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<a href=“Pakistan says 'ringleader' admits link with al-Qaida | UK news | The Guardian”>Pakistan says 'ringleader' admits link with al-Qaida | UK news | The Guardian;
<p>Assuming that torture was used, would you rather have no torture and perhaps 3,000 people entombed at the bottom of the ocean right now, or the alternative - all the good guys alive and the bad guys in jail?</p>
<p>First of all, for me to answer the question you have to be more specific about what the torture was. Did he have any skin left on his body or were there just a few burn marks on his arm, or some electrical burns on his privates? As long as the victims are guilty I say go ahead and torture them Just don’t torture any innocent people.</p>
<p>FF, somehow I doubt that the whole thing depended on breaking ONE guy in Pakistan, expecially if brit cops have been on the case for months.</p>
<p>So keep up your hypothetical red herrings. </p>
<p>Fortunately your question is BOGUS.</p>
<p>But, then, most of the stuff you post is a bit off the wall, anyway, thank you.</p>
<p>You’re always good for a laugh, though - thanks again.</p>
<p>BTW, did you used to see commies everywhere during the cold war?</p>
<p>torture, if you rea anything about torture, it is unreliable…there is no way for us to know if these men were really connected to the “plot”…no way at all</p>
<p>I could get fundingfather to admit to anything with the right techniques</p>
<p>So to think that a country that tortures all the time, has a history of abusing its prisoners, often innocent ones, that conviently, they produced some suspects</p>
<p>torture does not work</p>
<p>Imagine a young man, thrown in jail, and tortured for days and days, you can get them to say anything, sign anything, to get the pain to stop</p>
<p>Why in the world do you think torture is reliable…scary that thought</p>
<p>they may be guilty, but we will never know for sure because they were tortured to get information,which may or may not be true</p>
<p>Pakaistan doesn’t have the best repuation for human rights, but guess some people don’t care about that, so long as we get “information” that fits what we want</p>
<p>Think about this, if you torture someone, and they WILL say what you want to hear if you are good enough at your job, if they are innocent, then you have guilty people still out there because you forced bad information out</p>
<p>If the english can track these guys, arrest them, using warrants, etc, why cant anybody else?</p>
<p>I agree with Oren Gross, whose views on torture were posted 10/15/2005 but are equally applicable to these facts (emphasis added):</p>
<p>
.</p>
<p>IF they cracked this guy with some friendly persuasion, and we got the bombing plotters who were the next big deal, then good for us. The trick, of course is to know whom to persuade. </p>
<p>I wonder if they showed him an infinite loop of Barbara Walters.</p>
<p>OK, if we’re really at the point when we would consider torture as legitmate, allow me to make the following proposals:</p>
<p>Let’s stop outsourcing torture to other countries. If torture is in our vital interest, we should be doing this ourselves.</p>
<p>We just can’t use our standard psychopaths to do this. We need people who are well-trained in both physical and psychological torture. Such well-rounded people might come from our liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>We should expect these people to be well-paid in order to attract the best people. We need to get the word out to high-school students who might be interested in a Torture Studies (TS) program. Threads on CC could started discussing which schools have the best TS programs. “I received 2300 on my SATs and have lots of ECs; can I get into a good TS program?”</p>
<p>As TS becomes more established, we could probably find other uses for torture in our society. You know, keep our professionals sharp in-between anti-terrorist assingments. Applications could include police work, job interviews, homeowner association disputes, etc.</p>
<p>Dadguy - thanks for the laugh</p>
<p>CGM - if torture doesn’t work, how do you think they got Rauf to “break”? I suppose an infinite loop of Barbara Waters may indeed have been used, but I’m sure that would be construed by some as worse than fingernail pulling.</p>
<p>newmassdad - thanks for your typical vacuous ad hominem response. So, one guy couldn’t have been the key to breaking the cell? Here’s what is reported in the NY Times:
<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/17/world/europe/17pakistan.html?_r=1&ref=europe&oref=slogin[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/17/world/europe/17pakistan.html?_r=1&ref=europe&oref=slogin</a>
Perhaps if you stayed away from the personal attacks and provided some substance or at least some rational thought your posts would be more appropriate.</p>
<p>DRJ4 - good quote</p>
<p>ff,</p>
<p>So now you take the NYT as a respected authority? </p>
<p>Maybe you need a news article interpretaton course. Calling someone a “main coordinating figure” and saying “his arrest let to the arrests of…” is NOT the same as saying “if it were not for cracking him (via torture if needed)…”</p>
