Their ratings must being going down for such a performance.
BTW, there is nothing wrong with getting info from your enemy if it will save lives even if it involves torture. Would you rather a nuke go off in a city and kill millions or one guy to be tortured into spilling the beans? The problem is the government is our enemy, and the only info they want is who might be trying to shut them down.
The pathological case always presents the poorest paramters for decision making.
And torture yields poor intelligence.
This country got through WWII without it and German and British intelligence didn't resort to using it on each other's bomber crews held prisoner.
I imagine on that day when the lives of everyone in Houston or New York depends on the words of one prisoner, they'll pull the guy's arms out of their sockets, save the day, and be pardoned for it.
Generally, it's cruel and unusual, and contravenes our sense of civilized behavior and values. It demeans our dignity and reputation as a nation. Not least of all, it is also corrosive of the souls of men who have to do it.
I think we should torture the people responsible for 9/11. Not to get info, just to make their last few minutes on earth a complete horror for them, lest some other asshole gov't black ops folks think it is wise to carry out another false flagger on us.
BTW, there is nothing wrong with getting info from your enemy if it will save lives even if it involves torture.
As a field expedient, it may have uses. I would certainly consider torturing someone I was convinced had participated in kidnapping and selling my daughter, like in the movie.
Of course torture never works; this is why the mob never breaks legs.
(Incidentally, the real rates loan sharks charged 60 years ago were lower than many of today's perfectly legal rates. The breaking of legs may have something to do with this.)
But as soon as the bureaucracy gets involved...
It's interesting how morals vary from place to place and era to era. Traditionally, Mexican police thought nothing of beating prisoners for information, but considered undercover work to be very dishonorable.
Would you rather a nuke go off in a city and kill millions or one guy to be tortured into spilling the beans?
This is foolishness, often repeated.
The chances that that particular situation will occur are extremely remote.
Instead, this extreme argument is used to justify torture to weak-minded people as a routine administrative interrogation technique. This is precisely the propaganda technique foisted upon us by the neocons which the idiot public has fallen for. This is no more high-minded than the use of torture by the Inquisition to supposedly save people's souls.
It surprises me that Americans are so dimwitted and immoral that they simply don't care. In fact, you could probably make a huge hit reality show by televising state torture. Hey, go PPV and make the big bucks out of torture! After all, why should anyone object if you're saving millions of people, eh?
And if you do allow torture on these farfetched pretexts, then why not allow people to torture the suspect's children or dog or cat or mother or father or wife or husband? Why draw the line at only torturing the suspect? After all, you have a city of millions to save so why not torture a baby to make his daddy talk? Think of the greater good.
Of course, persons with any moral fiber know that there are no bad means to good ends.
Naturally, for all the people we have tortured so far (and continue to torture in the supposedly "secret prisons" in Thailand and Romania and Egypt and elsewhere), we have not once had the justification of trying to save a city from WMD.
It's another Bush-era neocon lie to fall for this nonsense. There were no WMD in Iraq; the invasion was an international crime. There have been no credible WMD threats revealed by torture; our administrative torture is despicable and also an international crime by any civilized standard.
I'm rather surprised that anyone here at 4um falls for these hokey justification adopted wholesale from Israel's pro-torture policy. These were direct imports from the talking points to justify routine administrative torture in Israel.