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.
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.
Thank you, christine. I do gather some hope that a large majority of posters here do not endorse torture when the question is put to them in a straightforward way. So you have some reason here to be proud of your forum members. At sites like FR or even LP, you'd have the pro-torture element in the majority. So 4um's members look pretty good by comparison, at least to me.
BushCo, ObamaCo, and the state's stenographers (liberal media) have not completely dominated the agenda on the matter of institutional torture. BTW, most people aren't aware that even the Soviet Union abandoned the use of routine administrative torture in its later years, recognizing that it wasn't effective. It wasn't that they had by any means any moral scruples about employing torture in their gulag or their "mental hospitals"; they simply recognized it was too unreliable and incited too much animosity against the state for the amount of useful intel it generated.