Quote:
Originally posted by taxwonk
Thank you. I was beginning to think that I was suddenly speaking in tongues.
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I know people who claim to speak in tongues. If they posted here, trust me, I would not respond to anything they posted. These are scary people who should be shunned and we would all be better off if these people never had any influence on governmental policy in this country. At least that is my opinion.
I waas under the impression that the main thrust of your argument is that in certain very limited circumstances the use of torture is OK (whether or not you want to call it moral) but putting permission for torture into actual policy that would attempt to cover that limited circumstance would be a recipe for disaster. Our Government, if you put into policy that torture was permitted, even in very limited circumstances, would drive a Super Carrier, and fifteen Supertankers, through that loophole. Their prior and current conduct demonstrates that is exactly what will happen if you create the opportunity.
You give them an inch, they will take three thousand miles and we will have abuses all over the place. So the only way to prevent a ton of abuses is to have a strict blanket policy against torture. The cost may be some innocent lives (although odds are that it wouldn't cost lives, and if lives were lost it would be minimal) but the inevitable result would be verging on catastrophic with untold abuses. Without officially allowing torture we get Abu Ghraib, can you imagine what we would get if we officially allowed torture? We simply can't trust them with such a dangerous weapon.
These abuses would set precedents which would lead to a general atmosphere of erosion of civil liberties that would end up negatively affecting our entire civil liberty system to everyone's detriment.
Did I get it wrong?
