You gots to ask yourself then, why, on every single goddam talk show, news broadcast and web site, is everybody suddenly talking about waterboarding? It's like Command Central took over all the information feeds and began injecting the Thoughts for the Day into the national discourse.
This is how it ends.
Quintin Compson, Negatory (at Eschaton Blog)
And this:
But this is not why I think torture is wrong. Just because something benefits me doesn't mean it's morally right. Let us assume that the logic of torture were sound. What, then, if the only way to convince a terrorist to reveal the ticking bomb's location was not simply to waterboard him, or to tear off his fingernails, or to electrocute him. In this day and age, many bombers have no qualms about sacrificing their own lives, so even extreme torture might not induce them to might only validate their martyrdom complexes.
Maybe dragging in their children would work. And if a little torture might help, then a lot of torture might be better. Maybe if you force the terrorist to watch his children be brutally raped and murdered before his eyes, that would break his spirit and force him to tell you everything.
That doesn't make rape or murder ethical, any more than it makes torture ethical. Indeed, I'd argue that the willingness to do what's right even when it's hard is exactly the measure of a person's morality.
Joshua Rosenau: Thoughts from Kansas.Our FREE PRESS is the sales vehicle for torture, and it isn't just on the Sunday Morning Chat Shows the promotion of torture has been a consistent theme in entertainment crime shows for most of the past twenty-thirty years. The complaint that juries are being corrupted by what they see on the popularity of crime shows featuring fictitiously omniscient forensics studs is taken seriously by the criminal justice system. The far longer promotion of the equally fictitious "ticking bomb" excuse for torturing people couldn't have less of an effect.
Our free press, our media, our establishment wants to abridge the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel punishment. They aren't only doing it to give their hack writers something to spice up their crappy scripts with. This is for a reason and there's nothing good about that. We will rue the day that we allowed torture to be made legal.