Numerous message boards here on ATS talk of how torturing terror suspects is so 'evil'; however, I would argue that now, more than any other period in history, its use is entirely justified.

Human rights/civil liberty promoters endlessly rant about how inhuman, unconstitutional, illegal, etc the practice is. I think the key flaw in their whole argument is that torturing suspects who wish to threaten our freedom and liberty is indirectly preserving our rights granted by law by removing the threat which they desperately advocate.

Another way of looking at the whole situation is to look at it subjectively, as opposed to objectively. Imagine, the situation: your loved one goes to work in a nearby city by means of a train commute. That train/subway is then attacked, as in London back in 2005, and your loved one dies as a result. However, the whole heartache and loss could have been prevented if the authorities were legally allowed to extract crucial information prior to the attack by means of torturing an associate of the terrorists. Would you still abhor the use of it as so many of you do?

Of course there will be innocent people who are wrongly suspected of involvement in any attacks/plots and subsequently tortured but is the torture of one innocent that wrong in order to be able to torture ten guilty persons?

People in the U.S. should be more proud of their government organisations, in particular the CIA, who allegedly participate in these practices.

When a forign government abducts you under suspicion of you being a spy, you'll likely be interrogated and possibly tortured. When you're hanging by your two broken arms from chains with chemical light fluid decaying your skin and 30,000 volt jolts of electricity pulsing through your penis, we'll try not to be offended.

For me, the only case against torture is the same as the only logical case against the death penalty.

And that is the question of "What If". What if you torture an innocent person? The inhumanity which you have inflicted cannot be taken back.

That said, in the active bomb scenario, I think pragmatism dictates that we would have to torture a potential suspect to try and gain knowledge of where the bomb is.

Routine torture of captured enemy operatives is not moral in my opinion. Contravention of the geneva code amongst other issues.

I'm not concerned with "justification".


What worries me is what it does to the soul of this country... the soul of the torturers to have the capacity within them to do something so horrible to another human being.


You can't win a battle against evil by becoming evil. Do that, and you automatically lose.

The entire premise that the OP is based upon relies on the idea that those causing the terror are in fact actual terrorists, individuals or groups of individuals taking action with the intent to cause harm or fear in the populace.

Replace this with the idea that most of the incidents are instead false flag black operations conducted by the authorities themselves, and the premise supporting the use of torture no longer has validity. Under this new premise, the use of torture on these individuals is nothing more than coercion to obtain a false admission of guilt.

I do agree to some extent I must admit, but none of you, bar soulslayer, have yet commented on how you would feel if it was your loved one who perished; you are looking at it objectively.

If torture is not the answer then what is? If a suspect knows that the authorities are limited in what they can do the suspects will obviously remain quiet because they know the authorities can only go so far.

Originally posted by Res_ipsa_loquitur
Of course there will be innocent people who are wrongly suspected of involvement in any attacks/plots and subsequently tortured but is the torture of one innocent that wrong in order to be able to torture ten guilty persons?

People in the U.S. should be more proud of their government organisations, in particular the CIA, who allegedly participate in these practices.

Here's hoping you or someone you love is not one of those innocent people. Try to 'Deny Ignorance'.

I question this post as being pure propaganda, meme steering, whatever term du jour you want to call it.

It's bizarre, especially that last paragraph.

Torture produces bad data. Think about it, if you didn't know something that your interrogators thought you knew, and they were torturing you, you would come up with something fast, to prevent further bodily harm, anyone would.

Not to mention the fact that Al-qiada is a load of BS invented by our own gov't, and the entire war on terror is a giant scam to make a few dirty people rich, and enslave the rest of the world at the same time.

If you are willing to trade liberty for security, you will have neither.

You are either a disinfo agent, or you just don't have a clue.

Torture is a tool of the unenlightened. Torture only satisfies a sadistic revenge and produces little results. Compare the intelligence of people who torture and those who do not. Torturers will consistantly have the lowest IQ. I cannot be proud of stupidity.

It just seems that what the OP is asking is for us to base our reasoning on emotion alone, rather than use logic. This is a standard ploy even: appeal to emotion and incite reaction based upon emotion. It is easier to create an intended response when appeal is made to emotion.

Terms like objective and subjective are being used in a double-speak like manner to mask the actual intent of appealing to emotion while ignoring logic.

I can tell you that no matter how subjective I view something, it doesn't mean that it will be based on emotion alone.

Oh, and disinfo agents do not routinely give away their credentials and employment. It is foolish to make such an argument that they are not paid to do exactly what you are doing in this thread. There are likely many that are, but we would never know it. The good ones do so in a way that no one catches on.

Human rights are as follows: only do to yourself what others can't do.

Ask yourselves this, how may times a day do you inflict torture amongst your body with your thoughtforms?Then punish yourself physically for not noticing you were already afflicted.

[edit on 15-5-2008 by menguard]

[edit on 15-5-2008 by menguard]

This is one of those arguments that will not change a person's mind. Those who disagree are already in the unenlightened barbarian category. Problem is, we tend to see these people who are tortured as people who need to be tortured for information they possess.

But torture doesn't make a person tell the truth or the information is just bad. He sure wouldn't talk about anything if we gave him a group hug. There are means to torture a person just to make him very uncomfortable, no physical scars, just emotional scars.

It's against all the agreements and conventions. No, these only apply to nations that have signed these agreements and conventions for their uniformed military services. This is why spies and saboteurs can be shot. That is the category the detainees fall under.

But we can lead by example. We'll let the terrorists mutilate and behead the prisoners they capture, which happens to be uniformed military, see paragraph directly above. We are above this and group hug the terrorist into decent people.

The only thing these people truly understand is a bullet in the head. They would gladly do it to anyone in this thread and brag about killing an infidel tomorrow. This is what we are against. People want to see the good in a person even if that person would just love to cut your beating heart out of your chest and hand it to you.

Originally posted by Res_ipsa_loquitur

I would not wish that on anyone but the incidents of innocents being abducted vastly outnumbers those who have had a connection.

Then, as a post grad law student, you know that the above statement need some proof. Otherwise you are nothing more than a common troll.

Originally posted by Ionized
Oh, and disinfo agents do not routinely give away their credentials and employment. It is foolish to make such an argument that they are not paid to do exactly what you are doing in this thread. There are likely many that are, but we would never know it. The good ones do so in a way that no one catches on.

How do you know this? Do you know anyone who does such a thing as disseminating disinformation? By your apparent 'how-to-disinform well' comments are we lead to believe that you are a disinformation agent? Of course not but

It fails to amaze me that whenever anyone in any thread on ATS offers a controversial, or mundane answer to the extraordinary it is immediately shot down as being disinformation or the poster is told to 'deny ignorance'.

As for the remark from about the subjective test, I refer merely to the legal test of subject/objectivity. Subjectiveness is purely what a 'standard' individual would do in those circumstances. It is always easy to say with hindsight that I would consider this, this and this; I wanted people's gut reaction to the hypothetical scenario, but to also consider it logically.

Your analogy to a car crash is completely irrelevant in the circumstances. The only possible way that the scenario could be used in an analogous manner is if we say an associate of that young foolish driver was aware that his friend was about to drive in an irratic manner, torture may illicit that information and prevent the accident from occurring. The argument that the torture is ONLY justifiable if guilt is admitted before torture is downright paradoxical. If this was the case there would be no need to torture in the first place??

Still I wait for someone to offer a viable means of extracting information from a suspect without torturing them. It is so easy to condemn torture anyone can do that, therefore I stand by my argument that it is a necessary evil because there is no alternative.