Originally Posted by PornMD

If it's a case of respectfully disagreeing vs. not giving the non-torture side any merit, then that's perfectly fine and I'd respectfully agree to disagree. Clearly someone that has been involved in trauma like what you mention will be more inclined to justify torture, and I wouldn't see anyone as wrong for wanting to use torture to save innocent lives.

I think my biggest problem with THIS (the stuff in the story) honestly is not that our government was torturing terrorist suspects, but that our government was covering it up, calling some obvious torture tactics non-torture, etc., which is to say they knew the American people and other countries wouldn't like it and they still did it anyways and hid it. If you're going to do it, do it, champion it, and explain why you're doing it...don't hide it and thus give credence to it being wrong to do.

My next biggest problem with it is the justification of it on the basis of terrorists do vile things to people they capture, because then where do you draw the line? If terrorists start capturing people and killing their families, do we start killing egregiously killing their families? How exactly would you justify that? Why try and be MORE savage than savages? Not only that, but if we keep going down that slope, we may as well start the countdown of someone using gnarly biological weapons and mass-destruction to seriously fuck things up. If each side constantly needs to outdo the other, things will lead to nukes and beyond. Then what, we live underground to be safe - what a wonderful life that'd be!

The issue of torture really doesn't involve a right or wrong opinion...there's differing opinions that all hold merit. Torturing people CAN end up saving innocent lives, just like torturing someone that is wrongly suspected would be needlessly ruining a life. The only thing I can say is that doing more vile things to people to try and reach peace and make life better for future generations just doesn't make much sense to me.