Originally Posted by roachboy

cyn--we've run through this before...the aspect of your position i respect while disagreeing is that you just say it. the problem is that it's hard to imagine a functional grounds on which this ok-ness could justify itself---on utility grounds, what torture generates is the desire on the part of the victim that the torture stop. so it is demonstrably *not* a way to get information that goes beyond "make this stop." the bush people appear to have understood this much, which explains why in some cases torture was used in an effort to get corroboration for an obviously false story that they understood to be politically useful.

there are also legal restrictions on it's use. international law, national law. in other debates, you've adopted positions that indicate you're a security-oriented kinda guy--in the everyday sense that you expect folk to abide by the law and seem to have little patience with folk who don't. except in this case, that of using torture. it seems inconsistent.

the "humanitarian" line on killing people is that pain is worse than death past a certain point, that it is more wrong to inflict unnecessary pain (and if you know that torture produces only one kind of information, and that information is that the torture stop, then the pain inflicted IS unnecessary) willfully and outside of that cordoned=off space of collective psychosis that we call battle than it is to kill people. this is obviously a very christian way of thinking about it for better (a moral Problem with the inflicting of unnecessary pain) and worse (this life is cheap because there's another one to follow, so death isn't necessarily so bad).

so you say you're fine with torture--but i don't think it's true---nor do i understand how the logic actually works that enables you to be fine with it because i can't figure out a coherent grounds for the position.