Torture

I almost cannot believe what I am seeing on the news today. The issue is not whether the federal laws and international treaties were broken. The issue is not whether torture "works" or not. We used to be a nation of laws and a nation with a strong moral compass - and look where we have gone. If the criteria is whether it works or not then you can justify ANYTHING. "Hey, it works even better if you get his wife and kids and torture them in front of him." Maybe it would work if you started cutting off his fingers one at a time. Where does it stop?

There are solid moral and practical reasons not to torture.  1. Enemies will use this as a recruitment tool. 2. US servicemen will be tortured in return. 3. Use of torture destorys US credibility on human rights and damages our reputation as a leading democracy. 4. It is immoral. Period.

Some today were defending torture on the grounds that it did not violate any law or treaty. Whether or not that is really the case, I do not think a piece of paper is necessary to tell  what's right from wrong! Torture is wrong. Period. There are some things that are just indefensible, things like slavery, genocide and TORTURE. To me, people who would have us sink down to this level are the biggest cowards of them all.

And even the issue of whether torture "works," is highly debatable -putting it's use on even shakier footing. It's well established that through torture you can make anyone say anything you want them to say. For this reason it's a tool that has been used extensively for propaganda throughout history. Witness the "confessions" of U.S. servicemen held captive in Vietnam. Or "counter-revolutionary" Russians in the 1930's. Torture worked wonders in those cases. It generated invaluable propaganda. As to whether it's useful in extracting key tactical information, that's another matter altogether - and there is considerable evidence that it is NOT useful in this regard. Whatever information a captive has becomes stale fast. Is whatever info you *might* get worth the huge intangible loss generated by using torture? Remember that when you use torture you have flushed your own morals down the toilet and morphed into a likeness of your enemy.

Also noteworthy is the fact that many of the same people who were lying about WMD are now saying basically "trust us" about the efficacy of torture. "Trust us, it generated useful information,", Dick Cheney says, "we can't tell you what that information is due to national security issues but we CAN tell you that it did produce useful information" he says. Sounds very similar to "trust us, Iraq DOES have WMD, we can't tell you exactly HOW we know, but we CAN tell you they DO have WMD" line that proceeded the invasion of that country and was exposed as false after.

The question is: are we a nation with a solid moral compass and a nation of laws or are we a nation that arbitrarily does things because "they work".