A few centuries ago, people nearly universally considered torture to be perfectly reasonable as a way of getting information from suspects. It was widely used for exactly that purpose, and the Inquisition in particular perfected means to get people to talk which left no injuries or marks on their bodies.

The argument which got it to stop was that it was unreliable. People talked, yes. They babbled incoherently, and they babbled anything and everything that they could think of. Very useful for keeping a witch hunt going. Somewhat less so if you want to see justice done.

Once it was no longer used, and people no longer believed that there was an overriding need to have it be used, the general public came to abhor it, and we wound up with our current attitudes. But I don't believe that we as a society would have come to that conclusion if it was seen as necessary to protect against clear and present danger.

Similar arguments apply to beating children. Virtually nobody thinks it is a pleasant thing to hit a child repeatedly intending to inflict pain. However what got our society to stop doing it in our schools was doubts about whether it worked. Today there are arguments in our society over whether spanking is wrong. The extreme cases are labelled "abuse".

If society continues as it is going, I can see a day where virtually all spanking would be called abuse, and people will be horrified that it ever happened.

But that wouldn't change the fact that it once was common and widespread, and originally ceased to be so because it was considered ineffective, not because people thought it was utterly wrong. (Indeed there are many people I know who don't spank their children but who would in a heartbeat if they thought it worked.)

Cheers,
Ben

So is murder.

Yet what do you think the US is attempting to do to the Taliban leadership? With the full support of a population that believes murder to be wrong?

The fact is that when we don't do things simply because they are bad, we may be inclined to do them anyways to prevent something worse. I don't know about you, but while I consider torturing 150 people heinous, it is not as bad as killing 6,000.

You are far less likely to do something bad if you think it won't work. And that is sadly the case with torture.

So we have 150 suspects. At a guess, perhaps 10 of them belong to al Qaeda. We don't know which 10, but we want to know what that 10 knows. So we torture. What happens?

Well 140 innocent people start saying anything that comes to mind to stop the pain. So we have 140 people laying random trails. But what about the 10?

If al Qaeda has any brains, they have already prepared their members for the possibility of torture. Such preparation is surprisingly simple. What you need to do is recognize that if you are tortured, you will break. So you torture your men a bit ahead of time so that they really understand that they don't have it in them to be heros under torture. Then you teach them how to break. It is quite simple really. What they have to do is give up, before they have really exhausted every internal resource, play wimps, and then start volunteering a bunch of names of people they choose at random. After all when you are being tortured, telling the truth doesn't help because the torturer doesn't know what is true and what is not. So you might as well lie early and often.

So you torture 150 people, 10 of whom know stuff you want to know, and you get 150 sets of false trails for your effort. Wonderful. You have just done something evil and despicable, and for your efforts you now get to waste a bunch more energy on false information, in which process you will waste energy and do more evil and despicable things.

Cheers,
Ben

PS BTW the lessons on how to handle torture were part of the training that US Marines got for Vietnam before being sent over. I heard about it from a brother who received that training.