Funny how Aussiegal, Climber, Feeier and the likes bring back two arguments all the time:
- The Armchair
- The "Fairy Tale life"
Being against Waterboarding is not in anyway related to the fact that we are sitting in our armchair (like you guys were fighting in Iraq) or that we live in Fairytale land (like we do not have family background destroyed by wars)....
However as I said earlier, in 7 years of using various methods (torture being one of them) the greatest and most powerful army on earth was not able to get any lead to Bin Laden...it tells me that Torture is probably not the best way and new ways should be found (better intelligence, better education, prosperity in those nations....)
It is very easy, as has been demonstrated here, to come out with comments such as 'torture them, string them up, execute, etc etc' and then make other comments that people who actually offer some perspective on these views that they 'don't live in the real world'. Well I hate to break it to you, but the real world is, whether you like it or not, subject to laws, domestic and international - so to state that reference to this is somesort of fantasy of the 'armchair intellectuals' is quite laughable.
If you think that laws are abused now, which of course they are, just take a moment to imagine what it would be like if everybody took the attitude towards them that has been displayed in the comments of some posters here or if they were not in place at all.
very unfortunately, i think torture, and like what climber has said, mental torture, is probably one of the most effective mean of getting information out.
the fact is, nobody here in this forum wld have any idea the actual effectiveness of those means because all we have are what is shown on CNN and BBC.
tell me one other way that we can get information then. getting the captured terrorist to sign a confession letter like wat the communist liked to do ?
real life and armchair are different.
if you are a soldier and you have hiked in warm, sweaty, insect infested ground for a week ended up encountering some enemies, the last thing you are going to do is to obey the geneva convention and have a nice 'do you yield' kind of conversation with them. just shoot the hell out and figure out what kind of convention you need to obey after they are disarmed. you are dead tired (yes there are people like myself that went thru simulated training of what happens in the field/woods which is probably just 10% the toughness of what actual soldiers went through) and any delay of the kill will increase the likelihood of you being the victim. the enemy are not going to care about geneva convention..
if you are on the ground waiting for an airborne attack, would you have waited for the parachuted or rope-pelling soldiers to reach the ground before you shoot them ? you must be crazy! but those are the geneva conventions!
We all live in the real world, though with different perspectives. The argument is really about what sort of world we would like to see and how we get there.
Of the developed countries (though I sometimes wonder about that description) the USA has most closely followed the hardline proposed by some on here. Can't really see where it has got us apart from more hate, more terrorism, more deaths and made it impossible for the USA to promote human rights. Whenever it challenges China on this issue, China can just laugh and say yeah like you really care about human rights.
Freeier: we are talking about the Geneva Convention with regard to handling prisoners, none of your examples are relevant to this.
By the way, does it really say you can not shoot parachutists and you have to ask the enemy to yield first? Or did you just make that up? Seems strange when the Geneva Conventions relate to prisoners of war, the injured, and civilians.