What I read from his argument is that he is against the amendment.
How would one write a law allowing torture in unusual circumstances? Would a bomb blowing up in half an hour count, but not an hour? The potential death of ten people doesn’t kick in the exception, but 100 people does?
The problem with not passing the amendment is that some people clearly think that torture is okay in non-unusual circumstances. (I hope John does not think that all the guilty parties from Abu Ghraib have been tried.)
The Israeli solution seems best to me - it is strictly illegal, but if a trial establishes extenuating circuimstances, there should be sentencing leeway to take these into account. If someone feels the need to torture a prisoner, they should be willing to defend the decision in some sort of court.
Considering I’m in sync with most of the OP, I don’t know what’s left to be said. Or would something a tad more quantifiable, such as “This is nothing new, as Charles Krauthammer has been an unabashed neo-con apologist for years,” be preferable?
This has no relevance to the question of whether it should be legally permitted. If you think it’s necessary, you do it, and you take your punishment like a man afterwards.
Exactly. Torture should be utterly banned. If one of those “ticking time-bomb” hypotheticals ever actually occurs, then the President can pardon the heroic torturers afterwards while the public cheers at their ticker-tape parade.
CK’s argument is the equivalent that we should pass a law saying that sometimes it’s okay to steal because someone somewhere might have to break into a closed pharmacy during a natural disaster to steal bandages. Only a moral midget would fail to grasp that ANY LAW can be rendered inoperative given particular circumstances. Given the choice between allowing a man to bleed to death and breaking and entering, the moral thing to do is break the window and steal the bandage. If a person doesn’t have a strong enough moral sense to know when breaking the law is the right thing to do, they certainly don’t have a strong enough moral sense to be allowed to torture someone.
When faced with a situation where all other avenues prove fruitless, and A life or lives are on the line, torture should be used. Even if there is only a slight, and may be no, chance of it giving any useful information.
And, so then…
Whether lives were saved or not, the torturers should be prosecuted. Let a jury decide on the torturers guilt.
I am against torture. It is evil and wrong.
To save my country, family or humanity, I would torture, kill and maim, and go to hell for it, with a smile on my face, knowing it was worth the price.
And if you’re not sure enough of your facts to risk a trial, you sure as hell aren’t sure enough to get out the electrodes. (The facts being the existence of the bomb, the prisoner being the person who knows where it is, there being no other possible source of the information, and there being no other way to save lives, such as evacuating the city. --Honestly, if you think someone’s planted a nuke in a city, isn’t evacuation the first order of business? Even if you get the culprit to talk, there’s no guarantee you’ll find the bomb in time or disarm it without setting it off.)
My answer to the “ticking bomb” argument is “Sure. When you catch a guy who knows where a nuclear bomb is hidden, go ahead and torture him. When that happens. The question is what we do until then. Do we torture people who have nothing to do with nuclear bombs? Why? So we can practice? Do we torture innocent people? Because the intelligence services aren’t infallible, and if they’re allowed to torture pretty much anyone, sooner or later they’ll pick up the wrong person and torture him anyway. Are you fine with torturing innocent people right now, because we *might * need to torture later if some fictional scenario comes true?”