Should torture be allowed , ever?

Now with the release of the torture memos thanks to the ACLU www.aclu.org(American Civil Liberties Union who I feel are ones responsible for safeguarding our freedom and not the troops!) this has "re-ignited" the debate re. torture.

Truth be told there was any debate and the previous Bush administration conducted torture secretly (which by itself indicates that it knew it was doing something unlawful) and then was forced to call it "tough-interrogation techniques" a laughable euphemism at best and Orwellian Newspeak at worst . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak when the New York ran the story.

Even interrogation experts admit that confessions obtained by means of torture is unrealiable and that it doesn't work. A google search will prove the veracity (truth) of this statement.

Thanks to doubtful information obtained by torturing one the Al Qaeda suspects, the case for invading Iraq was built. The CIA and adminsitration wanted to hear that Saddam harbored terrorists and the suspect in order to stop the torture told the interrogators what they wanted to hear.

Here's a cut and paste from Apr 25th-26th Weekend FT edition

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, says the fact that waterboarding was used on Mr Mohammed 183 times raises doubts about the efficacy of the technique. In Guantánamo, Mr Mohammed himself put it like this to the ICRC: “During the harshest period of my interrogation, I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop.”

My argument for not torturing is very simple. Would you like to be tortured? Some may find this reasoning simplistic. I say it is simple.

For e.g. one of the Senators who supported the warrantless wire-tap program of Americans is crying foul when she found out that she was herself wire-tapped!


http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/21/harman/index.html

Maybe your principal objection is "Those are the bad evil guys who deserve to be tortured".

Torture is one those few forms of punishment that is so degrading, in-human that it not only affects the tortured (quite naturally) but even the torturer.

In medeival times, torture was used a form of punishment even for relatively minor crimes like stealing a loaf of bread. Why is Muslim sharia law so abhorrent to most people people. Maybe even for significant numbers in Islamic countries. This is pure speculation.

Because of the barbaric forms of punishment - In accordance with the Qur'an and several hadith, theft is punished by imprisonment or amputation of hands or feet,[123] depending on the number of times it was committed and depending on the item of theft.

In accordance with hadith, stoning to death is the penalty for married men and women who commit adultery.

For more, please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia#Classic_Islamic_law

We have become more "civilized" over the centuries.

There is nothing to prevent the government from arresting an innocent person and torturing him/her and extracting confessions obtained under torture (which is what is permissible under the military commissions) to be used against you. I bet any innocent person would confess to crimes they never did commit! This is what happened during the witch hunts.

A vast majority of people in Gitmo fall under this category. We've tortured innocents and thus we are creating more terrorists.

The only way to win the battle against terrorism is not to stoop as low as your opponent.