I would like to get the opinions of the Board of this little known tactic. It is a provably effective, yet questionable, tactic of information gathering that could potentially save thousands of American lives but is it too barbaric for a civilized nation to engage in.

What are your thoughts on this?

A) Out of sight out of mind
B) Uncivilized and should never be tolerated of any country

Anyone that has ever been in a fight realizes the rules don't mean a thing if you don't surrvive the fight. I personally have never lost a fight because I believe the other guy would have to kill me to win. Very few people want to go that far and hesitate when they realize what the choices are. They are done right then and there. It also save a lot of scrapes because you also have to ask yourself is it worth it.

I think we should just kill them rather than capture them and then there is no decision to make. Thats rather Goldwater of me I know.

Especially out of sight from amateur photographers.

I would support Extraordinary Rendition of Katie kouric, Dan Rather the whole CNN crew and they should dig up Peter Jennings and render him as well.

I'll go with "uncivilized and should never be tolerated of any country". Final answer.

Get a rope (or cattle prod or ...) Out of sight, out of mind. Information saves lives.

ask any former japanese pow how they feel about it.

or korean war pow

or viet nam war pow.

the viet cong were adept at the use of electricity on our pow's and at times i'm sure that 'information' saved viet cong lives.

Does that make it right? Funny how when the shoe is on the other foot the idea of torture isn't as appealing.

Is it right for us to do the same thing because we fly the american flag? because we don't actually call them pow's? because it may save american lives?

I COULD however see reason to use the black bag in singular instances where there is an imminent threat. As a policy however this makes america look extremely hypocritical. Clearly the use of torture is a human rights violation. What right would we have then to hold any other country accountable for the same such violations, north korea for example?

Lead by example.

wwjd and all that.

more importantly, wwfjd?

Do you really think the enemies will quit if we do?

Let me re-phrase that; if the N. Vietnamese and Koreans paid no attention to the Geneva convention why would Al Queda?

i thought this was about what WE should or shouldn't be doing.


they do it so we should too? eye for an eye right? people forget that's a quote from the koran...

perhaps we should videotape ourselves beheading terrorist prisoners?

sounds great right? we'd really be giving them the finger then, wouldn't we?

from what i've been able to read the information gained via these means is not worth the price paid...that price being having to step down as the world's greatest champion for human rights and democracy.

Some could also say that the World Trade center attacks were simply legal preemptive strikes. Where is the line drawn?

H20 is right in this case. I have read about everything there is to read on POW's in Vietnam. the roughr they got the harder our guys resisted. Same thing in WWII. I have read where studies showed that the germans torturing civillians in WWII to give up resistance fighters yeilded random names of anyone in the village not actual perps. like I said above we have no time for prisoners. Shoot them on the battlefeild or let them go.

Good point on the ethics issue, this cuts right to the heart of Kantian vs. Utilitarian ethics; viable arguments can be made for both sides effectively… enter political rhetoric.

Actually, the ones who proclaim the information is no good are those who deride the tactics. There is also some room for debate as to what constitutes torture; in reality information gathered under Sodium Pentothal is often quite good depending on the administrators/interrogators; information gathered under abuse is often questionable as prisoners are often pre-programmed for responses, this is what we teach our military personnel also.

Well said!

John McCain said torture yeilds nothing of value. I read in one of the bravest Americans to ever live Adm James Stockdales account of his time as a POW and they got Jack Squat from him.

Well we have been doing it your way for a few years now and where are we?

I would fight the war differently. A scorched earth approach yeilds few prisioners. Take Fallujah for example. If the residents new from day one they had to leave or give up Ali Baba or face their entire town being wiped from the face of the earth I think they would have shoved them out the front door. By doing it the way we did it we let the vermin run all over the country side and now we have to kill or catch them one by one. We might have gained a little intel but all we did was extend the effort and put even more lives at risk.


80% of the worlds countries use torture BTW.

TK, in Vietnam the Vietcong handed out a few rifles and ammo to villages and advised them that when the Americans approach they are going to kill everyone and level your village. So, when the Americans approached a few pot shots ring out of the village and the GI's unleash hell leveling the village. The next village got the message and has more guns and ammo. The moral is that people don't give up without a fight and your enemy can use those scorched earth tactics to sway the populice against you.
Your tactics could pit the entire population of Iraq against our guys. We'd be on the losing end of that one.

It doesn't matter if "the enemy will quit if we do?", or anything of that sort...it doesn't matter one bit.

We are in this war, purportedly, because we and our style of government are better then theirs is (I say "purportedly", because I think that this is not the reason, but just a justification).

Justifying our actions by noting how they act removes that high moral ground that we claim...if we attempt to remove them by using the same barbaric behaviors that we are removing them for, then we become them...and then, what's the point? Remove one set of barbarians so that we can replace them with our own barbarians?

That is the unfortunate, some would say, consequence of claiming the high moral ground...we're "good", they're "evil"...so we have to walk the talk.

Anything less and we deserve the same fate that we are meting out over there.

Fish on...

Todd

"If you plant ice you're gonna harvest wind"

How about another?

"No-one wins, it's a war of man."

Oops, name that tune's another thread isn't it?
Sorry!

Neil Young!