Braddock wrote:
A couple of points on the thread so far...
FEOS & Co. ...it's obvious you're in the 'you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette' camp on the issue of torture but, as has already been raised here, the fact is information gleaned under duress is pretty much useless due to unreliability. And again what about the innocent ones ...what do you say to them afterwards? "Oops, sorry about that ...we're still the good guys though"?
Unreliability: Info obtained from two of the three (and quite possibly all three) led to the roll up of additional terrorists and stopped attacks. Please explain how "unreliable" information led to these events.
Innocent: Please show how the two that we know of (KSM and Abu Zubaida) were in any way innocent. We can't speak to the third one, as we don't know his name. I'm willing to bet he's in the same group as the other two.
Your faults in logic are thus:
1) waterboarding was in widespread use by the US--false
2) the info gained by the use of waterboarding was unreliable--again, false.
While, in general, information gained by
physically harming prisoners is unreliable, there is no proof that the information gained in these 3 cases of waterboarding (
not physically harmed, and did I mention that there were only three?) was unreliable. In fact, the data would indicate the exact opposite.
So, to summarize: No innocents were waterboarded, the data retrieved via waterboarding was accurate.
Your applications of generalizations to a
specific set of circumstances while blatantly ignoring the facts involved in those circumstances simply because they contradict your general feelings on the topic is below your typical standard in here.
Braddock wrote:
It's like this basically: torture is carried out by many countries (Russia, China, USA, North Korea, Israel etc.), if you as an American feel okay with that then that is up to you but don't go kidding yourself that your country is somehow better or above any of these other countries and certainly don't waste your time trying to convince the rest of the world of this.
I don't recall saying anywhere that the US was better than anyone. In fact, I made a post about that exact concept not too long ago...so try another tack, as that one simply won't work. If the worst thing other countries did to their prisoners was waterboarding, you would have an argument. However, that simply isn't the case.
