Here's an organization I give a paltry amount of my paltry salary to:

Amnesty International: http://www.amnesty.org/

They're on top of pretty much all of the biggest human-rights issues of the day. Read their site often. They're very on-the-ball and worth your time and attention.

Another group I like is Human Rights Watch: http://www.hrw.org/

They're excellent. They look into all sorts of abuses and issue very credible and thorough reports.

Needless to say, issues like waterboarding and extraordinary rendition are high on their agendas.

Can it?

...unless they can point out the part of the Constitution where an exception to the Bill of Rights is made for "national security."

The thing that bothers me about torture is not so much my concern for the torturees. Its what happens to people who torture, or allow torture to happen, or think that its ok in the right circumstances.

When I was a boy, I remember going out every morning and evening to feed and water the animals. One winter it was very cold, and there was a kitten that kept coming out from somewhere, mewing for food. Its mother had died or something. Anyway, its mewing got more persistent as it gradually got weaker. It probably was 15 degrees that winter in the midday sun, at night it really cooled down.

So one day I got annoyed and threw it into a watering tub full of icy water, one of the big rubber ones. I thought it would drown right away but it didn't. It just kept swimming around and making that damn mewing.

So I got a stick and tried to push it under water to hurry up the process. I pushed it under and little bubbles would come up, and then it would pop to the surface again. After a little while it died, and I hooked it out with the stick and tossed it.

The next day, and every day until spring, it was still there, frozen solid in a snowbank, its face pulled back in a kind of grimace.

I remember thinking that it deserved it for being such a pest. I also remember that immediately after that, I had an extra capacity for meanness.

Today I look back on that with a certain horror. But its not that I don't still have the capacity to do something like that. Or worse. Its that I wouldn't be able to justify it. I actually felt bad for the kitten at the time, but i felt like at some level, it deserved it, and I was doing it for its own good, to teach it a lesson for annoying me. But whats scary is that when you get on that train, you can see where it will take you. And you'd better jump off. Right away.

Million year freakshow, what the hell is wrong with you? Seriously, what the fucking hell is wrong with you? Any normal child would BRING THE FUCKING KITTEN IN FROM THE COLD!!!

One way or another, YOU ARE THE PERSON THAT GREW FROM THAT CHILD. You are one seriously damaged freak. Anyone who was remotely close to normal would presumably be much more remorseful than you seem to have been. And they would presumably post their comment anonymously. I wish I could say that your apparent lack of empathy, remorse, and shame disqualify you from being human but unfortunately they do not. I can say that the term psychopath comes to mind, however.

In any case, thank you for your insight on torture. Too often, people get wrapped up in foolish notions of empathy for torture's victims without giving thought to the bigger picture of how hard it must be for the torturer.

You write that waterboarding is "simulated drowning" . In fact, it is actual drowning, with water actually being forced into victims lungs. See SMall Wars Journal for debate.

Torture is terrible, it causes horrific damage to both torturer and subject. 2 or more people, suffering for the rest of their lives because of it. Our renditions have repeated this over and over for maybe a few thousand people. I believe at least some of them were innocent of any crime, which is the worst part.

Okay, now the other side. 3,000 people died on September 11th, would it be worth it to have tortured one person to stop it? 10 people? How about an extreme: is it worth the cost to torture one person to save the lives of every American (e.g. a biological attack)? I say yes.

Is it worth it to torture ten people to save the lives of your parents? What about someone else's parents? I don't like the Bush Administration, I don't trust them, but I think they include these calculations in their policy decisions, and I think the Democrats should too.

Torture is terrible, but it is not as bad as murder.

etyfreak wrote:

<<Okay, now the other side. 3,000 people died on September 11th, would it be worth it to have tortured one person to stop it? 10 people? How about an extreme: is it worth the cost to torture one person to save the lives of every American (e.g. a biological attack)? I say yes.

Is it worth it to torture ten people to save the lives of your parents? ... Torture is terrible, but it is not as bad as murder.>>

Okay by that reasoning, what is the level of acceptable breakage -- simply put, the wrong guy? Is it acceptable to torture or render 1000 people if 100 of them are a case of mistaken identity.. or 10.. or 300... or just one? Guess it depends on who the person is getting tortured? I mean, torturing my parents to save yours would be terrible, but torturing yours to save mine? Hey, I don't even KNOW you...

Then again, if we just tortured EVERYONE think of the lives we could save! Why stop with suspects? Let's make it the patriotic duty of every American to voluntarily submit someone to rendering... anyone! Once everyone in America -- and hey, why not, the whole world -- has been rendered and told their captors everything they know or even whatever their captors want to hear, we'll have ALL the information. Or someone will. Not us. We don't have the right security clearances.

Whew. I feel safer already.

Say the word, and as inevitable as a conditioned reflex, the question pops up: "would it be worth it to have tortured one person to stop it?"

Would it have been worthwhile to have listened to one intelligence report? To have had one meeting of the WH counter-terrorism group under Cheney? To have spent a few hours coordinating one intelligence agency with the other? To have made sure that the country's air-defense system was at least semi-functional?

The lurid torture fantasy works beautifully to deflect the obvious.