What is your stance on torture? Do you think it is ever acceptable? Are there alternate methods that should be used?


I'm writing a 7 page paper on torture and I'm curious how you guys feel about the issue. For me, I personally think it is O.K to a certain extent. Torture for the sake of obtaining information and not with the intent to punish can be acceptable. Though, I've recently come to embrace a more psychological method of obtaining information, simply because the person being subjected to the torture in the first place may be innocent, and with psychological methods, no physical harm is brought upon the innocent. Plus, physical torture can sometimes lead to invalid confessions; the terrorist/whatever admits to whatever we want to hear from them simply to get the torture to stop.

I think it's perfectly okay. Everyone wants every conflict in the world to be solved with rainbows and ponies. There world is filled with *bleep*ed up people and theres no changing that so why not give them a more effective punishment.

Nope, i'm against it in all cases.

If i resort to the methods of criminals to punish criminals, i'm sinking myself to their level. That's not acceptable in any form of social justice. Further, any laws that could be made to "allow" torture would have to be pretty damn vague, and thus they could be easily abused.

*bleep* that noise.

But it would be justified, it's not like you're doing it for fun it would be used to punish. It would also act as a very good deterrent, if I knew that if I would be tortured if I were to kill someone I'd seriously rethink.

Do you think mental interrogation is a better method then, Byzantine? It's not a punishment, more of a way to just get information.

Death penalty is used like 1% of the time. If you murder then you deserve severe punishment. Not the peel all your skin off and feed it to you, while lemon is poured on your wounds. I mean torture methods that are less extreme.
Edit: Isn't jail technically torture? You're being pulled away from familiar faces, shoved into a prison cell, abused by guards, have shit food, have your whole day planned out for you, and you fear for your life everyday.

By your logic, porn should be illegal, because if you allow any type of porn then eventually all types would become legalized like child porn.
Edit: Why does it have to physically hurting them? Mental torture is just as bad. And yes it's intentional, your putting them in jail it's not like they accidentally got locked up.

I totally am against torture. It's worse than the death penalty which to me is barely acceptable in my view. But use of torture goes against everything we stand for. This also sends the message that other nations have the right to torture according to their law. How is the United States going to successfully lead advocacy for human rights in other countries if we too are justifying our own violation of it? Torture is completely unacceptable.

We already are hypocrites. we invade other countries in fear of nuclear weapons, yet we are the only country to have ever used them.

And H.A I think that by now they know what's going on, and they don't care. Oh and they did intent to take them away from their friends and families, shove them into a small living space and feeding them shit.

We would be hypocrites if we continued using nuclear weapons and stockpiling them. Just because we used them does not mean the United States does not have some remorse over it and intention to ever use it again. Regardless of the upsides it may have had on our history. And we shouldn't be invading other countries over plain fear. But those for it are the same groups of people here in the United States condoning torture.

I'm not, I don't want the U.S to start invading countries based on fear.

I was reading an article released by the CIA and in it they went over how the terrorists believe that the US rapes the family members of those who we interrogate and force them to watch. Apparently one of the interrogators repeatedly asked "do we need to get your family in here?" to one of the suspects. Of course we don't rape their families, but now this guy is going to go back to wherever he came from and assert that we indeed do so.

How's that to improve our standings with the world?