Subject: you are torture happy
But I've accepted that.
ha ha
It's my good feiend Jimmy the lawyer.
(He's not a Monkey, he just pretending he is
:)
When you start using fictional TV programming
as a source for your argument,
you must even be desperater to torture.
I need a "source"
to save 10M hypothetical lives?
No, I just thought it was "co-incidental"
that Jack was taking the BartCop Quiz.
Remember, the season before, Jack said,
"The White House is faking a war to get
a pipeline built thru Afghanistan,"
which made me wonder if they read
bartcop.com
Now & then I get e-mails from readers
at paramount.com, or universal.com and I wonder
if these people are mailboys or janitors
or storyline editors :)
BTW, Mr. Lawyer, is "desperater"
a word?
ha ha (I
framed him on that one)
But I don't think you saw a question I put to you earlier.
1) Millions
have died protecting the Constitution of the United States of America.
2) Are
their deaths insignificant because they're already dead,
3)
and you want to save those who will yet die from the Osama blast.
Dude, I think you start drinking earlier
in the day than I do.
1) Maybe
2) No
3) Yes
Well, I guess since we have to save those
people,
Osama wins and the Constitution will be
destroyed.
So you see, he really doesn't have to blow
anything up at all.
He just has to make us believe that he
will.
God, you give up on the Constitution easy!
Sometimes I swear that you're a Democrat!
Jim H.
ha ha
You doves are funny.
You take pride in the 10M corpses because that way, "Osama loses.".
Is it just me, or are you lawyers easy? :)
Subject: torture madness
Bart,
I couldn't agree more with you on the torture
debate. The same people saying
your hypothetical situation would never
occur are the same ones saying that you
lost the debate because you couldn't answer
his ever-changing question.
While I don't have exactly the same opinion
about the soldiers that you do, I'm not far off.
One question that comes up is back to WWII.
Were the Japanese kamikaze pilots equivalent
to terrorists or were they noble Japanese
patriots that were giving up their lives for a higher purpose?
At least they attacked a military target.
We responded by (eventually) bombing the life out of two cities
made up of innocent civilians. Just
because you live to kill more people later on doesn't mean your attack
was any more noble. We see life a
bit differently than other cultures, but that doesn't make them wrong.
Just thought it was an interesting point,
Russ from WY
Russ, good question.
Looking back, they say kamakazi pilots had a negative effect.
If
a kamakazi could take out an aircraft carrier, that would be a great
strategic move.
But blowing up the WTC or a pizza parlor in Tel Aviv isn't strategic
- it's just terror.
Subject: can't get enough torture
The sort of person who is going to nuke
an entire city isn't going to break under torture.
You and I would, but you and I aren't trained
psychopathic terrorists, are we?
You think someone smart AND twisted enough
to get that far along with an insane plan
isn't smart enough to lie, and send Jack
Bauer (or whoever) to the wrong place until it's too late?
Dobie
Dobie, ...something I've never understood...
People see it as very important to look for a loophole in "the
scenario."
To me, that smacks of people who want to avoid answering,
and I understand that.
This is a decision nobody wants to make, but let's not
lie to ourselves.
Would it be so hard to address the problem, answer the question,
and then cover your butt
by closing with, "but I think the odds
are really against this situation happening."
To answer your question, suppose you just captured the bad guy's
driver.
He's not a trained killer, he's not a gut with years of torture-resistent
training,
he's just a guy with a car in Queens that knows where the bomb
in hidden.
Squeezing him is a guarantee that we'll find that bomb,
but we wouldn't want to risk it, right?.
Maybe it's better that we just let New York go ...and preserve
our dignity.
Subject: problem with torture
Bart,
I've been telling you this for years and
you've refused to post or acknowledge this point:
It's because I don't have the courage to
see the truth.
Torture is bad not just because it is cruel,
but the best intelligence services in the world
refuse to use it because people who are
being tortured will almost always give you FALSE INFORMATION!
I believe that's crazy talk.
For the 100th time, (I shouldn't have to
publish things 100 times) the Pentagon says torture works.
If you know more than them, please state
your credentials.
It's my understanding the troops are told,
"If you get caught, might as well talk
because
they'll torture it our of you, anyway,
so don't put yourself thru that for no reason."
Andrew, I don't mean to lay all this on
you, but who in their right mind thinks torture doesn't work?
I could get any one of you to say
"Bush is a great man"
in less than a minute.
Why do people lie to themselves this way?
Let's get to the point on this -- no self-respecting intelligence service would torture someone they felt had important information.
Did you just say, 'No
torture is taking place at Gitmo?'
I think you did.
Under duress, tortured inmates will lose
all sense of reality and spout off any answer the interrogaters want to
hear.
Sure - if they don't know the answer, they'll
make one up - that's obvious.
This is the main reason it is stupid IN
ALL INSTANCES to torture inmates, ESPECIALLY in the hypothetical case
you present, where 10 million people's
lives are on the line. There are more sophisticated and effective
ways to extract
information from suspects, and torture
will only ever get you bad information.
Andrew
Andrew, like many, many others who have debated this, you seem
to be saying
"pain cannot motivate people to do something."
I think that's 100 percent poppycock, but I've been wrong before.