I had to look that up.

Boing Boing thinks this is bad
 

It was a pinata, and not surprisingly, it is no longer available (and the picture is no longer up).

For Spanky
 

I didn't read that far. That definitely is a strong economic argument for independence. However, I don't think that is James Bond's main argument for the split.

I think it is a sticky wicket for the whole Labour party as I think Scotland generally sends labour MPs to London.

I agree with you that torture used in Iraq is problematic because we are trying to win the hearts and minds of the local population. Iraq was also a conventional war that fell under the rubrick of the Geneva convention. So I think there is a strong argument to be made for not torturing anyone in Iraq.

However, those same arguments dissapear when it comes to prisoner at Gitmo, and anyone that was captured outside Iraq, or other people we have detained in secret prisons all over Eastern Europe.

The ticking time bomb scenario is used when someone makes the sweeping comment that Torture is always wrong or the use of torture is never justified. You just need one exception to disprove such absolutist statements, and the ticking timebomb scenario is the one exception almost no one can argue with.

But the general argument for the use of torture in the war on terror is grounded on the following assumptions. Which one of these assumptions do you think is wrong

1) Al Queda can only pull off effective terroist acts to kill innocent people if certain information stays secret.
2) Al Queda operatives have varying levels of access to such information
3) We have captured and continue to capture Al Queda operatives
4) Many captured operatives won't want to give to our interrogators this pertinent information.
5) Not always, but in many cases pain and the threat of pain can induce people to do things they are reluctant to do.

Do you think people who've been imprisoned at Gitmo for three years really have any valuable information to provide?

I doubt that the Nazis or anyone else whom you've cited as an example ever obtained useful information from a prisoner who'd been isolated from any resistance movement for that long.


In any event -- my focus was Iraq, because the story that started this thread concerned prisoners held in Iraq. The others scenarios pose different issues, I agree. Not that I necessarily agree with you on the outcome, it's just a different discussion (and one I don't have time for right now -- happy holidays, everyone!!)

6) We are not very good at determining who is an al Qaeda operative.

7) The policy you propose involves us torturing many, many people who are not our enemies, and ensures that they become enemies.

8) Torture leads to a lot of false and unreliable information, and we seem to suck at filtering that out from the other kind (see, e.g., WMD, sweets and flowers, et al)

Remind me again, who was the poster who is so big on the notion of a universal moral code? What would such a code say about the deliberate infliction of pain and disfigurement on another human being?

If only we had a moral force to guide us through this wilderness.

In past conflicts -- WWII and the Cold War, for example -- we have collected information because we were on the side of truth and justice. In WWII, Germany's overseas network of spies was almost entirely flipped. Not because we tortured them. In the Cold War, we got defectors who believed we were right. The Russians got some of those, but not as many. If we torture people, we piss away both a huge advantage in the war on terror and an important aspect of who we are.

It says a lot about conservatives that they have so little faith in our values and are so scared that they are willing to surrender the former for a hollow promise of safety.

Haven't you heard? Torture never works. People just tell you things you want to hear. All the valuable information that the Nazis and Soviets obtained was through offering their prisoners ice cream.

I assume from this response that you agree with the first five but would just like to add your own (the first five being):

1) Al Queda can only pull off effective terroist acts to kill innocent people if certain information stays secret.
2) Al Queda operatives have varying levels of access to such information
3) We have captured and continue to capture Al Queda operatives
4) Many captured operatives won't want to give to our interrogators this pertinent information.
5) Not always, but in many cases pain and the threat of pain can induce people to do things they are reluctant to do.



Well. We should get better at that.

Where did you get that from? When did I propose such a policy?

We got our information on the WMDs through torture? We thought that we would get the sweets and flowers because of information we gleaned through torture?

You have it backwards, none of that information we got was through torture. Maybe if we had it would have been better. As far as bad information is concerned, as long as we get some good with the bad that is better than getting no informatoin at all. Absent coercive interrogation techniques we are not going to get any information. And as I said, if you get bad information from a prisoner, and you find out its bad, and introduce that same prisoner to the cattle prod after you get the bad informatoin, the next information proferred by that prisoner is probably going to be a little more reliable.

