apparently now A-0K to the new regime in DC.
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But many of us who generally think torture should be illegal admit we could rarely support torture in the ticking time bomb scenario.
And someone who was supposed to be on a 9/11 terror plane might well have had critical time sensitive information to save lives.
But we need some check to keep the government from torturing more broadly. Absent immediately saving another life, torture is cruel as defined by the Constitution.
Perhaps we could have torture warrants and the government should have to make its case to torture. I simply don't trust the government enough to decide on torture without checks and balance that the public can observe.
But we need some check to keep the government from torturing more broadly. Absent immediately saving another life, torture is cruel as defined by the Constitution
These past 2 years as America has rushed headlong towards becoming a Socialist Country I have studied the United States Constitution intently. While not a rocket scientist I am positive I saw no reference to the legality or the morality of the use of torture to protect the citizens of the Nation. Perhaps you could post the Article and section where you found this definiton of torture?
>>>Torture is terrible thing to do - worse in many cases than killing them.<<<
That is pure bull, especially in the context of those held at Guitmo, where “torture” has been defined by the NYT and other leftist propaganda outlets as “Loud Music” and “Water Boarding”.
>>>But we need some check to keep the government from torturing more broadly.<<<
What we really need is some check to keep the news media from deceiving us—from siding with one political stripe or another. Our real enemy in this day and age is the New York Times’s, the Bill Moyer’s, the Brian William’s, and the Chris Matthew’s of this world.
...torture is cruel as defined by the Constitution.
What Constitution?
Our 8th Amendment does ban “cruel and unusual punishments”, but at the time such punishments as cutting off an ear, branding with a hot iron, stocks and pillories were common and accepted. People accepted these as necessary - something had to be done to law breakers. Note: our Constitution only speaks to punishment, not interrogations.
Jails were used to hold suspects until trial, not for long term detention. Our first prison wasn’t established until 1790 in Philadelphia. Prisons were still rare and it wasn’t until the 19th century that more were added.
He was and is a non uniformed combatant and therefore should have been executed. How’s that for torture, Susan?
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It should be against the law (and it is)......
....And then those who are entrusted to protect our nation should go ahead and do it anyway if the situation warrants (potential or actual imminent danger).
....And if they are tried they should be exonerated.
No! Under no circumstance can you ever allow the government such a power, else they will morph it into an instrument of policy against its perceived 'enemies'.
Under your "ticking time bomb" scenario, the moral justification would and has sufficed for individuals to violate the legal restriction, and rely on the compassion and honesty of competent authority to legally clear the action, based on its valid and detailed result. And if the result does save lives, but you are still hung out to dry, then you are secure in your own mind that you did the right thing for a society that you are not morally a part of.
LLS
O.K., so what?
That 'ain't' torture. Just about every day of my first year at the Military Academy was worse than that. Not to mention Ranger School, and S.E.R.E. School and various other training.
“The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual,” she told the Post. “This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for.”
Interrogation techniques used on Qahtani included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold. He was hospitalized twice.”
This was the 20th hijacker. Poor baby, he suffered so. But not more than Barbara Olsen and all DC children on that plane that headed from Dulles toward the Pentagon. Or the passengers on Flight 93. Too bad he missed his flight that day, he’d have been in real hell all this time.
Yea, well listening to Hillary guffaw for the next 8 years as Secretary of State meets the legal definition of torture, too, and nobody's doing anything about that.
Very little that has been done anywhere would qualify in the Founding Fathers minds as cruel or unusual punishment. They could waterboard a guy 20 times, and not meet my definition of torture.
The only torture is the announcement by our government, to the world and our enemies, that there is a place THEY WILL NOT GO to protect our population.
That is sick.
“A Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo Bay says the U.S. military tortured...”
WTF is going on with this administration? Are their any Bush admin officials who aren’t complete idiots, or is that a job requirement?
Indeed. When we can't even trust the government to oversee Freddie, Fannie, Madoff, or TARP funds, why give those clowns in DC (not the field agents doing the hard work) a blank check on this issue??
You have to be carefull of your terms. Is 'lack of sleep' worse than killing?
The article noted: "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual," she told the Post. "This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for."
Interrogation techniques used on Qahtani included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold.
So, the acts were authorized, which meant that the folks in question had decided that the acts were NOT torture, since torture is illegal.
This Bush official is just inserting her private opinion here. She'd probably label any questioning without the word 'Please' in every question to be torture.
Note how she say's "When you think of torture", to imply torture as most folks think of it, and then go on to admit that she can't point to a single act of torture but implies a gestalt as the totality was "abusive and uncalled for". So, apparently she didn't have any friends in NYC on 9/11 so it was uncalled for.
Another chapter in the sad tale of the pussyfication of America.