Are you supportive of torture like waterboarding for terrorist suspects?

inc4t

Consistent with Trump America first policy, We reserve the right of protecting our country from horrible terrorist acts. If we save an american life by getting information from a likely terrorist by waterboarding, then yes - I support waterboarding. Is it a form of torture? Likely yes, but I support it anyway. America lost too many life in this fight with terrorists. Never forget Sep 11! Gloves are off.

ale5

I support Trump's administration decisive attitude on this. Waterboarding should be used when neccesary to fight terrorism.

agsr

I am not sure that is a great idea to torture suspects unless they are proven to be terrorists. Giving government too much power there may setup innocent people to be turture. After learning the history of what KGB did during cold war in Soviet Union and watching The movie Snowden, I am a bit hesitant there

kaksi_10291

And trump said, "fight fire with fire."

kaksi_10291

As Trump said, "fight fire with fire."

MayCaesar

I concur with a notion from one of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Vladimir Bukovsky. He said once that the extent to which you are willing to infringe on others' rights in order to achieve your goal is the best measure of your humanity. When a terrorist attacks you, you fight back and defeat the terrorist. Torturing a terrorist suspect who is already in custody and is harmless is not self-defense, it is revenge - and resorting to revenge is the first step towards becoming a monster.

WordsMatter

Not only is torture inhumane but it's ineffective. Study after study, for hundreds of years has shown torture to be unreliable. 
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known-for-400-years-that-torture-doesn-rsquo-t-work/

Vaulk

I can't speak in general, but my personal experience with torture is that it's effective.  If for any reason it wasn't effective...we wouldn't have entire occupational specialties dedicated to it in the Military.  There's a difference though between torturing someone that you know is withholding critical information and just torturing someone to see what they know.  The latter will result in them telling you whatever they think you want to hear.  Fear is the ultimate motivation, fear will cause a Mother to drown their own child and fear will cause a Terrorist to tell you everything they know on any particular subject.

WordsMatter

@Vaulk I'm having trouble finding anything to back up your claim but if you'd like I can offer you endless sources to back up that torture isn't effective in interrogation.

George_Horse

Yes. I would support waterboarding terrorist suspects. If interrogation does not work, then they will be waterboarded. They make it worse on themselves anyways to not say anything.

MayCaesar

Vaulk said:

If for any reason it wasn't effective...we wouldn't have entire occupational specialties dedicated to it in the Military.

It is the same excuse as defenders of authoritarian regimes use all over the world to justify the defense: "They would not take our freedoms for no reason. It must be important!" The premise that something being used extensively and for a long time means it works is a logical fallacy, and there are many examples of entire industries that do not work and still are being used (for example, UFO search programs in the military, or the usage of lie detectors in the military - both a result of pseudo-science and confirmation bias).

It is not effective exactly for the reason you stated in your own comment: they will want to tell you whatever you want to hear, not the truth. This is also the reason why torture actually has rarely, if ever, been used to retrieve information; it is Hollywood. In reality, torture has been used to get people to confess, it is a lazy way for the agent to quickly get something out of the person that can be put into records, so they can close the case quickly and go home early. This is why that information has costed the military so many lives: when you act on a wrong information, you are likely to do even worse than when you act on a lacking information.

NKJVPrewrather

I was tortured, so no. Pwoplw have the sbdolute right to not be tortured. Besides, the Iraq war was based off of torture.

Ampersand

George_Horse said:

Yes. I would support waterboarding terrorist suspects. If interrogation does not work, then they will be waterboarded. They make it worse on themselves anyways to not say anything.

Except for the people who don't say anything because they're innocent and have nothing to say.

Torture is viewed legally like rape, an irredeemable wrong where no benefit can ever be worth the evil of performing the act.

NKJVPrewrather

@Ampersand Due process is a right. You have to prove them guilty, and cruel unusual punishment is unconstitutional. You don't have the right to torture.

WordsMatter

Let's not forget torture violates the third article of the Geneva convention.

If you think that because your enemy is inhumane that justifies inhumane actions on your party you are wrong. It makes you just as inhumane as them.

MayCaesar

WordsMatter said:

Let's not forget torture violates the third article of the Geneva convention.

If you think that because your enemy is inhumane that justifies inhumane actions on your party you are wrong. It makes you just as inhumane as them.

I would say, however, that the matter should not be about justification (which solely depends on one's system of values, which is by definition subjective), but about practicality, when it comes to legislation. And I see two major problems (and no advantages) of actively employing torture. They are:

1. Torture does not lead to obtaining a reliable information, and is based on emotion rather than reason. A state that drops the standard a piece of information is required to satisfy in order to act on it - becomes systematically erroneous in its perception of the world, and hence in its action upon that perception. 
A classical example of that is Soviet KGB. They have gone so far in relying on domestic terror that, in the end, they completely lost grasp with reality and missed the point at which the system became unsalvageable. If they had a more trustworthy information about their own country, they could prevent the upcoming economical and social collapse before it started - but they believed to the last moment that they had the country in their grasp, and even when everything collapsed, they still attempted to salvage the situation by staging a military coup. Which failed as expected - expected by all but the state, which to the last moment acted on the wrong information.
A good popular illustration of the problem is the movie "Unthinkable".

2. Torture gives the government the power it does not deserve over individuals. When the government is allowed to torture and execute people, it will necessarily abuse these powers, and will want even more powers to further expand the range of tools it has at its disposal. This is where all the shadow ops, all the corruption, all the secrets from the nation start. It is hard to believe that a government that can label anyone as "terrorist suspect" and torture them in order to obtain confession will not use this tool to consolidate its power and to silence the opposition.

I find it very telling that many people who claim to want a small government, also believe that this government should subjugate its own citizens to such abuse. Shows that what they really want is not a small government overall, but a government only small in those areas they do not believe important. As far as the military or the religious sectors go, they have little problem with giving the government all the tools it could possibly desire and has a potential to abuse.

refugee

A small Perrier bath is not going to hurt the troglodytes. 

Vaulk

@WordsMatter

I think you might have misunderstood my statement or maybe I wasn't specific enough.  I'll offer this to all those who desire sourced information.  This is from 2001 however, it contains (Among many things) a very specific discovery and substantiation that Torture is in fact effective...just not as an interrogation technique.  Almost every organization that has ever used Torture has admitted at some point or another that the results during interrogation weren't any different than they were without the use of torture and in a great number of cases the results were worse.

"The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities.”

The above statement is from the Istanbul Protocol and clearly outlines what Torture is designed to do...nowhere in that statement will you find that Torture is meant to be used during interrogation for the purposes of extracting information.  In short, government agencies torture people for the results of dropping the Atomic bombs, the world now knows that it has been done before.