recently a report came to the u,s, senate about the CIA using torture to get information from terroists at guantanomo. the CIA says torture was used to stop terroists attacks such as 9-11
personally I feel torture is indeed justified, if it stops terroists from killing innocent civilians. only in these cases do I think torture is justified.
do you think torture on the part of the USA is justified?
The whole premise behind saying it's justified is the claim that the ends justify the means. But they aren't if they don't achieve those ends. What do I mean?
Just because you water board someone or sleep deprive them and make them stand up for hours on broken limbs (as was done by the United States) does not mean you prevented all terrorist attacks. You cannot prove a negative.
There are many experts who feel that torture is actually ineffective, many of them quite prominent. I think Mike Levine former DEA agent is one of them. What is said is that after a certain point, the information given by the prisoner becomes useless.
It's the perfect alibi for you if you violated international law to say that "according to your sources" you prevented a certain specific number of terrorist attacks. That's very convenient.
My honest opinion...I think torture is the lazy approach. It's the easy way out. Listen, if a group of people are dangerous to you, ban them from the country, period. Don't even let them in. Don't break the law in my name and then let 30 terrorists in with visas on the next inbound flight. That's lazy.
Edit: And if we are SO against terrorism and torturing prisoners over it, why in the world is the MTA in New York City filling the underground stations with WiFi???
That's a little dangerous, no?