<p>I would think a rock solid right winger like you could do better than this. </p>
<p>Frankly, I’m disappointed.</p>
<p>nmd, I haven’t a clue as to what you are talking about. You doubted the possibility that “ONE guy in Pakistan” could be responsible for the breaking up of the cell. OK, so I showed you another report, this one from the favorite paper of the left, to corroborate the initial report. So, other than trying to be a PITA, what is your point?</p>
<p>fundingfather, you could be tortured, and you could be “broken” and made to say anything</p>
<p>hey, we have your child in the next room, we will continue raping her unless you tellus what we want to hear</p>
<p>your family will be next if you don’t tell us</p>
<p>many military people say torture doesn’t work and you get bad informaton</p>
<p>but hey, if you want our country to be part of that elite group of torturers</p>
<p>you know they tortured "witches’ all throughout Europe and some of them confessed to having magic powers…imagine</p>
<p>If you (collective, not personal pronoun here) read the desciption of what would happen to a plane when this kind of liquid-based bomb is used (see this week’s cover story in Newsweek), it becomes difficult to be terribly concerned about the alleged perpetrators. If they were indeed plotting, they were planning the hideous death and suffering both mental and physical of thousands of people. Sometimes there are issues of right and wrong that have to do with greater good. I don’t believe in torture but even less do I believe in mass murder.</p>
<p>you are missing the point…torture does not work…you get false information…people turn in innocent people so the torture will stop for themselves…whether you agree with torture or not, it is not effective, and those that torture, ie Pakistan, do not have steller reputations of being trustworthy, etc, so what ever we get from them is questionable</p>
<p>they can get some poor schmuck to admit to whatever and turn in acquantences to save himself, and voila suspects</p>
<p>as i said, any one on this thread can be made to say anything under torture, and to think you wouldn’t you are naive</p>
<p>mattmom, if you were taken in the dead of night, abused, tortured, your family threatened, and you know that your government “disappears” people all the time, you too would confess and turn in “friends”…</p>
<p>imagine your son being grabbed, locked away, told that his mom was down the hall, and if he didn[t say who the other people were, she would be killed in even a worse way, what would your son do</p>
<p>and if you say this isn’t what happens, it does…torture is brutal…ask some of those rescued by Amenesty International or our prisonors of war in Vietnam</p>
<p>And, think about it, do we REALLY know that what the Pakistanis are telling uss is the truth about the information…</p>
<p>ff,</p>
<p>What I’m talking about is this:</p>
<p>Not for a minute do I believe breaking this plot was dependent on one key person talking, tortured or not.</p>
<p>So for folks like you to bring it into discussion, and mislead folks like mattmom that torturing folks is a viable tool, or worse yet, setting up straw man hypotheticals that lead one to such a conclusion, is just wrong.</p>
<p>Either wrong, or shows that you have no morals at all.</p>
<p>“Either wrong, or shows that you have no morals at all.”</p>
<p>Why is it that I said on another thread to DadGuy that I bet he would be fun to be around in real life and got reported, but this is ok?</p>
<p>CGM, I know that in your theoretical world, torture doesn’t work, but here we have a real situation where allegedly the key player was apprehended, “broken”, and the result was a take down of the terror cell. My question, which you have avoided, is how do you suppose they “broke” him? Since in your world torture doesn’t work, I’m wondering what your theory is as to what did actually work?</p>
<p>nmd, so let me get this straight … before I post something that is reported in two newspapers, I should check with you as to whether YOU think it is plausible. To not check with you first is now considered an immoral act. Got it. I’ll try to be better behaved in the future.</p>
<p>ff</p>
<p>Maybe you slept through logic or critical analysis in college?</p>
<p>We’re not talking plausable. We’re talking about what was reported. And what was reported was not the straw man you propose.</p>
<p>But crusaders don’t understand such concepts, I guess.</p>
<p>ff,</p>
<p>Torture? Sure what ever floats your boat. </p>
<p>What really interests me is at what point do YOU feel things have gone too far? </p>
<p>We’re reading here what others think about what is acceptable and what isn’t. </p>
<p>What I would like to know is when you do say “enough, you’ve gone too far.”</p>
<p>Care to share? :)</p>
<p>nmd, maybe this is just a bad day for you - one in which what you think you write is not consistent with what you actually write. As a refresher, here is what you wrote:
</p>
<p>and here is what was reported in two newspapers:</p>
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</p>
<p>Clearly you are disputing what was reported … or [to continue in the type of discourse that you seem to prefer] perhaps you slept through your course in communication in college.</p>