and-order "logic" alone.

Some will also argue wether or not waterboadring is torture. It is my convictzion that making somebody believe that he has to die now by drowning causes agony. If that agony would not be so painful that the subject cooperates, I wonder why it then cooperates indeed (water boarding is said to be extremely effective). Therefore, I conclude that OF COURSE it is torture. Or in other words: "Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who was tortured by the North Vietnamese as a prisoner of war, has said that water-boarding is torture: "It no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank."

Not the perfect option for me, but I choose - 4 - . I don't like it, but I like the other options even less.