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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (482370)	5/20/2009 5:15:08 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575480

>> Is preventing a 911 type attack on LA enough to justify waterboarding someone? This is the real issue. Not whether it is or isn't torture, which reasonable people can disagree about. But whether you would torture or treat roughly a person if that's what it took to save American lives. It is really a no-brainer. And should it come down to it, I suspect Barack Obama will authorize a rendition and torture if he believes it will prevent an attack. Just like everything else he does, he's learning that Bush had it right in the first place.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (482370)	5/20/2009 7:53:18 PM
From: Steve Dietrich	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575480

It's not really a legitimate question. For example, let's say we randomly take people off the streets of the U.S. and waterboard them. Every once in a great while we're bound to find out one of them was planning to shoot up his family or place of work, or something like that. We could then claim randomly waterboarding American's saves American lives. Some, like you and i-node, might then argue we should do that. You can't know (except maybe in extremely rare situations) what the person you waterboard knows, whether or not they have information that can save lives. And you can't know that waterboarding will get them to tell you what they may or may not know. It's a crapshoot. So the real question is, is it worth torturing people on the possibility that it may sometimes save lives? What about torturing the infant son of a terrorist in front of him to save Los Angeles? Would you be down with that, torturing a baby to save American lives? SD