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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kevin Rose who wrote (6706)	5/23/2007 8:08:57 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 10087

Let's define it more narrowly as "non-punitive action causing severe mental or physical discomfort aimed at extracting useful information". That's not really narrow. You didn't even require pain, let alone extreme pain. Keeping someone up for 2 days, will cause them to experience a lot of discomfort, but it isn't torture. That's another reason I think we should just chuck the whole concept - torture, or 'aggressive interrogation', etc - and apply our current protections to all prisoners. Cause it would be too hard to define what is and is not acceptable.... I think in some situations aggressive interrogation, that falls short of torture might be justified. Possibly, in very extreme and unusual situations torture might even be justified. But I have a problem with allowing for either as policy, because once you allow it, its human nature to stretch the definitions of those situations. Allow aggressive interrogation in situation X, and all the sudden everything becomes situation X. Allow torture in "ticking time bomb" situations, and you find more situations get labeled as ticking time bombs. Considering that, I might support clearly making real torture out of bounds, and officially it is. But I don't think its a simple issue.