U.S. airstrike kills Al Qaeda leader, al-Zarqawi

[Uncle Mxy]

For me, when you catch the bad guy, you want all the info he has. If you ask him and he tells you, go check it out and see if what he is telling you is true. If it isn't true, raise the stakes a little, or quite a little bit.

Typically, the best way to do that isn't to torture the baddie, but instead to put the screws on who they care about. Direct torture beyond interrogation isn't that effective, so why bother?

And although I said it, it doesn't really matter to me if we save lives or not if you caught someone like AZ. If he feels like he about to meet his maker, so be it. If he feels excruciating pain, thats even better. He made choices in life that will come back to haunt him. Something all humans should understand.

That's the logic that's led to millenia of conflicts in that region, because...

Abu-Ghraib is for another thread if you ask me. That isn't the use of torture that I'm trying to discuss. That was some stupid shit. And it didn't help one bit.

...such abuse inevitably gets turned into a rallying cry for the other side. An eye for an eye, and everyone's blind.

I feel that torture demands a level of collective perfection that humans just don't have. We must perfectly hide the fact that we're engaged in torturing, forever and ever, to avoid negative propaganda. We have to perfectly know that who we're torturing is worthy, and why. When your collective includes folks with "I love to make a grown man piss himself" attitudes (a direct quote from one of the Abu Ghraib troops), then embracing torture isn't the answer. For the religious folks out there, why not let God be the ultimate judge?

We do this kind of shit, and the terrorists win because we become them.

[Hermy]

We do this kind of shit, and the terrorists win because we become them.
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Thats it, thats all, thats all there is.

[Tahoe]

We do this kind of shit, and the terrorists win because we become them.

We do what shit? Abu Ghraib? Thats 'still' for another thread, imo. The idiots who did that are going to prison.

But policy going forward... if we catch an animal like AZ, I'm fine with torturing him. He should die anyway, so send him to his after-life knowing what he did to others.

[Uncle Mxy]

We do this kind of shit, and the terrorists win because we become them.

We do what shit? Abu Ghraib? Thats 'still' for another thread, imo. The idiots who did that are going to prison.

What shit = Torture. And I don't think you can have an abstract discussion about contexts in which it's ok to torture without discussing all the real-world cases where torture has run amok, be it Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Auschwitz, the Inquisition, etc.

But really, I've had enough of torture for one thread, so no more torture talk from me here in this thread. Feel free to carry on this particular topic without me.

But policy going forward... if we catch an animal like AZ, I'm fine with torturing him. He should die anyway, so send him to his after-life knowing what he did to others.

We agree to disagree.

[Tahoe]

We do this kind of shit, and the terrorists win because we become them.

We do what shit? Abu Ghraib? Thats 'still' for another thread, imo. The idiots who did that are going to prison.

What shit = Torture. And I don't think you can have an abstract discussion about contexts in which it's ok to torture without discussing all the real-world cases where torture has run amok, be it Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Auschwitz, the Inquisition, etc.

But really, I've had enough of torture for one thread, so no more torture talk from me here in this thread. Feel free to carry on this particular topic without me.

But policy going forward... if we catch an animal like AZ, I'm fine with torturing him. He should die anyway, so send him to his after-life knowing what he did to others.

We agree to disagree.

And I'm fine with agreeing to disagree.

Abu Ghraib to me was...maybe I'm splitting hairs here... was criminal. It should be treated as a crime. It shouldn't be discussed, imo, as a 'from the top down' policy of torture, because imo, it wasn't from the top down. If it was, I think more higher up would be impicated. Nancy and her band would be all over it.

So I might not be making myself clear but Abu Ghraib wasn't US policy type of torture to save lives, that was criminal acts that have been dealt with.