Reply #7: Torture works. [View All]

I agree with those posters who say that torture does work. The fallacy that people often stumble into is that torture is ineffective. That is not true. As others have said, torture is useless in eliciting cooperation towards the goal of truth. The thing is that torture is not used to extract truth, it is used to extract confessions. Torturers do not care about truth. They care about justification. Torture is very effective at intimidating the populace on which it is used and in bending them to the will of the torturers. Saddam Hussein used torture to suppress his opposition for decades until a larger military force removed him. It was one of the highly effective tools of terror that kept a fragmented country together in fear of their dictator. The Bush administration used it effectively to get the information they wanted in order to justify their war.

People continue to play by the Republican framed argument regarding the effectiveness of torture. Who care what its effectiveness is. It is ILLEGAL and a violation of human rights therefore we do not do it. We settled the legality of it long ago.