re: ineffective. How do you know I have information (or more information). You only know I might have information. And so when I make up something, it takes many people, equipment, money, and time to verify, assuming it’s even possible to verify. That’s why it’s an ineffective tool to gather intelligence. It wastes all those resources. Notwithstanding any moral arguments.
Remember I am positing that I know you know. Its not very useful for fishing expeditions unless you know the guy knows SOMETHING.
I’m not saying that you start torturing everyone as soon as you capture them but its a tool in your toolkit.
If I know you killed someone and i want to know where you buried the body, I can torture you to tell me where. If I capture a kidnapper, I can torture them to get information that they might not be willing to provide because I ask them really nicely.
(bolding mine)
Seems to me that if you’re going to torture someone for information that can be easily disproven, you start out by telling them, “This is going to hurt really bad, so you had better tell me what I want to know. If you tell me something and I find out it is bullshit, and I WILL FIND OUT if it IS bullshit, you’re going to beg me to kill you.”
How would that be “ineffectual”?
If one already knows the answer, one would be a monster to use torture to confirm it.
OTOH, your claim to be able to “easily disprove” an answer remains conjecture and the victim of torture cannot know that you will find the answer. That victim is going to be quite willing to say anything he or she believes you want to hear–even if false–in order to stop the torture. And once you have begun to torture someone, that person has no reason to believe that you will stop the tortue even with a correct answer, so the torture victim may prefer to lie for a brief surcease of the torture (while you check the answer), fully execting to be tortured more if he or she tells the truth.
In any event, torture, (a topic already discussed in many threads, here), is separate from the topic of this thread and I suggest that you open a new thread if you wish to continue it.
I think you’ll find “they” as in the victims didn’t have a say in it.
I thought we had already resolved that if the allies had not won the war then the nuclear attacks would clearly have been war crimes (at last the second one would have been). We have already established that it was necessary to accelerate a peace that was already in the offing.
Doesn’t really seem to be much of a debate anymore.
Torture is wrong.
Period.
The USA is (unfortunately) guilty of torturing prisoners of war.
I am saddened by this.
My father who fought in WWII would be as well.
Even though he voted Republican all of his life.
The more I hear about how we treated our POWs during the recent wars, the more I am disgusted.
Dangit!
These are human beings. Just like you and me.
There should be some standards of conduct in dealing with them
Cheney (that hive of scum and villainy) actually still defends torturing POWs for freaking years.
uuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
I cannot imagine where you got this idea. Scores of Nazis, maybe hundreds, were executed or imprisoned for the Holocaust during the war’s aftermath. Entire courts were set up to handle some of the slates of defendants, there were so many.
The Nuremburg trials were just one of a bunch of war crimes trials. Sixteen Nazis were sentenced to death at the Ravensbruck trials, the Auschwitz trial saw 21 more Nazis hanged; the Dachau Camp trials saw 23 Nazis hanged just on May 28-29, 1946 and dozens more hanged for crimes committed at other camps. All for concentration camp crimes, all arrested right after the war.
Deduction. Bush was elected on a moralistic platform. He was (allegedly) concerned with doing the right thing, morally. If he considered waterboarding a good thing, he would have made overturning the longstanding American opposition to waterboarding one of his first executive orders. He did not.
It might be resolved in your mind, but I am pretty sure that if you post a new thread on the topic it will go to several pages with many disagreements.
(Beyond that, I have no idea why you quoted my post before submitting views that talked about a rather different topic.)
My apologies for the hijack of this thread, and the subsequent ‘train wreck’ that seems to have ensued. 