Say no to torture, USCCB committee chair urges [CC]

[Darryl1958]

I disagree, such solitary confinement, prison, blindfolding etc can be for good reasons, and it certainly wasn’t with the intention of inflicting as much suffering on someone as one can in order to ‘extract’ something from them against his/her will.

So I do not think it is right to refer to solitary confinement, prison or blindfolding etc, as torture,** unless they are done with the ‘intention’ to torture someone,** than I think it would be just to call them torture and therefore wrong and evil.

I hope this has helped

God Bless You

Thank you for reading
Josh

Intent is a very good thing to focus on.
I fully agree that the intent of interrogation, or imprisonment, or solitary confinement, ought ever to be the infliction of pain and torture and punishment.
Intent is an important consideration for the prison warden, who fully realizes that protective custody can be acutely stressful and psychologically damaging.
He must chose the best option to protect everyone nevertheless.

That is the nature of the problem. These things do not happen in a vacuum.

 

[josh987654321]

Intent is a very good thing to focus on.
I fully agree that the intent of interrogation, or imprisonment, or solitary confinement, ought ever to be the infliction of pain and torture and punishment.
Intent is an important consideration for the prison warden, who fully realizes that protective custody can be acutely stressful and psychologically damaging.
He must chose the best option to protect everyone nevertheless.

That is the nature of the problem. These things do not happen in a vacuum.

I agree,

When it comes to specific things like ‘waterboarding’ there is no other purpose for such a practice other than to torture someone and why it must be flat out condemned.

I think It’s right and just to put a blanket prohibition and condemnation on ‘waterboarding’ and other such practices, unlike things like blindfolding, imprisonment and solitary confinement, which can be done for practical (and just) purposes that don’t included the intent to torture, even though some people may find them torturous.

I hope this has helped

God Bless You

Thank you for reading
Josh

 

[josh987654321]

I am against inflicting as much pain as one can in order to extract information too.
But I am also for finding ways to gain timely information in order to prevent, say, an elementary school full of children being incinerated.
Do we both agree that this would be good information to be able to obtain?

Yes, but it would have to be through psychological means like appealing to ones conscience or getting them to accidently spill information etc.

No matter how serious or how bad, waterboarding and other such forms of torture or ‘enhanced interrogation’ as some people refer to it, can never be justified, even if a school full of innocent children is about to blow up.

We both agree that it would be good information, but I certainly and strongly disagree that torturing someone is even remotely just way to go about it.

Even with torture, people would say anything to make the pain stop, so the information would be unreliable and highly dubious anyway and even if it was a very effective means of extracting information, it would still be wrong, evil and unjustifiable regardless of the circumstances.

I hope this has helped

God Bless You

Thank you for reading
Josh

 

[Darryl1958]

I agree,

When it comes to specific things like ‘waterboarding’ there is no other purpose for such a practice other than to torture someone and why it must be flat out condemned.

I think It’s right and just to put a blanket prohibition and condemnation on ‘waterboarding’ and other such practices, unlike things like blindfolding, imprisonment and solitary confinement, which can be done for practical (and just) purposes that don’t included the intent to torture, even though some people may find them torturous.

I hope this has helped

God Bless You

Thank you for reading
Josh

It helped a little.

And by the way, I too believe waterboarding to be something undesirable, for the simple fact that it has been deemed by the CIA not to get the wanted results.
But that is not the end of the discussion, but jsut the beginning. We are obviously living in a world where terrorists and terrorist organizations can go into any nightclub anywhere, and kill random people. Information is at a premium now like it never has been.
And sometimes, asking nicely does not work. That is not much of a problem when the stakes are low, but when the stakes are, say, an Oklahoma day care being incinerated on account of ‘welfare monkeys’ or some such hateful thing, there is a price in not having the preventative information in a timely manner. In many cases, the information is just not there anyway. But in the case where it is reasonable to assume that someone is sitting on information, what will we have to bring to the table?

The choice is not between torture/enhanced interrogation techniques and blue skies. It is about getting information and incinerated children.
Dogma is not as useful in that kind of situation as a cost-benefit analysis would be.
And that is not based on utilitarianism. It is based on the idea that innocent lives actually are infinitely important.