From: Adam Flinton 

Geo. wrote:

> "Robert Comer"  wrote in message
> news:40caf01c{at}w3.nls.net...
>
>
>>Not quite on the torture thing for me anyway, it goes against my
>>personality, but the rest of what you said makes sense.
>
>
> If something changed and suddenly we had 1000 US soldiers being killed every
> day, and the al Qaeda attacks started up in the continental US at a rate of
say
> one a day, would you find the idea of torture to get information that may
save
> lives more acceptable than you do today?
>

No for a number of reasons:

A) Torturers & abusers generally end up losing. No one was too keen on
the Japanese once they were found to be doing nasty things like the various
death marches etc.

B) The information you get is generally poor as people will say anything to
stop you branding their genitals or tying them to a metal bed, throwing on
some water & plugging into some electricity.

C) It becomes endemic. Suddenly your people also start killing people out
of hand & discipline ends up breaking down as soldiers start killing
officers for a bit of a giggle. Equally people who do it tend to carry on
doing nasty things in civie life. You stop having a military force &
end up with a useless bunch of thugs & murderers who get used to
"fighting" unarmed prisoners.

D) If you're fighting for a totalitarian system then OK but if not then you
are not fighting for anything assuming survival of the state is not in
question.


> See, I don't view it as a moral judgement, I think it's a logical evaluation
we
> go thru to decide what is a justified action wrt war.
>

There is also the question of is it efficacious. If you end up with wrong
information & a bunch of thugs & murderers you are then going to in
effect let loose on your own civies then...

> Now if you say that given the current situation you don't feel it's
justified,
> ok I can accept that but at the same time I can't argue with the folks who
say
> that having soldiers executed and their half naked bodies displayed on TV or
> being dragged around behind a car, or beheaded, does justify it. I think the
> differences in how you evaluate it is entirely dependent on how close to the
> action you are.
>

It becomes a circular justification. i.e. the more it is done the more the
reprisals against the troops get worse so the more it gets done etc until
eventually you're signing up for some ethnic cleansing. German
anti-partisan operations in WW2 are a textbook example.

Where you are hoping to somehow make friends with the locals once the
fighting/war is over then forget it. People don't forget torturing evil
minded types (e.g. look how long it's taking the Germans to live down the
Nazis).

Adam

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