Since the prison guards have been chided for disrespecting the Koran, I doubt they have obtained all the information they could if they were allowed to takes the gloves off.

A name is always valuable. If someone has not given us a name yet, that could still prove to me useful if we got it now. The other nice thing, is that Iraq is acting like flypaper for Al Queda operatives. We are constantly capturing them. We capture them, wisk them of to Gitmo or someother CIA camp in eastern Europe and extract the information. Seems pretty academic to me.

Okey Dokey

You don't believe in a UMC so why do you care about torture? If you believe in cultural relativism, in Gitmos culture it is OK to torture.

As far as a UMC code is concerned, if the choice is hundreds of innocent people riding a train in Madrid or flying in plane in the United States being killed or introducing a man who would like to kill millions of westerners to help bring about a new caliphate where women are given clitorectomies and people who convert from Islam to another religion are killed, to the cattle prod, my internal moral code is telling me introduce the terrorist to the cattle prod every single time.

Does you moral code tell you that it is OK to let innocent civilians die to save terrorists from being tortured?

Is this some sort of bad joke? On the side of Truth and Justice? I know you have gotten your information from WWII from a Superman comic book, but please. Japan attacked us that is why we went to war with them. Before they attacked eighty percent of Americans wanted to stay out of the war. We fought against Germany because they declared war on us and we thought the Germans pushed Japan into attacking us.

Then why did they flip? My understanding was that we executed a lot of them. In addition, many German spies (with US citizenship) were put into the camps just like many member of the German American society. They were thrown in these camps without a trial. However, the German American Nazis that were thrown into the camps ended up taking over the camps and kept their loyalty to the Nazi party. At least that is my understanding.

If you don't believe the CIA was involved in a lot of torture, and used proxies to torture KGB agents and operatives, you are even more naive that I thought.

What advantage? If we torture people is that going to make Al Qaeda hate us even more? Is that going to make these people blow up more planes than they would have done? And except for the NYT exposing these activities, why do we need to let the world know what we are up to?

That sounds nice on a harlequin card but what does it really mean.


Then why did they flip? My understanding was that we executed a lot of them. In addition, many German spies (with US citizenship) were put into the camps just like many member of the German American society. They were thrown in these camps without a trial. However, the German American Nazis that were thrown into the camps ended up taking over the camps and kept their loyalty to the Nazi party. At least that is my understanding.

If you don't believe the CIA was involved in a lot of torture, and used proxies to torture KGB agents and operatives, you are even more naive that I thought.

What advantage? If we torture people is that going to make Al Qaeda hate us even more? Is that going to make these people blow up more planes than we have blown up without the torture? If we give up torture, is Al Qaeda going to say, "well you guys are just too nice, we have been wrong to do this, we are now going to go back to farming"? And except for the NYT exposing these activities, why do we need to let the world know what we are up to?

I would say that Conservative have a better understanding of values and that is why they take the positions that they do. It is liberals inability to differentiate between the innocent and guilty, and what the innocent and guilty deserve, that allows them to make all sorts of twisted moral decisions that end up rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocent.

Hollow promises of safety? Remind me again, how many successful terrorist acts have been implemented on US soil since 9-11?

I know you hate dealing with logic and logical arguments but which one of these assumptions did you think was faulty?

1) Al Queda can only pull off effective terroist acts to kill innocent people if certain information stays secret.
2) Al Queda operatives have varying levels of access to such information
3) We have captured and continue to capture Al Queda operatives
4) Many captured operatives won't want to give to our interrogators this pertinent information.
5) Not always, but in many cases pain and the threat of pain can induce people to do things they are reluctant to do.

I've said this before, and I'm sure I'll wind up having to say it again. When you presume to tell other people what they believe or think, you sound both arrogant and rather unintelligent.

Furthermore, if morality is an absolute, then measuring hundreds of people against one is still immoral.

Finally, something you repeatedly fail to grasp is that is that it is one thing for an individual to make a value judgment; it is another for a state to adopt torture as a policy.